Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay: The Author of Devdas

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay spent his forties too poor to know if his next novel would sell. By the time he died, his stories had been adapted for the screen nearly 90 times — more than almost any other Indian writer.

Timeline

• 15 September 1876: Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay is born at Debanandapur, Hooghly district, Bengal, into a poor Brahmin family.
• 1903: He leaves for Burma. He works there for 13 years, eventually at the Burma Public Works Accounts Office in Rangoon.
• 1913: He resumes writing, contributing to the Bengali magazine Jamuna. He becomes an overnight literary sensation.
• 1917: He publishes Devdas and the first part of Srikanta.
• 1926-27: He publishes Pather Dabi, a novel sharply critical of British colonial rule. The colonial government bans it on 4 January 1927.
• 16 January 1938: He dies of liver cancer in Calcutta, aged 61.

Must Know

• Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was born on 15 September 1876, at Debanandapur, Hooghly district, Bengal. He died on 16 January 1938, in Calcutta.
• He wrote Devdas (1917), one of the most adapted stories in Indian cinema, with more than 20 film and television versions.
• His other major works include Parineeta (1916), Srikanta (four parts, 1917-1933), and Grihadaha (1920).
• He spent 13 years working in Burma, from 1903 to 1916, before returning to Bengal to write full-time.
• His novel Pather Dabi (1926) was banned by the British colonial government for criticising colonial rule. The ban stayed in force until 1939.
• His formal education ended after Class XII. Even so, the University of Dacca awarded him an honorary Doctor of Literature in 1936.

Good to Know

• The University of Calcutta awarded him the Jagattarini Gold Medal in 1923.
• He served as president of the Howrah District Congress Committee from 1921 to 1936, and was close to freedom fighters including Chittaranjan Das and Subhas Chandra Bose.
• Across Indian languages, nearly 90 screen adaptations have been made of his works, in Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Assamese, Odia, and Urdu.
• He won the 1978 Filmfare Award for Best Story, for the film Swami (1977) — 40 years after his death, based on a story he had written decades earlier.
• He sold his first published novel, Bardidi, for no payment at all. His second, Biraj Bou, earned him just two hundred rupees; only later novels finally lifted him out of poverty.

Test Yourself

Please wait…

1. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote which 1917 novel, later adapted for film and television more than 20 times?

Parineeta

Devdas

Grihadaha

Srikanta

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Great to Know

• Sarat Chandra’s fiction is known for its sympathetic, closely observed portraits of women’s inner lives. Biographers trace this partly to his own mother, Bhubanmohini Devi, who raised him through years of family poverty.
• A house fire in 1912, while he was still in Rangoon, destroyed his manuscript of the novel Choritrohin. He rewrote the entire book from memory.
• His first wife, Shanti, and their infant son died of plague in Rangoon in 1907, within a year of their marriage. He later remarried Hironmoyee, a young widow he taught to read and write.
• He published almost nothing of note before age 37, and wrote steadily for barely two decades after that. In that short span, he became, by most counts, the most-translated and most-adapted Indian author of all time.
• Unlike many contemporaries, his novels largely avoided direct political argument. This let his work travel easily across Indian languages and regions, since it addressed universal family and social themes rather than region-specific politics.