Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, born on June 26, 1838, was educated at the Hoogly College and belonged to an orthodox family. He was offered the government post of Deputy Magistrate and Collector which he accepted and held until he retired 1891. He did for Bengali fiction what Michael Madhusudan Dutt had done for Bengali poetry, that is, he brought in imagination. Chatterjee was more fortunate than Dutt as he did not have to set up his own diction from the very start. The prose style was already standardized; what Chatterjee did was to break its monotony, shear off its ponderous verbosity and give it a twist of informality and intimacy. Chatterjee’s own style grew up as he went on writing. The book contains the literary work of Bankim Chandra.
