‘Beggar’s Bedlam’: Nabarun Bhattacharya’s defiant, magic realist novel about class clashes in Bengal

Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Beggars’ Bedlam pulls no punches. The very first page plunges the reader into a scene of coordinated chaos. The date is October 28, 1999, and multilingual, polyphonic Calcutta still wears two names. While life goes on as always in the narrow lanes and paras of a city that defiantly holds on to the rhythms of a small-town, something sensational is witnessed:

“Rows of severed heads are rolling about on the banks of the Old Ganga. Ergo, something terrible happened last night. Shoved a sack full of the heads and split? So where are the bodies, then? Hacked to pieces, or sliced and diced? (…) At first, there were a lot of skulls, dancing. But when the police arrived, all of them had vanished but three.”

The extraordinary within the ordinary

“Dancing” skulls in the Old/Adi Ganga (once a stream of the Ganges, now reduced to a site for immersion of ashes), a beleaguered police force, the usual gaggle of the hoi polloi, sitting in observation of this strange phenomenon, and the media, bandying speculations instead of attempting to uncover any version of the truth, all pull the reader into the raucously carnivalesque universe Bhattacharya plots. The extraordinary folds itself within the ordinary with deceptive ease.

Subtly, in...

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