{"product_id":"the-life-and-times-of-banka-harichandan","title":"The Life and Times of Banka Harichandan","description":"\u003cp\u003eA tremendous portrait of the hopes and horrors, the threads of delicate perception and the pangs of fear and illusion, of a growing boy's life in a provincial town in Odisha. Banka Harichandan returns us to the unique atmosphere, at once particular and universal, of our own childhood. - Chandrahas Choudhury, Author of Arzee the Dwarf and My Country Is Literature Dipti Ranjan Pattanaik creates a masterly tale of coming of age in Odisha’s pious, rustic, heartlands. Deftly translated into English from Odia, \"The Life and Times of Banka Harichandan\" carries the reader into a delightfully immersive experience of young Banka’s heady confrontation with adolescence—and with the relentless world of grown-ups…. Dispassionate and compassionate at the same time, ‘Banka Harichandan’ is a heart-warming tribute to the eternal reenactment of growing up. - Paul Zacharia, Author of Bhaskara Patellar and Other Stories and The Reflections of a Hen in Her Last Hour and Other Stories In this tour-de-force of a coming-of-age narrative, the story of an ordinary but precocious boy named Banka Harichandan is told afresh, using a mixture of childhood perception, idiolect, and anecdotes. The stories evoke a child’s restless and questioning mind constantly pushing against the restrictive limits of his placid and conformist times. Presented in a series of discrete tales, the narrative—best thought of as a ‘composite novel’—takes the reader on an odyssey through the whole gamut of emotions that light up the passage from innocence to experience in a small-town, lower-middle-class setting. Unfolding at a leisurely pace and studded with epiphanies, The Life and Times of Banka Harichandan is a remarkable contribution from Odisha to literature centred on children.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dusky's Shrine","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46037601714233,"sku":"9789392099991","price":359.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0795\/3367\/0457\/files\/41TEQspd_9L_1b12f691-9e01-45ec-b2df-49c532fa3ef9.jpg?v=1782821260","url":"https:\/\/duskysshrine.com\/products\/the-life-and-times-of-banka-harichandan","provider":"Dusky's Shrine","version":"1.0","type":"link"}