BHABANI BHATACHARYA is unquestionably one of the celebrated Indo English fiction writers. Notwithstanding his rather scanty literary output, he has caught the fancy of quite a large reading public and academics both at home and abroad. No wonder, then, if his latest novel, Shadow from Ladakh, has won for him the much coveted Sahitya  Akademi award for 1967. Besides, he is a much-translated Indian novelist writing in English. His books have been translated into twenty-six languages including fourteen European languages. In spite of the global fame that has come to him spontaneously, he has not yet been explored and evaluated thoroughly well with the empathy of a scholar. Only two full length studies and a few articles in journals and books have appeared on him, and these, too, are just an introduction to his writings, and do not examine comprehensively either the thematic or the technical side of his fiction. Hence the need and justification for a book such as this.

The present book undertakes to make a thorough and objective study of Bhabani Bhattacharya’s vision, his dominant themes and his concept of a creative writer’s concern with social reality. It has been my sincere endeavour to make this study really useful and interesting for scholars in general and for university students in particular. Since there is a paucity of critical works on the contemporary Indian novelists writing in English, the book, it is hoped, will surely help the reader to understand, and develop genuine interest in, Bhabani Bhattacharya as well as the Indo English fiction of the recent decades.