Metaphors In Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas Metaphor

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Devdas as the word comes to mind it conjures up the visage of a haggard, world-weary, lovelorn soul, driving himself to drink and hurtling on relentlessly on the path to self-destruction. The ‘Devdas Metaphor’, a time-honoured, enduring tragic symbol of unfulfilled love, has captivated readers and film-going audiences for the better part of a century now. Devdas has several adaptations and translations and therefore it is good to look at the specific ways in which the Devdas metaphor has engaged our imagination over several generations. Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas was published in Bengali in 1917. It was also a time when the forty-year old writer has just experienced his meteoric rise to fame. Saratchandra Chattopadhyay was born on 15 September 1876 in Devanandpur, a village in West Bengal. His childhood and youth were spent in dire poverty and he received very little formal education. But he began writing as a teenager and was soon to become one of the best-loved Bengali novelists of all time. Much of Saratchandra writing bears the mark of the resultant trubulence in society. Sensitive and daring his novels captivated the hearts and minds of thousands of readers not only in Bengal but all over India. Apart from Devdas (1917) some of Saratchandra’s best-known novels are Parineeta (1914), Palli Samaj (1916), Charitraheen (1917), Nishkriti (1917), Grihadaha (1920), Pather Dabi (1926), Sesh Prasna (1929) and Srikanta ( in four parts in 1917, 1918, 1927

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