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Kunal Basu (Bengali language: কুনাল বসু; born 4 May 1956) is an Indian author of English fiction who has written five novels – The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003), Racists (2006), The Yellow Emperor's Cure (2011) Kalkatta (2015) and Sarojini’s Mother (2020). The title story of his only collection of short stories, The Japanese Wife (2008), was made into a film by the Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen. Basu has also written four Bengali novels – Rabi-Shankar (2016), Bairer Dorja (2017), Tejoswini O Shabnam (2018) and Angel(2020)
Following his doctoral degree, he was a professor at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, from 1986 to 1999. His 13 years at McGill were interrupted only by a brief stint at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, in 1989. Since 1999, he has been teaching at Oxford University's Saïd Business School. He has also written financial pieces for business publications such as Fast Company and MIT Sloan Management Review.
The cover design of Kalkatta (by Pinaki De) won two awards – the best Cover Design of India award from Oxford Bookstore at the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2016, and the best Cover Design of India award in Publishing Next 2017.
• Sarojini’s Mother, 2020
Sarojini-Saz-Campbell comes to India to search for her biological mother. Adopted and taken to England at an early age, she has a degree from Cambridge and a mathematician's brain adept in solving puzzles. Handicapped by a missing shoebox that held her birth papers and the death of her English mother, she has few leads to carry out her mission and scant knowledge of Calcutta, her birthplace. Luckily, she has Chiru Sen, an Elvis lookalike, as her guide. Together, Saz and Chiru chase the mirage of a lost mother, helped by Chiru's band members and his friend Suleiman, master bookie of the racecourse.
When luck leads them to a slum, Jamuna, a housemaid with a troubled past, presents herself as the likely candidate. As Saz settles into the routine of slum life, a second candidate, Urvasi, presents herself, emerging from the very opposite end of the spectrum.
With Saz split in half, nothing is spared in the battle between the mothers, moving at a fast clip to the final throw of the dice as rivals await the result of DNA matching from their blood samples. But will the verdict of science settle the puzzle of motherhood for Sarojini? Or will it be left to the judgment of Suleiman the Wise, King of the Racecourse, the bearer of ancient wisdom, to arrive at that supreme revelation? (Synopsis, Penguin India website)
An Indian man writes to a Japanese woman. She writes back. The pen-friends fall in love and exchange their vows over letters, then live as man and wife without ever setting eyes on each other, their intimacy of words tested finally by life's miraculous upheavals.
The 12 stories in this collection are about the unexpected and about lives that are never quite as ordinary as they seem. The title story was adapted on celluloid by the renowned filmmaker Aparna Sen, the cast including Indian actors Rahul Bose, Raima Sen and Moushumi Chatterjee, and Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku in the title role.
Bengali novels
Kunal Basu is the only bilingual English-Bengali novelist after Bankimchandra Chatterjee (who had given up writing in English after his first and only English novel, Rajmohan's Wife, 1864).
Basu has written three Bengali novels – Rabi-Shankar (2016), Bairer Dorja (2017) & Tejoswini O Shabnam (2018).
• Rabi-Shankar, 2016
This novel flits between contemporary and 1970's Calcutta. It is about two individuals who meet accidentally after 30 years. They had been mortal enemies during the Naxal period – one was a police officer and the other, a Naxalite. Each could have killed the other, and came very close to doing so. But 30 years later, the tide has turned, it is a different kind of world. The two individuals are in different stations in life: the ex-Naxal is now part of the affluent upper-middle class; and the police officer is a retired person, living a pretty ordinary life. They are awkward when they meet... and they do things to each other which they hadn't quite planned...
• Bairer Dorja, 2017
This novel was published by Sananda (a leading Bangla women's magazine) in their 2017 'Pujo-sankha' – their coveted annual Durga puja edition.
• Tejoswini O Shabnam, 2018
Set in New York, Iraq and Bengal, this novel is a story of two sisters who accidentally find each other in the backdrop of an ongoing war, bringing to the fore a murky story of human trafficking in the Gulf. This book has been translated into English as The Endgame by Arunava Sinha (Picador Books India, 2019).
From a literary history point of view, this translation is very interesting and has a special literary significance—because it is not the English translation of a book by a vernacular writer, but the work of an established English novelist in his own bhasha having a fresh life in English.
Translations of Basu's work
Kunal Basu's novels have been translated into several foreign languages.
January 2020 saw Chitrakar – the Hindi translation of his second novel, The Miniaturist – being published by Vani Prakashan. The translation has been done by Prabhat Milind.
Non-fiction
Intimacies, 2011
Kunal Basu collaborated with photographer Kushal Ray for this book. It contains 8000 photographs, all of them shot inside a 12-room house with 10 residents – who have lost out in the race for success. Poised between fiction and facts, Basu's narrative brings to life the remarkable world of the photographer and the photographed
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