Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay

Chattopadhyay grew up in poverty in rural Bengal, dropping out of college for lack of money and drifting through odd jobs (clerk, actor, wanderer) across eastern India and Burma before turning seriously to fiction in his thirties. That itinerant, precarious youth left him with an enduring sympathy for characters undone by poverty, social convention, and their own self-destructive longing.

Devdas, written around 1901 but not published until 1917, follows a wealthy young man's slow ruin after he loses his childhood love to an arranged marriage and drowns his grief in alcohol and a courtesan's devotion, a story simple enough to become the most filmed narrative in South Asian cinema, adapted dozens of times across multiple languages.

He became Bengal's most commercially popular novelist of his generation, writing prolifically about women trapped by social codes he clearly regarded as cruel, until his death in Calcutta in 1938.