[Hindi] Grihdah (गृहदाह)

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (also spelt as Sarat Chandra Chatterjee and Saratchandra Chatterji; 15 September 1876 – 16 January 1938), was a Bengali novelist and short story writer of the early 20th century. He generally wrote about the lives of Bengali family and society in cities and villages. However, his keen powers of observation, great sympathy for fellow human beings, a deep understanding of human psychology (including the "ways and thoughts and languages of women and children"), an easy and natural writing style, and freedom from political biases and social prejudices enable his writing to transcend barriers and appeal to all Indians. He remains the most popular, translated, and adapted Indian author of all time. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was born on 15 September 1876, in a Bengali Brahmin family in Debanandapur, a small village in Hooghly, West Bengal, about 50 kilometres from Kolkata. He was his father Matilal and mother Bhubanmohini's oldest son and second child. Birthplace of Sarat Chandra in Debanandapur, Hooghly Sarat Chandra wrote in the English translation of his monumental book Srikanta: "My childhood and youth were passed in great poverty. I received almost no education for want of means. From my father I inherited nothing except, as I believe, his restless spirit and his keen interest in literature. The first made me a tramp and sent me out tramping the whole of India quite early, and the second made me a dreamer all my life. Father was a great scholar, and he had tried his hand at stories and novels, dramas and poems, in short, every branch of literature, but never could finish anything. I have not his work now—somehow it got lost; but I remember poring over those incomplete messes, over and over again in my childhood, and many a night I kept awake regretting their incompleteness and thinking what might have been their conclusion if finished. Probably this led to my writing short stories when I was barely seventeen."