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Hawa Hawa: and Other Stories
A collection of inventive and surprising short stories from one of India’s most prominent countercultural writers.
In this wildly inventive collection of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s stories, we meet characters such as a trigger-happy cop in an authoritarian police state, a man who holds on to a piece of rope from a deadly noose, a retired revolutionary thrilled by delusions of grandeur, and people working for a corporation that arranges lavish suicides for a price. Ranging from scathing satires of society to surreal investigations of violence and love, these stories are also a window onto the political and social climate in Bengal, tracing both pan-Indian developments like the 1975 Emergency and local ones like militant-leftist Naxalism and the decades-long Communist reign in the state. Expertly translated from the Bengali, Hawa Hawa and Other Stories is a journey through the mind of one of the most daring countercultural writers of India, one with particular resonance in these chaotic times.
In this wildly inventive collection of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s stories, we meet characters such as a trigger-happy cop in an authoritarian police state, a man who holds on to a piece of rope from a deadly noose, a retired revolutionary thrilled by delusions of grandeur, and people working for a corporation that arranges lavish suicides for a price. Ranging from scathing satires of society to surreal investigations of violence and love, these stories are also a window onto the political and social climate in Bengal, tracing both pan-Indian developments like the 1975 Emergency and local ones like militant-leftist Naxalism and the decades-long Communist reign in the state. Expertly translated from the Bengali, Hawa Hawa and Other Stories is a journey through the mind of one of the most daring countercultural writers of India, one with particular resonance in these chaotic times.
152 pages, Hardcover
Published March 6, 2023
About the author
Nabarun Bhattacharya
32 books108 followersNabarun Bhattacharya was an Indian Bengali writer deeply committed to a revolutionary and radical aesthetics. He was born at Baharampur (Berhampur), West Bengal. He was the only child of actor Bijon Bhattacharya and writer Mahashweta Devi.
He is most known for his anarchic novel, Herbert (1993), which was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, and adapted into a film by the same name in 2005.
Nabarun is renowned as a fiction writer, and justifiably so. But he wrote poems as well and Ei Mrityu Upotyoka Aaamaar Desh Na (This Valley of Death Is Not My Country) is arguably his most acclaimed collection of poems.
Nabarun over the years consistently contributed to various little magazines, which together constitute a promising alternative mode of literary culture in Bengal that challenges the influence of big capital. It is equally noteworthy that his writing style deconstructs the gentle middle class ethos of the Bengali society. Most of his characters belong to the lower strata of existence. His fictions reinvigorate the received Bengali language with forceful idioms and expressions from the margins, which might often bombard the chaste taste of a Tagorean upper and middle class, still very much under the spell of a 19th century Victorian sensibility.
He is most known for his anarchic novel, Herbert (1993), which was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, and adapted into a film by the same name in 2005.
Nabarun is renowned as a fiction writer, and justifiably so. But he wrote poems as well and Ei Mrityu Upotyoka Aaamaar Desh Na (This Valley of Death Is Not My Country) is arguably his most acclaimed collection of poems.
Nabarun over the years consistently contributed to various little magazines, which together constitute a promising alternative mode of literary culture in Bengal that challenges the influence of big capital. It is equally noteworthy that his writing style deconstructs the gentle middle class ethos of the Bengali society. Most of his characters belong to the lower strata of existence. His fictions reinvigorate the received Bengali language with forceful idioms and expressions from the margins, which might often bombard the chaste taste of a Tagorean upper and middle class, still very much under the spell of a 19th century Victorian sensibility.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 15, 2023
Ranging from the strange and surreal to the gritty and dark these tales bring dirty cops, nostalgic former revolutionaries, unsavoury figures and anxious souls to life on the page. Bhattacharya excells at creating memorable characters and rapid, witty sequences of dialogue. Often violent, tragic, his is a sharply political satire set in Calcutta of the 1970s and 80s. A glossary provides context and background as needed, English words used in the original are shown in italics, but much of the Bengali/Indian terms are left untranslated (but understandable within context) a balance I really enjoyed.
Longer review here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/05/15/ra...
Longer review here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/05/15/ra...
September 1, 2022
Review for Litro Magazine:
https://www.litromagazine.com/usa/202...
https://www.litromagazine.com/usa/202...
April 25, 2023
I don't read a lot of short story collections. I never feel like I'm getting anywhere. But, that's on me, not the short story writer.
I had no idea what I was in for with Bhattacharya. An instagram friend recommend the author's novel, Herbert, as a great starting place. I found out both that novel and this story collection were available. I decided to start with the stories.
Often, I find 'surreal' to be a little bit of a lazy word when describing writing. Is there anything more surreal than letters to words to sentences to pictures- just black and white creating a world. That's surreal.
Yet. Here we are. These are fairly surreal- some of them, at times. Also, violent? I mean, not too bloody. And not scary. One doesn't wince or scream in horror. It's just the reality of a world. It's all blood and guts we've got. And Bhattacharya gives a lot of it.
I love Bhattacharya's quick, sharp sentences. And some of the lines are beautiful and weird and messy. There's just a lot of originality here.
I had no idea what I was in for with Bhattacharya. An instagram friend recommend the author's novel, Herbert, as a great starting place. I found out both that novel and this story collection were available. I decided to start with the stories.
Often, I find 'surreal' to be a little bit of a lazy word when describing writing. Is there anything more surreal than letters to words to sentences to pictures- just black and white creating a world. That's surreal.
Yet. Here we are. These are fairly surreal- some of them, at times. Also, violent? I mean, not too bloody. And not scary. One doesn't wince or scream in horror. It's just the reality of a world. It's all blood and guts we've got. And Bhattacharya gives a lot of it.
I love Bhattacharya's quick, sharp sentences. And some of the lines are beautiful and weird and messy. There's just a lot of originality here.
April 3, 2026
Reading Nabarun Bhattacharya is not like reading most writers. There is no easing in, no settling, no polite literary handshake at the door. He grabs you by the collar from the first page with the specific, unfiltered fury of someone who has looked at the world very clearly for a very long time and refused to pretend that what he saw was acceptable. Hawa Hawa carries that fury in every line, and it is one of the most alive, most discomfiting, most stubbornly itself pieces of Bengali writing I have come across.
Nabarun belongs to a tradition of Bengali literature that refuses respectability. He came after Manik, after Subimal, and he carried something forward from both of them while being entirely his own thing. The Calcutta in his writing is not the Calcutta of nostalgia or the Calcutta of literary romance. It is the city of the footpath and the margin, of the people the official story of Bengali culture prefers to step over, rendered with an affection so fierce it reads as indistinguishable from rage.
Hawa Hawa moves through this world with the rhythm of something between a prose poem and a fever. There is no conventional plot architecture here in the sense that most readers come trained to expect. What there is instead is accumulation, image pressing against image, voice against voice, the absurd folded into the real so completely that the fold becomes invisible. You stop asking what is literal and what is not. Nabarun is not interested in that distinction and the writing makes that clear early.
This is where the book demands something particular from the reader, and also where it gives back the most. Nabarun's Bengali is not the cleaned-up, grammatically proper Bengali of establishment literature. It is the language of the street, of the addas, of the back lanes, of people who were never invited into the drawing room version of the culture and made their own version accordingly. The slang is specific. The register shifts without warning. The humour is dark and physical and arrives in places you do not expect it.
For readers who grew up with that language, or near it, there is a recognition that lands like something coming home. For readers approaching in translation, some of that texture inevitably thins. Nabarun is one of those writers whose full force lives in the original, and I say this not to discourage but to say that even at partial force, what comes through is considerable.
Nabarun was a committed leftist and it shows, but not in the way that political commitment usually shows in fiction, as argument, as message, as characters who exist to demonstrate a position. His politics live in the structure of his attention. In who he looks at. In who gets to be a full human being in his pages. In the complete absence of any impulse to sentimentalise the poor or make their suffering picturesque.
The anger in Hawa Hawa is not righteous anger performing itself for approval. It is the quieter, more corrosive anger of someone who has watched the same injustices cycle through the same city for decades and has stopped expecting anything different and writes about it anyway, because writing about it is the one form of refusal available.
Nabarun's style, which is the most thrilling thing about him, is also where the book occasionally loses its footing for me. The deliberate rejection of conventional structure is a statement of intent and I respect it completely. But there are passages in Hawa Hawa where the associative leaping, the refusal to anchor, tips from exhilarating into something that kept me at a remove when I wanted to be fully inside it. The boundary between formally daring and formally sealed against the reader is a fine one, and Nabarun crosses it a handful of times.
That is not a reason to stay away. It is a reason to read with patience and surrender some of the usual reading habits at the door. The book rewards both.
What I carry from this book is less specific than a scene or a character. It is more like a residue, a particular quality of vision that Nabarun leaves behind. A way of looking at a city and seeing all the people in it that the city's self-image refuses to include. A reminder that literature does not have to be comfortable to be full of love. That the sharpest, most unaccommodating writing sometimes comes from the deepest place of caring about the world it is skewering.
Nabarun did not write to be liked. He wrote to be true. In Hawa Hawa he is both and the combination is something worth sitting with.
Rating: ★★★★ 4 / 5 stars
For readers drawn to: Manik Bandyopadhyay, Subimal Misra, Phanishwar Nath Renu, and anyone who has ever wanted Bengali literature to stop being polite and start being honest.
Nabarun belongs to a tradition of Bengali literature that refuses respectability. He came after Manik, after Subimal, and he carried something forward from both of them while being entirely his own thing. The Calcutta in his writing is not the Calcutta of nostalgia or the Calcutta of literary romance. It is the city of the footpath and the margin, of the people the official story of Bengali culture prefers to step over, rendered with an affection so fierce it reads as indistinguishable from rage.
Hawa Hawa moves through this world with the rhythm of something between a prose poem and a fever. There is no conventional plot architecture here in the sense that most readers come trained to expect. What there is instead is accumulation, image pressing against image, voice against voice, the absurd folded into the real so completely that the fold becomes invisible. You stop asking what is literal and what is not. Nabarun is not interested in that distinction and the writing makes that clear early.
This is where the book demands something particular from the reader, and also where it gives back the most. Nabarun's Bengali is not the cleaned-up, grammatically proper Bengali of establishment literature. It is the language of the street, of the addas, of the back lanes, of people who were never invited into the drawing room version of the culture and made their own version accordingly. The slang is specific. The register shifts without warning. The humour is dark and physical and arrives in places you do not expect it.
For readers who grew up with that language, or near it, there is a recognition that lands like something coming home. For readers approaching in translation, some of that texture inevitably thins. Nabarun is one of those writers whose full force lives in the original, and I say this not to discourage but to say that even at partial force, what comes through is considerable.
Nabarun was a committed leftist and it shows, but not in the way that political commitment usually shows in fiction, as argument, as message, as characters who exist to demonstrate a position. His politics live in the structure of his attention. In who he looks at. In who gets to be a full human being in his pages. In the complete absence of any impulse to sentimentalise the poor or make their suffering picturesque.
The anger in Hawa Hawa is not righteous anger performing itself for approval. It is the quieter, more corrosive anger of someone who has watched the same injustices cycle through the same city for decades and has stopped expecting anything different and writes about it anyway, because writing about it is the one form of refusal available.
Nabarun's style, which is the most thrilling thing about him, is also where the book occasionally loses its footing for me. The deliberate rejection of conventional structure is a statement of intent and I respect it completely. But there are passages in Hawa Hawa where the associative leaping, the refusal to anchor, tips from exhilarating into something that kept me at a remove when I wanted to be fully inside it. The boundary between formally daring and formally sealed against the reader is a fine one, and Nabarun crosses it a handful of times.
That is not a reason to stay away. It is a reason to read with patience and surrender some of the usual reading habits at the door. The book rewards both.
What I carry from this book is less specific than a scene or a character. It is more like a residue, a particular quality of vision that Nabarun leaves behind. A way of looking at a city and seeing all the people in it that the city's self-image refuses to include. A reminder that literature does not have to be comfortable to be full of love. That the sharpest, most unaccommodating writing sometimes comes from the deepest place of caring about the world it is skewering.
Nabarun did not write to be liked. He wrote to be true. In Hawa Hawa he is both and the combination is something worth sitting with.
Rating: ★★★★ 4 / 5 stars
For readers drawn to: Manik Bandyopadhyay, Subimal Misra, Phanishwar Nath Renu, and anyone who has ever wanted Bengali literature to stop being polite and start being honest.
March 25, 2026
what an absolutely beautiful evocative hate letter to establishment, the city of Calcutta circa 1970s and ultimately, humanity. despondency bleeds from every word. "kalyug" captured in a time period in a book. LOVE and big recommend.
July 7, 2023
Dark. Violent. Weird.
Even though I did not enjoy the stories, it was certainly deserving of five stars ⭐️
Well written. Imaginative.
Even though I did not enjoy the stories, it was certainly deserving of five stars ⭐️
Well written. Imaginative.
March 15, 2025
This is the coolest book I've ever read
October 15, 2025
In Nabarun Bhattacharya's "Hawa Hawa and Other Stories," we descend into a version of Calcutta where mercury lamps cast an unforgiving glow on society's forgotten corners. This isn't your grandmother's Bengali literature—it's a feverish hallucination where corrupt officers scratch murderous itches, businessmen purchase bespoke deaths, and even children harbour disturbing fascinations.
Masterfully translated by Subha Prasad Sanyal, these stories pulse with visceral imagery and dialogue that crackles with dark humour. Bhattacharya's characters—drunks stumbling through flooded streets, retired revolutionaries clinging to faded glory, men who carry noose fragments as talismans—are neither heroes nor villains but complex beings navigating a world where power corrupts absolutely.
What's remarkable is how Bhattacharya's satire, penned decades ago, feels unnervingly relevant today. His critique of authoritarianism, casual violence, and the commodification of everything (even suicide) reads less like historical fiction and more like yesterday's news. The collection serves as both a time capsule of post-independence India and a prophetic vision of our present global condition.
For all readers tired of sanitized narratives, this book offers a bracing antidote—a literary shot of country liquor that burns going down but reveals uncomfortable truths about the systems we've built and the monsters they create. If nothing else, it's a dark dance through Calcutta's underbelly.
My Rating -5/5
Masterfully translated by Subha Prasad Sanyal, these stories pulse with visceral imagery and dialogue that crackles with dark humour. Bhattacharya's characters—drunks stumbling through flooded streets, retired revolutionaries clinging to faded glory, men who carry noose fragments as talismans—are neither heroes nor villains but complex beings navigating a world where power corrupts absolutely.
What's remarkable is how Bhattacharya's satire, penned decades ago, feels unnervingly relevant today. His critique of authoritarianism, casual violence, and the commodification of everything (even suicide) reads less like historical fiction and more like yesterday's news. The collection serves as both a time capsule of post-independence India and a prophetic vision of our present global condition.
For all readers tired of sanitized narratives, this book offers a bracing antidote—a literary shot of country liquor that burns going down but reveals uncomfortable truths about the systems we've built and the monsters they create. If nothing else, it's a dark dance through Calcutta's underbelly.
My Rating -5/5
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