To this day, these qualities make him a unique figure in the pantheon of literary eminences of Bengal. Hard-hitting as these novels were, it was his gift as a travel writer, along with his abiding interest in natural history, which set apart Bandyopadhyay from his contemporaries. Bandyopadhyay captured the slow passage of life in a village, and its effect on his characters, in an idiom that could never be fully transposed on to film. Pather Panchali, as those who have seen Ray’s (albeit somewhat free) adaptation would know, chronicles an inter-generational tale of a family living in a hamlet in Bengal. But it was his close attention to the realities of rural life-the challenges that pushed desperate men to choose the hostility of the big city over the hard but sedate life of the village-that gave his writing its unique flavour. He did write with empathy and insight about the challenges of urban life as well, especially during the war and in its aftermath in novels like Anubartan, which was set among a community of teachers in a school in war-ridden Calcutta (now Kolkata).
Having lived through two world wars and witnessed the destruction wrought by avarice and lust for power, Bandyopadhyay also turned his gaze on the pristine, if poverty-stricken, heart of rural Bengal. In a sense, he was a kindred spirit of the Romantic poets of England in the 18th century, whose verses rang out with a call to return to nature-in literature, in the fine arts, in life-rejecting the trappings of mindless industrialization and capitalist greed. Although writers before him-Tagore, most notably, in Chhinapatrabali (translated into English as Letters From A Young Poet by Rosinka Chaudhuri in 2014)-had written about the hinterland of Bengal, Bandyopadhyay captured the magic of the rural landscape like no one else had done before him, or since. Yet, Bandyopadhyay was-and remains -one of the most original voices in Bengali literature.