Beggars' Bedlam

Beggars' Bedlam is a surreal, absurdist novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya that takes a comic look at the political landscape of West Bengal. It brings the chaos of carnival to familiar ground, drawing on the tradition of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita while also reconstructing lost Bengali history, in a spirit of subaltern anarchy and insurrection. Marshall Bhodi Sarkar and his lieutenant Sarkhel secretly dig on the banks of the Ganges in search of crude oil. They find curved daggers, rusty broadswords and a Portuguese cannon instead. Bhodi is an occasional military man and the lead sorcerer of Choktar, a secret black-magic sect. He joins the flying Flaperoos, men fond of alcohol and petty vandalism, and together they declare war on the Marxist-Leninist government of West Bengal. The revolution is bloodless and wildly implausible, and it is carried out by an equally implausible cast in a magic-realist remapping of Calcutta. The book was shortlisted for the 2025 Muse India Translation Prize and the 2025 TA First Translation Prize.