Debi Chaudhurani, Or The Wife Who Came Home

Bankim Chatterji was perhaps the foremost novelist and intellectual mediating western ideas to India in the latter half of the 19th century. Debi Chaudhurani is a didactic work that champions a particular interpretation of Hindu dharma and wifely duties reflective of the late 19th-century Calcutta context in which it was written. Lipner's idiomatic translation is enhanced by his detailed commentary on the original Bengali text and by a readable introduction that sets the novel and its ideas in context.