Bhabani Bhattacharya (10 November 1906 – 10 October 1988) was an Indian writer, of Bengali origin, who wrote social-realist fiction.
[4] The range of South Indian writers who seems to dominate the scene of 'Gandhian Fiction' Bhabani Bhtatacharya deserves to be mention for his first novel 'So Many Hungers'(1947), published few months after Independence.
set in a context of the 1942-43 Bengal famine and Quit India Movement this complicated and didactic novel takes its characters through a rigorously Gandhian education.
It is at one level, the story of Kajoli, a village girl who righteously rejects the prostitution forced on her by the destitution of her family, to sell newspapers and so also to assume the persona of the Gandhian 'New Woman.'
At another level, it deals with the spiritual and political growing up of Rahoul, a Cambridge educated astrophysicist who simultaneously discovers the limits of intellectualism and Western civilization and renounces both in favour of nationalism and village based economy.
Much of his instruction comes by way of his grand father, Devata, a saintly Gandhian figure with a penchant for the hunger strike, who is responsible for bringing satyagraha to the village of Baruni, where he lives like one of the peasant.