It is set in Calcutta and stitches early 20th century Indian cultural and cinema history with the farcical story of Abani Chatterjee to conduct a darkly comic investigation of the phenomena of pretending, lying and acting.

[2][3] The Bioscope Man is the recollections of Abani Chatterjee, a washed-out silent-era movie actor, who, through this book, makes a bid to convince the reader that misfortune and bad taste of the times conspired to turn him into a non-entity.

In 1920, German director Fritz Lang comes calling to make his "India film" on the great 18th century English Orientalist Sir William Jones.

The result is The Pandit and the Englishman, a film that mirrors the vocabulary of Abani's life, hinting at the dangers of pretence and turning away, the virtues of lying and self-deception, the deranging allure of fame and impossible affections.

Brinda Bose wrote in India Today, "journalist and novelist Indrajit Hazra's The Bioscope Man sneaks us adroitly past the cameras of the silent film industry and exposes with a wacky and trenchant black humour the bathos, the pathos and the incredible magic of the moving image in the heart of Bengali-land about a hundred years ago.

Pour commencer, j'ai adoré l'écriture, magnifique (bon j'ai lu une traduction, mais je pense que le fond est tout de même là), j'ai relu certaines phrases plusieurs fois, pas parce que je ne comprenais pas mais juste pour le plaisir... et il est rare que je m'arrête dans ma lecture pour me dire "Wahouh c'est super bien dit"..."[7] Before publishing The Bioscope Man, Indrajit Hazra also published The Burnt Forehead of Max Saul (Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2000) and The Garden of Earthly Delights (India Ink, 2003).