Even the name Bhattacharya chooses for his protagonist, a Bengali rendition of the English “Herbert,” demonstrates the complexity of the book. The name is on the one hand an affectation on the part of his deceased father, an expression of the internal colonialism brought about by British rule and American cinema, and on the other a sharp, insistent reminder that the world depicted here is impure, bastardized, and necessarily so. It is neither nativist-authentic nor globalized-assimilationist but rather a realm of contending oddities that includes both what is often assumed to be the province of the east (the occult, abjection, revolution) and that deemed to be the boundless terrain of the west (capitalism, Hollywood, whisky), with these opposites often all jumbled together in the person of Harbart.

But even Harbart the character does not encompass the novel as a whole. Bhattacharya’s book is not primarily about the individual, that obsession of the western liberal novel. It is about relationships: between the individual and the scattered collective, between revolution and the afterlife, between cockroaches and fairies. And it is always about language, its felicities and its inadequacies, its limitations and its pliability. Translated with brio into English by Sunandini Banerjee, Bhattacharya’s voice is wholly original: lyrical, melancholic, comic, and bracingly obscene.

Bhattacharya did not just stumble upon this style and this very particular approach to fiction. Harbart is part of a far larger body of work, a beguiling foot soldier in a lifelong campaign. The Bengali edition of Bhattacharya’s Collected Novels consists of ten works written between 1992 and 2006, including Harbart. There are four volumes of poetry, eight collections of short stories, and a book of essays. In their innards roam the petrol-guzzling sex worker Baby K and that underclass of flying humans, the fyatarus. The backdrop consists of verse, shit, and graffiti, while the narrative voice constantly innovates, rubbing racy street slang up against orotund Bengali gentility.

The author of all this remained an enigma to the end of his life. Bhattacharya’s leftist parents, who separated when he was eleven, were celebrated figures in the realm of Bengali letters. His father Bijon Bhattacharya was best known for Nabanna, a play on the Bengal famine of the 1940s that killed as many as three million people, while his mother was the writer Mahashweta Devi, introduced to western readers by the translations of Gayatri Spivak, and whose writings grappled fiercely with the inequities of gender, class, and caste.

Yet Bhattacharya’s work made its own way toward readers. It was only near the end of his life that his prodigious, relentless output brought some measure of grudging recognition, from a national award for Harbart to its film adaptation by Suman Mukhopadhyay (who has also directed two other films based on Bhattacharya’s fiction) and Nabarun, a documentary on the writer’s life by a Calcutta filmmaker known as Q. One can even see, on YouTube, Bhattacharya’s work being discussed at a literary festival in Calcutta, under the banner of corporate sponsors and a ridiculous, oleaginous slogan—It’s Got to Be Lit!