“When a man is in doubt what to do, he goes wherever he happens to be first called.”
Kopal-Kundala, Chapter IV: With the Kapálik translated by Henry Arthur Deuteros Phillips (1885)
Quotes from book
Kapalkundala
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
Original title
কপালকুণ্ডলা
(Bengali, 1866)
Kapalkundala is a Bengali romance novel by Indian writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. Published in 1866, it is a story of a forest-dwelling girl named Kapalkundala, who fell in love with and married Nabakumar, a young gentleman from Saptagram, but eventually found that she is unable to adjust herself with the city life. Following the success of Chattopadhyay’s first novel Durgeshnandini, he decided to write about a girl who is brought up in a remote forest by a Kapalika and never saw anyone but her foster-father. The story is set in Dariapur, Contai in modern-day Purba Medinipur district, Paschimbanga where Chattopadhyay served as a Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector.Kapalkundala is considered as one of the finest and the most popular of Chattopadhyay’s novels. It has been translated into English, German, Hindi, Gujrati, Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit. Girish Chandra Ghosh, one of the pioneers of Bengali drama, and Atul Krishna Mitra dramatized the novel separately.
