“By the bank of the canal, Haru Ghosh stood leaning against the enormous trunk of a banyan tree. The god of the heavens looked down at him from there and cast a mocking glance.”

With these haunting, almost biblical opening lines, Manik Bandopadhyay begins his 1936 masterpiece Putul Nacher Itikotha (The Puppet’s Tale). In a single stroke, the novel announces its central theme: humans as puppets at the mercy of indifferent forces — nature, fate, society, duty, and their own repressed desires.

What follows is not a story of thunderous rebellion but the slow, agonising erosion of one man’s identity under the accumulated weight of compassion, responsibility, moral dilemmas, and unspoken longings.

Dr Shoshi, a young physician trained in the scientific rationalism of colonial Calcutta, returns to his ancestral village of Gaudiya expecting only a brief stay with his father Gopal before moving on to greater opportunities — perhaps even further studies abroad.

The lightning that kills Haru Ghosh becomes the first thread in a web that will eventually ensnare him completely.

As the village doctor, Shoshi steps forward to handle the body with dignity, navigating family politics and social customs. This act marks the beginning of his transformation from a man with modern ideas and personal ambitions into the indispensable yet increasingly hollow centre of Gaudiya’s fragile world.

Manik unfolds the plot with masterful psychological depth. Shoshi treats relentless outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, and kala-azar (black fever), often working through the night as epidemics expose the painful limits of medical science against poverty, superstition, and fate.

His friend Kumud arrives from Calcutta, full of artistic energy as the leader of a traveling jatra troupe. Kumud, once the brilliant, meritorious star of their college days — someone Shoshi had looked up to as destined for greatness — has instead become a nomadic actor.

When Shoshi learns of this, he feels a subtle, almost guilty sense of relief and satisfaction. If even the more talented and free-spirited Kumud could not fulfil his supposed grand potential and had chosen instead the uncertain, performative life of the stage, then perhaps Shoshi’s own compromises were not so uniquely tragic.

This moment offers Shoshi a momentary psychological comfort, a small balm for his growing sense of personal failure and entrapment.

Kumud falls in love with Moti, Haru Ghosh’s daughter, and draws Shoshi into helping arrange their marriage. Shoshi assists, even as he feels quiet pangs of envy for a life of passion and freedom he himself cannot fully embrace. Kumud and Moti eventually leave for Calcutta, another departure that tightens the strings around Shoshi.

At the emotional and psychological core of the novel is Shoshi’s relationship with Kusum, a vibrant, unconventional woman who openly flirts with him, challenging every social norm.

Their bond simmers with raw physical attraction and intense unfulfilled longing. In one of the novel’s most piercing moments, Kusum confronts Shoshi with her desire. Shoshi, trapped between attraction and duty, remains restrained. In exasperation, Shoshi cries out: “Shorir! Shorir! Tomar mon nai Kusum?” — “Body! Body! Don’t you have a heart, Kusum?”

This single line exposes the heartbreaking mind-body divide at the heart of Shoshi’s crisis. Kusum seeks full connection, body and heart, while Shoshi’s deep moral inhibitions and sense of duty keep him from bridging the gap.

He both craves and represses the vitality she offers. When Kusum eventually leaves for her father’s home in Bajitpur, the separation is quiet but devastating — a silent amputation of his chance at erotic and emotional fulfillment.

Other threads tighten around him. Bindu’s scandal, Paran’s crises, Jadav Pundit’s rituals, and his father Gopal’s departure for Kashi all add weight. Sendidi’s death forces him to confront mortality’s futility.

As years pass, the village empties. Shoshi dreams of a hospital and escape, but every midnight call and moral obligation roots him deeper. His energy fades. He stops watching sunsets at Talban. He becomes a solitary guardian consumed by the world he sustains.

The novel’s title serves as both metaphor and protest. Shoshi is painfully aware he is dancing on strings pulled by duty, affection, social expectation, irrational impulses, and indifferent fate. Repressed sexuality and unacknowledged desires fuel his inner turmoil.

His restraint with Kusum is profound self-denial that fragments his psyche. His rational mind clashes with deeper forces, creating moral dilemmas — he knows the cost of staying, yet cannot leave.

But there is a dimension to Shoshi’s trap that the novel quietly encodes without dramatising: the colonial wound.

The inability to live up to one’s full capacity has evolved into a silent epidemic. In a hyper-competitive world dominated by social media highlight reels, many youth silently grieve unlived lives: the research they never pursued, the creative callings they abandoned, the relationships they never fully embraced.

He is a man shaped by the scientific rationalism of colonial Calcutta — an education system that implicitly promised its finest students escape, progress, and modernity. Yet that promise was never meant to reach places like Gaudiya.

The empire trained men like Shoshi but never intended to fix the poverty, the epidemics, the structural abandonment that make those men indispensable to their villages the moment they return.

Shoshi belongs fully to neither world: the rural life that shaped him nor the educated, modern sphere that promises escape. His tragedy lies in drifting endlessly — mentally as much as socially — unable to surrender himself honestly to either desire or duty.

This is existential crisis at its most intimate and grinding. Shoshi loses authenticity and “own-ness,” sacrificing his full potential — professionally, creatively, emotionally, and sexually — to the collective’s demands.

He lives in bad faith, allowing societal roles to define him rather than forging his own essence. The crisis is quiet daily attrition: possibility siphoned away by caretaking and a moral economy that equates virtue with self-renunciation.

In 2026, this narrative cuts deeper than ever. Millions live as modern Shoshis — outwardly functional yet existentially adrift. The colonial wound has only changed its shape.

Across the Global South, a generation has been educated by Western-modelled institutions that implicitly promise global mobility, intellectual freedom, and a life of chosen purpose.

Yet the same structural neglect that made Gaudiya dependent on Shoshi now makes families and communities dependent on their most educated members — the very people most primed to leave.

The NRB wiring money home, the first-generation graduate managing ageing parents’ medical decisions over WhatsApp, the scholarship student who returns not by choice but because someone has to — these are Shoshi’s inheritors.

The “body and heart” dilemma and Freudian undercurrents remain equally unresolved. In an age of dating apps and hyper-visibility, many experience profound emotional disconnection — physical relationships without true intimacy, or emotional bonds starved of passion due to conservative upbringings, long-distance arrangements, or the guilt of prioritising self-fulfilment.

Repressed desires surface as burnout, a rising mental health crisis, hidden affairs, digital escapism, or numbness. Societal expectations still frame personal longing as selfish, breeding the same moral paralysis Shoshi endured.

The inability to live up to one’s full capacity has evolved into a silent epidemic. In a hyper-competitive world dominated by social media highlight reels, many youth silently grieve unlived lives: the research they never pursued, the creative callings they abandoned, the relationships they never fully embraced.

The fleeting comfort Shoshi derives from Kumud’s “failure” finds its contemporary echo in the quiet schadenfreude of scrolling through peers’ curated struggles — seeing others compromise as well offers temporary relief, yet deepens the collective resignation.

Post-pandemic disillusionment has only heightened this — people turned to superstition or rigid traditions during uncertainty, much like the villagers of Gaudiya, while rational individuals like Shoshi grapple with the limits of science and personal agency in the face of systemic failure.

Algorithms now act as invisible puppeteers, feeding us content that reinforces guilt, comparison, and performative duty, while AI-driven work cultures make many feel like interchangeable parts in someone else’s machine.

True to his unsentimental vision, Manik offers no easy escape. Shoshi does not dramatically break free. He remains in Gaudiya, continuing his work with a quiet, melancholic dignity.

There is both tragedy and a strange, subdued heroism in his endurance — the recognition that some meaning emerges from holding a community together, even as one’s own self slowly dissolves.

Yet the novel never romanticises this path. It lays bare the profound human cost: stunted potential, unfulfilled desires, lingering loneliness, and the haunting awareness of roads not taken.

Putul Nacher Itikotha ultimately challenges us to examine our own strings with ruthless honesty. Today, amid technological disruption, ecological collapse, shifting gender norms, and growing mental health awareness, the novel asks urgent, uncomfortable questions.

Have we confused being needed with being fulfilled? Can we care deeply for others without losing ourselves? What hidden desires and moral conflicts are we repressing in the name of duty and belonging?

Shoshi’s silent rebellion reminds us that the most profound struggles are often the most intimate — the daily fight to remain the author of our own lives amid the insistent demands of love, obligation, and survival.

From that lightning-struck banyan tree by the canal in 1936 to the glowing screens and restless hearts of today, Manik’s masterpiece continues to speak with quiet, unflinching power. It warns us how easily freedom and potential can slip away, and how much courage it truly takes to finally claim them.

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Dhaka-based writer, researcher and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

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