Path Ke Daavedaar SaratChandra

Sarat Babu has applied his pen mainly on family and social plots and for most of his writing period, he did not try to touch any political issue though it was the period of the colonial British rule in India and the nationalist sentiments were emerging in all the nooks and corners of the country. Paather Daabi (In Hindi, Path Ke Daavedaar) is the only novel penned by him which has a political backdrop detailing the activities of the armed patriots who were called the revolutionaries, aimed for the freedom of the motherland from the shackles of slavery. Perhaps it was the last novel written by Sarat Babu because it appears to be incomplete in a way.

Paather Daabi or Path Ke Daavedaar (the claimants of the path) starts with a Bengali Braahmin youth, Apoorva who is fatherless and despite his mother’s abundant love, finds himself as aloof and feels to be extraneous in the family because of the negative attitude of his elder brothers (negative not only towards him but also towards the mother). The story takes off when Apoorva gets a decently paying job in Rangoon (the capital of Myanmar which was then known as Burma). His mother, Karunamayi who was dreaming to arrange his marriage with a religious Braahmin girl, becomes sad to send him overseas but seeing the attitude of her elder son towards hitherto non-earning Apoorva, she reluctantly agrees for that. However to ensure that Apoorva does not face any food-related problems on the foreign soil, she sends a Braahmin cook, Tiwari alongwith him.