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The Observant Owl is a bawdy, scatological, joyously irreverent portrait of the city he lived in. The writing is so vivid that there is within these pages a sense of walking through a nineteenth-century city as fishwives call out their wares, housewives hurry to the river for baths, thieves pick pockets, and carriages creak through slush and rotting banana peel carting passengers high on ganja.


Hootum Pyanchar Naksha (literally 'Sketches by Hootum the Owl'), a set of satirical portraits in Bengali of ordinary life in nineteenth-century Calcutta, is so popular that it has never been out of print since its publication in 1862. This is its first ever translation.


The author of the sketches, Kaliprasanna Sinha, ran several literary journals, wrote plays, donated generously to charities, translated the Mahabharata, and died in debt at the age of thirty. The Observant Owl is his bawdy, scatological, joyously irreverent portrait of the city he lived in. The writing is so vivid that there is within these pages a sense of walking through a nineteenth-century city as fishwives call out their wares, housewives hurry to the river for baths, thieves pick pockets, and carriages creak through slush and rotting banana peel carting passengers high on ganja.