About The Author

Rajshekhar Basu, better known by the pen name Parashuram (16 March 1880 – 27 April 1960), was a Bengali writer, chemist and lexicographer. He was chiefly known for his comic and satirical short stories, and is considered the greatest Bengali humorist of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1956.Basu began his writing career in the 1920s. He adopted the pen name of Parashuram while writing humorous pieces for a monthly magazine. The name was not, apparently, an homage to the Parashurama of mythology. In fact, Basu simply borrowed the surname of someone at hand, the family goldsmith, Tarachand Parashuram. His first book of stories, Gaddalika, was published in 1924 and drew praise from such personalities as Rabindranath Tagore.In 1937, when he published Chalantika, a monolingual Bengali dictionary, Rabindranath commented:”At long last, we have a dictionary for Bengali. The concise grammar for Bengali that you have included in the appendix is also wonderful.”Chalantika also included Basu’s first efforts to reform and rationalise Bengali orthography. A few years before its publication, in 1935, Calcutta University formed a committee, chaired by him, to formulate a set of guidelines governing the spelling of Bengali words. The recommendations of this committee were broadly accepted, and Chalantika is still in use today.