Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay was an Indian Bengali-language novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, and physician who wrote under the pen name of Banaphul. He was a recipient of the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan (1975). Mukhopadhyay was born in Manihari village of Purnia district (now Katihar District), Bihar on 19 July 1899. His family originally hailed from Sehakhala situated in Hooghly District of present-day West Bengal. His father, Satyacharan Mukhopadhyay, was a doctor, and his mother was Mrinalini Devi. He originally took the pen name Banaphul (“the wildflower”) to hide his literary activities from a disapproving teacher. He attended Hazaribag College and was later admitted in Calcutta Medical College. But he graduated from Patna Medical College and Hospital, later he practised at Azimganj Hospital and worked as a pathologist at Bhagalpur. He moved to Lake Town, Calcutta, in 1968, and died there on 9 February 1979. He is the elder brother of famous Bengali film Director Arabinda Mukhopadhyay. He is most noted for his short vignettes, often just half a page long. Still, his body of work spanned sixty-five years. It included “thousands of poems, 586 short stories (a handful of which have been translated to English), 60 novels, 5 dramas, several one-act plays, an autobiography called Paschatpat (Background), and numerous essays.”
