Bhadra Quartets: A Novel in Four Sections

Bhadra Quartets is essentially about choices and the independence in life at multiple levels-from work and participation to fulfilment of mental, physical, and spiritual urges. Set in the middle of the last century, the largely picaresque novel, like a multicultural rainbow, spans an expansive swathe from Europe to Asia. As some characters journey across countries and continents from United Kingdom to France and Italy, and again from London through Aden to what was then Bombay, their interactions add to the dimension of quest, probing the truth of human passion and love, as well as their role in reconciliation of people in life. The quest carries on in the journey from the west Indian metropolis to a nondescript village in the sub-Himalayan Indian hinterland. The first book of the novel finds Bhadra Pathak, an Indian from a seemingly orthodox background, arrive in London for higher studies. His primary circle there includes his supervisor Dr. Robert Croft; Anette Epstein, another scholar under Croft; Lydia Pal, his landlady; and her daughter Georgina. Young widower Bhadra finds himself conflicted over his feelings for Anette, who herself is no less unsure about relationships and marriage due to past experience. The ensuing interplay of passion, love, and mutual acceptance in the first book leads on in the three subsequent parts to exploration, adventure, enquiry, discovery, and finally, understanding in the otherwise disparate lives of individuals coming from cultures separated by half a turn of the globe.

Enquiry into ideas and traditions behind them has been a lifelong pursuit for Ashok Kumar Jha, an educator, poet and translator of literary classics. In his new novel Bhadra Quartets, he melds a rare insight into the history, art and culture of the east and west to weave a picaresque narrative of passion, love, and beliefs in a contemporary novel of multi-cultural interest.