The Scholar

📖 The Scoop

Holed up in his tiny apartment, it's all work and no play for Deep Ganguly. He is a Good Indian Boy. In the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship, he knows no one - apart from the television presenters, who are rapidly becoming familiar.

Everything seems so quiet and empty after life in Kolkata. And then in the Spirituality section of a bookshop, he meets Devdasi (formerly Deborah). She wants to set him up with the talented but elusive Aditi.

But Deep is focused on his research into 1920s Calcutta, and an English writer whose relationship with a young Indian man was doomed. When Deep is asked to show a reluctant Madhav around his new American city, however, he is shocked to find himself sexually attracted to him. 

What buried secrets from Deep's past will this attraction bring to the surface? And will history inevitably repeat itself? The Scholar is Niladri Chatterjee's passionate and provocative love letter to the power of literature, to the city of Calcutta, and to its undocumented, constantly surprising queer past.

Genre: Fiction / Romance / LGBTQ+ / Transgender (fancy, right?)