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Ghanada: who he is, and which of his stories to hear first
Premendra Mitra's Ghanada has told tall tales from a Kolkata mess since the Puja of 1945. Who he is, why his lies hold up, and the order we would play his three audio stories in.
In this post (5)
Ghanada arrived the way so much Bengali reading used to arrive: in a fat Puja annual, bought before Mahalaya and fought over by every child in the house. In 1945 Deb Sahitya Kutir's annual, Alpana, carried a story called Mosha, and in it a man in a Kolkata mess explained, over a borrowed cigarette, how he had once saved the world from a mosquito. According to Bengali Wikipedia's page on Ghanada, Premendra Mitra then wrote him a new story for the publisher's Puja annual every year, though the story list on English Wikipedia shows a few blank years. Eighty-one years on, Navami is as good a night as any to let him lie to you again.
Who is Ghanada?
His name is Ghanashyam Das. Ghana for short, and da, the word Bengal gives an older man, which is the one thing about him nobody questions. He lives in the rooftop attic room, up on the second floor, of a mess at 72 Banamali Naskar Lane, a Kolkata boarding house for single men of the kind every para once had. Mitra described him in the first story as a bachelor, dark, tall and so bony he looks like a skeleton, of any age between thirty-five and fifty-five. He does no work that anyone has seen. He sits in his armchair, eats with real devotion, and borrows cigarettes he never returns.
His audience is four young boarders: Shibu, Shishir, Gour and Sudhir, who tells the stories. Readers had to wait a long time for that last name. Sudhir narrates the first twenty-eight stories without one, and is only called Sudhir in a story named Dhulo. In the very first story there is also a Bipin, who then vanishes from the mess for good. The four plot all the time: to trap Ghanada in a contradiction, to flatter him into a story, to win one argument. He is cornered now and then. He is never beaten.
Mitra knew exactly what he was doing. In a 1983 interview quoted on Bengali Wikipedia he explained that foreign science fiction heroes were scholars and strongmen at once, so he chose an ordinary Bengali who lives on mess rice instead, a man whose muscle is his mouth. Wikipedia's English article adds that Ghanada is believed to be modelled on Bimal Ghosh, a fellow boarder from Mitra's own young days in a boarding house on Gobinda Ghoshal Lane in Bhabanipur. So the mess every Ghanada reader can picture began in a real one.
Why do Ghanada's lies hold up?
Because everything around the lie is true. Ghanada never claims to have been somewhere vague. In Mosha he is on Sakhalin, the island in the northern Pacific, in the summer of 1939, hired to collect amber, and he stumbles on a laboratory where a scientist is breeding mosquitoes into a weapon. The island is real, and the date is exact: a little over two years before the war reached the Pacific. Only Ghanada's part in it is invented. That is the trick of the whole series: the reader checks the facts, finds them sound, and is left with nothing to argue about except the one man at the centre.
He does the same with history. Some stories are about his ancestors, and one of them, Bachanram Das, is in Mughal Agra. Most of us learnt at school that Shivaji got out of Agra: on 17 August 1666, hidden in one of the baskets, with his son Sambhaji in another. Agra Jakhon Talomolo asks who arranged it. You can guess the family name.
Where to start: the three Ghanada audio stories
We carry three Ghanada recordings, all from Mirchi Bangla, and the order matters more than it looks: the first story, then a history, then the novel.
32:51Play: Mosha (Mawsha)Mosha (Mawsha)
Mirchi Bangla
The first Ghanada, from 1945. One borrowed cigarette, and the mess hears about Sakhalin, amber and a laboratory full of mosquitoes. 33 minutes, on Sunday Suspense, July 2024. The shortest way into him.
1:02:37Play: Agra Jakhon TalomoloAgra Jakhon Talomolo
Mirchi Bangla
Mitra's 1966 story of Shivaji's escape from Agra, with a Das somewhere in the plan. Arpan Mallik narrates. 63 minutes, on Friday Classics, first broadcast 18 July 2025.
2:10:46Play: Mangalgrahe GhanadaMangalgrahe Ghanada
Mirchi Bangla
One of Mitra's four Ghanada novels, dated 1972 on Wikipedia. It begins with a medical check-up and a pulse no textbook allows, and it does not stop until Mars. Two hours and eleven minutes, on Sunday Suspense, first broadcast 3 November 2024. Keep it for a long evening.
Mosha first, because everything the later stories play with starts there: the mess, the four listeners, the borrowed cigarette, the straight face. If you only have half an hour this Navami, that is the one.
After Ghanada: more Premendra Mitra to play
Mitra, who lived from 1904 to 1988, was born in Varanasi and belonged to the Kallol generation of the 1920s. He was a poet and a film director as well, and he wrote detectives, ghost hunters and Telenapota Abishkar, the last story below. Our Premendra Mitra page has 18 recordings. These are the ones a Ghanada reader should reach for next.
1:57:46Play: Parashar Ebar JohuriParashar Ebar Johuri
Mirchi Bangla
Parashar Barma, Mitra's detective who would rather be a poet, and who even turns up in two late Ghanada stories. Nearly two hours, on Sunday Suspense.
27:43Play: Bhoot Shikari MejokartaBhoot Shikari Mejokarta
Mirchi Bangla
Mejokarta hunts ghosts the way Ghanada hunts listeners. Comic, 28 minutes, on Friday Classics.
1:41:24Play: Mamababu: Kuhoker DesheMamababu: Kuhoker Deshe
THRILLER LAND
Mamababu, the uncle who worked in Burma, goes after a bee nobody has named. Part one of two, from THRILLER LAND.
41:14Play: Telenapota AbishkarTelenapota Abishkar
Mirchi Bangla
No tall tale here. A city man in a malaria village, a young woman called Jamini and a promise someone else made. 41 minutes, on Friday Classics. Play it last, and quietly.
For the same comic strain from another para, there is Narayan Gangopadhyay's Tenida, and if it is the Puja nights and you want a teller who frightens rather than boasts, our Taranath Tantrik guide is the next door down the lane.
Reading Ghanada: the books
The stories are collected in Ananda Publishers' Ghanada Samagra, in volumes, and Wikipedia lists the earlier single books too, from Ghanadar Galpo in 1956 onwards. In English there is Lila Majumdar's translation, The Adventures of Ghanada, from the National Book Trust in 1982, and Mosquito and Other Stories, from Penguin India in 2004. Ghanada has been on the air before, too: Bengali Wikipedia records two radio plays, of Mosha and of Nuri, with the actor Shekhar Chattopadhyay as his voice.
Read him, or play him, the way the first readers met him: late, after the pandals, with somebody in the room who is certain he is making it up. Ghanada would not mind. He has heard that before, and he has a story about it.
References (4)
- Ghanada, Wikipedia. Checked 30 Sep 2026.
- Ghanada (ঘনাদা), Bengali Wikipedia. Checked 30 Sep 2026.
- Premendra Mitra, Wikipedia. Checked 30 Sep 2026.
- Shivaji, Wikipedia. Checked 30 Sep 2026.
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