‘DEW DROPS Unseen’ by Dr. Samiran Chakravarty is a saga of pain, nostalgia and can be called a fictional counterpart of Osborne’s play, ‘Look Back in Anger’. The novelist being a medical practitioner and a very successful surgeon, dealing with mentally ill patients very effectively, used his experience for depicting the story of a young man in the Anglo Indian Catholic society and shows how he grows up in the midst of all ups and downs, how he interacts with the outer world with all his mental inhibitions. The young protagonist in the novel is Robin whose anger is mingled with deep depression, which only a psychiatrist can cure.

Written against the backdrop of Anglo –Indian Catholic culture, the novel is a portrait of a young man who suffers awfully during his adolescence and grows up with all the pains suppressed inside his heart. He is most uncomfortable with amorous emotions surging in him. Love in his Catholic rigidity of ethos, is mostly like lust or adultery. The restriction on his emotional abundance creates in him a crisis and this becomes most poignant when he falls in love with a Bengali girl.

Robin is an Anglo Indian Catholic and this identity becomes the great impediment to the marriage of true minds. He feels the pangs of untouchability. He remembers his dead father intensely and looks back in anger. His marked danger against his father was caused by the pressure to repress during his adolescence. He is also not at home with the Catholic interpretation of adultery. The worst psychic suffering however may be traced to his anguish, caused by the ongoing bloodbath because of fight between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. It affected Robin’s mental health to such an extent that his mother felt it imperative to consult a psychiatrist for curing her son. The advice worked and Robin was healed. He was at last able to reach the height of success as a member of the Discriminated Minority Community for a while soon after 1947.

Thus the novel depicts the colonial hangovers and the condition of a Catholic family in the pre-independence days. The Anglo-Indian Catholic community was under pressure and was ostracised socially, both from outside and inside. Chakravarty, through this novel depicted a society from psychic point of view, and the factors which make a young man a victim of psychic depression are well portrayed, displaying a wonderful narrative skill. The telling is as important as depicting in the novel. In Indian English writing, fiction is gradually becoming a powerful genre and the writers like Chakravarty who use the historical background of the Anglo Indian Catholic Community have showed their easy access into the problems and crisis, which they delineate with a profound insight.

The other novel under scanner is Rape Trial, which is shockingly controversial. Rape emerges from the Latin word ‘rapere’ which means ravishment. Anything taken away from anyone against his will is ‘rape’. Similarly anything forced upon a person against his will is also a rape. Rape Trial deals with the issue of female right, which is denied to them. A woman is subjugated unconsciously and like air, water and other natural resources, her right is also raped or denied to her in a male-dominated society. In this novel also the social is mingled with the psychic. There is a prelude in the novel which charts out the evolution of the word  and meaning of the term ‘Rape’  and the ‘Epilogue’ which portrays a struggle for  securing women’s rights since 15th and 16th century . It is pointed out that Prophet Mohammad was a great social reformist, favouring women’s rights. Rape Trial is a loud voice for the marginalized, ostracized and suspected Muslims in general as a minority group of mainly Muslim activists. It offers an explanation why the Muslim young men go astray under social ostracisation and repression. The hero of the novel, Anil is mostly a spectator and he wonders why Pakistan does not take a lesson in administration from Indonesia’s Susilo Bang Bang or Sheik Hasina Wazed of Bangladesh if it is allergic to learn democracy from India. In the distant backdrop, carnage in Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and Syria is depicted, where Muslims kill each other.

In this novel, the general study is more important than any case study. Political and social problems are more prominently delineated than the psychic problems. Thus Chakravarty shows diversity in his outlook. He uses psychology with restraint. His vision as a medical practitioner suits his vision as a novelist to cure the society of its mental and social illness. Almost in a tone of Shakespeare‘s Hamlet, who saw the degeneration and rottenness of Denmark, Chakravarty also seems to retort in the novel: “Cursed I am to set it right”. The ills of the society pain us, shock us, and we have rarely time for voicing the anguish of the repressed and the oppressed. But in his overmuch preoccupied life as a medical practitioner, Chakravarty finds out time for chronicling the saga of marginalized people and fictionalizes bitter reality with artistic skill and the insight of a visionary. His final message is not negative: “Though the field be lost/ All is not lost”. At the end of the novel Dew Drops Unseen, Robin becomes a happy person with all his mental illness cured. But there must be a psychiatrist of course. The mental health of the society, even today must be under the scanner.