Kunal Basu

Kunal Basu is an Indian novelist born in Kolkata in 1956 who writes in both English and Bengali. Raised in a politically engaged literary household, he was exposed from childhood to writers, artists, filmmakers and debates about Indian and international culture. Basu was educated in India and the United States and later settled in Oxford, where he taught at the University of Oxford alongside his literary career. His fiction ranges widely across cultures and periods, often exploring colonialism, migration, inequality and the encounters between people separated by race, language or political power.

Several of Basu’s novels are historical fiction. The Opium Clerk begins during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and follows the nineteenth-century opium trade from Calcutta towards China. The Miniaturist is set at the sixteenth-century Mughal court of Emperor Akbar and follows an artist whose unconventional work challenges religious and imperial authority. Racists examines nineteenth-century racial theories through an experiment involving European scientists and African children, while The Yellow Emperor’s Cure follows a Portuguese doctor travelling to China in 1898 during the tensions preceding the Boxer Rebellion. These novels are particularly relevant to readers interested in Mughal India, British colonialism, the opium trade, Qing China and the history of European racial ideology.