The story is set in a village near Tarakeshwar, in the district of Hooghly in West Bengal, near the author's birth-place, Devanandapur. The time is apparently early twentieth century, when village life was dominated by social conventions and caste prejudices, and social power was wielded by the richer sections of the society, namely, landlords and moneylenders, and to a lesser extent, by the Brahmins. The low-born and the poor were completely at the mercy of ...
