The Ekkos Clan (, 978-14-95229-78-7) is a mystery novel written by Indian author Sudipto Das, based on historical research. It was published by Niyogi Books and released in India in July 2013 and officially launched at a function in Bangalore on 3 August 2013.
In less than a fortnight of its release The Ekkos Clan was at third position in the bestsellers list in Flipkart in the Literature and Fiction category. It was also at third position in the "Top 10 Bestsellers of the Week" at Oxford Bookstore in September 2013.
Author
The Ekkos Clan is the debut novel of Sudipto Das, who holds an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur. Sudipto, a veteran in the Semiconductor Industry, stays in Bangalore. He is a member of a music band Kohal, which he started in Bangalore in 2007 with his IIT friends. He has been a secretary at the Sarathi Socio Cultural Trust for many years, looking after their cultural initiatives in Bangalore. In September 2014 he recreated Eastern European melodies of the 1940s for the War Musical Schweyk in the Second World War by Bertolt Brecht.
Plot summary
Thriller set against Ancient Indian history
Kubha tells many stories to her children. She has heard these stories from her ancestors. No one really knows where these stories came from. Many years later sometime during the nineties of the last century, long after Kubha died a gruesome death during the partition riots of 1947, her grandson Kratu, who is doing his masters at Stanford University, and his girlfriend Afsar, who studies linguistic palaeontology, figure out that the stories are not mere bedtime tales. They discover that each story is rich in linguistic fossils and is actually in the form of a riddle which has clues to some explosive aspects of ancient Indian history not well known. They also come to know that all the unnatural deaths that have happened in their family over the past hundred years were all murders. Some fanatic group wants to eliminate the entire family of Kratu's to remove all traces of Kubha's stories, which if exposed will change the way the fanatics want the Indian history to be seen as. Kratu, Afsar and their friend Tista embark on a journey across continents to decipher Kubha's stories. While doing so, they also discover Kubha in a new light. They come to know of several things about Kubha's life which no one in Kratu's family knew till now.
Clash between two mysterious forces
"Kratu, Sudipto’s protagonist, finds himself suspended deep in a clash between two mysterious forces, and sets on a quest to find answers to questions that man has posed to himself every now and then: Where did I come from?"
Fanaticism
In a blog Sudipto says the following about his book:
Mine is more of a mystery novel, where there are lot of riddles in the form of small stories, each leading to some prehistoric event or anecdote, all of which together tell a tale of our civilization, our culture... It deals with fanaticism in the garb of an extremist nationalism, something that gave rise to Nazism. It deals with the identity of India and the Indian civilization. It deals with the gradual evolution of hierarchies in a society and many more...
Background
"In India, there is the emergence of fiction and non-fiction writers who offer a sharp perspective, informed by their personal experiences, who are recording a historical (and painful) moment." Sudipto has mentioned in the acknowledgement of the book that the seed idea of The Ekkos Clan came from certain aspects of his grandmother's life. Having grown up with lot of stories about Bangladesh, from where his family had to flee during the partition riots of 1947, he has used Bangladesh and "the true stories which he heard... about the Partition" extensively in his book.
Bengal side of partition
Some of his readers have pointed out The Ekkos Clan is perhaps one of the very rare books which deals with the Bengal side of partition so vividly. The same was highlighted in an article in The New Indian Express. Sudipto talked about the sparse representation of the Bengal partition in Indian literature at a panel on Borderland Narratives of the Bengal Partition, held at the UIUC in April 2019.
Linguistic Palaeontology
The book also deals extensively with Linguistic Palaeontology, apart from other disciplines like Astronomy, Archaeology, History, Music, Mathematics and Poetry. "Sudipto wanted to come up with a literature that flourishes with [ancient] Indian history," and Linguistic Palaeontology has been used as the main tool to decode various controversial aspects of the ancient Indian history, which has left very little archaeological evidence.