| The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers | |
| Author: | Sarnath Banerjee |
| Illustrator: | Sarnath Banerjee |
| Cover Artist: | Chandan Crasta |
| Country: | India |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Graphic novel |
| Publisher: | Penguin Books (India) |
| Release Date: | January 2007 |
| Media Type: | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages: | 280 pp |
| Isbn: | 0-14-400108-X |
| Congress: | MLCM 2007/00163 (P) PR9499.3.B |
| Oclc: | 123767962 |
The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers is a 2007 graphic novel by Indian graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee. It is the author's second graphic novel after Corridor, which has been widely advertised as the first Indian graphic novel.
The novel reinvents the legend of The Wandering Jew as a Jewish merchant called Abravanel Ben Obadiah Ben Aharon Kabariti who once lived in 18th century Kolkata (Calcutta) and who recorded the scandalous affairs of its British administrators in a book called The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers. Although it has several subplots, at its core the novel is about the narrator's quest to find this book, which his grandfather Pablo Chatterjee found at an old Jewish trinket shop in Montmartre, Paris, in the 1950s. Pablo's wife gave away the book, as well as her husband's other belongings, upon his death; the narrator tries to recover the book, which was one of his childhood favorites.
The title of the graphic novel is the English translation of Hutum Pyanchar Noksha,[1] a 19th-century Bengali novel written by Kaliprasanna Singha. It was originally published as a series and later in novel form in two parts (1862 and 1864).