Krishnacharitra
In book form it was published in 1886 and revised in 1892. First published as a serial in the Prachar magazine starting in the Ashwin issue of BY1291 along with two other highly acclaimed articles, Anushilan and Dharmatatva, in Nabojivan. The latter two covered the theoretical constructs behind the hindu religion and philosopy and Krishnachritra was to serve as application or living proof of the thesis. The author wanted to publish these three works simultaneously as books. However, Krishnacharitra came out earlier and the other two works were combined and first published in book form a couple of years later (1888).In Krishnachritra the author traced the historical proof of Lord Krisna's earthly existence. His deductive scientific inquiry dispelled superstitions with reason, mythology with history and dogmas with logical principles. Krishnacharitra, in which the author traces available classical literature to establish the historical existence, or otherwise, of the Shri Krishna persona, shall remain as the best testimony and timeless monument to his immense intellectual and methodological ability to disect fact from fiction, history from legend, truth from imagination, fire from smoke and man from God. A task any lesser writer would find extremely difficult as he or she would have to negotiate a fine divide between popular beliefs and dearth of concrete evidence either for or against such mythology on the one hand and the logical impossibility of a man being God. Tagore said that in Krishnachaitra, Shrikrishna is not the lead character - the free-thinker, that resides in the human mind, is. It is that free-thinking mind the author has glorified for ever.
Acknowledgement:
Much of the materials for this article was sourced from the Bankim Rachanabali (Complete Works of Bankim Chandra), Tuli-Kalam, Calcutta 1986