In `The last burden` by Upamanyu Chatterjee, the author gives sharp insight into middle-class Indian family life and partly explains why the majority of populace abandoned the traditional joint family structure in favor of a nuclear one. All the intricacies that inhabit this world be it financial pressure, lost love, unwanted but unavoidable obligations are all given a free rein. This book can be called an unsung classic of Indian literature in English.

The author Upamanyu Chatterjee is a great voice in Indian postcolonial literature.hi snovels always tries to dig the truth of society in this way or the other. One of his novels attempts to do an expose of the IAS with its corruption and the tension which exists between the IAS officers representing the federal government and the state governments resulting in the victimization of the common people in the administrative nightmare in modern India. His thinking varied in his different novels as in another novel of his it`s concern is not with India`s relationship to the metropolitan centers but rather with middle-class life. It exposes the myth of the unity of the joint Hindu family as opposed to the Western nuclear one and its sense of duty. Sometimes his language becomes so mesmerizing that the redaer becomes stuck between the beauty of the high serious prose and the ridiculous emotions that it covers.

Synopsis:
`The Last Burden` by Upamanyu Chatterjee is a portrait of an Indian middle-class family at the end of the 20th century. Jamun is a young man, who has no work. His father, Shyamanand, is old and his mother, Urmila, is on her deathbed. As the novel opens the family are gathering for the inevitable parting. This is an amazing book by the author unfolding different truth of life as the story proceed and gets its pace.

This book `The Last Burden` is written by Upamanyu Chatterjee and is published by different publishing house as for example Faber and Faber and Viking,