Pother Kanta (Bengali: পথের কাঁটা) also spelled Pather Kanta, (Lit: A thorn on the path) is a detective story written by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay featuring the Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi and his friend, assistant, and narrator Ajit Bandyopadhyay. It is one of the first forays that Sharadindu took in the realm of creating a mature logical detective moulded in the pattern of Sherlock Holmes in the Bengali language, and one that Bengalis could immediately identify with. As such, it is not as well-drawn out as some of Sharadindu's later works and relies heavily on Sherlock Holmes and Holmesian deductive reasoning for inspiration.