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Vignettes from Pre-partition Bengal

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Struggle: A Novel

Author: Showkat Ali

Translators: V. Ramaswamy & Mohiuddin Jahangir

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Showkat Ali (1936 – 2018) was a renowned Bangladeshi novelist, short story writer and journalist whose work explored history, class and identity in Bengali society.  In 1989, he published a novel called Narai (translated from Bengali as The Struggle) which is set in a remote village in the Dinajpur region of undivided Bengal during the mid-1940s.

The novel is broadly divided into three sections. In the first section entitled ‘A Ploughing Household,’ the author gives us detailed description of an agrarian society where poor Muslim farmers as well as some other lower classes of untouchable Hindus eked out their living primarily through farming as well as other low-paying jobs. The feudal setup of the society is complete with threatening and wily landlords (often Hindus) who are always on the lookout for cheating the sharecroppers of their legitimate dues.

The story begins with a poor farmer called Ahedali who, unable to procure a second bullock to till his field, bore one side of the yoke himself, and soon fell ill and succumbed to death leaving his young wife Phulmoti and a ten-year-old son Abedali behind. The real problem for this widow begins when she is left alone to fend for herself along with a few ducks, chickens and goats. Her fragile world is shattered. People in the village start advising her to get married once again and she gradually finds it very difficult to survive from the ogling eyes and salacious offers from different men in the community. Her son can offer little defense against the men now circling her—neighbours, relatives, even the local cleric—drawn by desire and the lure of her small property. Malek, a kindly bookseller at the local market, too, proves not to be what he seems. It is Malek’s hired hand, Qutubali, who finds himself drawn into her struggles, standing by her in ways that others do not.

The second section of the novel ‘Home and Family’ describes in detail how Qutubali, the simple-minded outsider whose unexpected kindness and fierce loyalty turns into Phulmoti’s unlikely ally. Apparently, he was a senseless and stupid man who provided her benefaction again and again. Much younger to her, he was totally ignorant of standard man-woman relationships and though he often stayed back at Phulmoti’s house, he didn’t express any sort of physical desire for the young widow. He tended to the animals, helped in sowing seeds and worked relentlessly to bring some comfort and peace in the household.

This entire section gives us details of how they come close to each other. Finding no other alternative to live a decent and harmonious life, they go to a mosque where a saint called Darbesh Chacha, who had brought up the orphan Qutubali earlier, gets them married in order that both can live their lives peacefully hereafter. Since then, things gradually changed. If a young widow found a husband, or brought home a ‘ghor jamai’[1], that was definitely news, especially if the man in question was from another village. But people gradually accepted it. Of course, the widow’s suitors fumed with resentment, though even that fire cooled eventually.  Qutubali also gradually started learning the tricks of the trade – he had their own land and along with the yield of the sharecropped land, he knew he could become a full-fledged farmer soon. He was sure the days of his misfortune were over. At the end of this section, when Phulmoti announces to the simple-minded Qutubali that she was pregnant, the reader feels that the rest of the story would follow suit in domestic harmony and bliss. The family had a happy air about them. But that was not to be.

The third section of the novel aptly titled ‘We Must Fight!’ begins amid the upheavals of a precarious feudal order and the stirrings of a nation on the verge of independence. Qutubali did not have the time to stay at home. He was never clear about where he went and what he did. When asked, he replied in monosyllables. He started attending sermons. The headmaster of the village school started indoctrinating him and the village folk with the idea of swadeshi.

The politics of the Congress and the Muslim League started to hover on the margins of village life, far removed from their daily battles. But when the tebhaga[2] struggle broke out in Bengal—with sharecroppers demanding two-thirds of the harvest from landlords as their rightful due—Phulmoti and Qutubali stand to lose what little of their lives they had pieced back together.

By that time, she no longer saw Qutubali as a callow youth. He had become a regular, responsible, labouring man but his gradual involvement in the politics could not be avoided. He got involved in the activities of the peasants’ union. The novel remains open-ended with Phulmoti keeping on waiting for her husband to come back from wherever he was even after a decade is over.

Before concluding, a note must be added about the excellent quality of translation. Both V. Ramaswamy and Mohiuddin Jahangir have done a wonderful job in translating this social realist novel from one of the most celebrated novelists of Bangladesh for the benefit of a wider audience to remember a very detailed study of rural Bengal from both social and political angles from the 1940s — a very significant time when amidst the prevailing feudal order of the agrarian society in rural Bengal, the stirrings of a nation on the verge of independence as well as outside forces were gradually creeping in.

[1] In the usual Bengali tradition, a wife moves on to live in her husband’s house after marriage. The situation is reverse when the married man comes to live in his wife’s or in-law’s house and is then called a ‘ghor jamai.’

[2] The Tebhaga movement was significant peasant agitation, initiated in Bengal in the late 1940s by the All India Kisan Sabha of peasant front of the Communist Party of India. It aimed to reduce the share of crops that tenants had to give to landlords.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Struggle

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.

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Review

The Lost Pendant

Book Review by Udita Banerjee

Title: The Lost Pendant

Editor: Angshuman Kar

Publisher: Hawakal Publishers

The Lost Pendant brings together poems translated from Bengali by translators such as Himalaya Jana, Mandakranta Sen, Rajorshi Patronobish, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Angshuman Kar, and Souva Chattopadhyay. Through these compelling translations, the volume makes a significant intervention in Partition literature, arriving at a moment when revisiting the lingering spectres of the event has become especially urgent. The Partition of India in 1947, which divided the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, resulted in one of the largest mass migrations in history and left enduring scars of displacement, violence, and fractured identities. As the editor, writer and academic, Angshuman Kar, notes in the book’s introduction how Partition remains a 78-year-old wound that continues to bleed.

The anthology showcases poetry from the eastern parts of the subcontinent, chiefly Bengal, Assam, and Bangladesh, featuring works by 41 poets from India and Bangladesh. Kar does not simply compile these poems but thoughtfully curates them to reveal several critical nuances. He invokes the concept of “buoyant memory,” introduced in his earlier work, Divided: Partition Memoirs from Two Bengals, to depict how “forgetting the past is impossible for the direct victims of Partition.” He also draws attention to the disproportionate representation of upper-caste Hindu Bengali poets, in contrast to the relative invisibility of Muslims and those from marginalised communities. This imbalance extends to gender as well, with a noticeable disparity between male and female poets in the collection.

The book is structured in two parts, respectively featuring poets from India and Bangladesh. The Indian section is notably larger and presents a wide range of emotions, reflecting both the immediate trauma of Partition and its long-lasting reverberations over the years. Many of the poems in this section express a deep nostalgia for a lost homeland. For instance, Alokeranjan Dasgupta’s ‘Exile’ evokes memories of abandoned spaces. Similarly, Ananda Sankar Rai’s ‘The Far Side’ laments the estrangement from what was once familiar. He writes, “Once it was a province, now an alien land / where you must enter passport in hand.” Basudeb Deb’s ‘Picture of My Father’ constructs a powerful portrait of the nation through the figure of the father: “Swadeshi movement war sirens famine flood / Riot and partition written in the wrinkles on his forehead.” After the father’s death, only a walking stick remains. The poem draws a powerful parallel between the futility of the father’s dismissive words, “This country is not a pumpkin that you can cut it in one blow”, and the uselessness of the walking stick after his passing. This object comes to embody the spirit of the deceased father, “just another old toy”, offering a stark commentary on how individuals became pawns in the hands of the state.

Several poets in the anthology focus intensely on the experiences of refugees, capturing both their suffering and the complexities of their identities. In ‘The Refugee Mystery’, Binoy Majumdar laments the loss of linguistic roots, noting how “the Bangals now speak the dialect of Kolkata all the time, having forgotten the dialects of Barishal and Faridpur / The Moslems of Dhaka are heard singing and speaking in the radio with the lilt of Uluberia.” His reflections emphasise the deep connection between language and social identity. This theme finds a resonance in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s poem ‘That Day’, where he writes, “On one side they named the waters Pani / on the other side–Jol.” Through this simple yet evocative contrast, Gangopadhyay underscores how a shared concept can be articulated through divergent linguistic expressions in India and Bangladesh, which become subtle yet potent markers of socio-linguistic divisions. Such poems provoke profound questions: Can the adoption of a new dialect truly redefine one’s identity? How does one navigate the tension between past and present linguistic selves, and is reconciliation even possible?

Viewed through the intertwined lenses of faith and suffering, poetry often functions as a repository of collective memory and a means of resilience. In this regard, Devdas Acharya’s three poems present a poignant exploration of the lived experiences of refugees in post-Partition India. A recurring and haunting image emerges in his work: a grieving father, who has recently lost a child to hunger, standing before a deity symbolically embodied by a swadeshi leader. This image encapsulates both the profound deprivation endured by displaced communities and their simultaneous reliance on unshaken faith. Despite the magnitude of loss, what sustained many refugees was a deeply rooted belief system that imbued their suffering with meaning.

By foregrounding the gendered dimensions of violence, Partition poetry exposes how women’s bodies became contested sites of power and trauma. In “She, on the Platform of a Station”, Krishna Dhar powerfully captures the plight of women during Partition. She writes, “Chased from the other side of the border, escaping fire and the fangs and tongues of wolves, one day she arrived,” evoking the image of a refugee woman doubly marginalised– “devastated by Partition” and simultaneously “dodging the eyes of the hyenas.” Here, the metaphorical wolves and hyenas represent predatory men who treated women’s bodies as extensions of territorial conquest. Kar points out in the introduction that very few women wrote poetry about their Partition experiences, largely because they were already engaged in the broader struggle for gender equality. While women’s memoirs on Partition exist, poetry by women addressing these themes, particularly from the 1970s, is strikingly limited. This absence is significant, as women’s experiences are crucial to understanding how deeply gendered the space of the subcontinent was during and after Partition.

Following independence, conflicts often emerged within the nation, revolving around issues of region, language, religion, and ethnicity. In ‘The Diary of a Refugee’, Shaktipada Brahmachari reflects on his sense of belonging across borders, juxtaposing his memories of a past home in Bengal with his present life in Assam. He writes, “The world is my home now, in Bangla my love I spell–Prafulla and Vrigu are the cousins of my heart,” referencing two leaders of the Asom Gana Parishad. While refugees in Assam experienced a more complex form of marginalisation due to ethno-linguistic differences, Brahmachari portrays a gradual process of acceptance, where both the homeland he left and the land he adopted come to hold emotional significance.

Across the border in Bangladesh, the theme of displacement persists. In “Leaving Home”, Jasimuddin asserts, “this land is for Hindus and Muslims,” calling on educators to return and “build the broken schools once more…we will find out our beloved brother, whom I lost,” a poignant appeal for reconciliation and return of Hindu families displaced by Partition. The motifs of memory and loss recur throughout most of these poems, a trope common between both the nations. This sense of finality is further echoed in Binod Bera’s lament: “Our nation is now three, all three are independent, and love lives an alien existence.” The emotional chasm created by Partition, and the subsequent loss of mutual affection, renders any notion of return futile.

The collection deserves commendation for its ambitious effort to recover voices from Bengali literature and render them accessible to a global readership beyond linguistic boundaries, through gripping translations. It is the first-ever translated collection of Bengali Partition poetry that captures the angst of the original poems with perfect nuance. The very title, The Lost Pendant, merits particular attention, for it resonates with themes of liminality and the fractured sense of identity experienced by the refugee poet Nirmalyo Bhushan Bhattacharya, better known by his pseudonym, Majnu Mostafa. Born in Khulna, Bangladesh, yet spending much of his life in Krishnanagar, India, Bhattacharya embodies the dislocation and dual belonging of Partition’s afterlives. As Kar insightfully observes, the choice of pseudonym can be read as a deliberate act of defiance, “a strategy to cross the boundaries set up by religious politics and fundamentalism–a move much needed in the subcontinent of our times.” In this sense, The Lost Pendant is not merely an anthology but a work of cultural recuperation as it attempts to resurrect poets whose voices risked erasure, while simultaneously protecting their oeuvres from the twin threats of historical amnesia and linguistic inaccessibility.

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Udita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of English at VIT-AP University. Her work has previously been published in platforms such as Outlook Weekender, Borderless Journal, Indian Review, and Poems India.

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Colonisation in the Global Frame

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India: A Saga of Monstrous British Barbarianism around the Globe

Author: Rakesh Dwivedi

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Rakesh Dwivedi’s Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India is an unflinching indictment of British imperialism and a forceful challenge to the long-standing narrative of colonialism as a “civilizing mission”. Written with the precision of a seasoned constitutional lawyer and the moral urgency of a historian disturbed by selective memory, the book seeks to dismantle the myths surrounding the British Empire while situating India’s freedom struggle within a wider global context of colonial violence.

At its core, the book argues that British rule in India was not an aberration of excesses but a carefully structured system of exploitation sustained by economic plunder, engineered famines, racial hierarchies, and institutionalised violence. Dwivedi rejects euphemisms such as “benevolent administration” or “rule of law,” insisting instead on naming colonialism for what it was: a barbaric enterprise masked by moral rhetoric. In doing so, he aligns himself with a growing body of postcolonial scholarship that seeks to recover suppressed histories of suffering and resistance.

One of the book’s notable strengths is its global frame. Dwivedi does not treat India in isolation but links the subcontinent’s experience to British imperial conduct in America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. By drawing parallels between policies of extraction, demographic manipulation, and divide-and-rule strategies across continents, he underscores the systemic nature of empire. This comparative approach lends weight to his claim that colonial brutality was not incidental but intrinsic to imperial governance.

The chapters dealing with famines, wartime exploitation, and economic drain are particularly compelling. Using archival material, parliamentary debates, and secret British records, Dwivedi exposes how starvation and deprivation were often outcomes of deliberate policy choices rather than natural calamities. His discussion of India’s role during the World Wars—both as a resource base and as expendable manpower—adds a crucial geopolitical dimension to the freedom struggle, reminding readers that independence was shaped as much by global power shifts as by internal resistance.

Dwivedi’s legal background is evident in his methodical narrative. He builds his case like a prosecution brief—marshalling evidence, anticipating counter-arguments, and dismantling colonial apologetics with forensic rigor. This gives the book a distinctive voice, though at times the prosecutorial tone may feel relentless. Readers looking for narrative subtlety or emotional restraint may find the language uncompromising, even polemical. Yet this stylistic choice appears deliberate: the book is less concerned with balance than with moral clarity.

The treatment of Partition is another significant aspect. Dwivedi views it not merely as a tragic inevitability but as a consequence of imperial betrayal and strategic manipulation. His critique of British exit policies challenges sanitized accounts of decolonisation and raises uncomfortable questions about responsibility, culpability, and historical accountability.

That said, the book’s sweeping scope occasionally works against it. The ambition to cover centuries of imperial history across multiple regions can lead to dense passages that demand close attention. Some readers may also wish for greater engagement with alternative historiographical perspectives. However, these limitations do not diminish the book’s central achievement: forcing a re-examination of colonial history stripped of nostalgia and imperial self-congratulation.

Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India is not a neutral history—it is a corrective one. It speaks directly to contemporary debates about historical memory, reparations, and the politics of remembrance. In an age when empire is often romanticised in popular culture and public discourse, Dwivedi’s work serves as a necessary provocation.

This book will resonate most with readers interested in colonial studies, Indian history, geopolitics, and the ethics of empire. Whether one agrees with all of Dwivedi’s conclusions or not, his argument compels engagement. It stands as a powerful reminder that freedom was not gifted to India—it was wrested from an empire whose legacy must be confronted, not softened.

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

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Geetika Mehendiratta Comes of Age!

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta

Author: Anuradha Marwah

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Anuradha Marwah’s debut novel, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta, republished by more than thirty years after its original publication, is a delightful read. It is a trailblazer and a pioneer in more ways than one-an Indian campus novel before the campus novel became identified as a genre; and a frank exploration of female sexuality without the usual  humbug  and euphemisms associated with the treatment of sex in many 20th century novels.

It scores in other respects as well-its recreation of small-town ennui before the internet took over our lives, in the middle of a hot summer is a feeling  we recognise well. Time moved slowly, people still read books and families still conversed with each other, albeit in the most cliched terms. However, the novel’s tone is not nostalgic, and does not “invite readers into a sepia-tinted past.” (Authors Note)

When the novel opens, we see Geetika whose outlook and  family context is quite at variance with the majority of people around her. We cannot imagine her settling into middle-class bourgeois domesticity with her ‘boyfriend’  or otherwise. The slow pace of life and limited options available in Desertwadi make it a claustrophobic trap for someone like Geetika, who is ready to embark on her adventures, both intellectual and sexual. Her experiments in both directions is a sort of liminal phase before she embarks upon the next stage of her life.

The author has hit the right mixture of irony, tongue-in-cheek humour and social satire. Her social satire pierces particularly deep, albeit at the risk of occasionally falling back on stereotypes. This is strongest in the case of the typical small-town aunty, Andy’s mother. Andy, her son, who is attempting to court Geetika, can barely get anything said (or done!) without  his mother butting into the conversation or walking into his room. Dalpat Singh is another such character, a corrupt small town sports official who has considerable clout and fully exploits his position in whatever way possible. Geetika realises that “Dalpatji was a reality I could not accept. He did not care if the Indian team won or lost; he only cared about the requisite number of scotch bottles that had to be presented to a journalist in order to get good coverage in the papers.”

Drawing on an undertow of real events like the mega sports hosted by India, ASIAD in 1982, the novel stays moored to recognisable places and times. Sometimes, it almost seems like a ‘roman a clef,’ a novel where real events and people appear with fictitious and invented names. The author has explored the nooks and crannies of the two cities, Delhi (Lutyenabad) and Ajmer (Desertwadi) in intimate detail, the claustrophobia of small town existence and the fraught ‘freedoms’ of the big city which breeds its own threats and insecurities. Double standards of morality and the double binds of gender are both in evidence in the novel. Geeti’s friend, Vinita, gets married to a NRI who while being sexually experienced himself, wants  a ‘pure’ Indian wife. Vinita is comfortable with her new husband’s sexual exploits before marriage: she did not mind as it was “all before marriage and men will be men-if girls were game, one couldn’t expect them to be saints.” The double bind of gender is evident in Geetika’s careworn mother. A working woman who is also engaged in social work, Geetika also observes how she has to do the heavy lifting when the domestic help is on leave.  

Many aspects this coming of age story seems particularly prescient for a novel that  was first published in 1993. Its primary concerns —  the stifling and limited choices of life particularly for girls in small-town India, its frank and unabashed exploration of sexuality, narrated in a sassy and unapologetic way make it seem like a fitting story of twenty-first century India.   The book accurately captures the inner conflicts of a young woman caught between a society where even progressive parents are limited by the paucity of available options and the narrowness of societal expectations.   Geetika inhabits a society that veers between conservatism and a kind  of  progressive  hypocrisy. On a quest to expand the contours of her world, she learns that there are no easy choices and the seemingly viable options of settling into bourgeois domesticity, albeit self-chosen, would clip her wings and disable her from self-realisation. This realisation hits her when she is already into the relationship. Some of the fault lines in the relationship between Geetika and her boyfriend, Ratish, are evident from the beginning. From his conservative perspective, feminism is a problematic term. On being asked about his mother, he declares that she is not a hysterical feminist. For him, a woman’s primary duty is to make herself available and agreeable and  be a good mother and wife, and any other aspiration is dismissed as a feminist excess.  

 Geetika realises that her curiosity and quest for freedom have led her up a slippery slope and this book is about the incremental costs of chasing one’s dreams.  The book ends on a somewhat sombre notes with Geetika giving up on dreams of middle class marriage  which would severely limit  her choices. The unconventional and difficult choices she makes also demonstrate the influence of feminist staff rooms where many  women– colleagues and associates — have made difficult and  unconventional choices.  In their company, Geetika realises that she has let herself drift into a relationship which would negate any exercise of agency on her part. It is in part, her recovery of her intellectual freedom to think and write authentically that constitutes her higher education.

The novel also offers us a social satire of ‘higher education’ in the premier institutions of Lutyenabad, replete with references to Capital University and Jana University. This is an insider joke with barely veiled references to actual universities in Delhi. Further, the academic pretensions of many academics who unleash fancy theories, which they have barely grasp themselves, on their hapless research students,  are called out. Literary references pepper the text where Roland Barthes’s   essay “Striptease”, a masterpiece of structuralist criticism, actually refers to a stripping of Geetika’s professor of her pretensions of having been at Sorbonne .   

The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta is a sharp, accurate, searing and witty coming of age story, a bildungsroman, which is unabashed in its honesty about an ambitious  young woman’s journey to self-realisation. To quote from the Author’s Note, “Geetika, my outspoken protagonist, questioned and challenged, and the issues she grappled with are by no means resolved till date.” She continues, “Young people continue to face similar dilemmas: career or family, feminism or femininity, love or rebellion.” Geetika’s story is still relevant and contemporaneous,  ”adding the heft of history to present-day conversations on marriage and partnership.” It’s a coming of age story that resonates far and wide into the twenty-first century.  

Click here to read an excerpt of the novel.

Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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Last Song Before Home

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Last Song before Home

Author: Indira Das

Translator: Bina Biswas

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Last Song Before Home, the English translation of Indira Das’s Bengali memoir Shuru Theke Phera – Mayer Smritikatha[1], emerges as a luminous elegy to the fragility of memory and familial bonds. Translated by Bina Biswas, the book chronicles the author’s mother, Gayatri Das, navigating vascular dementia post-stroke. Through an epistolary structure of imagined letters, Das captures the slow erosion of self, where recollections surface like half-remembered melodies amid Bengal’s partitioned landscapes. The thematic depth and stylistic finesse position it as a vital contribution to South Asian memoir literature.

Central themes orbit memory as both lifeline and tormentor. Dementia strips Gayatri of chronology, yet fragments—rain-soaked courtyards, Partition’s unspoken wounds—resurface as anchors of identity. Das reframes loss as resistance, transforming maternal decline into a testament to resilience. Sisterhood underscores this; bonds with siblings weave a tapestry of shared silences, countering isolation’s void.

Partition looms subtly, not as a historical spectacle but an intimate scar—displaced homes echo in Gayatri’s fading queries: “Where is home?” This mirrors postcolonial Bengal’s flux, where personal trauma intersects collective upheaval. Dignity persists through ritual: songs hummed off-key, hands folding faded saris. Das elevates the mundane, critiquing modernity’s erasure of oral legacies. Resilience triumphs, not via triumph, but quiet defiance—memory’s “last song” before oblivion. The memoir critiques gendered aging in India, where women’s stories dissolve unspoken, urging reclamation.

A practicing gynaecologist, Das’s prose, via Biswas’s fluid translation, mimics dementia’s rhythm: elliptical sentences drift, loop, and fracture like synapses firing erratically. “The courtyard bloomed once, or was it twice? Rain came, carrying voices from across the river.” This stream-of-consciousness narrative eschews linear plot for associative flow, evoking Woolfian interiority fused with Bengali lyricism—sensory motifs—jasmine perfume, monsoon mud—ground abstraction, rendering emotion tactile.

In the translator’s note, Biswas, who is a poet and academician, says: “This book is not simply a narrative-it is a mosaic of survival, and the search for belonging. As John Berger once wrote, ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one.’ The protagonist’s journey is part of a greater collective-a shared history of migration, exile, and emotional displacement. Her voice rises in a chorus of the grieving, each thread woven with shared loss and a fierce resolve to cling to identity.

“She is a figure many will recognize: a woman who, though exiled by circumstance, carries the remnants of home in every gesture and memory. Her story becomes a vessel for inherited struggle, for resilience passed from one generation to the next. As Milan Kundera so memorably stated, ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’”

Epistolary form innovates: letters to an absent self-blur authorial voice, fostering intimacy without sentimentality. Repetition (“Remember? No, forget.”) mirrors cognitive loops, building hypnotic cadence. Das avoids melodrama; understatement amplifies pathos— a single, misplaced utensil evokes existential ache. Cultural bilingualism enriches: Bengali idioms, untranslated, preserve authenticity, challenging monolingual readers. Pacing accelerates in crescendo passages, where songs bridge eras, culminating in cathartic release.

Last Song Before Home transcends memoir, becoming a philosophical meditation on impermanence. Its strengths—haunting style, layered themes—outweigh minor translation hiccups, like occasional stiffness. Essential for readers of Partition literature or aging narratives, it earns four stars for profound humanity. Das not only mourns but hymns endurance, leaving echoes that linger.

[1] Translates to: Returning from the Beginning: Memories of Mother

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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A Mingling of History and Mystery

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Book Title: Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery

Author: Anuradha Kumar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

With Love and Crime in the Time of Plague, a sequel to her first Bombay mystery novel, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, Anuradha Kumar brings historical fiction and moral inquiry into a gripping, imaginative dialogue. Placed in 1896 Bombay during the plague, the book begins with an image of visceral dread — a rabid rat biting a dock-worker — and from that moment on, the city is portrayed as a place where anxiety, illness and suspicion trickle into every crack of public and private life. The author, while successfully evoking an image of a city under siege, also makes a reader wonder whether epidemics, when they arrive, also expose deeper social and ethical contagions long embedded in a society.

The novel reconstructs the atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Bombay. The city, the colonial bungalows, the horses, the streets and the just added bicycles to the streets. Along with unnerving coexistence with science and superstition, it comes palpably alive in the pages. The plague is handled with restraint. Hospitals and the quarantine measures take the hue of resented interventions which provoke resistance from communities that view them as assaults on religious customs and social autonomy.

At the centre of the narrative is Maya Barton, a character whose quiet determination and curiosity anchors the novel. Alongside her is Henry Baker, an American trade official who figured in Kumar’s earlier novel, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain. The prequel had introduced both characters in a different historical and emotional register, foregrounding adventure, transnational intrigue, and the unsettling proximity between colonial India and the American literary celebrity. In Love and Crime in the Time of Plague, Maya and Henry reappear, seemingly shaped by prior experience. The relationship between the two books is subtle rather than overt. The second does not really depend upon the first for comprehension. Yet, the readers familiar with The Kidnapping of Mark Twain will sense a continuity of temperament, trust, and shared ethical curiosity between the protagonists.

This continuity is substantial indeed. Where the prequel revolved around kidnapping and spectacle, Love and Crime in the Time of Plague turns inward, replacing dramatic motion with moral gravity. Maya emerges as an introspective figure, troubled by unanswered questions about her lineage and identity. Her own search reflects the wider inquiry that shapes the book — what realities lie hidden beneath official narratives, and who bears the cost of their concealment? The discovery of some mysterious sketches further draws Maya into an investigation which links private memory with public disorder.

Kumar here renders institutions as sites of ethical strain. Offices, hospitals and private societies are shown not as abstract systems but as fragile human constructs, susceptible to fear, bias, and ambition. A secret organisation which opposes plague-control measures shows the darker side of communal solidarity, revealing how traditions can be mobilised to validate coercion and violence. Where colonial authority is shown without romanticisation, scientific rationality is depicted entangled with coercion and indifference.

Stylistically, the prose is austere and restrained. The unhurried pacing permits atmosphere and character to come together steadily. Although the narrative may appear deliberately slow, but this slowness mirrors the creeping, inescapable nature of the plague itself. The revealing of conspiracies does not erase loss, nor does the waning of the epidemic reinstate moral balance. Trauma lingers, relationships are changed, and the city remains marked by what it has borne. In this sense, the novel extends the thematic concerns of The Kidnapping of Mark Twain. It moves from the excitement of historical adventure to a more sobering contemplation on accountability, memory, and subsistence.

This book is historically immersive and yet quietly unsettling. Reflecting upon how societies perform under intense pressure, and how crime often emerges not from evil but from fear and silence. It stands as a richly imagined historical mystery can be read on its own. When read alongside its prequel, it divulges the steady evolution of a fictional world—and of characters—who keep searching for truth in times when certainty itself is under threat.

Click here to read an excerpt from the novel.

Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ .

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Review

This Could be A Love Poem for You

Book Review by Gazala Khan

Title: This Could Be a Love Poem for You

Author: Ranu Uniyal

Publisher: Red River

This Could Be a Love Poem for You by Ranu Uniyal, is her fifth collection of poems. Uniyal is a passionate bilingual poet at heart, a retired professor of English literature by profession and an inspiration to many budding poets. Across the Divide (2006), The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough (2018), December Poems (2012) and Saeeda Ke Ghar (In Saeeda’s home, Hindi, 2021) are some other significant contributions made by the poet.

“Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful, you find co-existence; it breaks walls down.” A quote by Mahmoud Darwish is reflective of Dr Uniyal’s poignant portrayal of human existence layered with love, grief, crises and relationships with the One (Self) and the World.

The collection is an aesthetic delight that traverses the heart of the readers with astute directness and a distinct confessional tone. It has three segments: ‘Dust My Regrets’, ‘Be a Good Girl’ and ‘Thy Eternal Grace’. Collectively, there are 62 poems in all.

The poems start from the personal and move to the universal  with their intricate details. The poetic sensibilities take us to the female imaginary of the physical, psychological and spiritual domains. If Kamala Das in the 20th century introduced the readers to her brazenness in poetry, then Ranu Uniyal in the 21st century coerces her readers to travel from the common routine to the coveted spiritual abode found in the creative doctrine of poetry. The poetic depth can also be inferred through the rhythmic structure, the play with the words through alliteration and rhymes introduce jibes in poems such as ‘The Shop and the Shutter’.

The themes of love, identity, self-expression, language and power, old age, body’s fragility, vulnerability, precarity, loss, women and domesticity, motherhood, death and memory are persistent throughout the collection. She poetically contours the theme of human existence and its distinct flavours like WB Yeats in Sailing to Byzantium with — “That is no country for old men.”

The poetic pondering over the question of ‘Self’ or recurrent declaration of ‘I’ is developed through linguistic, racial, and geographical temporal identities. For example, the poet’s ‘Garhwali’ identity is camouflaged with the the more modern Anglophone identity. The declaration of the personal “self” and dedication to some personalities like Mohini Mangalik, S. A. Hamid and Amma takes us to the glints of the poet’s biography in the most poetic manner. Gulzar once uttered that, “we poets are errant grains of dust… life takes us and tosses us, we do not know where it will end.” The poems hail the essence of life’s evolutionary journey, especially the one of experience and the mature years of life.

Her poems present multiple binaries: of love and grief, seller and buyer, life and death, through picturesque imagery. Additionally, the poet familiarises the readers with the references to the pagan myths from diverse cultures, Christ, Nachiketa, Yama, Isis, which also introduce us to the eco-folklorists’ traditions which is a delight to explore.

She writes in aphorisms at times and critiques the personal and public crises. The poem, ‘Only Grief’, provocatively emotes the climate crisis as an apocalyptic warning through a distant voice from the future, wherein, critiquing the war-torn present world and the catastrophic space left for the progeny of the future.

We sang dangerously of the failure.
Of our prodigal ancestors.

Another poem, ‘From One Life to Another’, reflects a similar concern about the cataclysmic/tragic climate situations left for the future:

Sparrows and crows have 
been hushed to silence.
The once-green acacia shrieked
as they chopped her limbs.

Nature and motherhood hold each other’s hands in sharing the identity of exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, the intricate details through the lens of the ecofeminist poetic sensibilities highlight the diversified literary corpus in the anthology. The same poem states further:

I was once a tree- all green.
Very tall, bobbing in the wind.
I had leaves, branches.
And occasional flowers.
I, too, had a name.
A woman. A mother.
Once a tree.
I brush them aside,
My tears, an upright foliage
Lying heavy on my chest.

Dr Uniyal can be set alongside the “literary greats” like Kamla Das and Sujata Bhatt.

The usage of the colloquial vernacular Hindi words and phrases makes it more personal, tinctured with cultural aesthetics.

The eponymous poem in the anthology, ‘This Could Be a Love Poem for You’ is raw and personal between the one waiting for the other partner far away from a distance is the talisman of the relationship, the theme that finds its way again and again in the poet’s poetic oeuvre. This colourful and mature anthology glossed with distinct sonorous imagery could indeed be a reflective love poem for the present and for our progeny, the rightful claimants, who would reminisce over the past.  It’s a love poem about resilience and human existence that shall follow the hearts of the readers for a long, dialogic course of expressions and insights.

Gazala Khan teaches in the Department of English at Doon University, Dehradun, India. She has published poetry in magazines such as Setu, Borderless, and The Fictional Café and has been consistently working on creative and literary projects.

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Review

Blues, Devil and Gothic: A Fantasy that Travels Back in Time

Book Review by Andreas Giesbert

Title: The Devil Take the Blues: A Southern Gothic Novel

Author: Ariel Slick

In her newest book, The Devil Takes the Blues, the Texan novelist, Ariel Slick, takes on a journey into the deep South. Her novel is very well written and crafted. It has been substantially enriched with blues music and its mythology. 

The novel centres around Beatrice who learns of a threatening prophecy about her beloved sister, Agnes, that can only be prevented by making a pact with the Devil. The protagonists are joined by the handsome blues musician, Angelo, a mysterious voodoo practitioner, and the unlikeable husband of Agnes. The plot is superb as is the writing style. Slick is able to paint an immersive picture of the (fictional) rural town of Azoma in the 1920s. She knows how to write breathtaking action scenes as well as solemn moments and includes a lot of philosophical and ethical considerations. It is an entertaining read that also gives you food for thought.

The main reason why I picked this book was that blues is part of the title. I’m very much interested in the history of blue music, and if it is combined with (supernatural) Southern Gothic I am basically sold. Alas with many tales, blues is just some spice added into the mix and all too often reduced to a bleak cliché.

Ariel Slick approaches it differently. The novel is set in the 1920s, the period where blues was born as a popular genre of music. Victrola record players became relatively common in the US and mail delivery made the records available to the newly emerging customer group of African-Americans, even in rural regions. Slick also does not choose the obvious Mississippi Delta as the place for the story but a fictional small town in Louisiana. Slick’s book is no history class though. If you did some research on the origin of the blues you will find some errors, such as records with multiple tracks or that it’s a year too early (1924) for consumer phonographs. If you are into the history of blues music, you will also note how blues and jazz are somewhat conflated, which, by the way, is not always a problem, since genre boundaries are usually drawn in retrospect.

However, the novel tries to take on the culture that surrounded blues. The whole book is fundamentally informed by a world view apparent in pre-war blues. While there are minor flaws, Slick is able to present a much more complex picture of the blues than is usually present in fictional works. It is not about downtrodden “authentic” Black geniuses expressing their pain – a story that is too often repeated and tends to cater to expectations of a White audience – but about blues in all of its nuances. It’s about pain and racist experiences but also about love, joy and the very unique sense of humor and quick-wittedness prevalent in blues music.

What’s the deal with the devil?

As the title promises, the Devil plays a big part in this story. That comes as no surprise as the Devil is one of the core elements in the pop cultural view of the blues. Even if you don’t know a thing about the history of the blues, it’s likely that you have heard of Robert Johnson’s deal with the Devil. Fortunately, Slick doesn’t go down this path. She mentions and debunks the hurtful myth in passing and is absolutely on point in her ‘Historical Note on the Blues’ when she states, that “„[i]t’s probably a testament to racism that we’re more likely to believe a Black man sold his soul to a supernatural being rather than was a musical genius.”

Rather than solidifying the myth that the blues is the Devil’s music, she embeds it in the cultural discussion of its time. For example, she addresses the fearmongering against the alleged sins of the Devil’s music, while the actual terror was not the excess or the sexual promises of a juke joint but the lynching of human beings.

Instead of the Johnson myth and some crude idea of evil, she presents a Devil inspired by Papa Legba, that is not evil, just the guardian of the crossroads. Furthermore, this Devil is not only a concept but takes an active role in the story and even narrates parts of it. Most interesting and original is the fact that the Devil doesn’t follow a clear agenda. He is himself conflicted about his role and ethics. In some ways it’s the most human Devil I know, and for sure, more human than some of the human antagonists of the book …

Just as with the Robert Johnson myth, the book is also careful in catering to clichés when it comes to blues music. There are still some passages that put too much emphasis on a supposed immediate expressiveness and disorderliness of the genre, but the author clearly knows, that this is only a part of the blues at best. She knows that it is also an outlet to deal with hardship, by having a good time and laughing to keep from crying. Most importantly, Slick never mistakes poverty and discrimination for authenticity: “There [is] no nobility in suffering.”

Not limited to blues, the difficult topic of racism of the era is at the heart of the book. By that the book faces the particular challenge of reflecting worldviews and language from the 1920s without reproducing racist stereotypes and language itself. The book indirectly addresses this issue, when describing a situation as awkward as “a white author writing first-person perspective of a black character.” As a non-native speaker, I am not in a position to judge whether the book always succeeds in this task. There are passages where I find the choice of language problematic, but I can plainly see an anti-racist stance throughout the whole book. 

The Devil Take the Blues is a unique Southern Gothic novel that stands out by seriously involving (the history of) blues music. Even with some flaws in historic accuracy it is able to present a nuanced picture of blues music what gives the story an interesting twist. For all my focus on history and the treatment of blues music and cultural sensitivity, it should not be forgotten that the book is simply a well-crafted, entertaining read. It is compelling read from page one to the last sentence. This novel’s a good read not only for blues enthusiasts but anyone who is looking for a well-crafted story with a special twang.


Andreas Giesbert is a reviewer of speculative fiction, board games and more based in the Ruhr Valley. He mostly writes for online magazines such as www.zauberwelten-online.de, or Ginger Nuts of Horror. He is also a board member of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund.

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Review

Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive

Book Review by Satya Narayan Mishra

Title: Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive

Author: Amal Allana

Publisher: Vintage Books, Penguin

During an extensive interview, Pankaj Kapur, the highly acclaimed actor, director and writer, nostalgically remembered his days in NSD[1] as a student in the 70s and of Ebrahim Alkazi who was the guiding light of the school as the Director from 1962-77. Mandi House was the vibrant cultural hub where the quartet of NSD, Triveni Kala Sangam, Sriram Art Centre and Kamani Auditorium breathed cadences of art, music, dance and theatre. As the presiding deity of NSD, Alkazi’s prodigious talent in all aspects of theatre except costume (where his wife was the moving spirit) brought his dynamic genius into the quest for intercultural and interdisciplinary thinking in artistic expressions that was both transformative and liberative for his myriad students like Sai Paranjpye, Nasir, Om Puri, Surekha Sikri, Uttara Baokar and Pankaj Kapur[2], who later on lit the stage and celluloid  though their exceptional talents and skill. He would have been a hundred this month. Amal Allana, his daughter has authored a biography of her father, Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive. The book  makes an absorbing read.

She brings out Alkazi’s early encounters and reception by the Hindi Theatrewallas of Delhi in the early 60s. It is the story of a western educated Bombayite who was presumptuous enough to think he could teach Delhi theatre buffs a thing or two. As a second-year student, Sai Paranjpye recalls Ebrahim as a storm under whom a metamorphosis took place in the NSD overnight. Walking in to the den of Hindiwallah writers’ camp, Alkazi caught them unawares by picking up the works of the most cerebral and experimental of the Hindi new wave movement; Mohan Rakesh’s Aashadh Ka Ek Din[3]and Dharmavir Bharat’s Andha Yug[4].  Aashadh ka Ek Din, a play with a rural background, was the story of the Indian villager, whose lifestyle, pace and values were succumbing to the inevitable onslaught of urbanisation. The basic theme was autobiographical to Mohan Rakesh himself, where he identified himself with a classical playwright like Kalidas. This mix of history and the present entwined in to a single entity, was a modernist strategy that Alkazi too had attempted while contemporising myths. He exquisitely crafted the mise en scene[5]that sparkled with delicate, nuanced performances from young student actors such as Sudha Sharma as Mallika and Om Shiv Puri as Kalidas.

 India had lost a war with China in 1962.  Alkazi had chosen Andha Yug, set during the last days of the Kurukshetra war, when Aswasthama stood in rage, prepared to use the ultimate weapon to annihilate the mankind. It was just not the play’s topicality, its anti-war thrust that drew Alkazi to it. Alkazi tried to shrug off the baggage of European modernism he was carrying, embarking now on a foundational journey towards a deeper ‘discovery of India.’ Through Andha Yug, Alkazi came closer to learning about India’s value system and philosophy as explored in the Mahabharata, while Aashad gave him an appreciation of the artistic sensibility of the great Sankrit poet-dramatist Kalidas, India’s veritable Shakespeare. From now on, he would engage with the idea of India between the two polarities: India as a myth and India as a kind of documented reality. Alkazi was introducing the idea that theatre was a performance art, not literature performed on stage. He was creating a language of performance that was distinct from the language of words.

The making of Tughlaq and its staging in Purana Qila is a watershed event in the theatre landscape of Delhi. Alkazi was greatly drawn to Girish Karnad’s play Tughlaq. Karnad had confided in him how Tughlaq was the most idealistic, the most intelligent king ever to come on the throne of Delhi and one of the greatest failures also. And how in the early sixties India had also come very far in the same direction. Alkazi felt that this play effectively reflected the trials and opposition a visionary leader faced, while trying to function within a corrupt political scenario. The cast of Tughlaq had some of the most brilliant actors, each painstakingly trained by Alkazi himself. There was Manohar Singh who was playing Tughlaq, Surekha Sikri and Uttara Baokar were doubled as Sauteli Ma, Nasiruddin Shah as the Machiavellian Aziz, Rajesh Vivek as Najeeb. The young reporter members included Pankaj Kapur, KK Raina, Raghuvir Yadav, a veritable who is who of latter-day cinema. Tughlaq was staged in 1972 at the Purana Qila (Old Fort) in Delhi, utilising the historical ruins as a backdrop for the dramatic spectacle. This production is considered a landmark event in Indian theatre, combining history, politics and performance to create a commentary on the reign of Tuqhlaq[6] and politics of the 60s.

Nehru’s dream of reconstructing the nation needed a powerful and unitary concept of ‘nationalism’ to recognise all productive forces in the country. Culture was very much a part of the reconstructive process that needed to be systematised and brought under one umbrella and for this purpose, three national academies had been set up: the Sangeet Natak Academy, the Lalit Kala Academy and the Sahitya Akademi. The desire to modernise Indian theatre was part of the same reconstructive cultural policy. And Alkazi was the mascot of the theatre movement and Mandi House, the epicentre of cultural conflation and crescendo.

The Purana Qila festival in 1972, with Tughlaq, Sultan Razia and Andha Yug became the most talked about cultural event of the decade He wanted to offer both the hoi polloi and the cognoscenti, including burqa clad women, high quality theatre that did not conform to ‘popular taste’; theatre that had a social relevance, that both instructed and entertained. This was Alkazi’s ideal of what constituted national theatre.

There have many stars in firmament of Indian theatre. Ebrahim revitalised Indian theatre. Habib Tanvir, blended folk traditions with modern drama. Badal Sirkar revolutionised Bengali theatre by challenging conventional norms. They are like the great troika of Indian Cinema, Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak and Mrinal Sen.

Alkazi left NSD as it was denied autonomy by scheming bureaucrats. Allana brings out how Alkazi passionately believed that an artist belongs to no political party, and has no religious ideology. An artist has to distance himself from each one of these in order to see each one of these objectively. “And finally, he has to distance himself from himself.” He wrote: “ It is our duty and moral responsibility to study history dispassionately, but with a passion for the truth, with humility and with a profound sense of responsibility and to ask ourselves seriously: What is the legacy that we shall leave behind?”

[1] National School of Drama

[2] Well known Indian actors

[3] A Day in Aashadh (June-July) was a Hindi play that debuted in 1958

[4] Blind Age was a verse-play in Hindi written in 1953

[5] Placed on stage

[6] A 1964 Kannada play by Girish Kannad, translated to Urdu in 1966 in NSD and most famously performed for in Purana Qila, New Delhi, in 1972

Satya Narayan Misra is a Professor Emeritus and author of seven books. The latest, Against the Binary, was published in December 2024. He is a regular columnist and reviewer of books for several leading newspapers in Odisha and digital platforms likeScroll.in and The Wire. He was associated with the NSD in the 70s.

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Review

‘A Story of Moral Contradictions and Human Cost’

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: India in the Second World War: An Emotional History

Author: Diya Gupta

Publisher: Rupa Publications

When we think of the Second World War, the images that most often come to mind are those of Europe’s ruin — the Blitz in London, the camps in Poland, the victory parades in Paris. India, though one of the largest contributors of men and material to the Allied cause, usually slips to the margins of that global story.

Diya Gupta’s India in the Second World War: An Emotional History sets out to correct that imbalance — and does so not by recounting battles or strategies, but by uncovering the feelings, memories, and private sufferings that shaped India’s wartime experience.

In this groundbreaking work, Gupta turns away from generals and governments to listen instead to soldiers, families, poets, and activists. Through letters, diaries, photographs, memoirs, and literary texts in both English and Bengali, she reconstructs the emotional life of a country caught in the contradictions of fighting for freedom while serving an empire. Her book is as much about the inner weather of a people at war as it is about history itself.

The story begins with the strange binary of India’s position in the 1940s. The British declared India a participant in the war without consulting its leaders. While nationalist politics in the country were reaching their boiling point, over two million Indian men were dispatched to fight on foreign fronts — from North Africa to Burma — under the Union Jack. They fought for a cause that was not their own, for a government that denied them liberty.

Gupta’s focus on emotion allows her to expose this moral paradox with nuance. The letters of sepoys from the Middle East reveal homesickness, confusion, and occasional pride; families back home are haunted by anxiety, caught between imperial propaganda and the whisper of rebellion. The result is a portrait of divided loyalties — of men and women who inhabited both the empire’s war and the nationalist struggle at once.

But it was the Bengal Famine of 1943 that made the war’s cost most brutally visible. Triggered by colonial economic mismanagement and wartime policies, it claimed nearly three million lives. Gupta’s chapter, ‘Every Day I Witness Nightmares’, captures this catastrophe through eyewitness accounts and literature that tried to make sense of it. Hunger, she suggests, became not only a physical condition but an emotional state — an emblem of the moral starvation of empire.

In poems and essays by writers such as Sukanta Bhattacharya and Mulk Raj Anand, the famine appears as a mirror held up to civilisation’s collapse. Tagore’s haunting late work, ‘Crisis in Civilisation’, forms a central thread in Gupta’s narrative — the poet’s disillusionment with humanity, his grief at the world’s descent into barbarism, and his call for renewal through compassion.

One of Gupta’s greatest achievements lies in her ability to braid together the intimate and the historical. The war years, she shows, were also years of reflection and redefinition. In the chapter named ‘The Thing That Was Lost’, she explores how the idea of “home” was transformed by displacement — whether through the departure of men to distant fronts or through the forced migrations caused by famine and air raids. Home, once a site of safety, became a space of longing and loss.

Another chapter, ‘Close to Me as My Very Own Brother”, turns the spotlight on male friendships in Indian war writing. Here, Gupta uncovers the tenderness that often underpinned comradeship — relationships that blurred the lines between duty and affection, and that offered emotional sustenance amid violence and uncertainty. In these pages, she challenges the stereotypes of stoic masculinity, showing that vulnerability and empathy were also part of the soldier’s story.

While the battlefield has long been the focus of war history, Gupta gives equal weight to those who remained behind. The women who waited, worked, and wrote — often in silence — emerge as witnesses in their own right.

Activists such as Tara Ali Baig, nurses and doctors on the Burma front, and countless unnamed mothers and wives populate the emotional landscape she paints. Through their letters and memoirs, we see how war invaded domestic spaces, transforming everyday life into a theatre of endurance.

Gupta writes of “anguished hearts” not as metaphor but as historical evidence. The fear of air raids, the sight of hungry children, the absence of loved ones — these, too, were the realities of India’s war. By restoring emotion to the historical record, she argues that feelings are not soft data but vital clues to understanding how societies survive crisis.

What makes the book so compelling is its insistence on looking at the global war from the Indian perspective. For Britain, the war was a fight for democracy and civilisation; for India, it was also a confrontation with the hypocrisy of those ideals. As Gupta notes, the same empire that called for liberty in Europe jailed Gandhi and suppressed the Quit India movement at home.

Seen from Calcutta rather than London, the war ceases to be a heroic narrative of Allied victory and becomes instead a story of moral contradictions and human cost. Gupta’s intervention is both historiographical and ethical: she reminds us that global history must include the emotions of those who bore its burdens without sharing in its glory.

A historian with literary sensibility, Gupta writes with precision, empathy, and grace. Her prose balances academic rigour with narrative warmth, allowing the reader to move effortlessly between archival fragments and the larger questions they evoke. Each chapter unfolds like a story, yet the cumulative effect is that of a symphony — voices rising and blending, carrying echoes of pain, pride, and endurance.

Gupta’s work has been widely celebrated for its originality and emotional depth. Shortlisted for the 2024 Gladstone Book Prize, it has drawn praise from scholars and critics alike for its fresh approach to war history. What distinguishes her study is not only its range of sources but its refusal to treat emotion as peripheral. For Gupta, feelings are the connective tissue of history — the invisible threads binding individuals to events, memory to nationhood.

The book is  more than the  war. It is about the human capacity to feel in times of fracture — to love, mourn, and imagine even amid devastation. It shows that the emotional life of a people can illuminate their political choices, their artistic expressions, and their vision of freedom.

By reassembling scattered memories and forgotten emotions, Diya Gupta offers a new way of reading both India and the world in the 1940s. Her India is not a passive colony swept along by imperial tides, but a living, feeling community navigating grief and hope in equal measure. The war, as she reminds us, did not just redraw maps; it reshaped minds and hearts.

In giving voice to those who seldom found one in history books — the sepoy writing from the desert, the poet confronting famine, the mother waiting for news — Gupta transforms statistics into stories, and stories into testimony. Her book stands as a reminder that history is not only written in treaties or timelines but in tears, silences, and the fragile language of feeling.

It ensures that those emotional histories, too long buried under the dust of archives, are heard again — quietly, insistently, and with the full weight of their truth.

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

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