Blossoms in the Graveyard is the story of Mehr, a young girl from a village in what is at that time, East Pakistan. It is the story of her journey from dependence to self-reliance, both emotionally and physically. Parallel to her story, is the narrative of a land that is struggling to assert its identity, and moving towards a hard-won Independence in a crucible of blood and tears. Mehr is the symbol of the land. Her suffering, her distress, her tortured anguish, is an emblem of its agony, in particular of the women of the country, as it is being birthed. Set at a crucial time in the history of the struggle, when the land is on the cusp of becoming Bangladesh, the novel is in the voice of Robin Babu. As an Assamese, he, like so many others living in this part of India that lay adjacent to the theatre of war, is deeply affected by horrors taking place at his very doorstep. Jnanpith Awardee Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya has told the story with a fine understanding of all the issues involved, in a non-partisan way. Though fiction, it deals with events and issues of recent history. Each of the characters is delineated with empathy, and a thorough understanding of what he or she stands for, without them being typecast in any way. The author’s unswerving humanism imbues the whole work with a luminous compassion that is often very moving. The echoes from that time reverberate across the entire subcontinent even today, making this a work of contemporary significance.
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