Nabankur: The Seedling’s Tale

Translated for the first time from the Bengali, this astonishingly radical novel is about Chhobi, a gutsy, misfit girl from a rural landowning family, who questions injustice, fights to share the privileges offered to her brother and male cousins, and refuses to see her future as just another submissive household drudge. Nabankur means a new seedling, which is personified by Chhobi, who is growing up in the late 1930s and the early 1940s in Bengal where anti-colonial struggles against British rule are in full swing. Soon World War II breaks out in Europe and India as a colony is sucked into it. Chhobi who was being educated in town, returns to her village as an adolescent and becomes involved in the movement for relief as the manmade famine of 1943-44 begins to take its horrifying toll. Side by side her political wakening gains maturity, and questions of political freedom give rise to thoughts of personal freedom. Moving from the darkness of the interior to light is a recurrent theme in the novel, and Chhobi succeeds in doing so, awakening her selfhood, just as a seedling strains towards the sun.