It begins with a familiar story of displacement. The people of Jambhli have been ousted from their homes with promises of rehabilitation, and compensation in cash and land, to make way for an irrigation project and the construction of a large dam.
The Jambhlikars’ anguish at leaving behind everything they have known and resettling among hostile strangers – the beneficiaries of the dam project – and their desperate search for alternative employment, for which they are neither trained nor qualified, are just the beginning of their troubles. In their search for a place to call their own, they must battle petty local politicians, scheming government officials strengthened by exploitative laws and self-serving social workers, and face the ultimate betrayal at the hands of trusted leaders. Yet, even as the fabric of their social structure disintegrates, their courage, faith and innate goodness shine through in the face of unspeakable hardship.
Heartbreaking, humane and utterly relevant to our time, this remarkable Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel stands apart in giving a voice to those who pay the price for progress and development, and in vividly encapsulating the struggles of the impoverished against a ruthlessly corporatized world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Keerti Ramachandra
Keerti Ramachandra is a fiction editor, multilingual translator and teacher. With a Masters in literature and an M Phil inj linguistics she has been teaching in schools and colleges in India and abroad. She is currently teaching a course in Creative Non-Fiction and Structures in English at Xavier Institute of Communication, Mumbai. She can translate from Kannada, Marathi and Hindi and has been actively associated with Katha as a fiction editor. Her interests include art history and art appreciation, Hindustani classical music, dance, handicrafts and folk art. Besides Hindi, Marathi and Kannada, she is fluent in Konkani and Tamil and has a working knowledge of Gujarati and Bangla.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vishwas Patil
VISHWAS PATIL, recipient of the 1992 Sahitya Akademi Award, is a prominent novelist and playwright in Marathi. Born on 28th November, 1959 of farmer parents in the small village of Nerle in Maharashtra, Mr. Patil is today an I.A.S. officer in the Maharashtra cadre. Jhadazadati, the novel that fetched him the Sahitya Akademi Award is based on the life and plight of the people displaced by the construction of big dams. Widely translated into almost all languages in India, Mr. Patil’s social and historical novels have a mass as well as a class appeal. Mahanayak was the result of an extensive study and research for seven years during which Mr. Patil traveled through Japan, Germany, England and Burma, where Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army had created history. The novel, which came out of a long arduous research, was originally published in Marathi and went into six editions.
There are no reviews yet.