Harvest Song: A Novel on the Tebhaga Movement

Sabitri Roy’s trilogy, Paka Dhaner Gan, translated for the first time into English, provides as epic panorama of rural Bengal of the late 1930s and the 1940s, encompassing the freedom movement, war, and the Tebhaga movement, the peasants’ uprising against unjust taxes by the zamindars or landlords. Spanning generations, this story shows how the struggle changed rural Bengal. The peasants and their leaders took ideas of equality into the fields, sometimes paying with their lives. While focusing on a momentous social revolt, Roy also writes of young women and men, struggling for personal freedom, of trying to take decisions on their own lives, free from the bonds of an oppressive social hierarchy, of wrestling with commitment and the search for personal fulfillment.Tanika Sarkar provides an incisive foreword that places the novel within its tumultuous historical context.