The story is set in a village near Tarakeshwar, in the district of Hooghly in West Bengal, near the author's birth-place, Devanandapur. The time is apparently early twentieth century, when village life was dominated by social conventions and caste prejudices, and social power was wielded by the richer sections of the society, namely, landlords and moneylenders, and to a lesser extent, by the Brahmins. The low-born and the poor were completely at the mercy of the leaders of the society who dealt with them in any way they pleased.The novel deals with the efforts of Ramesh, a young Roorkee-trained engineer, to bring some change in the caste-ridden village and to elevate the villagers to a better level of existence. There is also the story of Ramesh and Rama, childhood friends, and their mutual attraction, a relationship which is, however, doomed, as social convention decrees that they must not come close to each other. The novel deals in depth with the corruption that infects the village, and Ramesh’s efforts to remove it. In the end we find that Ramesh has been partly rewarded, but he has lost Rama forever.
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