Author: Sulekha Sanyal
Translator: Gouranga P Chattopadhyay
Publisher: Stree
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 246
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185604304
Description
Passionate and moving account of a girl growing up amidst the challenges, the excitements, the pressures and the tensions of the nationalist movement in the early part of the twentieth century.
Translated for the first time from the Bengali, this astonishingly radical novel is about Chhobi, a gusty, misfit girl from a rural landowning family, who questions injustice, fights to share the privileges offered to her brothers and other 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 late 1930s and the early 1940s in Bengal where anti-colonial struggles against British Rule are in full swing.
Soon world War 2 breaks out in Europe and India as a colony is sucked into it. Chhobi gets involved in this political movement and her life takes a different turn.
Moving from the darkness of interior to light is a recurring theme of this novel, and Chhobi succeeds in doing so, awakening her selfhood, just as a seedling strains towards the Sun.