Wonderful storytelling, stimulating and moving
- Book: Victory Colony, 1950
- Location: Kolkata (Calcutta)
- Author: Bhaswati Ghosh
This compelling novel is set in Calcutta, three years after India’s painful partition along ethnic lines and at a time when, as the author puts it, Every day, new batches of refugees spilled into the city like sugar falling off a torn sack.
When we visualize a refugee camp most of us see blurry images of tents and indistinct faces of people trapped in squalid living conditions. Enter Bhaswati Ghosh, who vividly portrays life within the Gariahata Refugee Camp in all its complexity. Her attention to detail sets the mood and readers will savor descriptions such as, “Water gathered in stray pieces of junk littered on the ground: torn clothes, old newspapers with blotting ink splattering on the ground, a perforated aluminum plate that sang stridently as the rain hit its base.”
There are two protagonists in Victory Colony, 1950: Amala—who arrives by train in Calcutta with her little brother Kartik, after fleeing the violence in her village in East Pakistan and Manas Dutta—a book-lover and volunteer at the camp who comes from an upper class family. Both of them are well drawn and the evolution of their relationship as well as their individual growth are central to the book.
As the story begins, Amala loses Kartik in the crowded railway station and desperately searches for him. Manas finds her there and with great difficulty persuades her to enter the van going to the camp.
Having adjusted to camp life, Amala is recruited by Manas to help other women, in spite of her needing as much, if not more support as those she is expected to comfort. This theme of how we can lift ourselves up by helping others runs through the book and spoke to my heart. Amala continues her search for Kartik and as she bonds with other women in the camp they face many other conflicts and obstacles. There is also a love story that makes the book even more of a page-turner.
Manas is a voracious reader and at one point he purchase Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches from a bookseller on College Street. He reflects in his diary on the similarities between the downtrodden people Turgenev writes about and the people in the camp where he works. He asks himself, Who is going to write their stories when no one even cares whether they exist or not? This is a question that I can hear author Bhaswati Ghosh asking herself. Her answer is a resounding “I will.” She has done a magnificent job.
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