An exploration of post-colonial Indian life through "engagingly embroidered stories that leave us replete and delighted" ( The Sunday Tribune, India).
Marriages, affairs, death, madness, and second chances all live within the walls of Rajmahal, an unusual Bengali house that has stood through a century of turbulent changes. Within the walls of this stately home, now divided into six apartments, the melting pot of tenants include Sikhs, Muslims, Brits, Russian-Bengalis, zamindari Bengalis, and Roman Catholics. As different as they are, all face the same struggle to come to grips with the social, economic, and intellectual forces working in India as it moves from the British Raj to independence.
In this beautifully crafted tale, the intertwined fortunes and personal battles of these characters become a mirror of the country's struggle for possession of its future. "The encompassing achievement of the novel is its penetration... of the life of the post-colonialist and post-colonized living on, somehow together" (Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).
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"The encompassing achievement of the novel is its penetration of a new stage in our human history: Sengupta's is among the first and unquestionably to me the most revealing description of the life of the post-colonialist and post-colonized living on, somehow together. The colonizers who have lost the sense of what home they came from, and the colonized finding they have become inexorably something like the people from whom they struggled so long to gain their freedom."-Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Marriages, affairs, suicides, duplicitous relations, second chances, murder, madness, and true love-Rajmahal is a beautifully crafted tale of families brought together in an unusual Bengali house over a century of turbulent changes. Within the walls of this stately home, the melting pot of tenants, alive and dead, struggle to come to grips with the social, economic, and intellectual forces working in India as it moves from the British Raj to independence. Their intertwined fortunes and personal battles become a mirror of the struggle for possession of the country's future.