BENGALURU: Westland Publications has acquired celebrated Bangladeshi writer Shaheen Akhtar’s third novel, Beloved Rongomala (Shokhi Rongomala). Translated by award-winning translator Shabnam Nadiya from Bengali to English, the book will be published under Westland’s language imprint, Eka.
In Beloved Rongomala, Akhtar turns the assassination of the mistress of a small king, a footnote in the history of eighteenth century Bengal, into an exploration of class, caste, and gender. The story of Rongomala and Raj Chandra Chowdhury, mostly ignored by formal historians, lives on in local traditions, and Akhtar uses it to create a vivid and cinematic work which, in its aesthetics, is reminiscent of Satyajit Ray’s movies like Devi or Jalsaghar or the period novels By the Tungabhadra by the great Bengali writer Saradindu Bandyopadhyay and The Chieftain’s Daughter by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay.
Beloved Rongomala is being represented by Jayapriya Vasudevan of Jacaranda Literary Agency, which is known to bring out books in four Indian languages, including Mandarin and Bahasa.