Akankshya Abismruta

A landscape greets us, from grass to the clouds high above, covering the hilltops, trees spread across and rocks in the front, all in black and white. This vastness is interrupted by a goat standing in the centre of the page, looking straight at the camera. The third page shows a child standing in front of a tin hut. These three atmospheric photos appear before the title page, as if already setting the stage for the discussion that the natural world came much before humans set foot on the land.

At the outset, the collection of 12 different essays that include a short speculative fiction and a couple of grandmothers’ recipes declares that it has been compiled to tell unrelated things to entertain the reader.

Akankshya Abismruta reviews Rimli Sengupta’s A Lost People’s Archive (Published by Aleph Book Company, June 2023) Rimli Sengupta’s second novel A Lost People’s Archive is about the impact of the partition of India on the people of present-day Bangladesh, known in the book as Bangals, different from the Bengali folks of India. The Punjab partition saw the impact and response immediately after the Radcliffe line was drawn.