Plucking at one thorn with another

Chowdhury Lorai (Chowdhury’s Battle) is a Bengali folk ballad about a zamindar’s battle with neighbouring kingdoms in the 18th century. The ruins of Chowdhury’s palace still stand in south Bengal; there’s a lake named after his mistress Rongomala, who was assassinated amid family feuds.

Shaheen Akhtar, a Bangladeshi writer, came across several versions of the story when she was researching representations of women in Bengali literature.

She turned local legend around Rongomala into an expansive and exciting novel about the paramour of a spoilt zamindar prince.

It opens with Rongomala’s severed head arriving at the palace. Hundreds of black crows swarmed the skies, cawing and shrieking. The palace was in uproar, everyone was terrified. “From the commotion, it didn’t seem as if it was a low-caste woman’s head that was arriving but a wildfire… that threatened to wipe out the entire Chowdhury dynasty.”

Beloved Rongomala (lushly translated by Shabnam Nadiya) is constructed around the circumstances that led to her decapitation and its aftermath. The novel is about the sexual politics of women in the life of the debauched Raj Chandra Chowdhury — his mistress, his wife, his mother, the maids, and others — all vying for his fickle attention. In the background is 18th-century Bengal, where British colonial expansion first began in India. After winning the Battle of Plassey against the Nawab of Bengal, the British East India Company had its tentacles around every estate and control over all trade and commercial activity. Aristocratic and feudal families were grasping at dwindling resources and alliances were being forged to seize whatever limited power or wealth remained.

In this time of tectonic political shifts, Rongomala was determined to cross barriers of class, caste and custom, one step at a time. The besotted Raj Chandra promised to have a lake dug and named after her and prepared to arrange a ceremony to raise her caste status. But, ultimately, “Rongomala’s beauty could not conceal that original sin. Like the blemishes of the moon, that caste-sin reared its head again and again.”

The novel is filled with tragedies, however it is anything but tragic. It’s too rich a work to dwell upon any emotion for too long. In the palace, Raj Chandra’s ignored, childlike wife Phuleswari spends her days talking

Shaheen Akhtar, Trans. Shabnam Nadiya 294pp, ~499, Eka to her birds. Her mother-in-law spends her time plotting to have her wayward son give her an heir. Akhtar spins vivid dramatic scenes. For a brief spell, Phuleswari is able to seduce her husband by dressing like his mistress — “Rongomala was not a thorn between husband and wife; she blossomed like a flower between them each night they spent together.”

As they have sex, Ma Shumitra watches with, albeit a little disapproving satisfaction: “True, Phuleswari’s nightly attire pricked her eyes — whoring it up with that gauzy see-through sari. But if her husband was so taken with whores, what could the young wife do? It was best to pluck one thorn with another.”

The plot moves along through death and detail. There’s a vast