Vande Mataram. A truly powerful and pivotal speech for Mother India. As a poet and writer, this is a praise of the highest form for any work of kavya. The story of a nation, its struggle, hopes and dreams. 🇮🇳🙏https://t.co/xKI4MyhaUi
— Salik Shah ✨🚀 (@salik) November 7, 2025
Yesterday, I watched Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji’s Vande Mataram speech, which led me to revisit Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandmath (1882)—a novel that, like Harmony, chooses a famine as its historical backdrop.
As I work to weave contemporary and classical Bengali literature into the worldbuilding of my novel, I’ve found myself reflecting on the choices I’ve made in crafting this story. Reading a translator’s notes and caveats [see the postscript below] in The Abbey of Bliss—a translation of Anandmath—by Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta confirmed something important: Harmony consciously avoids the sectarian politics that have historically divided us.
My objective isn’t to explore the symptoms of injustice, intolerance, and bloodshed under the British Raj—but rather to trace their root causes. Where Harmony differs fundamentally from Anandmath is in its recognition of all victims of Churchill’s famine: both Hindu and Muslim, both peasant and soldier, both those who starved and those who were forced to watch.
The Bengal Famine of 1943 was an engineered catastrophe that transcended religious identity—its victims were united by their shared humanity and their shared suffering under colonial policy.
I do not advocate hate. I never will.
In the next book—which deals with Partition—I will have to confront communal violence directly, and I confess: I wish I didn’t have to. But historical honesty demands it.
The trauma of Partition, the violence that accompanied it, and the enduring wounds it left on both sides of the border cannot be ignored if we are serious about understanding how we arrived at this present moment.
Both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons of mass destruction that can annihilate each other. This existential reality—this terrifying, undeniable fact—makes it our moral duty to do the necessary work for peace, unity, and coexistence.
Not out of naivety, but out of necessity. Not by ignoring history, but by refusing to let history determine our future.
Literature can’t solve geopolitical crises. But it can remind us of our shared humanity. It can name atrocity without feeding hatred. It can refuse the easy comfort of binary thinking—us versus them, victors versus victims, righteous versus damned.
That is the work I am trying to do with the Akhand Saga.
To tell a story where the enemy is not a people, but a system. Where resistance is collective, not sectarian. Where justice is sought not through vengeance, but through accountability.
We owe this much to the three million who died in the Bengal Famine.
We owe this much to the millions displaced and killed during Partition.
We owe this much to ourselves.
– Salik
November 8, 2025
Postscript
Excerpts from the Prefatary Note in The Abbey of Bliss—a translation of Anandmath—by Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta (1906) (Wikisource / The Internet Archive) with my paragraph breaks and highlights:
The fact is that in this work our author was overwhelmed with the teaching he sought to impart and had very little attention to spare for the perfection of the details. The story therefore has very much the appearance of a noble figure, rough-hewn. All through the narration we notice the breathless haste of the author.
They story runs and with it tuns our author’s language, and he is in a desperate hurry to rush it on and finish. The work therefore partakes very largely of the nature of a parable, and as a parable of patriotism it has to be read in order to appreciate its depth of observation and intensity of feeling.
Even as a parable it has to be viewed from the point of view of feeling rather than of conception. For the type of patriotism which our author has here depicted is certainly not the richest in conception nor well worthy of emulation. It is its intensity in feeling and its richness in self-sacrifice that ought to commend it to all right-thinking people. The reader must however be warned against taking the parable too literally.
Our author’s patriotism is not to be identified with the revolutionary propaganda of his adventurers in the present work. There is no place for revolution or aggressive warfare in his scheme of patrotism. Bloodshed and war Bankim Chandra looked upon as the detestable remnants of a barbarian age which were bound to pass away.
If therefore he seems to have so much sympathy with revolutionaries of the type of his Children, it is not because his common sense would endorse similar proceedure but because his natural instincts were largely in sympathy with them. And if there is one lesson more than any other that he seeks to impart by his Children it is that revolutionists though foolish are very often estimable men, inspired with lofty sentiments, and perfectly honourable in their conduct.
They may fail, but their failure does not justify the world in branding them as infamous brigands. On the contrary, we have a great deal to learn from them. Their earnestness and singleness of purpose, their tenacity and resourcefulness, their courage in facing the immense odds that are arrayed against them, not only on the battle-field but everywhere in the existing order of things and above all their supreme indifference to their own interests,—these are traits of character which every reformer, every patriot and every fighter in a noble cause should lay to heart if he wants to succeed.
Our modus operandi must needs be different from the suicidal path of revolution, our conception of national welfare and of the goal of national life may be altogether different, but let us all he inspired with the same sense of the nobility of our mission and the selfless zeal in serving the interests of our ‘Mother’ as the Children.
Two outstanding features of our author’s conception of patriotism are its provincialism and its religious tone. As for the provincialism in his patriotism, it is difficult to believe that Bamkim Chandra was a stranger to the idea of greater nationality which is the goal of cultured Indians of to day.
The explanation is rather to be sought in his romantic temperament which was deeply stirred by it, as much as was that of Sir Walter Scott by the parochial patriotism of his Highlanders and by the Scottish patriotism which even now makes itself felt in after-dinner orations in the St. Andrews Dinner.
As to the religious tone of his patriotism he perceived that the strongest sentiment of the Indian, as well as the most pronounced element in the Eastern civilisation, is the religious sentiment. To acclamatise Western culture in the Eastern soil then, we have to dip it full in the well of spiritualism. Nothing in Western culture can take root in the East unless it is inspired with the religious sentiment.
The attempt to bring about this synthesis led him, not only to imbue patriotic sentiments with religion but also conceive nationality itself under the category of religion. He evidently thought that the only nationality India was capable of was a religious nationality;—the sentiment probably which inspires people who talk about a Hindu Nation and a Mussulman Nation in the same Indian soil. To say the least, such an idea is absurd. We must have one Indian nation or no nation at all. Sectarian sentiments are ill dignified by being named in the lofty vocabulary of patriotism.
Two very sinister consequences are seen to flow from this conception of a religious basis of nationality in the present work. The first is the attempt to rehabilitate the Hindu Pantheon with new-fangled patriotic gods and goddesses, and the second is the morbid dislike of Mussulmans that seems to be indicated in this work. Neither would seem to be the least profitable.
As for the first, it sets a premium upon superstition and suggests a proceedure which has been unhappily followed by some of our public men of to-day. If it is sought by this means to instil patriotism into the superstitious mind through superstitions, it fails sadly; for patriotism thus distorted can never develop into genuine patriotism and must remain a superstition for ever. It is a matter of common knowledge that superstitions, once rooted, are far more difficult to uproot than mere ignorance, and if permitted to remain, they may promote particular ends, but must be a dead block to all progress. Thus patriotism gains nothing by this distortion and it only helps to hinder the growth of true Indian Nationality by preventing the participation of Hindus and Mussulmans and other religious communities in a common patriotic work. The experiment therefore of degrading patriotism by basing it on superstition is not only fruitless but positively harmful.
The other is a more serious matter still. Now one thing that would be patent to every reader of this novel is that its heroes are frankly hostile to Mussulmans. This has led me to think thrice before placing the work before a larger public by translation. Our Mussulman friends have no doubt a good right to get offended at the way in which the anti-Mussulman sentiment has been developed in this novel.
But several facts have got to be taken into consideration.
Firstly, as I have already observed, our author is not to be too much identified with the sayings and doings of his adventurers in this book. Then again, the impression left by a study of the whole book is that the feeling was not so much against Mussulmans quá Mussulmans, as against the anarchy and misrule under the Mussulman kings of the age and particularly under Mir Jaffer who ruled at the time. It is notorious that that the times were bad beyond mention.
Between themselves the East India Company and the Nawab had contrived to plunge the country into a state of distress which is looked upon, even by Englishmen as a tale of their disgrace. If they were so harassed, the people might well be angry with Mussulmans for their misdeeds and persecute them as they persecuted the people and even put to the credit of the community the misdeeds of its rulers. This is really all that the author seeks to depict.
It would appear that in narrating the pranks of the free lances of his Children the author gives us only what would be natural in a body of uncultured men elated with victory and excited by activity. He does not justify them nor is he in sympathy with them. It would therefore not be quite fair to him to hold him responsible for these sayings and doings of the rabble which are so obviously wrong.
But with all this, one cannot but regret the anti-Mussulman sentiments that our author has so freely introduced in the present work. Whatever poetic justice there might be for those expressions considering the situation of the people whose careers are depicted in the novel, every true son of India to-day would sincerely wish that they had not existed in the work.
I would willingly have expunged those passages from the translation were it not for a desire that the author should be presented in the translation as no better or worse than he is. The mischief is in fact past undoing, but may we not, Hindus and Mussulmans, agree to forgive our author’s aberrations in the respect in view of the noble lessons in patriotism that he has given us. In justification of my attempt to present the work to a larger circle of readers, I may say, that it is this consideration which has prompted me to translate the work in spite of its defects.
The work of translation has been by no means a plain sailing. Yet with all its difficulties the work has been one of love and a joy to me. I do not therefore feel entitled to claim any indulgence from the reader or quarter from the critic on that score. The work, however, has been rushed through the press for the importunity of my publisher and I shall not be the least surprised if faults are found to have been permitted to remain.