Publish Date
15 Sep, 2025
About This Book
[Mujtaba Ali’s] Shabnam was a love novel of rare quality. It was simply poetry in prose like Tagore’s Shesher Kobita.’—Dhaka Tribune ‘Mujtaba Ali was a writer, scholar, traveller, linguist. His brilliant wit and sparkling prose have been lifting the spirits of generations of Bengalis.’—The Telegraph Afghanistan in the 1920s. A country on the cusp of change. And somewhere in it, a young man and woman meet and fall in love. Shabnam is an Afghan woman, as beautiful as she is intelligent. Majnun is an Indian man, working in the country as a teacher. Theirs is an unlikely love story, but it flowers nonetheless. Breaking the barriers of culture and language, the two souls meet. Shabnam is poetry personified—she knows the literary works of Farsi poets of different eras. Majnun is steeped in the language and thoughts of Bengal. Together, they find love in immortal words and in the wisdom of the ages. As the country hurtles towards yet another cataclysmic change, and the ruling king flees into exile, Shabnam is in danger from those who covet her for her famous beauty. Can she save herself and her Indian lover and husband from them? Shabnam has been hailed as one of the most beautiful love stories written in Bengali. Lyrical and tragic, this pathbreaking novel appears in English for the first time in an elegant translation by the translator of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s famous travelogue Deshe Bideshe (In a Land Far from Home).
About The Author
Syed Mujtaba Ali A cosmopolitan par excellence and a true internationalist, the legendary Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali from Sylhet (in erstwhile Bengal, now Bangladesh) spent a year and a half teaching in Kabul from 1927 to early 1929. Drawing on this experience, Mujtaba Ali later wrote Deshe Bideshe (Home and Abroad), which was published in Bengali in 1948. His young mind was curious to explore the Afghan society of the time and, with his impressive language skills, he had access to a cross-section of the Kabul population, whose ideas and experiences he chronicles with acute observation and a wicked sense of humour. Nazes Afroz A journalist for over four decades, Nazes Afroz has worked in both print and broadcasting in Kolkata and in London. He joined the BBC in London in 1998 and spent close to fifteen years with the organization. He has visited Afghanistan, Central Asia and West Asia regularly for over a decade. He currently writes in English and Bengali for various newspapers and magazines and is working on a number of photography projects.
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