Shabnam

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).