A Love Story in a Country on the Cusp of Change

Shabnam, originally written in Bangla in 1960 by Syed Mujtaba Ali, a Bengali writer, journalist, travel enthusiast, academic, scholar and linguist, and translated into English by Nazes Afroz in 2024, is a narrative that brilliantly intertwines personal love with political conflict. The novel is a profound exploration of love and loss that echoes with both the mystical and the tragic. It retains the lyrical quality of the original text, with Afroz’s translation preserving the nuances and cadence of Ali’s writing. The inclusion of Persian transliterations, along with Bangla, Urdu, and Sanskrit, further enriches the novel’s poetic language, reflecting the deep intertextual connections between Persian and Indian poetry, as evidenced by references to works like Gul-e-Bakawali and Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s writings.