<b>The Revolution is Over, Baby</b>

From the turbulence of Partition, through the creation of Bangladesh to the cynicism of today
Qurratulain hyder brings many joys to the reader: strong narrative, believable characters and, above all, a deep sense of history. For those of us who have forgotten the times when communism was the lifeline meant to rescue a world of murderous greed and promiscuous capitalism, Hyder evokes it in pre-Independence India. The idealism and blind belief that led many to the gallows is set, unusually, in Bengal. This is a departure for Hyder, who usually furrowed the fertile lands of Uttar Pradesh and the rest of north India for her tales. Needless to say, the ideology that mesmerised many youthful freedom fighters of that period into rejecting their wealthy homes and comfortable existence was a far cry from the bourgeois, drawing-room communism that is so fashionable today.

Fireflies in the Mist is told from multiple viewpoints, exploring not only Hindu, Muslim and Christian, but also British and anti-colonial dimensions. Primarily, this is a three-part saga of one idealistic woman, Deepali Sarkar, and others around her who live through the turbulence of Partition. But Hyder perceptively carries the narrative beyond the creation of Bangladesh into the cynicism of the present day. In fact, Deepali completes the trajectory of growing up in seclusion in undivided Bengal to the cosmopolitan diasporic individual. Just as today we find former, “dangerous” Naxalites as respectable IAS officers, Hyder gives us a credible plot in which the socialist rebels of yesteryear are slowly but surely ensnared within a net of respectability and luxury.

Her vision is acerbic, and while she gives us insight, she also provides us a platform to examine these ideals and find them wanting. The tool she uses is humour and a cunning wit — so that you can empathise and yet laugh at the fallible creatures she has created, even as they are uncomfortably familiar.

Each character is designed to reveal both endearing values and significant flaws. For instance, Deepali’s hero

Rehan, the strong socialist whom she adores, returns, pathetically, to a nawabi existence. Deepali herself

finally lives in self-exile in the West

Indies, unable to accept the dramatic changes in both Bangladesh and West Bengal, even though, as a young girl, she was willing to sacrifice her life for her country.

Hyder’s use of contemporary expressions (she herself translated the book from the original Urdu) makes the narrative extremely lively, which allows even the long descriptions and dialogue to retain their authenticity. At the same time, the constant comparison of the hopeful past and the tortured present allows us to examine the extent to which everyone is eventually compromised — in social relationships, in marriage, in politics. The novel is also a rich mine of information evoking memories of Muslim and communist freedom fighters who have now been written out, in favour of the Congress revolutionaries. But it also covers a period of dramatic change — so that when the shell-shocked Deepali returns to an unfamiliar, present-day Bengal, she thinks, “The Revolution is over, baby.”

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