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KAMALINI SENGUPTA writes for newspapers and magazines in India, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. As the executive director of the Surya Trust, she films documentaries that aim to correct misconceptions about Indian life. Rajmahal is her second novel.

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Rajmahal

Kamalini Sengupta

Marriages, affairs, suicides, duplicitous relations, second chances, murder, madness, and true love—Rajmahal is a beautifully crafted tale of families brought together in an unusual Bengali house over a century of turbulent changes. Within the walls of this stately home, a melting pot of tenants, alive and dead, new generations struggle to come to grips with the social, economic, and intellectual forces working in India as it moves from the British Raj to independence. Their intertwined fortunes and personal battles become a mirror of the struggle for possession of the country’s future.

“Kamalini Sengupta’s Rajmahal is indeed her Howard’s End! But the encompassing achievement of the novel is its penetration of a new stage in our human history: Sengupta’s is among the first and unquestionably to me the most revealing description of the life of the post-colonialist and postcolonized living on, somehow together. The colonizers who have lost the sense of what home they came from, and the colonized finding they have become inexorably something like the people from whom they struggled so long to gain their freedom.”

—Nadine Gordimer

"[Rajmahal] is witty, vivid, evocative and informed. . . . [T]he writing is sharp and compelling. Finally, it is the quality of the author's intelligence—of mind and heart—that determines the value of a novel. . . .Sengupta's book is. . . distinct from the recent body of competant Indian fiction in English. . . . Just read it. There is something in it for everybody. And many will love it all."

—The Book Review (India)

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