Chuden Kabimo Song of the Soil

Annotation

On a day of earthquake and rain, a young man gets bad news. Ripden, his childhood friend, has been swept away by a landslide. He makes his way back to Malbung, the village of his birth, and the memories come rushing back: growing up together, harsh teachers at school and playing truant, bullies and backyard fights. He remembers, also, the day they ran away from home to Lolay to find out about Ripden's father, vanished years earlier in the revolution. There the pair meet Nasim, who narrates to them an extraordinary tale from his younger days. Set in the foothill town of Kalimpong in the Himalaya, Song of the Soil brings alive the story of the revolution for a separate state of Gorkhaland in the late 1980s. It lays bare the many faces of violence during the brief but politically charged Gorkha movement, exploring the idealistic dreams of the youths recruited into a revolution they do not fully understand-mere children who failed to see the selfishness of their leaders, leaders who disregard the lives of their foot soldiers in the name of the greater good of Gorkhaland. In doing so, the novel asks the vital question: Who, ultimately, wins in a revolution-and who loses?