Moonlight Saga

Colonial Assam is the setting for this novel about the tea plantations and the people who paid for their growth. Adivasi families from central India are lured by the promise of Assam desh, a land of dignity, plenty and fair pay. They are crammed onto steamers and sent upriver, with hunger, disease and death following them the whole way.

Durgi is one of those travellers, a young woman whose strength holds through hardship. She carries a small bundle of marigold seeds, a reminder of the red earth she left behind. Her husband Dosaru, a rebellious archer, is beside her, and the two share a hope of making a life of their own. At Atharighat Tea Estate they find no promised land. Workers are stripped, disinfected, penned into barracks and driven to ceaseless labour, while illness, fear and quiet resistance build beneath the neat rows of tea bushes.

Over the years Durgi's life becomes more complicated. Her relationship with Fraser, the white manager of the estate, produces three children of mixed race. Their unequal bond points to a truth rarely spoken about plantation life: generations of such children, many abandoned by their white fathers, still live in Assam's tea gardens.

Moonlight Saga speaks for the forgotten men and women who produced the empire's green gold, recording their suffering, endurance and fragile hopes as the British Raj starts to fall apart during India's freedom struggle. Written originally in Assamese, the novel is much discussed in Assam, and this English translation brings it to a wider audience.