BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The Land of Monsoons and Martyrs: A New History Of Bangladesh by Salil Tripathi

ABOUT THE BOOK

Between March and December 1971, the Pakistani army committed atrocities on an unprecedented scale in the country’s eastern wing. Pakistani troops and their collaborators were responsible for countless deaths and cases of rape. Clearly, religion alone wasn’t enough to keep Pakistan’s two halves united.

From that brutal violence, Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation, but the wounds have continued to fester. The gruesome assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—the country’s charismatic first prime minister—and most of his family, the coups and counter-coups which followed, accompanied by long years of military rule were individually and collectively responsible for the country’s inability to come to grips with the legacy of the liberation war.

Around five decades later came the catastrophic fall of Mujib’s daughter, Hasina Wajed, who ruled the country for twenty years. Bloody protests erupted across Bangladesh in 2024, when Hasina reinstated quotas for government jobs, the majority of which benefited the progeny of freedom fighters. Over a thousand dissenting civilians were killed when she unleashed the security forces on them. Within a month, she was forced to flee to India in a helicopter, marking an ignominious end to her career.

In this revised and updated edition, Salil Tripathi travels the length and breadth of the country, probing its trauma through interviews with hundreds of Bangladeshis. The Land of Monsoons & Martyrs, which was originally published as The Colonel Who Would Not Repent, offers the reader an unforgettable portrait of a nation whose political history since Independence has been marked more by tragedy than triumph.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Salil Tripathi was born in the city once known as Bombay and studied at New Era School and Sydenham College, and later at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in the United States. An award-winning journalist, his books include Offence: The Hindu Case, Detours: Songs of the Open Road, and The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community, which was long-listed for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize and received an honourable mention at the History Literature Festival in 2026. The Colonel Who Would Not Repent, the earlier edition of this book, was long-listed for the non-fiction prize at the Tata Literature Live festival in Mumbai in 2015. With the artist Shilpa Gupta, he has co-edited For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, a collection of writings about prison. As a foreign correspondent and human rights researcher, he has reported out of Southeast Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. He has chaired PEN International's Writers in Prison Committee and is a member of its board. He has also chaired juries for writing about human rights, including the Disturbing the Peace Prize at the Vaclav Havel Center. He lives in New York.

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