Shamba

Shamba, published in 1978, is a remarkable work in Bengali fiction because of its masterly use of the myth of Prince Shamba, retold from the Mahabharata in the light of modern consciousness. Man’s yearning for something afar finds its most vivid articulation in this novel.

Prince Shamba, afflicted with leprosy, refusing to submit to fate, undertakes a long and arduous journey in quest of cure, in the course of which he comes across a wooden replica of the Sun God, the Divine Healer, in the confluence of Sindhu and Chandrabhaga and realizes that “nothing is meaningless in life”.

It is fundamentally a story of man’s attempt to meet the challenge of his own self. Shamba reaches fulfillment in human existence not as a Ksatriya prince but as an outsider in the contemporary society, to which he never returns after the cure.