Fever

Ruhiton Kurmi has been in jail for seven years. Once a notorious Naxalite—a militant leftist revolutionary—he is now a withered shell; a man broken by police torture, racked with fevers and sores. The only way he can endure his life is by shutting out the past. But when Ruhiton is moved to a better jail and eventually freed, memories return to haunt him.

Ruhiton inevitably looks back upon his youth, his marriage, his home in the Himalayan foothills—and he remembers, too, the friends he has killed, the revolutionary colleagues he worked with, and the ideals he once believed in. Dark, powerful, and full of ambiguities, the classic novel Fever, originally written in Bengali in 1977, questions the human cost of revolution and its inevitable transience. A sensation in its time, it remains one of the greatest novels about the Naxalite movement. Fever is an intense look at the universality of militancy, violence, and civil war, and the power of revolutionary ideals to seduce young minds.

Samaresh Basu (1924–88) was a renowned Bengali writer of more than one hundred novels. Arunava Sinha is an award-winning translator of more than thirty books. He lives and works in New Delhi.