“There was no need to be ashamed of tears, because tears testified that a man had the greatest courage, the courage to suffer.”
— Viktor E. Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”
“There are some values that keep pricking us like thorns throughout our lives… we learn to live with those pricking thorns.”
— Garima Srivastava, “Auschwitz: A Love Story” (p. 182)
Analyzing literary works often poses challenges when existing critical techniques, refined over years, fail to fully interpret new works with unique tastes and structures. World-famous books on novel theory offer limited insight into novels like “Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha” by Garima Srivastava, necessitating a deeper engagement with the work’s soul to identify its distinct elements and cultivate a new reader’s taste. This “new taste” stems from a fresh worldview, evolving across generations and requiring novel expressive forms.
Love, a central theme in world and Hindi literature, has transformed over time. Vijaymohan Singh’s “Love ki Parikalpana in Hindi Novels” explored this, but the form of love has since evolved. Garima Srivastava, a writer and critic, focuses on women’s torture across cultures and eras. In “Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, she creatively reconstructs the untouched aspects of women’s suffering, intertwining heart-wrenching incidents from Auschwitz with the global and local dimensions of love, set against the backdrop of Bengali-speaking East Pakistan during the Indian subcontinent’s partition.
The novel’s dual structure weaves multiple narrative levels, seamlessly transitioning between Poland, Dhaka, and Kolkata. It opens with Pratiti Sen, a Jadavpur University professor researching conflict zones, meeting Sabina Schmitz, a Polish tourist, at an international seminar. Pratiti reflects, “Sabina was the door through whose crack I peeped into her life. And not just life, but also her country.” Her inner conflict reveals personal struggles: “We are so oblivious to ourselves... Even after being so educated, has the mind of the woman inside me improved? ... I myself threw love out of my life as if it were a sore, it still hurts like a sore.” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 8)
Srivastava employs poetry, including Rabindranath Tagore’s, to fluidly convey intense emotions, a rare technique in Hindi novel writing. The section titled “My Soul Wants You” (“Amaare Paranon Jahan Chahe Tumhi Tai Go” – Tagore) frames a love story layered with failure, resilience, and the moral courage to accept others’ constraints. The narrative, rooted in historical memory, tells the tragic story of women through Pratiti’s lens.
The novelist unravels human sensibility with care, emphasizing self-criticism. Pratiti calls her lover Abhiroop “lowly” but struggles to forget him, highlighting the complexity of emotions. Acharya Ramchandra Shukla’s defense of the Indian novel’s poetic structure resonates here: “Why should the old structure that keeps the novel close to poetry be abandoned all at once?” Unlike many Hindi novels mimicking Western forms, “Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha” aligns with Indian narrative traditions, offering a fresh model.
Realism, as a life perspective, drives the novel’s impact. Its imaginative realism feels authentic, distinguishing it from contemporary Hindi novels’ sentimental trends. Great works require complex characters, as George Eliot noted in “Adam Bede” (1859): flat characters—evil ones always objectionable, good ones always virtuous—lack depth. Srivastava’s characters, like Pratiti and Abhiroop, Draupadi Devi (later Rehmana Khatun) and Birajit Sen, and Sabina, are vibrant, using idioms tied to their environments. This plurality, per Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Dialogic Criticism,” marks a great work.
Pratiti Sen, the novel’s most complex character, reflects: “My ‘I’ has been separated from me... When I write to Amma, I myself become Rehmana Khatun. When I meet Sabina, the tears of her eyes get stuck in my throat like a hiccup...” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 125). She seems an alter-ego of her grandmother, Rehmana Khatun, while male characters extend Birajit Sen’s personality, emphasizing a female perspective over historical saga.
The novel evokes “The City Without Jews”, whose author was killed by Nazis for its impact, and Theodor Adorno’s “Negative Dialectics”, where “Auschwitz” symbolizes the Holocaust’s tragic intensity. Srivastava interweaves this with love’s fluidity, set against Bangladesh’s liberation struggle, providing an Asian context.
“Auschwitz,” Hitler’s notorious camp for Jewish extermination, is vividly depicted through Pratiti’s research, supported by authentic historical data. Srivastava’s sociological imagination transforms data into a creative document, blending seamlessly with the story. The novel equates the stifling conditions for women in various societies, including the Indian subcontinent, to Auschwitz, echoing V.S. Naipaul’s “India: A Million Mutinies Now”.
This is not a conventional love story but a quest for life’s purpose, sustaining characters through adversity. Pratiti and Sabina navigate their “gas chambers,” finding solace in humanity. The novel critiques global inhumanity—war, murder, exploitation—reminding us of ongoing atrocities, from Ukraine’s devastation to the arms trade and human trafficking.
Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946) resonates, comparing suffering to gas filling a chamber, meaningless to scale. His “Logotherapy” emphasizes enduring pain for purpose, a theme Srivastava adapts to highlight women’s stifling realities, as seen in Draupadi Devi’s transformation into Rehmana Khatun.
The novel illuminates unrecorded historical truths, akin to Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, which exposes partition’s absurdity. Srivastava’s female perspective, woven through Pratiti’s letters to Rehmana and conversations with Sabina, incorporates massacre statistics, reflecting extensive research, as seen in her “Deh hi Desh: Croatia Pravas Diary”.
The novel’s beauty lies in revealing what history omits, particularly the sexual torture of women during Auschwitz and Bangladesh’s liberation war. Pratiti describes Auschwitz: “Beautiful women were raped openly... Their thick, black, brown, silky, curly hair was torn to pieces, used in German factories for wigs and woolen threads. Bald women were stripped naked for SS officers’ parades.” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 77) In Bangladesh, “563 Bengali women were imprisoned in the Dingi Military Camp as ‘comfort women,’ enduring physical atrocities... Their experiences were not recorded in any archive.” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 196)
The novel critiques the Hindu patriarchal mentality through Birajit Sen, who abandons his wife, Draupadi Devi, after her conversion to Rehmana Khatun during communal riots in Hasanpur. A mob attacks their host’s home, and Draupadi sacrifices herself to save Birajit: “Seeing her husband lying helpless, the wife ran without thinking and caught Birajit in her arms. She screamed—kill me, leave my husband... One by one lungis started opening...” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 187) Birajit, unable to accept her post-conversion, embodies Gandhi’s condemned “barbaric” mentality: “The husband or father who does not accept abducted women back is barbaric.” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 193) His guilt persists: “Many times he would stand at the railway station, hoping to see his wife... Questions and counter-questions went on within him.” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 190)
Rehmana Khatun questions, “Does compassion arise in the minds of those who call themselves your own? When they consider you abandoned, where do you go?” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 194) On calling war victims “brave women,” Srivastava notes, “How would they know these women are the cause of shame in their families... A woman has no country, no caste.” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 197)
Pratiti’s relationship with Abhiroop mirrors her grandmother’s tragedy. Imagining his unsent email reply, she writes poetically: “The letter that was never written / will not be written... A dependent sky of joy and happiness / Erasing the past like a clean slate.” Abhiroop’s reluctance, influenced by family disapproval, echoes Birajit’s failure: “If his mother hears about his marriage to a nameless refugee Bangladeshi, she will commit suicide. Why did I not insist?” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 141)
Sabina, a Polish tourist, expands the Auschwitz narrative through flashbacks. Her husband, Renata, a Jewish scientist, carries his community’s bloody history, reciting “Kaddish” even in intimate moments: “Carrying the past on our shoulders, we can walk towards the present only with a bent back and a heavy waist.” (“Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha”, p. 32) Her correspondence with Pratiti evokes Simone de Beauvoir’s “A Very Easy Death” and Krishna Sobti’s “Ae Ladki”, reflecting Srivastava’s study of Sobti and her Hindi translation of Beauvoir.
This novel transcends traditional love stories, portraying love’s modern tragedy. Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu songs, like Syed Shamsul Haque’s “Some words fly away... Which word rises like a star, have you seen it in the mirror of your heart?” enhance its musicality, as Paul Valéry suggests: “A good novel is ultimately music.” Chapters inspired by Jayasi’s “Phool Mare Pai Mare Na Basu” and Tagore’s “Tumi Rabe Nirbe Hridaye Mamo” feature poetic prose.
Maxims like “In saving others we save ourselves,” “Love gives energy to face life’s sorrows,” and “Hatred is a distorted state of love” (recalling Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”) add depth. The twenty-two chapters maintain engagement, with Birajit Sen’s fixation on Tagore’s "Geet Vitan” reflecting unhealed love: “I know that you are not unaware of my inner thoughts. I want to hide them but my eyes reveal everything.”
Like global works on ethnic genocide, “Auschwitz: Ek Prem Katha” awakens human sensitivity, challenging conservative tendencies and fostering empathy for women. Translated into English, Bengali, German, or Hebrew, it could stand among the world’s finest fiction on genocide.
---
*Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad
Comments