I first read the translation of Manoj Rupda’s Hindi novel Kaale Adhyaay, for a podcast with its author and translator. I was unfamiliar with Rupda’s work, but the novel was a finalist for the now-discontinued JCB Prize for Literature and I knew its translator Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar was a writer with a magical touch. Having devoured Sowvendra’s fiction before, I was excited about his journey in translation. I knew it would be a good book but I wasn’t prepared for the blow to my gut.

I Named My Sister Silence narrates the story of an unnamed Gond boy from Bastar, whose childhood is coloured by destitution and tragedy. As a child he follows an elephant into a forest, but the foray ends in tragedy when the elephant is attacked by wild dogs and succumbs to its injuries. For the little boy this is an almost impossible scenario – how can an animal as mighty as an elephant succumb to a pack of reckless dogs? But isn’t that the reality of our imposing forests too? Trees that have stood tall and proud through centuries have fallen to the slick axes wielded by short-sighted men. When the axes were no longer enough, man bulldozed vast acres of green with monstrous machines that have left the soil permanently barren. 

Years later, the boy remembers this episode in the forest aboard a giant ship on which he is working to earn money. He wonders if it is his destiny to witness the destruction of immense things: the land of Bastar, the elephant, and his ship that will soon be decommissioned. His thoughts turn to his half-sister, Madavi Irma, a silent girl who nurtured him and gave him an education by selling what she collected from the forest. Until one day, she left home to join the Maoist Dada Log.

When the boy returns home after his stint on the ship, Bastar is on fire. The Adivasis have mounted an armed rebellion to protect their land and lives. In retaliation, whole villages have been razed to the ground and their inhabitants stuffed into dingy camps. Determined to seek out his sister, the boy enters the forest once again as a young man, and is soon confronted with the elaborate deceptions of those who rule and of those who profit from land they do not own or understand. 

Within 200 pages, the novel chronicles the enormous human cost of brutalising the land for the profit of a few. The author takes a humanistic view of armed rebellion against the exploitation of natural resources and seeks to understand the impossible conditions in which indigenous communities try to survive as their lands and forests are snatched away from them. A harrowing story of ecological destruction, I Named My Sister Silence is an essential read to develop empathy for both the land and its original inhabitants.