Deshe Bideshe

Deshe Bideshe (At Home and Abroad) is Syed Mujtaba Ali’s travel memoir of his time in Kabul during the late 1920s, when he taught at a school there in the final years of King Amanullah’s rule. It is one of the great books of Bengali non-fiction, and one of the most reread.

What makes the book a classic is Mujtaba Ali himself — a cultivated, humorous, polyglot man who could move easily between Persian poetry and Bengali jokes, who befriended Pashtun students and Kabul shopkeepers, and who saw the political collapse of Amanullah’s reformist government from the inside. The Kabul of Deshe Bideshe is not a guidebook Kabul. It is people met, conversations had, food eaten, history lived.

Bengali readers have loved this book for nearly a century because it travels lightly. There is real learning in it, but it is worn easily. There is loss in it — the world Mujtaba Ali describes is gone — but there is no sentimentality. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Bengali prose at its most companionable.