Bangladesh was once East Pakistan, the Muslim nation carved out of the Indian Subcontinent when it gained independence from Britain in 1947. As religion alone could not keep East Pakistan and West Pakistan together, Bengali-speaking East Pakistan fought for and achieved liberation in 1971. Coups and assassinations followed, and two decades later it completed its long, tumultuous transition to parliamentary government. Its history is complex and tragic—one of war, natural disaster, starvation, corruption, and political instability.
First published in India by the Aleph Book Company, Salil Tripathi’s lyrical, beautifully wrought tale of the difficult birth and conflict-ridden politics of this haunted land has received international critical acclaim, and his reporting has been honored with a Mumbai Press Club Red Ink Award for Excellence in Journalism. The Colonel Who Would Not Repent is an insightful study of a nation struggling to survive and define itself.
Speaker Bio
Salil Tripathi is a contributing editor at Mint and Caravan, both published in India, and lives in London. He chairs PEN International's Writers in Prison Committee. He was born in Bombay and studied at New Era School and later Sydenham College, and did his MBA at Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College in the U.S. He has been a correspondent at India Today, and in 1991 he moved to Singapore, where he was regional economics correspondent for Far Eastern Economic Review. He moved to London in 1999 and has written for publications including Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Guardian, The New Yorker, and others. His journalism has won the Red Ink Prize for human rights journalism from the Mumbai Press Club, a Bastiat Prize, and the Citibank Pan Asia Journalism Award. His books include Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull, 2009); The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (Aleph, 2014, and Yale, 2016), and Detours: Songs of the Open Road (Tranquebar, 2015). Aleph will publish his next book, about Gujaratis, in 2018.
