Literary fiction Author
It’s time to meet literary fiction author, Debalina Haldar, and find out more about her book: The Daughters of Shantiniketan, a tale of forbidden love and generational struggles that released in September 2025.
Helen: Welcome, Debalina. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Tell us about your latest book.
Debalina: The Daughters of Shantiniketan is a work of fiction and largely revolves around an aristocratic and orthodox Rabindranath Tagore-worshiping family in their ancestral mansion called Shantiniketan situated in the heart of Kolkata. Charulata, also called Charu, is the protagonist of this novel. She is the ideal progeny of the aristocratic family. The novel gradually reveals how her individual honesty and virtue, coupled with the hard-hitting questions about her beliefs raised by a carefree boy, enable her to rise above the pre-set notions that she has lived by all her life. The novel explores the troughs and crests of the sea of human emotions and as Charu sails through each of them, the readers discover how Tagore has weaved a song on every human emotion.
Helen: It sounds like an interesting tale set against the musical and literary backdrop of Tagore. Is there a story behind the cover?
Debalina: The cover shows the family mansion called Shantiniketan, which is also the name of the learning abode established by Rabindranath Tagore decades ago. It is symbolic of the extent of Tagore-worship. The family mansion, the very many Tagore portraits around the house, and of course the name – all of that is an outwardly attempt to show the world how the family has been a generational connoisseur of Tagore. However, the mansion fails at retaining the essence of being Shantiniketan, which translates to ‘abode of peace’. As we read the book, we find the mansion is anything but that… as the portraits on the walls witness the lies, secrets, conflicts, and silent tears.
Helen: There are always secrets hidden behind the walls! What made you write this particular book?
Debalina: Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s in Calcutta, we were beginning to witness a slow change in the kind of music that were being made. These new, free-spirited music was commonly called Jibonmukhi Gaan or Life-ward Music. I still remember, we had an essay topic for our exam in school – If we are now listening to life-ward music, were we listening to death-ward music for so long? And these so-called life-ward music compositions had begun to spread their reach to the songs by Tagore as well. In my impressionable young mind, this conflict had settled deeply and I’m happy to have liberated it so many years later. There exists an undeniable anxiety in the Bengali intelligentsia over the “purity” of Rabindrasangeet (songs written by Tagore) in the various renditions by artists. This gives them an entitlement to guard this “purity”. This tug of war between traditional and modern renditions of his music is explored in this novel.
Helen: An environment of many experiences certainly supports creativity. When did you realise you had a passion for writing?
Debalina: When I was a child, I grew up surrounded by books. Week by week, month by month, their numbers multiplied until they felt less like objects and more like companions. My father’s frequent job transfers meant I attended five different schools, but in all that moving, it was the books that stayed. They shielded me from the ache of losing friends to distance, from the fragility of belonging. By the time I was seven, I had already learned that love and loss are constants of life, and perhaps that was when writing began to draw me in.
Helen: I’m glad you had your books around you, and I can see why they would be important to you when you were constantly on the move. The Daughters of Shantiniketan was your third novel. Tell us what you are working on next.
Debalina: I am wrapping up my next literary novel. While this work also has strong women characters who must support each other in adversity, it focuses on motherhood and its many forms.
Helen: Thank you so much for joining me today. Just to finish, with your books containing a lot of history, and references to real artists and their works, how much research do you do for each book?
Debalina: I spend a significant amount of time researching for my books. I explored contemporary musicians who reinterpret Tagore’s works as part of my research for the latest novel. It is refreshing to see musicians reimagining classical music written by Tagore (Rabindrasangeet) with a contemporary resonance, bridging the past and the present. They certainly gave me vivid ideas about Bolai’s free flowing songs in the novel. I also explored the complex relationship between Rabindrasangeet and the tradition of Carnatic music on one hand and local folk music on the other. How the usage of technology and modern instruments strengthens and sometimes weakens traditional compositions!
Around the time that I was writing this novel, I was also reading a lot about the women in Tagore’s life, some of whom might have influenced him to write songs. I read Jorasanko and The Daughters of Jorasanko by Aruna Chakravarty, Kadambari Debi’s Suicide Note by Ranjan Bandyopadhyay – amongst many others. I found women and their silent rebellions in these books – women from Tagore’s own family. How brave of these women to have stood against the looming patriarchy in every brick of the house and yet, create a place of their own! That moved me deeply.
About the Author – Debalina Haldar
Debalina Haldar writes in the literary fiction genre. Her novel, The Female Ward, was published in October 2012, by Thames River Press (UK). Her second book, Wrinkles in Memory, is a collection of 22 short stories. It was published in August 2016 by Lifi Publications. Wrinkles in Memory was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for books in English in 2020. Recently, in 2025, her third book, The Daughters of Shantiniketan, was published by Readomania Publishing.
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