The peasants’ struggle in the Midnapore District of West Bengal is just one small instance of revolutionary failure where armed struggle had been adopted as the means of liberation from the capital landholding system.            

With this as the background, Professor Gunomoy Manna has portrayed a new birth of hope for the oppressed amidst the destruction wrought by the state. His characters are villagers, peripheral forest-dwellers and tribals. They appear in his other works too, amongst them Lakhinder Digaar, Katavanaari (the blond women inspired by Mary Taylor), Junapur Steel, Buddha Bihanga (The Stricken Bird) and others. Shaalbani or the story of a people dependent on the forest of Shorea robusta is once again contemporary history that has become folklore.