Rebels and Assassins is a parallel episode of the author’s previous novel Round Loaf and the Moon [Minerva, 1999]. It is a story of revolt and of rethinking about the true path by its young protagonists.  Even though the novel uses the historical background of the late sixties of two countries viz. India and USA, the protagonists, other characters and events described in the novel are completely imaginary. In 1968, following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., there is sudden eruption of violence in the black people’s movement in USA. The other country where a revolt was staged, almost at the same time, was India at a remote village in Bengal. That revolt was subsumed into the mainstream in no time.  This story is about two student ideologues of that movement who flee and go abroad, one to USA and the other to the UK, to hide and about events that follow…

As a graduate student of Presidency College, Calcutta and later as a Ph.D. scholar of JNU, Delhi and also as a post-doctoral visitor to foreign universities, Subhas Basu had contact with people having first-hand experience of the macabre happenings of periods immediately before and after the collapse of the two movements that the novel, Rebels and Assassins, is about.  Basu tells the story of two small groups of rebels, one in  USA and the other in India and of romance and ideology,  in an easy flowing narrative.  It is a page-turner with vivid portrayals of passionate love affairs, rivalries among rebels and tragedies that follow almost in a poetic sequence. The book is a must-read for those interested in untold legends of local history and also for those who love pristine stories of romance and passion…