The Dams have faced innumerable obstacles in their desire to carve out a home in Assam among tribal people whose own cultural traditions were repressed by the previous British occupiers and who now regard the Dams, and Bengalis in general, as interlopers. Part of a cultural minority which was threatened by religious and social upheavals there, Babu's grandparents and father were among the lucky ones who managed to escape the war there by fleeing to Assam, a remote, northeastern province of India nestled between Bangladesh and Bhutan. The Dam family is ethnically connected to Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, which became a separate country during the Partition of India in 1947. Acutely aware that men of every generation are molded by the events and experiences which occur during their own lifetimes, Babu recognizes that though he and his father have shared many events, their views of these events are vastly different, in each case conditioned by their separate, though sometimes intersecting, pasts. Dam, reminisces about his father's life, trying to understand him-at least to the extent that sons can ever understand their fathers. In this sensitively imagined and astutely observed novel, Babu, son of veterinarian Dr. That is the ironythat we should have learned to be more human only when they became less so.' We saw the honesty of the tribal people as stupidity, and through that we taught them our own deviousness. We were insular and narrow-minded, with a false sense of superiority when we first came here. 'We were not perfect, we are not perfect now and never will be.

Siddhartha novel book review