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This is a review of the early 20th century English translation, titled Abbey of Bliss, by Basanta Koomar Roy.

Set during and in the aftermath of the Bengal famine of 1770, Bankim Chand Chattopadhyay’s Anandmath begins with a brief description of the devastating famine, and the way—despite there being nothing more to even survive upon, let alone give—the English, under Warren Hastings, continued to squeeze out taxes, often by violent means. Starving and desperate, a wealthy man named Mahendra Singh, with his wife Kalyani and their little daughter, sets out for one of the cities: a city is the only place they can now hope to find food.

What they find is disaster: their daughter nearly dies, Kalyani ostensibly kills herself, and Mahendra comes in contact with Mahatma Satya, the revolutionary who heads the Children. The Children have only one ideal, one deity, one faith, one goal: the protection of Mother India. Disguised as yellow-robed sanyasis and chanting Bande Mataram, the Children gather arms, build fortifications, attack Englishmen and loot tax collectors of their revenues.

This is the story of Mahendra’s joining the Children of Anandmath. It becomes, too, the story of the others of Anandmath: Mahatma Satya’s main deputies, Bhavan and Jiban; of Kalyani herself, who is rescued and revived by Bhavan; of Jiban, who comes across Mahendra and Kalyani’s little daughter and rescues her, leaving her with his sister to be cared for. Of Shanti, the tomboy wife whom Jiban—who like all the other Children, has renounced the rest of the world—has left behind. Shanti, who decides to be with her husband, and so disguises herself as a young sanyasi too and joins the Children as Nabin.

Shanti, to me, was the most interesting of the characters of this book. Besides being spunky, she is nuanced: feminine, but not conforming to the expected norms of femininity in that period. The others, male and female, are rather more one-dimensional. The story itself is short, uncomplicated, and somewhat repetitive (the constant refrain of Bande Mataram began to get on my nerves after a while).

As an appeal to a militant, Hindu-centric, Mother-worshipping patriotism, I can see why this book might be a hit with some. To me, it was nothing to write home about. The characterisations, barring Shanti, are uninteresting; the miraculous healings (and there's more than one) are unreal; and the fervent vows to attain atonement only by death and no other means are tedious. Besides, some things are hard to swallow. A village, for instance, described as being verdant, full of fruit trees, with ducks and geese swimming on ponds—but the villagers starving and emaciated because of drought?

I haven't read the original, so have nothing to go on regarding the worth of Basanta Koomar Roy’s translation (which has its own flaws, including grammatical errors). If Roy’s translation is, in fact, true to the original, I fail to see what the fuss is all about.