In the eighties, Odisha has a mushrooming growth of colleges. Every panchayat can boast of one. The leaders of the locality set up colleges, and recruit lecturers with vested interest. Standard of education deteriorates. During this time, Rajiv Gandhi reduces the voting age from 21 to 18 years. Party politics enters directly into the college campus and classrooms at the cost of academic atmosphere.
Madhavi is a student in one such college where Sanat teaches History. Madhavi has talent and beauty. She is a trained dancer and a budding poet. But her mother forces her to discontinue dance. Her mother fears combination of her beauty with talent. Her mother believes, if she pursues her passion, she has to mix with other people, and may go the wrong way and bring disrepute to the family. Sanat encourages her to continue with poetry. Both have an emotional relation. They develop a kind of relation in which Madhavi can confide him her private sufferings.
Her parents marry her off to an engineer. But Madhavi finds her husband a debauch and a crook. He stays with a woman without the knowledge of his parents. Her husband tortures her. Madhavi leaves her wedded husband, but she cannot return to her own parents. She finds a job in a private firm and stays in a working women’s hostel. In her time of trouble and tribulations, she meets her sympathetic boss who is married to a taunting wife, and falls in love with him.
They marry in a temple. Sanat, Madhavi’s teacher in the college, is born in a poor family. A self-made man, he has studied with much difficulty; he earns by giving private tuitions to fund his study expenses. A committed teacher with a bright academic career, he feels suffocated and finds it difficult to cope with changing environment in the college.
The story of Madhavi and Sanat is told against the background of such momentous events India witnesses during this period of mid eighties to mid nineties of the last century. Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her own body guards on the October 31, 1984 and her assassination is followed by a pogrom against the Sikhs in Delhi and other parts of the country. Her son Rajeev Gandhi succeeds her as the Prime Minister. He is killed by a suicide bomber. A widow commits sati in a remote Deorala village of Rajasthan. When the young Prime Minister Rajeev Gandhi is talking of taking India to the 21st century, a section of the society is still rooted to the 18th century and eulogising the sati.
A Prime Minister is accused of taking bribe by a crook. It is immaterial whether it is true or false, but people believe the Prime Minister of India could also be bribed.
Another Prime Minister implements the recommendations of Mandal Commission report which was gathering dust and precipitates unprecedented students protest in the country. Students across the country start committing suicides.
Probity in public life is on the decline, standards of morality decay. Sanat cannot accept the fact that the teachers get fat salaries teaching rubbish in the class and dabbling in petty things in the college. During students’ agitation against the implementation of Mandal Commission report, he witnesses the students divided on caste lines.
The local MlA, a criminal himself, has taken over the management of the college by instigating the students against the president of the management committee, who is in fact an ideal person.
But Sanat is a helpless spectator. Frustrated, he resigns to be free from the bondage of the college to work for the people in general. The story of the book, Concubine by Sahadev Sahu, is readable, told in a dairy style.
The events, dates and figures given in the narration are accurate. One can relate to the events, identify the characters and moreover, the events being of recent past, the book is an interesting read.