Rainbow Years (Kannada)
Three friends chase Marxist revolution from the 1960s onward — a generational novel about what remains when ideology runs its course.
Overview
In the early 1960s, Marxism felt like the future. Three young friends — Rajen, Suri, and Mallana — threw their lives into Left-Wing organisations convinced that revolution was not only possible but imminent. Madabhushi Madan Gopal's novel, now available in Kannada translation, follows their trajectories across the decades that tested and ultimately dismantled that conviction: strategies that failed, ideologies that diluted, mass connections that frayed, and a state that played its own games throughout.
When the three men meet again after the tumultuous decades have passed, there is nothing left for judgment. What remains is the question of what a life spent in service to an idea — and to the common people in whose name that idea was pursued — actually produced. The novel's answer is quiet and unsentimental: that selfless service, undertaken without the ego of the doer, was the only aspiration that survived the century intact.
Originally published in English in 2022 to widespread acclaim and currently being adapted for film, Rainbow Years is a generational novel about the distance between revolutionary ardour and the shape a life actually takes. The Kannada translation brings this story to a readership for whom the Left's regional history carries its own particular weight.
ABOUT THE BOOK:- This is the Kannada translation of the epochal book Rainbow Years: Conflict to Contentment by Madabhushi Madan Gopal that was published in 2022 and received widespread acclaim and appreciation and is in the process of being made into a film. The author captures intriguing and gripping realities. Beginning 1960s, Marxist ideology was the flavour of the youth. Convinced about the revolution that must come, three friends-Rajen, Suri and Mallana-set out charting their paths through the Left-Wing organisations and movement. As decades pass by, the strategies fail, the ideologies get diluted, connect with the masses is lost, they allow foreign intervention. Of course, the state played its own games. When they meet again after the momentous decades, there is no scope to be judgmental; they must accept the vicissitudes of life. The novel is the journey of a generation that dreamt of a revolution, the dream shattered by the calming realisation that being of service to the common people-with a sense of non-doership-was the only dream worth pursuing.
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