Bookboochi

In Amba: The Question of Red, Laksmi Pamuntjak does what myth, history, and politics so rarely allow a woman to do—be both allegory and flesh. Inspired by the Mahabharata’s Amba, the woman wronged, silenced, and avenged, Pamuntjak’s Amba is reborn in 20th-century Indonesia. And yet, her tragedy is eerily familiar, her choices still boxed in by men with weapons and ideologies.

Set against the brutal backdrop of the 1965 anti-Communist purges, the novel fuses the mythical with the historical. Amba, now a young woman named after her epic namesake, is caught in a triangle—not just of love and politics—but of memory, identity, and silence. Her relationship with Bhisma, a gentle yet principled doctor, and Salwa, her more traditional fiancé, becomes the terrain on which bigger questions unfold: What does it mean to choose? And who pays the price for that choice?

Lakshmi Pamuntjak writes in a style that is lush without being indulgent. Her language simmers with sensuality, often pausing long enough to make space for grief. She writes not just of violence, but of its afterlives. Of the way blood stains more than just soil. And how women often become the repositories of national trauma—expected to mourn, survive, forgive, and then forget.

It is tempting to read Amba as a love story wrapped in a political thriller. But that would be a disservice. This novel is not about whom Amba loves, but what she becomes because of that love—and how she continues to exist in spite of it. In Lakshmi Pamuntjak’s hands, Amba is no longer the wronged woman waiting for justice. She is justice—messy, flawed, unforgiving.

In a literary culture that often asks women characters to be either saints or symbols, Amba: The Question of Red gives us something far rarer—a woman who dares to be both myth and mortal. It’s a novel that leaves you haunted, questioning, and—perhaps most dangerously—remembering.