Arnold Hurrichand Itwaru's Shanti is a powerful story set in British Guiana. The ugly face of colonialism with its degrading human relationship and the double burden of being a coloured woman in such a et up is the backdrop of the short novel. That imperialism and colonialism degrade both the coloniser and the colonised is graphically imaged in the rape of a coloured girl of Indian origin, Shanti by a white Estate owner and the retaliative brutal murder of a black man by the husband of an Indian woman he had tried to molest. The images are stark and expresses the writers pain in detailing the lives of his people. The story does not only highlight the humiliating experiences of men and women under bondage, it also depicts the triumph of the human spirit. Itwaru reminds us of a history that stays with its people, the struggle that a people make to survive brutal conditions, and the need to understand what has shaped them. For those whose histories are coloured with the atrocities of whitemen and those who have been fortunate never to have known degradation, the novel is an eye opener.