Introduction
“We have heard your story from others / […] Tell us all those stories in detail today / […] Tell us of your joys and of your sorrows over there, / And in which months they occurred” (p. 45). Thus begins the first part of Book II of Chandrabati’s Ramayan (Translation: Poetry), Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s 2020 English translation of a work composed in the 16th century by the female poet Chandrabati, born in Kishoreganj, now in present-day Bangladesh. Of the hundreds of versions of the epic that exist in South Asia, Chandrabati’s irreverent retelling is the only one that reimagines the story from the perspective of Sita. Chandrabati, thought to have been the daughter of Bangshidas Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Manasamangala, is also the author of two other notable works, Sundari Molua and Dasyu Kenaram. Chandrabati’s reassessment of Valmiki’s Ramayana is noteworthy for its Bengali rendition of the epic in the “Baromasi” (literally, “the twelve months”) lyrical tradition popular among village women across South Asia. In her retelling of the Ramayana, Chandrabati’s Sita is unencumbered by the divine trappings of her destiny and is turned into a human figure who earnestly comprehends the sorrows and lamentations of the everyday woman. The epic battle between Rama and Ravan are bypassed by Chandrabati who devotes all six sections of her Ramayan to women such as Mandodari and Kausalya and to worldly concerns of ordinary woman for whom the battle between Rama and Ravana is insignificant.
It is notable that Bengali retellings of the Hindu epic, though not necessarily invested in the political and sexual equality of women, are “protofeminist” in the sense that the highpoint of such retellings is women’s experiences — from dominant mother goddesses to modest village women. In the popular and provincial songs called “Ramayan Gaan” (Songs of Ramayana) that prevail to this day in rural Bangladesh and Northeast India, Saymon Zakaria and Tutun Mukherjee, in “‘Ramayana Gaan’ or Singing the Ramayan in West Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh”, show that the indubitable authority of the goddesses Kali and Durga is imperative in the manifestation of the storyline. In the Bengali “Ramayan Gaan”, Sita manifests as Bhadrakali (Kali the protector), one of the many embodiments of the goddess Kali, while Rama appeals to the fiercely imperious Durga for benediction before meeting Ravan headlong in battle. In “The Healing Powers of Goddess: Oral History Narrative of Bengal” (Criticism: General Studies), Sudarshana Bhaumik examines historic accounts which attest that the worship of Durga in Bengali oral narratives date back to the 5th century. Women had an important role in the dissemination of these narratives because the worship of Durga was invested in fertility rites associated with agriculture and physical ailment. Women’s yearnings and the hardships of separation from their loved ones are the main themes prevalent in another genre of folk songs called the “Bhawaiya” that originated in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries in parts of northern Bengal mainly Rangpur (in present day Bangladesh), Goalpara and Cooch Behar (in India). In “Women’s Desire Portrayed in Bhawaiya Folksongs in Northern Bangladesh” (Criticism: General Studies), Abdullah Zahid Osmani observes that though these songs have been traditionally sung by men of the labouring class such as mahouts and cart-drivers, they are about rural women’s agency and subjecthood. Snehangshu Shekhar Chanda’s Sylheti Language and Culture, Bangladesh (Criticism: General Studies) explores the folk songs of Sylhet and the historical development of languages spoken in this part of Bangladesh.
Whereas the widespread popularity of Ramayana songs among Muslims and Hindus in Bangladesh had kept the performative aspect of the tradition alive with minor deviations and disjuncture, in “An Authentic Performance? The Cultural Politics of Folk in Bengal and Bangladesh” (Criticism: General Studies), Priyanka Basu notes that another ancient performative art called Kabigāna, well-established in Bangladesh, has had to reinvent itself over the years in multiple artistic spaces, from rural ceremonies and urban festivals to contemporary media representations in cinema and television. These modern performances and renditions of the Kabigāna grapple with questions of “authenticity” and the politics of performance. Notwithstanding the political purposes of such “folk” performances, in her essay, “Dance and Music in the Bangladeshi Diaspora in Italy: The Identity Links Forged by Musical Education” (Criticism: General Studies), Katiuscia Carná stresses two features: firstly, the mobile nature of Bengali/Bangladeshi music and dance and, secondly, the socio-cultural purposes of such performances. Carná’s work explores the role played by traditional Bengali dance and music in cultivating a deep awareness of Bangladeshi “native culture” in host nations such as Italy.
Sajjid Bin Doza’s The Ruins of Darasbari Mosque: A Visual Diary (Non-Fiction) presents a picturesque account of the architectural wonders of the mosque built by Sultan Shamsuddin Abul Muzaffar Yusuf Shah in the years 1478–1479 in the iconic medieval Bengal Sultanate city of Gur-Lakhnauti (also known as Gaur), now in the present-day district of Chapainawabganj in Bangladesh. The years 1478–1480 were marked by the construction of several ornate mosques under the patronage of Yusuf Shah: the Darasbari Masjid, the Chamkan Masjid, and the Tantipara Masjid. The inscription of the Sultan assigned to the Darasbari Masjid is written in the ornate Ottoman Tughra form. The famed Darasbari Mosque was built during the Bengal Sultanate period when Turkic, Arab, Abyssinian, Persian, Arakan and Indo-Bengali elites mingled in great number in the city of Gaur. Doza presents a fascinating artistic and architectural exegesis on its construction when East Bengal became a major region for the production of Persian and Persianate literature. The literary history of medieval Bengal, as Thibaut d’Hubert notes in “Bengali Literature of Arakan” (Criticism: General Studies), is multilingual for it ‘addresses a diverse audience’ and displays a distinctive religious syncretism (p. 7). The Sultanate courtly culture greatly benefitted from the patronage of a large body of works in the dobhasi tradition and the Bengali Muslim literature of south-eastern Bengal and the Gauḍīẏa Vaiṣṇava tradition, both historically connected to the Ḥusayn Shāhī court according to d’Hubert. The elites of the Sultanate period also admired the Pala-Sena period Sanskrit poetry and extended support to multilingual Muslim and Hindu poets and scholars. D’Hubert further contends that this tradition of “multilingual literacy” continued from the Sultanate era until the early 18th century as can be seen in the works of Alaol, Rammohan Roy and Mir Mosharrap Hosen. An important literary text from the early modern Bengal period is Nabīvamśa (The Prophets Lineage), generally ascribed to the 17th-century Sufi poet, Saiyad Sultān. However, in “Authorship, Reception, and Meaning in Early Modern Bengal: Songs Attributed to Saiyad Sultan” (Criticism: General Studies), Ayesha Irani questions the ascribing of the composition of the 13 Bengali songs in Nabīvamśa to a single author. Both Irani and d’Hubert discern the socio-religious implications of Nabīvamśa in the development of a distinct 17th-century mode of Islamic literature in East Bengal.
Arunava Sinha’s Modern Bengali Poetry: Desire for Fire (Anthologies) brings together most of the major Bengali poets of the 20th century. Although writers from both Bengals are represented, the poets from East Bengal appear to be an afterthought in this collection. This is obvious in Ayan Chatterjee’s introduction, which offers a potted history of Bengali modernism as it developed in West Bengal. Other than a fleeting reference to the 1971 war of independence, the separate political, cultural, and even linguistic reality of East Pakistan/Bangladesh is not discussed. The reader of this anthology would naturally assume that the poetic context of East Bengal/Bangladesh could be subsumed under the development of modern poetry in Kolkata/West Bengal. However, the modern poetry of Dhaka and East Bengal is intimately connected to the politics of the language movement of 1952 and the politics of independence of the 1960s. The poetry of the period is replete with references to protests and other political events of the day. Sinha’s anthology opens with two poems by Rabindranath Tagore, who is, undoubtedly, an integral part of modern Bengali poetry. However, the emergence of modernist poetry in Bengal is the creation of a group of young writers who came of age in the late 1920s and 1930s and who felt that Tagore’s poetry did not reflect the realities of modern Bengal. The new poetic diction of the 1930s was, therefore, a result of self-conscious disowning of the poetic world of Tagore.
Before the advent of the modernist group, however, the figure who struck the first note of discordance was none other than Kazi Nazrul Islam, whose poetry marks a significant juncture in the development of modern Bengali poetry. Nazrul was closely associated with the influential magazine Kallol (1923). Known as the Rebel Poet, he created a new poetic sensibility, one that broke free from the towering presence of Tagore. His poetry takes us into a world replete with not only Hindu mythology, but one that is also immersed in an Islamic sensibility. He borrows freely from the Persian tradition and is equally comfortable in the literary world of the West. In 1971, the government of Bangladesh declared Kazi Nazrul Islam to be the national poet of the newly independent nation. The ailing poet left Kolkata and spent the last years of his life in Dhaka. 2020 saw the publication of Kazi Nazrul Islam: Selections Volume I (Miscellaneous) the first of a two-part collection of prose writings and poems by Nazrul Islam. Edited by Niaz Zaman, some of the most eminent Bangladeshi literary figures such as Ayesha Kabir, Kaiser Haq, Fakrul Alam, Razia Sultana Khan and others have translated a selection of Nazrul’s works comprising iconic poems like “Bidrohi” (“The Rebel”) and “The Comet”.
Selected Poems on Love, Environment and Other Difficulties (Translations: Poetry) offers translations of one of the major modernist poets of Bangladesh. Rafiq Azad was a freedom fighter and a maverick, the rebel and enfant terrible of the 60s. He belonged to that group of avant-garde poets who knew that neither their politics nor their poetics would find place in established magazines and journals. They created their platforms though independent little magazines and boldly worded manifestoes. Azad was the main poetic force behind the group known as the Sad Generation. His most famous poem is no doubt “Give Me Rice, You Sonofabitch” (“Bhat De Haramjada”). Penned during the famine of 1974, the poem begins as a poignant plea for food: a bowl of rice is all he asks of this nation. The helplessness quickly turns to anger. The poetic persona becomes a “ravenous maw” threatening to devour the newly independent country itself:
I’ll eventually swallow
plants and trees, rivers and canals,
towns and hamlets, pavements,
water flowing down drains,
pedestrians, broad-hipped women,
the Food Minister and his flag-carrying car —
to me nothing is inedible.
Give me rice, you sonofabitch —
or else I’ll gobble up the map.
Although an angry persona is common in Azad’s oeuvre, many of his poems are focused on nature and the destruction of the natural world. He was an ecopoet avant la lettre.
In the 1960s Azad and others who were affiliated with the Sad Generation met regularly in Madhu’s Canteen in Dhaka University. Owned and managed by Madhusudan Dey, the Canteen became the centre of not only student politics but also of the major political movements of East Pakistan/Bangladesh. Dhaka University has always been the epicentre of Bangladeshi politics and students at this university have played a pivotal role in all the major political events of the country. The establishment of the University is, in many ways, intimately linked to East Bengali cultural and political sovereignty, as discussed by Fakrul Alam in his essay “The University of Dhaka and the Partitioning of Bengal” in Once More into the Past: Essays, Personal, Public and Literary (Criticism: General Studies). Muslims of East Bengal believed that the 1905 Partition of Bengal would bring economic development and educational opportunities to the East. This first partition of Bengal was opposed by Hindus and was eventually revoked in 1911. The establishment of a major institution of education in the east was, as Alam discusses, a form of consolation gift for Muslims who opposed the reunification of Bengal. As Lord Lytton stated, “the University of Dhaka was a way of making up to the Muslims of East Bengal for the annulment of the partition of Bengal” (p. 79). In his book, Alam also explores that intimate connection between Bengali nationalism and Tagore’s songs. From the 1952 language movement onwards, Tagore’s works symbolised for East Pakistanis their Bengali heritage. As the political struggle for independence gained momentum, Tagore’s songs became slogans for independence. Alarmed by the potency of these songs, the Pakistani government banned all works of Tagore in 1967. This was a last-ditch effort by the Pakistani government to, as Alam states, “drive a wedge between [East Pakistanis] and [their] Bangla heritage”. For most Bengalis, the idea of Bangladesh was “vividly encapsulated” in Tagore’s songs (p. 9).
It is ironic that Bengalis found such nationalistic zeal in the songs of Tagore since his animosity towards nationalism is well documented. As Mohammad Quayum argues in “Imagining ‘One World’: Rabindranath Tagore’s Criticism of Nationalism” (see Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers: Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism), anti-national sentiments were “at the heart of Tagore’s imagination”. Tagore was, as Quayum explains, “an avid advocate of inter-civilisational alliance”, one that is multipolar and dialogic as opposed to the “unipolar, monolithic” characteristics of nationalism (pp. 66; 71). The Bangladeshi Marxist academic Serajul Islam Choudhury also elaborates on Tagore’s dislike of nationalism in “Tagore’s Engagement with Nationalism” (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers: Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism). However, Choudhury points out that there are caveats to the criticism of nationalism in Tagore who attacked “the political nationalism of the West, by which he really meant Capitalist Imperialism, without naming it as such” (p. 50). According to Choudhury, Tagore failed though to grasp the anti-imperialist, nationalist struggle in India and other colonies.
The politics of theatrical performance and filmic illustrations of the poetics of Partition and independence and bordered identity and crossings are the subjects of several critical publications this year. While Diana Ansarey in “Evolution of Theatre in Bangladesh as a Form of Democracy: A Post-war Analysis” looks at theatre in Bangladesh as a democratic medium of expression as well as an art form. Fahmidul Haq’s Cinema of Bangladesh: A Brief History (Non-Fiction) explores the extent to which the “multisensory” nature of films sheds light on the political and social history of a people. South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters, edited by Elora Halim Chowdhury and Niyogi De (Criticism: General Studies), is a major critical enquiry into South Asian films, with a focus on film archives extant in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, that interrogate how the South Asian region has been framed and theorized in the global context. A foremost feature of the volume is the fostering of scholarly discussion between Bangladeshi and Pakistani researchers and activist scholars on a deeper understanding of crimes committed during the genocide of 1971. Some of the essays open a transregional space of regional encounters, exchanges, and alliances in Bangladeshi cinema pre-and post-1971. In particular, the volume explores the cinematic representations of 1971 in Bangladeshi Liberation War films, the exoticization and, in essence, the marginalization of the Chittagong Hill Tract peoples in Bangladeshi cinema, the exploration of contested ideas of nationalist identity and Islamic identity in Bangladeshi independent films and archival records of Urdu filmmaking in Dhaka and the shared history of Pakistani cinema, East and West. The trauma of post-Partition displacement is also the opening point for Manishita Dass’ The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) (Criticism: General Studies), a critical analysis of the iconic Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (born in Dhaka in 1925). Dass explores the historical and politico-cultural contexts within which Ghatak’s most acclaimed films came to envision his theorization of cinematic realism.
Returning to the printed word, the translated letters of Nazrul Islam’s have also been brought together by Alamgir Mohammad in a volume of 67 letters Nazrul wrote to family, friends, and well-wishers between 1917 and 1942 (see Selected Letters of Kazi Nazrul Islam, Letters and Auto/biography). Some of the letters contain fascinating insight into mystical sightings, Nazrul’s commitment to the Muslim League and his thoughts on Islam and poetry. In a letter to Anowar Hossain, Nazrul states that “I have never attempted to write the rules of the Shariah, I have merely written poetry. To judge poetry in the light of religion and the Holy Scriptures breeds indiscipline” (p. 27). These letters also shed light on Nazrul’s failing health from as early as the 1920s, only to gradually deteriorate by the 1940s; many letters communicate the destitution in which his wife and young sons lived, coercing Nazrul to repeatedly search for benefactors to withstand the harassment of ruthless creditors.
Notwithstanding the communal and civic potentialities of epistolary exchanges, there is a deeply personal and intimate relational component to the writing and receiving of letters, even the most public ones. Letters are a form of intimate gift, and gifts, like most commodities, exist within networks of social relations and have, by virtue of the mobility and circularity of relations, their own (hi)stories to enact. Prominent photojournalist and social activist Shahidul Alam’s The Tide Will Turn (Letters and Auto/biography) documents the events leading to the author’s arrest and incarceration at the Keraniganj Jail in Dhaka in 2018 and concludes with a reflection on his epistolary friendship with Arundhati Roy. Alam recalls re-reading Roy’s letters in prison because the words felt like a “nourishment”. The epistolary exchange also strengthened Alam’s conviction in their “shared legacies”, “collective griefs” and struggles they both “face[d] as autocrats rule our lands”. In his response to Roy, Alam points out “You have Kashmir, we have the Chittagong Hill Tracts. You have ‘encounters’, we have ‘crossfires’” (p. 171).
Bangladesh’s “crossfire” culture — the practice of extrajudicial execution by the government-led security force RAB (Rapid Action Battalion) — has come under increasing scrutiny from international human rights organizations. In Rashid Askari’s aptly titled short story “Crossfire” (see Short Stories: 1971, Fiction), an intelligent young man called Tapan, made destitute by poverty and the ills of an orphaned upbringing, is killed point-blank by the joint forces of the police and RAB for his connections to a “left-leaning outlawed party”. The next day, the press publish a routine news item about the death of an armed outlaw terrorist who “fell in direct line” with the police during an illegal arms recovery operation. A newspaper calls Tapan “a fugitive” and “a murderer” although we know that the extent of his crimes was only the stealing of a bicycle to pay for his college fees.
In Bangladesh today, the most controversial writer is undoubtedly Taslima Nasreen. Shameless (Translations: Fiction) is Arunava Sinha’s translation of Nasreen’s Ekul Okul. This is a sequel of sorts to Lajja (Shame, 1993), the novel that made Nasreen a household name in both Bangladesh and India. Lajja is set against the backdrop of the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and recounts the plight of the Dutta family in Dhaka who eventually leave Bangladesh for Kolkata. In Shameless, Nasreen, now exiled in West Bengal, imagines an encounter between herself and the characters from Lajja. One fine afternoon, Taslima Nasreen receives an unannounced visitor. It is no other than Suranjan Dutta who has long thought of visiting the author who made his family famous through her novel. As the novel progresses, we find that both Suranjan and Nasreen are disappointed with each other. Nasreen cannot forgive Suranjan’s membership of BJP whilst Suranjan feels that Nasreen’s celebrated novel has made life difficult for them, specifically, that it is because of the publication of Lajja that his sister Maya cannot shake off the stigma of rape. Yet Suranjan’s communal politics readily uses rape as a tool of revenge. “What I do with Hindu women is lovemaking, and what I do with Muslim women, that’s rape” (p. 152), he states. The Dutta family have found neither happiness nor financial security in Kolkata, a city that is as riven by communal strife as Dhaka. Although Nasreen, the author turned character, feels at home in Kolkata, she is weighed down by exile: “I am lonely — frighteningly lonely, actually. I have no one I call a friend, but this is an ugly truth I reject with all my heart” (p. 250). Loneliness is also experienced by Suranjan’s mother, who yearns to return to her life in Bangladesh.
My Girlhood (Letters and Auto/biography) is Maharghya Chakraborty’s translation of Nasreen’s 1998 memoir Amar Meyebela. It opens with the violence of the war of 1971, of frightened people fleeing from the invading Pakistani army. Nasreen writes of her parents’ relationship, her father’s transgressions and her mother’s turn to religion as a form of solace. She writes of sexually abusive relatives who assault the young Nasreen and of menstruation and the social taboos surrounding this topic.
Khandokar Mahmudul Hasan’s Bengali science-fiction adventure story called Africar Bibhishika has been rendered into English as Horror in Africa (Translations: Fiction). The story is told from the perspective of a young Bangladeshi engineer, Zahid, who is stationed in Cameroon by a European petroleum company. Hasan’s Horror in Africa is, in many ways, a retelling of Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s much-loved 1938 African adventure romance, Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon) in which a young Kolkata-university graduate Shankar Chowdhury travels to Uganda as an employee of the British railway company but soon establishes himself as an explorer who uncovers rare diamonds at Richtersveld.
Hellfire (Translations: Fiction) is Shabnam Nadiya’s translation of Raurob (2010) by the Bangladeshi-British writer and actor Leesa Gazi. The novel recounts a day in the life of Farida Kahnum, her two daughters, Lovely and Beauty, and her husband Mukhles. We encounter Lovely on her 40th birthday, setting off to visit Gausia market. Lovely is both excited and nervous to find herself navigating the streets of Dhaka on her own for the first time in her life. At the market, marvelling at her own impulsiveness and courage, she decides to visit Ramna Park, where she has a conversation with a stranger. She is tempted by the stranger’s offer to take her to his flat but is unable to commit to such a daring act. All the while, Lovely holds a parallel conversation with a voice in her head, a voice of a brash young man who appears to encourage and warn Lovely against her transgressions. As the story progresses, we begin to understand the strangeness of her and her sister’s lives under the strict supervision of their domineering mother. The father is a silent, withdrawn figure, browbeaten into submission not only by Farida Khanum’s formidable presence but also by a family secret which readers slowly begin to grasp. The delayed revelation, firstly, of the strange relationship of Farida Khanum and her husband and, secondly, of the girls’ parentage, climaxes in a macabre murder.
Leesa Gazi is one of the founding members of the London based theatre company known as Komola Collective which on 20 October 2020 live-streamed Tahmima Anam’s play Shahrazad (Miscellaneous). Set during the Covid lockdown, the lead character, Zadie Brown, played by Leesa Gazi, hosts an internet talk show, where women from various walks of life share their stories. As she listens to stories of domestic abuse, Zadie Brown’s relationship with her husband comes into the spotlight. It transpires that Zadie’s real name is Shahrazad, originally from Kolkata. Her husband Simon has “rescued” her from a failed marriage and family conflict, brought her to England and offered to create a new life for her. He has changed her name to Zadie Brown and appears to be in complete control of her life, from the specific shade of lipstick that she should wear to selecting the calls that she should entertain for her show.
Hashim & Family (Fiction) is the debut novel by the Bangladeshi-British author Shanaz Ahsan. Explaining the impetus behind the novel, Ahsan said: “I wrote this book because I was tired of browsing shelves in bookshops and not finding any stories that reflected my heritage, my family’s history, which has so much in common with the experiences of other migrant families” (Irish Times 18 Apr https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/hashim-family-a-perfectly-fine-book-that-delivers-nothing-new-1.4220139). Readers will find that Ahsan’s story traverses a familiar novelistic terrain: the story of South Asian immigrants, hardworking, suffering racial abuse, but determined nonetheless to succeed in Britain whilst retaining a deep emotional connection to their native lands. Ahsan’s novel spans the period between the 1960s and the 1980s. During the pivotal year of 1971, one of the central characters who has set up a Bengali newspaper in London decides to return to Dhaka to cover the war. This is a nod on Ahsan’s part to commemorate the role played by the East Bengali diaspora in Britain during the war of independence.
Roger Gwynn’s Songram 71: British Bangladeshis in the War of Independence (Letters and Auto/biography) is a collection of essays by Bengalis in Britain who contributed to the war effort. Badrun Nesa Pasha writes about one of the first public demonstrations in England in support of independent Bangladesh. On the 28th of March 1971, around 3,000 people met in Small Heath Park, Birmingham. At this gathering, Pasha’s husband announced the establishment of the “Bangladesh Fund”. The Bengali diaspora in both Europe and America played a crucial role in fundraising, with the most famous fundraising event of 1971 having been the Concert for Bangladesh. Barry Feinstein and Chris Murray’s George Harrison Be Here Now (Letters and Auto/biography) documents how the Concert for Bangladesh was originally envisioned by George Harrison with the assistance of Ravi Shankar, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and other notable musicians. The book features rare photos taken by Barry Feinstein, the only photographer permitted by Harrison and the organizers to be on stage during the live performance on 1 August 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Leave the World Behind (Fiction) is the third novel by Bangladeshi-American author Rumaan Alam. Clay and Amanda, a middle-class couple, arrive with their two children at a remote Long Island mansion for a holiday. As the family settles into a typical holiday of barbeques and lazy afternoons by the pool, a late-night visit by an elderly African-American couple, the Washingtons, brings an abrupt end to their holiday. The Washingtons are in fact the owners of the house and had been ensconced in Manhattan for the week. An unexplained power cut in the city compels them to return to their Long Island Home. In this instance, the book changes, becoming, as Alam has said in an interview, a story “about six strangers brought together under strange and maybe unknown circumstances”. It slowly dawns on the characters that the power cut is no ordinary affair, that some catastrophe has struck New York and perhaps even the nation. No one can be sure of the specific nature of the disaster for all communications, internet, television and radio, are down. The disaster, the novel’s main plot device, remains a mystery. We are given a few fleeting glimpses of a dystopian future. This taut atmosphere reveals the fault lines of American society, most notably racism which, although subdued, forms a powerful undercurrent as Amanda and Clay try to grapple with the arrival of the Washingtons. The novel also explores the fragility of human civilization and of the way that order is easily disrupted by the failure of technology.
Bring Now the Angels (Poetry) is Bangladeshi-American Dilruba Ahmed’s second collection. Like Alam’s novel, Ahmed’s poetry also deals with the fragile foundations of our lives. The first half of the book focuses on her father’s illness and passing. There is a rumination on the paraphernalia of medical treatment, the “whirring machines” that take over a life. The poems reveal the frighteningly impersonal environment of the hospital as captured here: “Please note patient unable / to take medicine due to nausea. Therefore, / for that reason, consequently, because of that, / ergo, accordingly, thus — patient unable / to take nausea meds” (p. 14). It is a treatment that robs the patient of his humanity and dignity as the daughter asks, “Will nothing/ be spared; will nothing remain unseen?” (p. 12). It is an environment that stifles emotions. However, in the title poem, this deadening restraint is cast aside. The poet becomes a shaman and summons various powers, both mundane and supramundane: “Bring the healer the howler […] the sword-eaters […] the cleric the clerk […] the messengers divine” (p. 32). There are “political” poems that reflect on America’s endless wars abroad and of the experience of immigrants. In “Interrogation”, Ahmed reveals the world of post-9/11 America where certain immigrants are deemed to be inherently dangerous. In this need to prove their “good” credentials such immigrants are subjected to a perpetual state of interrogation.
The other collections of English poems this year are Farhana Ferdousi Imtiaz’s Cherry Blossom, Munawar Sarkar Anik’s Stand by Humanity, Tasnim Mastura’s The Silent Rebellion, Shaira Afrida Oyshee’s All the Quiet Places, Raj Reader’s The Poet’s Urn: Bangabandhu in Timeless Translation and Mohammed Shafiqul Islam’s Inner State.
Other notable 2020 fiction includes Two Cent Life, Shereen Rahman’s debut novel that charts the story of two young women, Maya, from an unnamed village in Bangladesh, and Ellen, from California, whose stories intersect and dovetail. Shahazadia Basunia’s novel A War Widow recounts the trials and travails of a war widow in post-1971 Bangladesh. Her second novel of the year is An Expatriate which explores the life of a Bangladeshi émigré in Qatar.
Introduced by Serajul Islam Choudhury Razia Khan: Omnibus Edition (Miscellaneous) brings together a collection of articles that Khan wrote for Forum, an influential political magazine of the 1960s. There are also tributes written by her former students and colleagues, such as Kaiser Haq and Fakrul Alam. Khan was a prolific writer of articles, fiction and poetry. Although this edition does not include her poems, it includes four short stories. The heroines in these stories fall into a type — they are either academics or university students. The stories are set on campuses, most often in English universities, where the heroines make it a point to wear sarees and despair of the provincial nature of the British. They inevitably face a degree of patronizing behaviour for “a certain underestimation” is always “in the air”. Her heroines are comfortably cosmopolitan and well-read and take pride in their knowledge of both Shakespeare and Tagore.
A stimulating anthology of culinary literature that came out this year is Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (Anthologies). Edited by Claire Chambers, the volume explores the histories, cultures, and culinary traditions of Muslim South Asia through the writings of “foody” scholars from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India as well as the South Asian diasporas in Britain and the United States. In in the first half of the anthology which comprises life writings, Kaiser Haq’s “Alhamdullilah: With Gratitude and Relish” (Letters and Auto/biography) explores the rituals surrounding the delectable biryani of Old Dhaka. He recounts the distinctive religious rituals which influence the food habits of both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis. Haq also looks at the ways in which a thriving economy has changed the eating habits of Bangladeshis. For the second half of the book, we, the authors of this Introduction, wrote a story, “Jackfruit with Tamarind” (Fiction), about our childhood, much of which revolved around food and the mysteries of collective preparation, and about East Bengali delicacies such as Pithali, Ilish Polao and Macher Jhol.
