Introduction
2021 marked 50 years of independence for Bangladesh. Four notable anthologies containing an eclectic body of work commemorate this event. Despite what the title suggests, the 27 stories collected in Demoness: Best Bangladeshi Stories (1971–2021) (Anthologies) were not all written after 1971 but, as Niaz Zaman explains in the introduction, within a particular “political and linguistic space” by writers who are “associated with the land that gained its independence from Pakistan in 1971 and came to be known as Bangladesh”. Some of the stories, such as “Demoness” by Kazi Nazrul Islam and Syed Mujataba Ali’s “Ah! Common Cold”, were written before the Partition of 1947, whilst Syed Walliullah’s “The Tale of a Tulsi Plant” recounts the experience of Muslim West Bengalis who fled Kolkata during the violence of 1947. There are stories of 1971 such as Akhteruzzaman Elias’s “The Raincoat” and stories of contemporary Bangladesh by writers such as Syed Manzoorul Islam, Jharna Rahman and Shaheen Aktar.
When the Mango Tree Blossomed: Fifty Short Stories from Bangladesh (Anthologies) also edited by Niaz Zaman, is a weightier compendium that includes 17 stories written in English and 33 translated from Bengali. The stories are grouped thematically (and somewhat chronologically) into six sections. Each section traces unique facets of the nationalist narratives that provide a more comprehensive picture of Bangladesh. Although most of the stories are set in Bangladesh and revolve around the 1971 war, some are situated in the Anglo-American diaspora. A few of the stories explore contemporary issues such as the fate of the Communist Party in Bangladesh, the July 2016 terrorist attack in Dhaka, the Rana Plaza tragedy of 2013, while several others explore issues of sexual identity not only in relation to homosexuality but also the experience of the hijra community whose presence has been felt more profoundly and more regularly in Bangladeshi writing since their recognition by the government in 2013 as “third gender”.
Golden Bangladesh at 50: Contemporary Poems and Stories (Anthologies), edited by Shazia Omar, captures the voices of those who have built the nation amid political anarchy, patriarchal hegemony, class struggle and poverty. Chaos appears to be a running theme across the volume as the stories explore the many facets of anarchy and mayhem that gave birth to the nation in 1971. The denouement in each story is a reconciliation with the pervasive material, financial, emotional and political chaos affecting people’s relationships with one another, the city of Dhaka, the political order and the nationalist narratives that go into making Bangladesh at once an emotional, patriotic idea and a living reality/entity.
Our Many Longings: Contemporary Short Fiction from Bangladesh (Anthologies), edited by Sohana Manzoor, contains seven stories translated from Bengali and 12 stories written in English which cover a range of contemporary issues faced by Bangladeshis at home and abroad. “Without a Name, Without a Tribe” by Hasan Azizul Haq and “Torso” by Afsan Chowdhury focus on the war of independence. Shaheen Akhtar’s “Green Passport” delves into one of the most underexplored consequences of the war of 1971. Akhtar’s story spotlights the Biharis of Bangladesh, the Urdu-speaking community from the Indian state of Bihar who migrated to East Pakistan after the Partition of 1947. During the war of independence Biharis supported Pakistan and, after the war, they were stranded in Bangladesh. The newly independent country saw them as traitors whilst both India and Pakistan turned their backs on them. It was only in 2008 that Biharis gained Bangladeshi citizenship. Manzu Islam’s “Catching Pheasants” tells the story of two Bangladeshi restaurant workers in England who plan to steal pheasants. Islam’s story disrupts our understanding of not only the English countryside, often seen as an exclusively white domain, but also of the common perception of immigrant workers in the UK being confined to big cities.
It is also fitting that the golden jubilee of Bangladeshi independence saw the publication of Arunava Sinha’s translation of Akhteruzzaman Elias’ Khwabbnama (Translation: Fiction). Despite his slim literary output consisting of two novels, 28 short stories and a few essays, Elias (1943–1997) is a dominating presence in modern Bengali literature. Khwabnama, considered to be one of the greatest novels written in Bengali, continues to baffle and intrigue readers. It gives voice to the subaltern, for at its heart lies the story of fishermen, sharecroppers and ordinary villagers of rural Bengal. It is a commentary on the socio-political history of Bengal, referring to all the major events of the region: the Battle of Plassey, the Sanyasi/Fakir Rebellion of 1771, the peasant rebellion of 1946 (known as the Tebhaga movement), the creation of the Congress Party and the Muslim League, Hindu-Muslim communal violence, Partition and the emergence of East Pakistan. The narrative, which makes use of myth, indigenous storytelling, local legends and beliefs, moves seamlessly between the realist and the supernatural. The novel opens with a reference to the Sanyasi rebellion, of how a certain Munshi travelling with Majnoo Shah Fakir, one of the leaders of the rebellion, is fatally shot by a British soldier. The spirit of Munshi takes abode in the fig tree above Katlahar lake and plays a crucial role in the life of the villagers living around the lake, the main setting of Elias’ novel. Though the villagers fervently believe in the benevolent power of the spirit perched in the fig tree, it is only the fisherman known as Tamiz’s father and Fakir Cherag Ali, the local interpreter of dreams, who appear to act as conduits between Munshi’s spirit and the villagers. This element of magic realism encapsulates the socio-political reality of sharecroppers, their dreams of a better future, their fight for a more equitable share of the crops that they plant and their hopes for a new nation.
Translated by Fareea Lara Life Is Beautiful (Translation: Drama) is a one-act play by Selina Hossain that revisits humanity’s past and uses it as a narrative tool with which to critically examine the present. Christ, Mohammad, Faustus, Gandhi, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ila Mitra are a few of the historical figures who appear on stage to comment on the socio-cultural and political tensions in South Asia. The backstory of how Hossain came to write and stage the play is perhaps equally interesting. Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and the humanitarian Sushebha Barve, approached Hossain to stage a play with a “universal context” for the 1992 Moral Re-armament Conference in India.
The Reason Why Abdul Jalil Died (Translation: Fiction) is Quazi Mostain Billah’s translation of Moinul Ahsan Saber’s Abdul Jalil Je Karone Mara Gelo. Told in a Kafkaesque manner, the novella recounts the experience of Abdul Jalil, an ordinary low ranked office worker abducted by three mysterious men. It is not clear whether the abductors are law enforcers or criminals themselves, but they accuse Abdul Jalil of murder, money laundering, forgery and anti-government activities. As he undergoes the bizarre, absurd and horrific interrogation which involves various forms of torture, Abdul Jalil fails to understand the reason for his abduction and is unable to convince his abductors that they have captured the wrong man.
From the realm of the absurd we move to the world of science fiction. Volume II of The Gollancz Book of Science Fiction (Anthologies) contains three works from Bangladesh, Kaiser Haq’s poem “2020-nKarV”, Muhammad Zafar Iqbal’s short story “The Zoo” (translated by Arunava Sinha) and “Bring Your Own Spoon” by Saad Z. Hossain. Iqbal’s writing has been at the vanguard of Bengali science fiction since the 1970s. In “The Zoo”, reminiscent of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Iqbal tests the moral parameters of scientific experimentations when a wealthy industrialist, modelled on Josef Mengele, crossbreeds and inter-breeds animals with humans in a remote island where he has set a human “zoo” for private recreation. In an unanticipated act of retribution, the horror deepens when he is thrown into one such enclosure containing “animalistic” humans. Saad Z. Hossain’s “Bring your own spoon” tells the story of the unusual friendship between a jinn, Imbidor, and a human, Hanu. Hanu has set up an illegal eatery in a futuristic Dhaka where the air, water and soil are so badly infected by biohazardous pollution that citizens live in tiny protected enclosures and eat food from “synthesizers” which convert “algae and other supplements into roast chicken”. However, the poor, homeless, infected, and the dying live by scrounging. It is for them that the unlikely duo set up a kitchen cooking “real” food. Kaiser Haq’s poem “2020-nKarV” is not set in a dystopian future but is a meditation on our post-Covid world. It is an example of, to borrow a term coined by Claire Chambers, postcoronial literature. Haq plays with the scientific name Corona and writes it as Karuna, the Bengali word for compassion. The poem resists the postcoronial quarantined world, but also imagines a world where the onslaught of the virus might create more compassionate human beings, “a goon forgets to draw his gun”, “soldiers on the West Bank/ Forget Krav Maga and fall at the feet/ Of grieving mothers”, “Mme Suu Kyi” visits a Rohinga camp and “pitches a penitential bell tent” and Trump embarks “on a pilgrimage/ Of redemption through Central America”.
Saad Hossain’s Cyber Mage (Fiction) is set in an imagined 2089 where countries have been replaced by cities modelled on corporations. In his characteristic dark comic fashion, Hossain blends mythology, fantasy, cyberpunk and science to deliver a humorous tale of techno-wizardry and corporate greed as the teenage protagonist Murzak, a legendary online hacker called the “Cyber Mage” who works for the Russian crime syndicate, faces a huge challenge when he must attend school in real life. Dhaka holds its ground as an imposing character in Hossain’s novel that envisions a future where the city’s population density becomes a nanotechnology and bioengineering tool for the creation of a habitable microclimate, including an AI-controlled ecosphere.
The poems of Lata Osmani in Lonely Bird (Poetry) allude to Covid, emphasising the unmistakable allure of the “tiniest” of living beings capable of instigating prolonged global revolution and changing the course of history — not necessarily for the worst. Persecution (Poetry), Sofiul Azam’s fourth poetry collection, explores many of our current political problems and the various forms of persecution unleashed by politics of expediency. In these poems, the realm of the public and the political intersect with the calm and comforting integrity of the poet’s private life, of relishing “rice cakes best served with a paste of spices/ and black cumin seeds” and of reflecting on the bucolic beauty of village life. In Epidemic of Nostalgia (Poetry), the Bangladeshi-American poet Sujash Purna writes of the immigrants’ experience. Many of the poems explore the immigrant’s shock of arrival, the fading hope of a better life, the false glamour of America (“your Tom Cruises are old”) and imperialism (“We wash their dishes./ They bomb our lands./ We build their roads./ They cage our kids./We make their hats./They trash our foods.”)
Tahmima Anam’s The Startup Wife (Fiction) is not ultimately an example of postcoronial literature, though the novel ends with the beginning of the Pandemic in 2020. Although the inclusion of the Pandemic may feel a little too affected, a sense of an impending apocalypse permeates the novel. The main character Asha Ray, a Bangladeshi-American, drops out of her PhD program to invent an app that helps people create personalised rituals from weddings and funerals to feline baptisms. The app makes use of the theological and mythological traditions of the world and caters to those who are not religious in the conventional sense of the word but crave nonetheless a spiritual dimension that is not bound by a single belief system. Although Asha is the creator of the app it is her husband Cyrus Jones who becomes the public face of the company as it turns into a popular social platform with millions of subscribers. Anam’s novel is not only about the current world of social media and apps that govern every aspect of our life, but also of boardroom sexism. Asha is unable to sell her app to potential investors, but when her charismatic husband, who is not a “techie” but whose knowledge of myths, rituals and religion Asha relies on to create her app, becomes the frontman, the financial investments are secured. Very soon, Cyrus becomes not only the CEO of the company but also the “messiah” for the millions who use the app. It is Cyrus who takes credit for the invention of the app, side-lining Asha. As he begins to bask in his cult-like following, a reckless decision he makes threatens to derail both the company and his relationship with Asha.
In Numair Atif Choudhury’s Taxi Wallah and Other Stories (Fiction), we see Bangladesh through the eyes of the less privileged — the taxi drivers, the brick breakers of Dhaka’s many construction sites, the maids and the street children who live of the food that they can scavenge. Home of the Floating Lily (Fiction) is a collection of short stories by the Bangladeshi-Canadian writer Silmy Abdullah. The stories recount the triumphs and travails of the Bangladeshi diaspora in Canada and explore the feelings of isolation and alienation experienced by newly arrived immigrants. The stories focus on the immigrants’ experience of in-betweenness and of the re-enactment of Bangladeshi social norms within the diasporic community which at first may appear to be difficult to accept but in the end appear to be oddly comforting. In “Reflection”, Abdullah tells that well-known tale of an arranged marriage which the bride finds oppressive. Yet the story ends on a note of hope, of the bride and groom realising that the “arranged” relationship is not the oppression they had imagined it to be.
The Shaytan Bride: A Bangladeshi Canadian Memoir of Desire and Faith (Auto/biography) by Sumaiya Matin offers a different account of the diasporic experience. The author describes it as “non-fiction, non-linear, literary coming of age memoir”. It tells the story of her arrival in Canada at the age of six. At the age of 19, when the family visit Dhaka, Matin is faced with the prospect of a forced marriage. Her resistance to the marriage leads her family to conclude that she is possessed by an evil spirit requiring exorcism. Her family take away her passport and proceed to lock her in a room. Although the book inhabits the space of Muslim “misery memoirs” in many ways, Matin states “I would be careful to refrain from stoking the flame of “Canada rescues Muslim girl, again”. The Secret Diary of a Bengali Bridezilla: Hilarious Women’s Fiction with a Woc Twist (Fiction) by Halima Khatun is a humorous and light-hearted take on the “big fat Bangladeshi wedding” in England.
Two articles were published last year on the charismatic Bengali-Ugandan scholar and poet Rajat Neogy who in 1961 founded Transition, one of Africa’s leading literary magazines (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). The articles explore not only the central role Neogy and his magazine played in the emergence of a pan-African literary culture but also the small but versatile collection of poetry that Neogy left behind. As poet and editor, Neogy was deeply invested in and influenced by the political calamities in east Bengal, then East Pakistan, the ancestral home of the Neogy family, before settling in Kampala in the mid-1930s. Anxious at the possibility of involuntary exile for millions of non-Ugandans such as himself after Uganda gained independence from Britain in 1962 and, at the same time, deeply moved by the political insurgency against Bengalis in East Pakistan, Neogy’s poems and editorials for Transition magazine foreshadow the uncertainties of exilic despair, displacement and immobility.
Ayesha A. Irani’s Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Criticism: General Studies) is an analysis of Nabīvaṃśa, an early 17th-century epic poem composed by Saiyad Sultan, a Sufi pir from Chittagong. In 17,396 couplets, Nabīvaṃśa narrates the story of the Prophet Muhammad. Although Sultan used various medieval Arabic and Persian texts as source materials, the life of Muhammad in his epic poem is embedded within an Indic tradition. The poem refers to Rama and Krishna, to Buddhism, Jainism and Vaishnavism, and it borrows from Puranic tales and Hindu creation stories. Irani examines the socio-political context of medieval Chittagong, of the political and cultural alliance between Chittagong and the Buddhist rulers of Arakan, present-day Rakhine in Myanmar, which was crucial to the composition of Nabīvaṃśa. As Irani explains, in 17th-century East Bengal, “two nodal literary production centres” emerged: “the Chittagong port town and its environs, and the Arakanese Court”. It is in this environment that earliest examples of Bengali Islamic literature appeared. Parthasarathi Bhaumik’s Bengalis in Burma: A Colonial Encounter (1886–1948) (Criticism: General Studies) examines the migration of Bengalis to Burma and Bengali writings on Burma from the colonial period.
Subhasri Ghosh’s The 1947 Partition in the East: Trends and Trajectories (Criticism: General Studies) is an exploration of the impact of Partition in Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. Partition as Border-Making: East Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh (Criticism: General Studies) by Sayeed Ferdous looks at the various identities that Bangladesh has undergone from East Bengal to East Pakistan. The book does not see Partition as an event in the past but analyses the “prolonged aftermath” of 1947 which lingers in contemporary Bangladesh. Film, Media and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia: Beyond Partition (Criticism: General Studies) is a collection of essays, edited by Nukhbah Taj Langah and Roshni Sengupta, on literature, theatre, art, film, television and digital media by scholars from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India who make an argument for an interpretation of Partition that is not confined by “one dimensional religio-nationalist narratives” and demands “an engagement beyond the ideological impasse of border politics”. In many ways, Samrat Choudhury’s The Braided River: A Journey along the Brahmaputra (Miscellaneous), a travel narrative that delves into history and contemporary politics, is also a plea for a narrative of the Subcontinent that is not fragmented by the politics of Partition. The author explores the river Brahmaputra from the northernmost tip of Assam to Goalando Ghat in central Bangladesh. As he charts the river’s trajectory, he arrives in border towns in Assam where India’s newly enacted Citizenship Amendment Act may disenfranchise many who are accused of being Bangladeshi. Although such political acts as the CAA ignore the shared history and culture of the people of North-East Bengal, the river is a constant reminder of that shared history. In Pre-Partition Bengal Goalando Ghat was a major transportation hub where travellers from West Bengal would take the steamer to Assam. As Choudhury discovers, the romance of Goalando Ghat persists in the collective imagination of Bengalis from both sides of the border. Its most potent manifestation is in the near mythical status of the Goalando Steamer chicken curry. The early 20th-century writer Syed Mujtaba Ali wrote about it, and it is fervently believed by many Bengalis that Rabindranath Tagore was partial to it. Although there are no written recipes for this curry, food historians such as Pritha Sen have tried to recreate the taste of the curry that was served on the steamers of Goalando before the Partition of Bengal.
To end on the subject of food, Claire Chambers’ Dastarkhwan: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (Anthologies) is the UK publication of Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia published by Picador India in 2020.
