Bangladesh

Introduction

Although 2021 marked 50 years of independence for Bangladesh, in 2022 three notable anthologies continued the previous year’s commemoration of Bangladesh’s half century. An Ekushey Anthology: 1952–2022 edited by Niaz Zaman brings together twenty-five stories and poems, most of which have been translated into English for the first time for this volume. The texts reminisce about the events that led to the 1952 Language Movement in Dhaka as a result of the diktats of the government in Karachi to introduce Urdu as the state language of Pakistan. The entries in the anthology pivot around the violence that ensued between Dhaka University students and the West Pakistan military on February 21, 1952. For some, this violence precipitated a long list of psychological maladies akin to a Fanonian “nervous condition”. The same violence expedites the slow death of romantic involvements across the East/West, Bengali/Urdu divide as Niaz Zaman’s “My Friend, My Enemy” reveals. In other stories, as in Saleha Chowdhury’s “Talking Their Heart’s Out”, memories of the Language Movement herald a renewed vigour for the language among both West and East Bengalis. Perhaps the most intriguing entries in the anthology are Mojaffor Hossain’s “An Ad Seeking the Identity of a Hand” and Nuzhat Amin Mannan’s “Ahad’s Last Words”. Hossain’s story is loosely based on real events about an elderly woman who visits a newspaper office in Dhaka wanting to print an advertisement for a missing person who helped her escape the army’s attack on February 21, 1952. Mannan’s story, composed in prose poetry, recalls the disembodied voice of a dead young man called Ahad who speaks to his mother from beyond the shallow, unmarked grave as he defends his “right” to have died for a “tongue” that appears to have risen from the bellows of the primordial earth.

Bangladesh: Writings On 1971, Across Borders edited by Rakshanda Jalil and Debjani Sengupta brings together texts written in Bengali, Urdu and English by writers from Bangladesh, West Bengal and Pakistan. Some of the Bengali stories were collected in earlier anthologies such as Lilies, Lanterns and Lullabies (2014) and Fault Lines: Stories of 1971 (2008). The three opening essays by Kaiser Haq, Manas Ray and Meher Ali set the tone for this volume. Whilst Haq’s account gives a Bangladeshi freedom fighter’s perspective on the war, Manas Ray’s essay explores the plight of Hindu refugees who fled East Bengal/East Pakistan not only during 1971 but also during the Partition of 1947 and looks at the political turmoil that took over West Bengal during the 1970s. Meher Ali’s “Between Remembering and Forgetting: 1971 and an Inheritance of Loss” explores the ramifications of “Pakistan’s continued refusal to acknowledge, let alone apologise for, the evidence of rampant army atrocities, rapes, and selective genocide”. However, as this anthology reveals, many Pakistanis chose not to remain silent. The anthology contains well-known work by Urdu writers such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem “Dhaka se Wapsi Par” (“Upon Returning from Dhaka”) and “Mohenjodaro” by the Bangladeshi Urdu poet Naushad Noorie, a native of Patna, Bihar who settled in Dhaka in the early 1950s. Sameena Nazeer’s Urdu story “Paan ka Beeda” (“Betel Leaf”) was written especially for this anthology.

Translated by Nabina Das, Arise Out of the Lock: 50 Bangladeshi Women Poets in English, includes many well-known Bangladeshi poets such as Khaleda Adib Chowdhury, Anwara Syed Haq, Meherun Nesa, one of the martyred intellectuals during the war of 1971, and Farida Majid, who lived in London during the mid to late 70s and was the founder of Salamander Imprint. The title poem is by Sufia Kamal (1911-1999), the foremost feminist poet of Bangladesh and a political activist who played prominent roles during pivotal moments of Bangladeshi nationalism. It is a collection that explores women’s experiences beyond the conventional roles assigned to them.

Aftermath is the English translation of Syed Shamsul Haq’s Ditiyo Diner Kahini (1974). The novella examines the societal shake-ups besetting the fictional village of Jaleswari in post-independent Bangladesh. These challenges unfold in a breathless manner, reflected in the speed in which the story is narrated, for the text is one long paragraph from the first page to the last. It tells the story of Taher whose return to Jaleswari which, in the words of Syed Manzoorul Islam who has written the foreword for the English translation, is not “simply a physical place where everydayness rules” but is “situated in an indeterminate geography of memory, magic and nostalgia”. Morshed Sofiul Hasan’s novel, Seventy-One, translated by Nibedita Haldar, also revisits the war of 1971. Much like Haq’s Aftermath, Hasan’s novel does not glorify the post-1971 years but emphasises the political instability of the period.

Another writer who has written of the disillusionment that accompanied independence is Shahidul Zahir, known for his distinctive use of magical realism and story-telling techniques. Harper Perennial has brought out Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas by Zahir. His debut novel, Jibon o Rajnaitik Bastobota (Life and Political Reality), published in 1988, describes in an unemotional and compressed language the war-time atrocities of the Pakistani army and the new nation’s inability to deliver on the promises of independence. In the novel we encounter a neighborhood in Dhaka city where the people were victims of brutality, murder and rape during the war. Zahir questions the rehabilitation in independent Bangladesh of those who collaborated with the Pakistani army and criticizes politicians who believe that in politics one must forget the atrocities of the past. Abdul Mojid, whose stream of consciousness the reader inhabits, is unable to erase his memories of the war and is not willing to forget, though he feels his helplessness and his inability to change the course of events acutely. The novel opens in medias res with the snapping of Mojid’s sandal strap as he walks around his neighborhood. The sound of that snap along with the cry of crows becomes a recurrent motif throughout Mojid’s free-flowing reflections triggered by witnessing a political rally organised by the son of Moulana Bodu who during the war had collaborated with the invading army. The other novella in this dual publication is Abu Ibrahim’s Death, the narrative technique of which is greatly inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Harper Perennial India has also brought out a collection of Zahir’s short stories, Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony: Stories.

Kasinath Roy’s The Memashib’s Foot, translated by Shawkat Hossain, is told from the perspective of a young servant, Phulbanu. Her reflections on the life of the mistress of the house and her leftist academic and activist husband who is unable to hold on to his political ideals expose the vacuous lives of the newly rich, upper-middle-class of Dhaka. The moral dilemmas and misfortunes of people making sense of petty ordeals that spiral out of control are highlighted in the eleven stories gathered in A Strange Coincidence and Other Stories by Quazi Mostain Billah. Framed, by Adrita and Golam Kibria, is a crime thriller that investigates the murder of a man.

Saad Z Hossain’s tragi-comic dystopian fiction Cyber Mage is the fourth in a series of sci-fi novels set in Dhaka. It maps the adventure of the teenage cyber hacker known as the Cyber Mage, who counsels Russian oligarchs and spies on the International Space Station. The citizens in this dystopian world, swayed by biological nanotechs, feed on seaweed and algae broth tempered with a “million different flavourings”, whilst djinns, humans and artificial intelligence imbued with Vedic wisdom refashion the history and economy of a world divided not by nations but city-states. Hossain’s other publication for the year is Kundu Wakes Up, a sequel to The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (2019). This too is focused on a futuristic South Asia of airborne nanotech, video games and environmental disaster. Set in the coastal city of Chittagong which is on the verge of being engulfed by the Bay of Bengal, Kundu, a burnt-out artist, begins to realise that the disappearance of his wife cannot be the result of marital discord but something far more sinister.

Iffat Nawaz’s Surjo’s Clan examines Bangladesh’s need to memorialise the events of 1971, especially the burden of remembrance on the generation born after the war. It narrates the growing up of Shurjo, whose freedom-fighter uncles were killed in the war. The trauma of that loss appears to be alleviated, after independence, by the mysterious nocturnal visits of the martyred uncles from their state in the “Unknown” to the realm of the “Known” inhabited by Shurjo and the living members of the family. Shurjo and her extended family appear to settle into a daily nocturnal celebration of meals with those visiting from the Unknown, but Shurjo’s father is uneasy about the night-time familial gatherings with the spirits of the martyred and decides to migrate to America with his daughter and wife. In the novel, Nawaz weaves the trauma of 1947 with that of 1971.

Friendship between women from multicultural backgrounds in the diaspora is the purview of Afroz Martino’s novel Five Pebbles in a Pond set in contemporary Australia. Strong female figures also dominate the storyline of Nilopar Uddin’s The Halfways, which is set in Bangladesh, the United Kingdom and the United States. The death of a parent compels two siblings to embark on a curious trans-Atlantic trip from New York to Dhaka via Wales to confront painful truths about their deceased father’s past. Writing about her novel, Uddin has said: “Being a daughter of first-generation immigrants from Bangladesh, it felt important to me to tell this story. Representation is important and I wanted to foster an understanding of the Sylheti Bangladeshi community in Britain, their food, their language and their customs”. ¹ Another novel centred on the Bangladeshi diaspora in London is Tufayel Ahmed’s This Way Out. Ahmed explores gender, ethnic and religious identities through the character of Amar who finds love with Joshua and wishes to get married. Realizing that he can no longer hide his sexuality from his family, he breaks the news of his engagement in the family WhatsApp group. Amar not only finds it difficult to make his Muslim Bengali family accept his sexual identity but also struggles to carve out a separate, non-white gay identity amongst Joshua’s middle-class white family and friends. The discovery of a Muslim LGBTQ online forum helps Amar to reconcile his Muslimness with his queer identity.

Brown Girl Chromatography: Poems, part of the Pitt Poetry Series, is Bangladeshi-American Anuradha Bhowmik’s debut collection. It portrays the quotidian elements of the immigrant experience. The poems chart out Bhowmik’s life from her birth in Bangladesh to the process of being Americanised, starting with “losing the aspirated last syllable” of her Bengali name, for such a sound is not to be found in the “American alphabet”, to the forgotten birth certificate packed away in a suitcase along with her father’s Bata shoes from Bangladesh. Many of the anxieties of immigrant life are revealed through experiences, from her parents’ “political asylum interviews” in their broken Bangla-English to being “blue collar brown in a white town”. Exile: In the Labyrinth of Homesickness is Arunava Sinha’s translation of the work of the poet in exile Tuhin Das who was forced to leave Bangladesh in 2016 due to his writings on religious persecution and seek refuge in Pennsylvania. As the title indicates, the 65 poems in this collection are an expression of the state of being in exile, of the profound sense of loss of homeland.

A curious volume published this year is Letters of Lost Lyrics: A Book of Translation of Bengali Heritage Poems, which showcases eighty classical Bengali poems translated by fifty-five graduate students in the translation studies programme at the Bangladesh University of Professionals who undertook this task under the guidance of Mohammad Shamsul Hoque, the editor of the volume. The other volumes of poetry are Nusrat Aziz Mim’s Untamed, Saiful Islam Shamim’s A Loving Breeze, Shamanta Montahin’s The Fake, The Real, And You, Mithila Aich’s Bravely and Arifur Rahman’s An Elegiac Funeral. There are also the Selected Poems of Kamrul Hassan and Mohammad Nurul Huda’s Choice of Verse.

Behula’s Sari, translated by M Harunur Rashid, is a collection of 29 poems by Mohammad Nurul Huda which retells the legend of Behula and Lakhindar from the medieval Manasamangala Kavya. The collection takes its title from the poem on Behula’s tant saree, a cotton weave native to East Bengal. On the “faithful” Behula’s body, the sari materializes as an emblem of feminine dignity and indomitable virtue and reminiscences on its long “feminist” and cosmopolitan history in the Subcontinent where it claims to have empowered women, even travelling, much like Behula, across perilous seas to reach the shores of Southeast Asia, effortlessly binding women in a web of connectivity and weaving their stories of shared struggles and aspirations across borders.

Selected Poems by Shamim Reza, translated by Dulal Al Monsur and Mahbub Siddique, brings together a selection of poems published between 2001 and 2019. Few readers in Bangladesh will argue with the statement that Reza is one of the most innovative and interesting of contemporary Bengali poets. Reza’s attempt to create a new poetic language has been praised as well as criticized. His distinctive language tries to catch the sounds and rituals of the folk traditions of Bengal, of the world of the farmer and the villager. One sees through their eyes the vast paddy fields, the empty fields of autumn and the mysterious, mythic river. The poems exude a sense of primeval rootedness where the familiar world becomes mysterious, but it would be wrong to see him as a romantic poet of rural Bengal. His poems are shaped by the stark reality of rural Bengal, yet this world is imbued with a sense of the fantastic. The mythic, the historical, the archeological, the village and the city speak simultaneously in his poetry.

Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism by Elora Shehabuddin traces the entangled histories of women from Britain, the United States and Muslim-majority East Bengal — where women are not defined chiefly by their “Muslimness”. Shehabuddin explores how feminist movements in the West have evolved in parallel with feminist movements in Muslim societies. If there are many ways of being a Muslim, as Shehabuddin notes, there are equally many ways of being a feminist, attested by the remarkable stories of challenge and conquest by women from the Global South and North across racial, ethnic, geo-political, spatial and cultural divides. Hailing from East Bengal, the volume examines the remarkable lives of women such as Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain and Masuda Rahman who, despite never travelling outside of Bengal, contextualized the need for Bengali women’s emancipation and sovereignty in relation to their counterparts in the West. Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s writing can also be found in Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women which, as the editors have said, challenges the “Orientalist assumption that [Muslim women] belong to a religious or cultural background that demands meekness”. This anthology aims at “writing Muslim women back into a history of travel”. Hossain’s “A Frog in a Well Seeing the Himalaya” can be found in this anthology.

“They fear us because we are fearless” is the governing motif of In the Crossfire of History: Women’s War Resistance Discourse in the Global South, a collection of essays edited by Fayeza Hasanat and Lava Asaad. The volume brings together emancipatory and revolutionary movements spearheaded by under-presented and politically misrepresented women’s resistance movements from Argentina to Bangladesh. The collection includes two chapters on case studies from Bangladesh, both involving the 1971 war and women’s bodies as sites of patriarchal contestation. Shafinur Nahar traces issues of pedagogy in the Bangladeshi classroom where students, we are told, are traumatized by women’s narratives of the 1971 war, while Farzana Akhter explores a recent shift in the cinematic representation of women’s agency in Bangladeshi war movies such as Nasiruddin Yousuf’s Guerilla.

Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights and War Cinema in Bangladesh by Elora Halim Chowdhury not only looks at 1971-centric films by well-known male directors such as Zahir Raihan, Alamgir Kabir, Tareque Masud and Nasiruddin Yousuf, but also primarily at the works of female filmmakers such as Shameem Akhtar and Rubaiyat Hossain and documentaries by Leesa Gazi, Shabnam Ferdousi, Yasmin Kabir and Farzana Boby. Chowdhury aims to offer a perspective on 1971 that is not confined to the heroic exploits of male freedom fighters nor the conventional image of the victimised Bangladeshi woman. Through the works of female filmmakers, Chowdhury reveals a different narrative of the war from the perspective of women who are not devoid of agency, who do not valorise war nor occupy the battlefields, but question the dominant narratives from their feminised domains.

Identity, Nationhood and Bangladesh Independent Cinema by Fahmidul Haq and Brian Shoesmith looks at how post-2000 independent and art house filmmakers have constructed national identity. Haq and Shoesmith divide Bangladeshi cinema into three broad and often overlapping categories: the “foundational”, with a focus on the rural landscape of eastern Bengal and the 1971 war; the “transitional”, which traces the various nuances of Bengali Muslim identity, often by depicting alternative accounts of nationalist narratives; and the “contemporary”, which has shifted the emphasis away from 1971 to more global concerns that transect with local interests.

Volume 29 of Muntassir Mamoon’s Media and the Liberation War of Bangladesh is a record of how textual and visual media represented the 1971 war, though it neglects to include auditory sources and radio archives from its analysis. The Murti Boys: The 61 of ‘71 First Bangladesh War Course, edited by Ishrat Firdousi, Tahmina Ain Qurratul and Tanim Ahmed, is a collection of memoirs and personal anecdotes of men (professional soldiers, trained students and army personnel) who fought in the 1971 war. In The Role of Nixon-Kissinger in the 1971 Pakistani War Crimes Against Bangladesh, Nurun Nabi explores the diplomacies surrounding the Cold War and how the United States dealt with the internal crises in Pakistan and its tensions at the border with India in the years leading up to the independence of Bangladesh.

In Implacable Foes, historian Tahsin Ali notes that nationalist uprisings flourished in Bengal because, unlike Gandhi who promoted ahimsa, Subhas Chandra Bose recognized early in the 1920s the need for physical coercion and, if required, violence against imperial forces which thrived on, if not promoted, violence to varying degrees. According to Ali, the current scholarship on the twentieth-century history of anti-colonial struggle in South Asia needs to reconsider the role played by Bose against imperial insurgency since, Ali maintains, it was Bose and not Gandhi who posed a real challenge to the Raj. In the Partition of India: A Political History of the Subcontinent, Anisur Rahman explores why the idea of a “Greater Bengal” was never a reality in South Asia.

In In-Between Worlds: Performing [as] Bauls in an Age of Extremism, Sukanya Chakrabarti categorises Baul performers (drawn from her research on the Bauls of West Bengal and the ancient Baul-Fakir traditions of Bangladesh) as imbued with heterogenous sociopolitical identities whose spiritual and musical identity is deeply implicated in the political. In Indeterminacy in Rabindranath Tagore’s Representation of Women and Minorities, Srabonee Mustafiz asks “where is the space” of the Tagorean women in the “desired national space” of political and social activism of the early decades of the twentieth century? The author argues that despite the growing involvement of Bengali women in the nationalist struggles of this era, Tagore’s heroines in Gora and The Home and the World are ambivalently presented. Ultimately, irrespective of their “intellectual ability and sexual freedom”, Tagorean heroines are sidelined by patriarchal discourse, and more alarmingly, the women themselves ultimately “approve” of male hegemony. Niaz Zaman has edited Syed Waliullah: A Centenary Tribute. The volume includes eleven essays by leading Bangladeshi academics on various trajectories of Waliullah’s work produced before 1971, as he travelled between Bengal and France, profusely composing plays, novellas, short stories and an unfinished novel that has never been published. Though not comprehensive, the volume is a good place to begin a critical inquiry into Waliullah’s contribution to Bengali literature.

Ted Hughes in Bangladesh: A Memoir by A. J. Spence and Liaqat Ali Khan recounts Hughes’ visit to Bangladesh in 1989 to inaugurate the Second Asian Poetry Festival in Dhaka. At the festival, Hughes spoke of the “spirit of Bangladesh”, the “human solidarity” and “cheerful heroism” of the young nation on the cusp of a “new identity”. For the next three days, Hughes remained in Dhaka as a guest of President Ershad, attending dinners with dignitaries, enjoying a cruise on the Buriganga river, classical music recitals and mingling with celebrated poets and artists who had gathered in Dhaka for the poetry festival. On the fourth day, Hughes along with his liaison officer Liaqat Ali Khan took off for the much-anticipated trip to the Sundarbans, for Hughes longed to see the Bengal tiger up close. Khan charts in meticulous detail the poet’s eight-day stay in Bangladesh, notably the quick succession with which the pair moved by boat between Jessore, Khulna, Bagerhat and Narail admiring the autumnal riverine landscape of the Bengal delta. In Narail, Hughes met the Bengali painter S. M. Sultan (1923–94) and the two spent a cheery afternoon at the painter’s sprawling complex discussing abstract art in Bengal. The highlight of the memoir is the pictographic stories that Khan narrates behind every poem that Hughes wrote during this trip, poems written on scraps of hotel papers, on notebooks and diaries, guestbooks and stray papers, all of which have been painstakingly reproduced by Khan for the volume.

The centennial issue of Spectrum, a journal run by the Department of English at the University of Dhaka, paid tribute to the University’s inception in 1921. The introductory article offers a sweeping history of the English Department and its many literary luminaries such as Buddhadeb Bose, Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Razia Amin Khan and Shamsur Rahman. Incidentally, included in the Master’s programme in English in 1921 was Leela Roy née Nag (1900–70), the first woman to be awarded a degree from Dhaka University. As a leftist political activist with a formidable career in anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial and anti-communal emancipation for Bengali women, Nag was active in the Civil Disobedience Movement, working assiduously in 1946 to rehabilitate hundreds of Bengali women dispossessed by the communal riots in Noakhali even before Gandhi arrived at the scene during the height of the Hindu-Muslim violence in Bengal. Nag is better known as the founder of numerous schools, assemblies, committees and funds for women’s self-protection and education across Bengal and Assam, most notably the “Dipali Sangha”, a progressive women’s association that produced Bengali women revolutionaries such as Pritilata Waddedar (1911–32) and had strong links with Surya Sen and Subhas Chandra Bose who encouraged women’s participation in the armed revolution against the Raj.

The Journal of Postcolonial Writing came out with a special issue on Bangladeshi literature in English. It includes discussions of literary texts that have developed, as stated by Mohammad Quayum in the introductory paragraph, “through three historical phases, during which the geographical territory that now constitutes Bangladesh has gone through several political rebirths and renamings: Bengal/East Bengal (1905–11), East Pakistan (1947–71) and Bangladesh (1971–)”. The article on Humayun Kabir’s Men and Rivers (1945) analyses the novel’s criticism of imperial power through Franz Fanon’s assertion that “in colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary”. Kathryn Hummel examines the “transnational local” perspective of Bangladesh’s preeminent English poet, Kaiser Haq. Alamgir Hossain explores the plight of the “environmental subaltern” in Tahmina Anam’s Bones of Grace. Md. Rezaul Haq discusses In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider, focusing on how the novel utilizes the “diasporic location” to “build a bridge of understanding between seemingly irreconcilable adversaries like Bangladesh and Pakistan”. The issue contains poems by Kaiser Haq, Sadaf Saz and Mohammad Shafiqul Islam and an interview with Monica Ali.