Abstract
An exclusive historical event in South Asia was witnessed in the process of the formation of Bangladesh. There was a sudden turnover to Bengali linguistic and cultural nationalism from the religious fratricide of the 1947 partition of India. The present Bangladesh is the result of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement and the 1971 War, with the bloody contributions of many. The present book is a dedication to the people of Bangladesh, past and present, in commemoration of the fifty years of independence.
Jalil and Sengupta’s work has been presented as an edited book combining history with intellectual pursuits through the collected literature revolving around the liberation of Bangladesh. The selections and collections of literatures reflect the inclusive approach of the editors, projecting the works of renowned Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian literatures with their Bangla and Urdu works in their translated versions. In this line, the book has incorporated the holistic voices of the war. To provide a structured combination to the literatures collected, the book has been divided into three themes: essays, fictions and poems. This anthology has enumerated all the contradictions and ironies related to the Bangladesh war of independence, marked by violence, nostalgia, confusion, pain and regret.
Starting with the ‘essay’ section, the three essays have depicted the events of 1971 from different perspectives by the authors, presenting them as an ideology, a promise and a trauma, respectively. Each of the collections exhibits the experiences of different stakeholders with their own distinct but connected side of the story. Kaiser Haq, in the very first essay, pens down his own young and proud experience of being a part of the ideology of MuktiBahini of having their freedom from the clutches of the military suppression which penetrated every nook and corner of the then–East Pakistan. The vulnerability of the youth and the uncertain life of the refugees are explained from the own experience of the writer Manas Ray in the next essay. In different sections, Ray expresses the ups and downs of the refugee families getting settled in West Bengal, the vulnerability of the youth then and the pull and push of Naxalism; the essay ends with the optimistic call of reality to the young revolutionaries. Meher Ali’s essay is the projection of indirect experience from a sympathetic Pakistani Army official’s side: his grandfather’s memories relating to East Pakistan and the war, representing the small sympathetic community of Pakistanis. This piece of writing reflects a ‘more human history of the war against the nationalist agendas of selective remembering and forgetting’ (p. 68). These essays, in their elaborated forms, capture the war from different points of view.
The next section, ‘fictions’, is a collection of sixteen stories depicting the era of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Each of these stories embraces the readers by projecting the characters in their daily normal lives and how they were being affected directly and indirectly by the flow of the national-level war. The fear of being targeted and uncertainty, the hatred of the Pakistanis over the betrayal of Bangladeshis, the ambiguity of the many versions of the truth which strangulates the common people in between, the caged life of the ‘freedom fighters’, the war breaking the human ties between the nations and the ‘unfitted’ military characters are projected in each minute detail in the stories. How can the cruelty and brutality experienced by the women be left out? The most heartbreaking story has been narrated in the story of Amina and Madina, where the girls were unaware of the act of rape on them, and also in the story by Jhumur Pandey. There is also a story of a Birangana who fought for herself at different fronts with the weapon of red-chilli powder, as explained by Saheen Akhtar.
The expression ‘Are children people too?’ (p. 118) reflects the obtuseness the children went through, in terms of their lives, studies and activities during the war, as shown in the story of Papree Rehman. The story of Betel Leaf is an epic which depicts the junctions of the dynamics of religions, regionalities, feelings and the victims of opposite forces in the same place. At one point, a Hindu girl got raped by the Razakars (the army); at another, the Bihari identity of a male partner compelled his family to leave Bangladesh for Pakistan by the Mukti Bahini. It shows the duality of the war by devastating the people and their feelings. The section is perfectly concluded by the question of the mother, ‘You killed someone and don’t know who?’ and her being unsatisfied with the confused answers of her Pakistani army son. This section is very interesting to read, being the locus of most of the stakeholder characters. The narrations are realistic. But these stories are fictions. This section can be more vigorous with real-life stories.
The last section, ‘poems’, is a collection of eleven translated works elaborated on the traumatic experiences of the invasive presence by the Bangladeshi poets, the disintegration of Pakistan in the form of a falling arm by the Pakistani poets, especially Naseer Turabi, and the dedicated friendship from Indians to the Bangladeshis in the poem of Jan Nisar Akhtar.
The book through its narrations has explained each minute detail of the mundane lifestyle of the period, making the readers get involved with them. And these commingled collections present a broader experience of the independence struggle as well. Here, all the sections reflect social reality in terms of ‘sociological imagination’ as explained by C. W. Mill, with the co-optation of the characters in their daily lives in relation to the social and historical contexts of the war. The raw descriptions of the memories, fictions and narrations of the masses in their own imagined community enrich the work furthermore. The book can be beneficial for the neophytes who have started knowing Bangladesh and its people and for the readers in general, being a great anthology of notable literature. The book stood complete with the works of these prominent writers, despite all the hectic times during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the book could have made a little more space for the new writings. These collections altogether focus on the painful stories surrounding the war. There is a thin representation for the enthusiasm of the new Bangladesh identity, the new hope and the way forward.