Birthing Bangladesh

Bangladesh is a country which is on my ToDo list. Its my "roots" country but for one reason or another, I can never get to grips with it and have sufficient time. As I have mentioned before, my father is a refugee from that country and I remember people dancing in the streets in 1971 when Bangladesh was liberated. I also remember Bangladeshi refugees in Calcutta fighting over waste food in rubbish tips. But the amount of literature on that topic by Bangladeshi's is very poor and rare. Indians, yes, Pakistani's, yes, but Bangladeshi's? nope.

But Salil Tripathi, my friend (who I admire greatly!) has done me a favour and has written a book review on a recent book. And yes, I do promise to write more about Bangladesh!

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!


Birthing Bangladesh
By SALIL TRIPATHI
August 10, 2007
"The violence was unspeakable. There were no words for it." So says author
Tahmima Anam during a conversation at her favorite organic bakery near her
home in West London. Ms. Anam is discussing the 1971 war in which Bangladesh
gained independence from Pakistan. The war, which is estimated to have
claimed at least 300,000 lives, mainly civilians, is among the worst of the
"forgotten" carnages of the 20th century.
One has to ask why there is so little native literature on the war.
Europeans have spent much of the past century downing books, plays and
visual artworks as so many bromides to help digest two hot wars, and one
cold, fought in relatively quick succession. Bangladesh has found it harder
to undergo such artistic catharsis. Writers of Indian origin have waded into
these waters -- Salman Rushdie in "Midnight's Children" (1981), Amitav Ghosh
in "Shadow Lines" (1988), and Rohinton Mistry in "Such a Long Journey"
(1991). But one looks in vain for a Bangladeshi Erich Maria Remarque or
Primo Levi.
Part of the reticence owes to the fact that some Bangladeshis collaborated
with the West Pakistan troops and were unwilling to admit it.
Understandable, although collaboration didn't stop Günter Grass from
probing Germany's war guilt and then, last year, seeking exculpation while
profiting from his own to boot. Some Bangladeshis who had suffered did not
want to make their pain or shame public. Perhaps the most convincing
explanation for the silence is that in Bangladesh's fragile political
environment, it was never especially safe to speak out, because you simply
couldn't trust who would be your enemy tomorrow.
Now, however, that may be starting to change. Witness publication of Ms.
Anam's debut novel, "A Golden Age." It's the first major Bangladeshi work to
tackle the 1971 war, and the first of a planned trilogy that will survey
Bangladesh's troubled 20th-century history.
Bangladesh has long been a country torn between two types of nationalism --
Bengali and Islamic. At independence in 1947, East and West Pakistan
(today's Bangladesh and Pakistan) were intended to provide a home for the
Muslim communities within undivided British India. But religion was not
strong enough to unite the two halves. When a Bengali nationalist -- and
relatively secular -- party, the Awami League, won a free and fair election
in 1971, West Pakistani forces invaded. Yet Bangladeshi views of the war
have been complicated by Bangladesh's subsequent dalliances with Islamism,
tendencies that insert a question mark after the secular nationalist spirit
that motivated the war in the first place.
Ms. Anam gracefully navigates these shoals. She approaches the war through
the eyes of a widow named Rehana and her teenage children, Sohail and Maya.
Rehana's quotidian life is peopled with women friends playing gin rummy with
her and sipping whisky when no one is looking, and Hindu neighbors who rent
a house she has built. She's a slow convert to Bengali nationalism; she even
starts out as an admirer of the grace and charm of Urdu poetry. (Urdu is
Pakistan's national language, and its imposition on Bengali-speaking eastern
half of the country sparked the resentment, culminating in the war.)
But times change, and so do Rehana's children, who are radicalized by
Bengali nationalism as they hear of West Pakistani authorities suppressing
expression of Bengali language and culture and then sending troops and
establishing martial law. They ultimately join the rebel army, as many
students did.
If Rehana seems to "speak" with an authority that's striking given her
creator's age -- Ms. Anam was born four years after the events she describes
in this novel -- it is because the author has done her homework, literally.
The novel grew out of her doctoral dissertation in anthropology at Harvard.
Ms. Anam interviewed hundreds of warriors, victims and survivors of the 1971
war. She has blended the voices into composite characters, creating a novel
out of her Ph.D. research.
Which makes her novel's humanity only more remarkable. While rooting the
story in Bangladesh, she makes the plot and characters recognizable by
affirming universal emotions. This is the first major Bangladeshi novel
about the country's recent history, but the reader will not be buried under
the burden of history. There are no gratuitous descriptions of massacres,
for example, because although Rehana hears about them, she does not witness
any herself.
Nearly 93 years after the outbreak of World War I and slightly more than 62
years since the end of World War II, Europe's own literary reckoning with
that turbulent era and its aftermath seems far from complete. In Bangladesh,
which is still plagued today by instability, the process is just beginning.
Ms. Anam's novel is a good place for it to start.

Mr. Tripathi is a free-lance writer in London.