Booknotes
1) Uponnash Shomogro by Anis Chowdhury; Dhaka: Mowla Brothers; February 2006; pp. 583; Tk. 450.2) Ai Deshe Ek Deen Juddho Hoyechilo by Mohiuddin Ahmed; Dhaka: CDL; February 2006; pp. 231. 3) Abar O Prem Ashchay by Shaheen Akhtar; Dhaka: Mowla Brothers; February 2006; pp. 122; Tk. 125.4) Prokriti O Prem'er Kobita Shomogro by Nirmalendu Goon; Dhaka: Mowla Brothers; March 2005 (second edition); pp. 319.
Uponnash Shomogro
A collection of ten substantial, longish (by today's definition, that is) short stories by Anis Chowdhury, a now largely forgotten Bengali writer of the fifties and sixties. In a graceful foreword, Syed Shamsul Huq talks about the necessity of reviving him, stating that if one is to fully understand Bangladeshi literature today, then it is necessary to read those who presided over it during its early day, those who sowed the seeds of its modernity. Truer words than these have not been spoken. The storytelling pace in these stories is noticeably slower, more relaxed, than the zip which is injected, to its detriment some would say, into Bengali prose by writers today. Anis Chowdhury ('Anis Uncle') was a colleague of my father, and I used to see the tall, soft-spoken author quite frequently at one time. A gentle person, who, on learning that I had joined Dhaka University as a teacher, gave me a rueful smile and using my childhood nickname had said, "Ah, teaching! You know, I miss it sometimes." At that time I knew that he had won the President's gold medal (in the sixties, during Pakistan times) for writing, but had never actually read him. Now, thanks to his daughter Luva Chowdhury's efforts at collecting all her father's writings (not all his stories, according to Syed Shamsul Huq, could be found) in a single volume, and publisher Mowla Brothers, I can. And so can other readers of Bengali/Bangladeshi fiction.Ai Deshe Ek Deen Juddho Hoyechilo
A political memoir by a now-veteran activist, which begins in1958 in the-then East Pakistan when the author was in class two, and ends in January 1977, with the assumption of CMLA powers by Ziaur Rahman. In between, the book deals with the author's involvement in radical politics, and the details of his doings during his student years at Dhaka University in the late sixties and early seventies makes for specially interesting reading. Though it is tersely written, to the point of being without affect at times, the author when inclined can convey the flavour of student life in those days, as in the following passage (translation mine): "By frequenting Anwar Restaurant (at Nilkhet) I came to know a lot of people. I saw that a caucus had grown up centering itself around this restaurant. After a few days I realized that there was a separate group within Chatra League, and that it had formed itself around Sirajul Alam Khan. A group of young men had banded together around him. They were fiercely opposed to Chatra Union, and they were fiercely opposed to the Islamic student organizations. Here organizational matters were discussed. Previously I was unaware how bad food could be: very coarse rice, twenty percent of which was gravel and grit, meat so tough that it couldn't be chewed. We used to say it was dog's meat, though we had no way of knowing whether even dog meat could be this tough. We used to call this restaurantLe Anwar de Kutta de Goshta."A point made, implicitly, in a previous book edited by the author consisting of first-person accounts of our liberation war (reviewed in this page) is repeated more explicitly here in his introduction: that history-writing in Bangladesh is in a poor state, that distortions are being promulgated in the writing of such history, that it is being written by historians who have had no direct connection with the events they write about. He states that he himself has no wish to write history, or a historical account, but simply to furnish the "raw material" for future "neutral" researchers and historians. While one can appreciate his viewpoint given the bitter, politicized debates about our national history and identity, it has to be pointed out that no writing, least of all political memoirs, is value-free, that all texts are organized on the basis of an order of selection and have built-in epistemic and ethical biases, and that such continuing insistence on the author's part may actually do more harm than good to his cause.
Abar O Prem Ashchay
A collection of eight short stories written during the period 2001 to the present by last year'sProthom Alonewspaper's writing award winner. The title story is the most telling of the lot, a tale about ahijrajumping into a car laden with a family going on a picnic to escape from police harassment, and then devolving, attractively, into the subtle up-ending of some social norms. Shaheen's Bengali, with its'najehal,' 'shorik,' 'khushbu'and the like, reads easily. The one drawback of this writer is perhaps a creeping sameness to her stories, along with, thus far, an inability (albeit within my limited reading, and I could be wrong here), to create a convincing, major male character. Or perhaps these two features are intertwined, each reinforcing the other.Prokriti O Prem'er Kobita Shomogro
It is startling to see a book of poems go into its second printing in this day and age, but perhaps it shouldn't be so in the case of Nirmalendu Goon, a major poet of Bangladesh whose quasi-Rabindrik persona is a familiar one to Bangladeshis. Magazine readers are also familiar with his travel writings, where also Rabindranath is evoked deftly, wittily and aptly. Nirmalendu Goon is that rare thing, a genuine poet, in an age where we Bengalis perhaps tend to accord the status to anybody with half a lyric streak in him/her. The poems in this volume displays musicality; Goon has a gift for an alliteration, allied to a deep and suitably understated knowledge of poetic diction and the traps to avoid, as demonstrated, say, in the poem '10-5-84, Teen.' Which, being a poem about the poet coming across one of his book in a secondhand bookshop in Sadarghat while taking shelter from the rain, could easily have lapsed into an easy sentimentality, but does not. At times like this, reviewing a book of Bengali poems, one wishes that this paper was a Bengali-language one, for then one could reprint the opening poem of the book, 'Borshar Gaan,' to demonstrate the ease with which Goon achieves musicality in his poems. As it is, the reader will have to buy the book to find out for her/himself. If there is one criticism that could be said of the book, it is that'natya kobita'is a difficult form to handle and may have not been done wholly successfully here.Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.
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