Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

American children’s book author Beverly Cleary, who responded to a young reader’s plea for realistic characters by bringing rare insight and humor to the lives of Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins and the other children who populated her more than 40 books, has died at age 104, publisher HarperCollins said.

During the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, collaborators led the Pakistani army to Sohagpur village. In one day, they killed 164 men. Fifty-seven

Solayman rolled off his bed in terror. Twisting his body, he dived under the bed stand and lay flat. His whole body was trembling. The freedom fighters must have surrounded his house!

“Did you see the dead bodies over there?” a little wizened old woman bursting out from nowhere asked, fixing her lackluster eyes on them.

“Muktishongram-e ami jog diyechhilam bishuddho ekjon biplobi hishebe”.

After half a century from where we began, Daily Star Books will spend all of this year—the 50th year of Bangladesh—revisiting and analyzing some of the books that played crucial roles in documenting the Liberation War of 1971 and the birth of this nation. In this sixth installment, we revisit both Khadim Hussain Raja’s A Stranger in My Own Country (Oxford University Press, 2012), in which a retired general gives often problematic views from West Pakistan’s perspective, and Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas’ The Rape of Bangladesh (Vikas Publications, 1971), a pivotal book in changing world opinion on the then-underreported genocide of East Pakistan.

“Once there was a severe flood in the month of Magh.

I was in the middle of a hectic shift at Dhaka Medical College Hospital a few days ago when I heard a close colleague was down with fever and severe body ache—symptoms typical of COVID-19. By the next day, his whole family had been critically affected. It is not very likely that his family will come out of this wrath unscathed. Instances like this do not shock me or my colleagues anymore; this has been routine for the last year.

The Ekushey Boi Mela, which was inaugurated on March 18, 2021, is stretching out across an expanded space of 1500,000 sq ft to accommodate the 834 stalls allocated to 540 organisations this year.

It took Dr. Nilima Ibrahim 25 years to publish the narratives of rape victims of 1971 whom she interviewed almost immediately after the war.

Essentially a people’s hero, the most unique “disruptive leader” of Bengal, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-75) solved a number of the “wicked problems” that the West Pakistani feudal-colonial overlords orchestrated and let loose on his nation before its independence in 1971 “by challenging the existing cultural hegemonies that fail to serve communities through concentration of power and the marginalisation of stakeholders” (Ryan, Christian N 2016, 108). Under his charismatic leadership subaltern Bengalis fought their glorious war of liberation, subverted the power structure, and liberated themselves through a nine-month long bloody war which claimed three million lives.

When searching for literature covering the role of the Mukti Bahini in the victory of 1971, a noticeable dearth of objective analyses is apparent.

In July of 2013, Patricia Lockwood wrote the decade’s most immediate and pressing poem, “Rape Joke”. Already by then Lockwood had amassed prizes and praises enough to fill a few cabinets.

We barely see cross-disciplinary initiatives that try to understand our media, culture, society and politics. In this wake, Dr Ratan Kumar Roy’s Television in Bangladesh: News and Audiences (Routledge, 2021) offers a rich ethnography of television news practices in Bangladesh, with a foreword by Marcus Banks, Professor of Visual Anthropology at Oxford University.

In the 1890s, many South Asians were brought to Uganda by the British Empire for administration and development purposes.

I am a songstress with

Are you reading this or just staring at what is written?

My body is not my own.

Here is a door stopper for the lingering period of hibernation. All 522 pages provide ample literary support for long-term homebound inmates.

It wasn’t until my 20s that I realised I had read less than 10 Bengali women authors in my childhood and adolescence.