Taxes, the caretaker government and UPL book sale
One of the areas that the caretaker government has not turned its reformist glance at is the exorbitant taxes imposed on imported books by Bangladesh, as well as the indiscriminate way various governmental agencies apply it. It results in untold miseries for booksellers in terms of customs clearance and confusion about categories of books liable for taxation (textbooks on Shakespeare, for example, may be taxed by one not-too-bright customs officer while let go under a loophole by another). It also has resulted in an ever-diminishing supply of quality books into Bangladesh and a consequent pauperization of its intellectual and literate bases, never too strong to begin with. Good foreign books are in short supply. They have become hideously expensive, a situation that causes outrage when one reflects on the fact that Bangladesh has the highest tax rate on imported books in the whole of South Asia. How can the Nepalese and Sri Lankese (both in far more roiling national turmoil than us) pay less for the same book? And why? Additional outrage is fueled by the knowledge that such taxes were originally imposed by unscrupulous elements in the domestic book publishing industry by lobbying past governments in order to have a captive market for their products. While their protectionist efforts were directed at books from West Bengal ('if you can't match them, ban them' is the motto here), the indiscriminate application of such a duty meant that nearly all categories of imported books came under the ax. No amount of appeals to previous authorities, indifferent to issues of books and literacy, held hostage hand and foot by publishing lobbies, managed to have it even reviewed, let alone rescinded. The immediate past government had as its coalition partner the Jamaat, which managed to get 'religious' books (i.e. books on Islam) off the hook, flooding its madrassahs with its required reading. Shouldn't the same relief be provided to Tolstoy and Shakespeare, among others? Isn't it time that books were freed from such manacles? Has anybody ever heard of better books being written, or superior authors being produced, by erecting protectionist barriers around the written word? In fact, what happens is the very opposite, since freed from the necessity of pursuing excellence, getting a free lunch off a captive market, the quality of books produced domestically deteriorate and intellectual standards fall. Readers get habituated on the narcotic of substandard, one-dimensional literature, and good, established booksellers are driven to desperation and out of business. It is time we citizen-readers were freed from such shackles! In such times it is therefore refreshing to come upon discounted book sales, and none is more welcome than the annual sale of inventory by UPL. This year, it was held at the Public Library at Shahbagh, and even though it was a hot day the temptation to check it out was irresistible. Books were laid out on tables a bit too close to each other, so diligent browsing was hampered by the bustle of bodies. One disappointment was that the London Oxford publications were on display but not available at discount rates. So, though I lusted after Badruddin Omar's 2-volume set on the Language Movement, I decided not to buy it on the principle that a discount sale is a discount sale and one should not be made to fork out regular prices at such events! No doubt the import duty is responsible for such a policy. Still, the discount rates on the other books were excellent, and I came away with a few, among which were: The State of Martial Rule by Ayesha Jalal. The author is a Pakistani Cambridge- and Harvard-trained scholar who first came to prominence by displaying a refreshing lack of restraint in critiquing Jinnah. She has written a string of highly regarded books on the political economy of Pakistan's defence establishment. This particular book was published in 1990, and foreshadows the themes that she was so eloquently later to extend. Of particular value is Chapter 6, 'State and Society in the balance: Islam as ideology and culture' where she probes the dialectic between state and society in terms of using Islamist ideological and cultural symbols. Ayesha can deploy a withering sentence: "Exposed to Arabic while speaking a regional language or dialect at home and learning English and Urdu in schools, and in Baluchistan also Persian, most of the first-generation of upper and middle class Pakistanis grew up being literate not in one language but practically illiterate in at least four." A four-and-half-star (****1/2) buy. Memoirs of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. I have never been a Suhrawardy fan, mainly because of his cheerleading of Pakistan's membership in Cold War bully John Foster Dulles's erection of a cordon sanitaire around Red China by means of the SEATO and CENTO pacts. It gave the Pakistan Army its first, later grown insatiable, taste for American money and material, thereby precipitating its emergence as an authoritarian and undemocratic force in the domestic political arena. But the force and charisma of the man is undeniable--Suhrawardy was personally courageous, with a tremendous drive, and had the interests of Indian Muslims at heart. Anti-communism and its corollary came naturally to a man who built his political machine in Calcutta by forming anti-communist labour unions--as he says here, "I paraded a blue flag in opposition to Red." "These," notes Dr Kamal Hossain in the book's Foreword, "are unfinished memoirs...a first draft of what would have been a much larger work" had Suhrawardy lived. It is, of course, self-serving, but no less the fascinating for it. A three-and-a-half star (***1/2) star buy. Vintage Short Fiction from Bangladesh, translated and edited by Sagar Chaudhury. I'm always interested in translations of our local fiction/literature, and so I picked it up. However, the translation quality is so-so, interesting in an archival sort of way. A two star (**star) buy. Manik Bandhapadhya, edited by Kayes Ahmed. This is the centenary year of the birth of Manik Bandhapadhya, testimony to which is the lavish coverage afforded him by the literature pages of our Bengali dailies. This collection of essays on the writer of the classic Dibaratrir Kabya is one that has to be absorbed slowly. Of note are the substantial pieces by two of our foremost writers, Hasan Azizul Huq and Akhtaruzzaman Ilyas. A three star (*** star) buy. We book readers should get more such discounted sales. All thanks to Mohiuddin Bhai of UPL Bangladesh. Who, come to think of it, should send me Badruddin Omar's volumes on the Language Movement free of cost... Khademul Islam is literary editor of The Daily Star.
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