Arts & letters january 7 final 1 0

DHAKA TRIBUNE SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 2017

Editor’s note

Editor Zafar Sobhan Editor Arts & Letters Rifat Munim Design Asmaul Hoque Mamun Cover Kiss The Joy As It Flies/Alexandra Eldridge

A

rts & Letters wishes all a very happy New Year. It’s quite a pleasure to present readers on this occasion with a special 20-page issue.

I regret to say the January issue has not quite turned out the way it was planned. Even so, it is a relief to find the right focus in place. The reviews truly make this issue stand out: On top of several important books, a film and several painting exhibitions have been reviewed in illuminating articles. Arts & Letters will continue to have more substantial reviews not only of books but also of plays, TV Shows, films, painting and arts exhibitions. Side by side, pieces of fiction, poetry, translation, essay and criticism will be carried in more creative collaboration with cartoonists, painters, portrait artists and graphic artists.

The year 2016 was significant for many reasons. In 2016 we lost, among others, Rafique Azad, Shaheed Quaderi and Syed Shamsul Haq whose contribution to our literature and poetry, especially, is vast. We also saw a rise of the extreme right as much in the international arena as in the local. Fear of attacks on writers and online activists is still high.

But the year was also marked with commendable strides in the literary and cultural fields. Ignoring all fear and risks, the biggest literary and cultural festivals saw the spontaneous gathering of thousands of men and women at the Bangla Academy and Army Stadium grounds.

This year we hope to see more of productive and progressive strides in these fields. l Rifat Munim

Illustration Syed Rashad Imam Tanmoy Colour Specialist Shekhar Mondal

A painting by Jamal Ahmed from the “Sands of Time” exhibition. See review of the exhibition on page 19.

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Essay

The baul in Rabindranath n Azfar Aziz

“I

have mentioned in connection with my personal experience some songs which I had often heard from wandering village singers, belonging to a popular sect of Bengal, called Bauls, who have no images, temples, scriptures, or ceremonials, who declare in their songs the divinity of Man, and express for him an intense feeling of love. Coming from men who are unsophisticated, living a simple life in obscurity, it gives us a clue to the inner meaning of all religions. For it suggests that these religions are never about a God of cosmic force, but rather about the God of human personality,” said Rabindranath Tagore in his 1930 Hibbert Lecture at Oxford by way of introducing Baul.

“That is why, brother, I became a madcap Baul. No master I obey, nor injunctions, canons or custom. Now no menmade distinctions have any hold on me, and I revel only in the gladness of my own welling love. In love there’s no separation, but commingling always. So I rejoice in song and dance with each and all,” he added.

Here Tagore, however, made a deliberate exaggeration. He never was a baul, and never a madcap. A part of his philosophical and aesthetic selves did subscribe to the theo-philosophic creed of certain sects of the bauls and its unique expression in music and dance, but he did not accept the boundless umbrella that covers disparate sects that have both similarities and dissimilarities in creed, culture and life.

“They have their special sectarian idioms and associations that give emotional satisfaction to those who are accustomed to their hypnotic influences.

Some of them may have their aesthetic value to me and others philosophical significance overcumbered by exuberant distraction of legendary myths. But what struck me in this simple song was a religious expression that was neither grossly concrete, full of crude details, nor metaphysical in its rarified transcendentalism,” Tagore said in the lecture.

Unlike the prophet-pundit-priest-produced religions, the bauls are a composite cult encompassing Vaishnava Sahaja Yana, Buddhist Sahaja Yana, Nathism, Tantra, Yoga, Shakti Sadhana, Gurubada, and Sufism, in addition to myriad other less visible faith-streams. The bauls usually are wandering minstrels, mystical seers, and they initiate into a system of esoteric practices.

This heterogeneous community has a wide range of practices and they preach through their songs which are linked by recurrent themes of love for man and god, critiques of established religions and caste practices, while alluding deeply to cult rites.

When seen from a social perspective, being a baul is about a lifestyle. It spans a wide spectrum of practices with ecstatic singing and dancing at the one end and drinking semen or menstrual blood as two of the five pure and eternal substances described by the Kaula Agama (which a large section of the bauls adhere to) at the other. Some of these aspects were not acceptable to Tagore. He just said, “These Bauls have a philosophy, which they call the philosophy of the body; but they keep its secret; it is only for the initiated,” and then kept mum.

To Tagore, bauls are mainly mystic minstrels and devotees of love. He could identify his poetic and Vedantic selves with such bauls who are lovers and seekers of “Moner Manush” (the man of my heart) which goes so well for a Vedantist person seeking union with the Paramatma (the supreme being).

The emphasis on love as a spiritual way shaped by the Bauls following the Vaishnava revival led by Sri Chaitanya suits well with Tagore’s concept of a perpetual affair between the animal and the cosmic selves.

So, Tagore accepted some parts of the baul while rejecting others that did not suit his ideals or taste. The image of Baul he projected and promoted in the West as a whole was a created one that omitted features like Agama,

Kaula Tantra, Sufism and Buddhist influences. Dr Amrit Sen, a Reader in English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, has come to similar conclusions. In an article published in the Nov-Dec 2016 issue of Muse India, an online literary journal, Sen wrote, “Clearly for Rabindranath, the Baul was a personal construct. Having studied the songs carefully and having interacted with the members of the sect, Rabindranath carefully deleted all references to the various secret practices of the Bauls, including their fascination with the bodily fluids. In Jishucharit, Rabindranath also expressed his unease with the radical members of the sect who deliberately sought isolation and rigid adherence to secret cult rules. Clearly for Rabindranath, Baul literature had a deeper and personal resonance. As Jeanne Openshaw points out, the baul was an abstracted form for Rabindranath, used with a definite idiosyncratic outlook.”

“It is also significant to locate the proximity of the philosophy of the Baul to the individual and the cosmic, the Upanishadic doctrine that had influenced Rabindranath to a great extent,” adds Sen, who has recently been awarded the UGC Research Award for his project, “The Self and the world in Tagore’s Travel Writings.”

The popular notion that Tagore promoted Lalon Fakir is actually an overblown myth. Babukishan, a baul, recently informed us that it was not Lalon Fakir, who leaned heavily towards Sufism, but Sri Nabani Das Khyappa Baul of Birbhum belonging to a Vaishnava lineage who became Tagore’s Baul inspiration and “his best friend for many, many years.”

Babukishan aka Krishnendu Das Baul, a grandson of Nabani Das Baul and the eldest son of Purna Das Baul, claims, “Nabani Das was the Baul who inspired Tagore.” “Tagore built Nabani a place to do his sadhana on his land,” Babukishan writes, “He was the first and last baul teacher” at Viswa Bharati and was Indira Gandhi’s music, dance and philosophy teacher there. That is how he came to know Jawaharlal Nehru and when India gained independence in 1947, “Nehru invited Nabani Das Baul to sing at the inaugural ceremonies all over India, which too was through Tagore,” he adds, and then drops this bomb: ”Tagore knew a little bit about Bauls, and as he learned he developed more interest to learn... and was finally initiated into the Vaishnava Baul by Nabani Das Baul which is a fact whether it is written down or not.”

Blimey, from so many contradictory statements, I am forced to generalise that in public Tagore was a Vedantic baul, if there is any such thing anywhere, not a madcap baul as he claims, while there is a slight chance that he might have been an underground Vaisnava baul, but that’s an uncharted part of history yet. l

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ARTS & LETTERS

Non-fiction/Translation

Memories of the Cuban Revolution First installment of a two-part article, translated into English for the first time from original Spanish n Gabriel Garcia Marquez* (Translated by Zubaer Mahboob)

B

efore the Revolution, I had never been very curious about Cuba. Latin Americans of my generation thought of Havana as a scandalous brothel for gringos where pornography had reached its peak as a public spectacle, long before it became fashionable in the rest of Christendom. For the price of a dollar, it was possible to see flesh-and-blood men and women making real love on a bed on stage. That paradise of the pachanga dance breathed out a devilish music, a secret language of the sweet life, a way of walking and dressing – indeed an entire culture of enjoyment that exerted a happy influence on the daily existence of the Caribbean.

But those who were better informed knew that Cuba had once been the most cultured of Spain’s colonies – the only culture, in truth – and that the tradition of literary salons and poetry contests remained incorruptible even as the gringo sailors pissed on the statues of heroes, and the gunmen of the presidents of the republic carried out armed attacks on the courts in order to steal trial records. Besides La Semana Comica, a smutty magazine that married men used to read while hiding out in the bathroom from their wives, there appeared the most sophisticated literary and arts journals in Latin America. Mawkish radio serials lasted for interminable years and kept the continent drowned in tears; alongside them were created the fiery, delirious sunflowers of artist Amelia Pelaez and the hermetic, mercurial hexameters of poet Jose Lezama Lima. These brutal contrasts helped to confuse rather than to clarify the reality of an almost mythic country whose eventful war of independence had not yet ended, and whose political direction, even in 1955, remained an unpredictable enigma.

It was that same year, in Paris, that I heard the name of Fidel Castro for the first time. I heard it from the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen who was then grinding out a hopeless exile in the Grand Hotel in Saint Michel, the least sordid in

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (19272014) was a Colombian Nobel Prize-winning Latin American novelist who’s considered the most popular and influential fiction writer all over the world.

The propaganda poster “Homeland or Death” on a house wall in Havana, Cuba

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a street full of cheap flophouses where a gang of Latin Americans and Algerians used to sit around waiting for a return ticket home, keeping themselves fed on rancid cheese and boiled cauliflowers. Guillen’s room, like almost all others in the Latin Quarter, was merely four walls of discoloured drapes, two armchairs of worn felt, a sink, a portable bidet, and a single bed where two lost lovers from Senegal had once found happiness before killing themselves.

However, at twenty years’ remove, I can no longer evoke the image of the poet in that room. Instead I remember him in circumstances in which I never actually saw him: fanning himself in a wicker rocking chair, at the hour of the afternoon siesta, on the terrace of one of those sugarmill mansions straight out of the wonderful Cuban paintings of the 19th century. At all times, even in the cruelest Parisian winter weather, Guillen kept up the very Cuban habit of waking up at cockcrow (though there were no roosters around), and of reading the newspapers by the firelight of a café, lulled by the wind running through the scrub along the sugarmill and by the plucking of guitars in the fragile dawns of Camagüey. He then opened the window of his balcony – just as he used to in Camaguey – and woke up the entire street by shouting out the latest news from Latin America, which he had translated from the French into native Cuban slang.

The situation of the continent in that era was best expressed by the official portrait of the national leaders who had met at a summit in Panama the previous year. One can barely glimpse any wretched civilians amidst the rumble of military uniforms and medals won in battle. Even Dwight Eisenhower, who as president of the United States used to hide the smell of gunpowder in his heart under the most expensive suits from Bond Street, had posed for that historic photograph in the finest togs of a soldier at ease.

So that when, one morning, Nicolas Guillen opened his window and shouted out a single headline – “¡Se cayó el hombre! The Man is down!” – a commotion stirred up in the sleepy street because each one of us thought that the fallen Man was his own. The Argentines thought that it was Juan Domingo Perón, the Paraguayans thought it was Alfredo Stroessner, the Peruvians thought it was Manuel Odría, the Colombians thought it was Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the Nicaraguans thought it was Anastasio Somoza, the Venezuelans thought it was Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the Guatemalans thought it was Castillo Armas, the Dominicans thought it was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, and the Cubans thought it was Fulgencio Batista.

Actually, it was Perón. Later, when we were talking it over, Guillen painted us a desolate picture of the situation in Cuba. “All I can see in the future is a guy who is causing a ruckus along the Mexican frontier.” He then paused like an oriental seer, and said: “His name is Fidel Castro.”

Three years later, in Caracas, it had seemed impossible that that name would break through so rapidly, and so forcefully, to command the continent’s attention. At the time, no one would have thought that the first socialist revolution in Latin America was brewing in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra.

Instead, we were convinced that it would start off in Venezuela, where a vast popular conspiracy had scuttled General Marcos Perez Jimenez’s powerful apparatus of repression in a mere 24 hours.

Viewed from the outside, it had been a highly unlikely coup because of the simplicity of its approach and the speed and devastating efficiency of its results. The people were given a single signal: at midday on the 23rd of January 1958, all the car horns would sound in unison, interrupting work and calling everyone out on to the street to overthrow the dictatorship. Even in the newsroom of a rather well-informed journal, this had been seen as a childish signal, though many of its own staff were involved in the conspiracy. At the appointed hour, a deafening clamour of car horns erupted, unanimous in their racket, a tremendous gridlock broke out in a city already legendary for its traffic jams,

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Cuba. Santa Clara. Monument Che Guevara

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At the time, no one would have thought that the first socialist revolution in Latin America was brewing in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Instead, we were convinced that it would start off in Venezuela

and numerous groups of workers and university students took to the streets, armed with little more than stones and bottles, to confront the forces of the regime. From the neighbouring hills, decked out in colourful ranches that resembled Nativity cribs, descended a rampaging horde of the poor, turning the entire city into a battlefield. At nightfall, amidst the scattered shootings and the wails of the ambulances, a rumour circulated through the papers: Perez Jiménez’s family, concealed in army tanks, had taken refuge in a foreign embassy. Shortly before dawn, there was an abrupt silence in the sky, and suddenly a shout exploded from the wild crowds, church bells and factory sirens and automobile horns all let loose, creole songs blasted out of every window, playing on and on almost non-stop through the next two years of false illusions. Perez Jimenez had fled his rapacious throne and, accompanied by his closest accomplices, was flying off in a military plane to the Dominican capital Santo Domingo.

The airplane had been on standby since noon at La Carlota airport, a few kilometers from the Miraflores presidential palace, but no one had thought to bring out a gangway when the fugitive dictator showed up, closely pursued by a convoy of taxis which failed to catch him by just a few minutes. Perez Jimenez, who looked like a big baby in tortoiseshell glasses, was barely winched up to the cabin by a rope, and it was during that costly manoeuvre that he clean forgot about his attaché case still on the ground. It was an ordinary briefcase, made of black leather, in which he had stashed away the dough for his pocket expenses: thirteen million dollars in hard cash.

From that moment on and through the entire year of 1958, Venezuela was the freest country in the world. It looked like a genuine revolution: every time the government spotted a danger, it immediately reached out to the people

via direct channels, and the people took to the streets against any attempt at backsliding. The most delicate official decisions were out in the public domain. Every affair of state beyond a certain size was resolved with the full participation of the political parties, with the Communists leading from the front, and at least in the first few months of the revolution, the parties were conscious that their strength originated from the pressure of the streets. If this was not to be the first socialist revolution in Latin America, it must have been because of the dark arts of the double-dealers, because never had the social conditions for revolt been more propitious.

A certain collusion was established between the government of Venezuela and the Cuban rebels in the Sierra Maestra, a complicity without any deceit.

Prominent members of the 26th July Movement in Caracas delivered public propaganda through the organs of mass media, organized massive fundraisers, and dispatched help to the guerrillas with official sanction. Venezuelan university students, who had fought ferociously in the battle against the dictatorship, sent women’s panties by post to their fellow students in Havana University. The Cuban students swallowed down the impertinence of this cocky gift, and when, within a year, the revolution in Cuba had triumphed, the panties were returned to the original senders without comment. The Venezuelan press became the legal mouthpiece of the Sierra Maestra rebels, the wishes of the newspaper owners overridden by domestic pressures. One had the impression that Cuba was not a separate country, but a part of Free Venezuela that was yet to be liberated.

The New Year of 1959 was one of only a handful in the entire history of Venezuela to be celebrated free of tyranny. Already married during those happy months, Mercedes and I returned to our flat in the San Bernardino neighbourhood at first light, only to find that the elevator was out of order.

We climbed the six stories on foot, pausing to rest on the landings; we had barely entered the apartment when we were shaken by the absurd feeling that a moment that we had already lived through the year before was now repeating itself: suddenly in the sleepy streets, a shout exploded from the wild crowds, church bells and factory sirens and automobile horns all let loose, and through every window came the surge of strings and voices singing glorious joropo songs celebrating the victory of the people. It was as if time had gone into reverse, and Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown a second time. Since we had no telephone or radio, we strode down the stairs fearfully wondering what kind of crazy booze they had given us to drink at the party, when someone running past in the bright light of dawn stunned us with the ultimate, unbelievable coincidence: Fulgencio Batista had fled his rapacious throne and, accompanied by his closest accomplices, was flying off in a military plane to Santo Domingo. l

Zubaer Mahboob is a London-based translator.

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ARTS & LETTERS

Book review

Different and brave poetry n Mohammad Rafiq

P Akankhar Manchitro Gopone Ekechhi

by Razu Alauddin Publisher: Srabon Prokashoni 2014.

Price: Tk 80

oet Razu Alauddin has been with the world of writing for a long time now.

He has been a very conscious poetry activist. He is very sensitive. I must say he is temperate and talented.

I was quite surprised to learn it was his first book of poetry. Later I thought, or was forced to think, this is only natural. This is the natural approach, the poetic approach, made by a talented and temperate poet. A real poet learns to wait and he can indeed reap the harvest of that wait. Proof of this conviction is to be found abundantly in the inner rhythm of this potry collection.

The poet travelled around the globe, learnt many languages and was exposed to the poetry and poets working in different languages. Eventually, he has returned to his own land, own language -- in the very poetic sense. His

poetry has been alive with mud, soil, water, rivers, tributaries. So his poetry has truly become national and universal at the same time.

So, naturally, Razu Alauddin won’t follow in our tracks and even if he did, he wouldn’t succeed. This is what’s called the destiny of a poet. His poetry, instinctively, has grown to be unique, distinct, flowing and formidable. His poetry nonetheless is Bangla poetry, emanating from the same river that Bangla poetry feeds on; his is just a different tributary. Rich and dynamic. Assets of our culture.

I hope enthused readers will find great pleasure and encouragement upon reading these poems. I hope readers and the poet find some unity in these poems. Bangla poetry will be benefitted. l Mohammad Rafiq is one of Bangladesh’s pre-eminent poets.

You’re my world n Razu Alauddin (Translated by Abdus Selim) The more I traverse across The more my motherland multiplies.

Miguel wants to know: Where are you from?

Bangladesh, haven’t you heard of it before?

No, never.

Where is it?

Near India.

Oh, I see.

The more I traverse across The more my motherland multiplies.

One day Mariana wanted to know, Where are you from?

I gave the same answer.

Coyly she said, yes, I heard about India, though I don’t know exactly where this country is.

Haven’t you heard of Asia ever?

Oh, I see. Bangladesh then is in Asia!

Exactly.

If I ever go even further away Suppose, to the Mars.

If someone from there wants to know, Hey, where do you come from?

I come from a far off place encased in green A circular celestial body named the earth.

There’s a vast continent there by the name

Asia.

And within that exists a landmass called India.

And next to India there’s a sea-maid Which is my homeland.

The more I traverse across The more my motherland multiplies.

As it gets bigger and bigger it gradually comes near me.

When she comes near I whisper in her ears: You aren’t that small as others think, listen, You’re as big as any other country of this world, You’re in fact as big as this world, You’re my world.

Reconstructing Samudragupta n Rifat Islam Esha

G Rifat Islam Esha is a poet and writer.

oing back in history is important to get a better sense of where we stand today. Bappaditya Chakravarty does just that in Samudragupta: The Making of an Emperor, telling us the story or the “making” of the most influential and successful emperor of the Gupta dynasty in a way that would make you think differently about what shaped the region we belong to.

When you flip the crisp hardcover of this book published by University Press Limited, you enter a world lost in the pages of history in 4th century CE India. For many this leaf of history spirals down to the caste system that exists in India to this day – even if, Samudragupta – “the king of kings” – is known to be peace-loving and was friendly towards neighbouring kings.

The book – divided into five parts – is essentially about what led to the crowning of Samudragupta by his father, Chandragupta I, who chose Samudra over Kacha Chandra’s oldest son. There are many episodes of Samudra’s valour and how he was the perfect candidate to unify the dynasty politically during the Swarna Yug (Golden Age) of India. The author allows readers to visualise the landscape that was a very vital part of this bit of history with a geographical progression that is propelled by political conflicts. Samudra’s leadership that was compared to the greatness of Mauryas was explained through his “heroic” feats and victories. Spatial descriptions and the fashion of war in all its glory -- battle weapons, royal bodyguards, sworded and jewelled kings and a spymaster weaved in a tone of oral narration -- make it easy

for readers to imagine this complex slice of the Indian Golden Age. The story starts with the tension that Kacha was fuelling a feud between the Buddhists and the Hindus – creating a perfect contrast with the techniques used by Samudra. The contrast in itself presents Samudra as a better leader in the king’s eye. However, Bappaditya doesn’t allow us a look beyond Samudra’s crowning.

The author shows us all facets of the great ruler – a king’s successor who earned the throne by dodging several murder plots and bringing harmony to the empire, opposing many divisive forces of the kingdom. He ends the book by Samudragupta’s rise as the king: “He, Crown Prince Samudragupta – soldier, poet, lover, musician, champion of freedom – would not submit. He would not allow the shackles to strangle him; he would reinvent his own freedom, rise above himself, so that the Crown Prince of today could blossom into the Emperor, Param Bhatarak Maharajadhiraj Samudragupta, an example to himself.”

As a feminist, I believe it is tough to deal with the patriarchal ideologies that lead to conflicts and land-grabbing. Though it is possible to come up with a feminist reading that may unfold many potential areas, such as the rhetorics around women – the royal maids, the queens and the prostitutes; even the description that the author offers on fashion – how men and women dressed back in those days have a socio-political aspect.

This book will definitely make for a great readers of fiction, especially those who are keen on historical fiction. l

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Book review

A twinge of nostalgia n Rifat Munim

These difficulties, however, should not deter a good translator from taking up the pen. After all, everything depends on the translator’s skills and choices.

So I assigned myself to an exercise that is characteristic of literary nerds like me. I sat down with Rafique’s poetry collections and found out the orginal poem and gave it a thorough reading. It celebrates the arrival of Baishakh, the first month in the Bengali calendar, but it does that through a different lens that looks first at starved kids with distended bellies, squalid rows of stinking huts, sick women vomiting, poverty-stricken, famished people dotting villages. Then I shifted to the translation and read it at one go. The stanzas were not changed and although it is impossible to translate the metre and rhythm, I felt exactly the same thrill by reading Islam’s translation that I had by reading the original. I was stunned to see the effect a good translation could have on you.

The same goes for all the translations collected in the book. Budhhadev Bose’s “A Rainy Day”, Samar Sen’s “On my birthday”, Ruby Rahman’s “Quarrelling”,

W

hen I was presented with a copy of On My Birthday And Other Poems In Translation, a collection of 25 Bengali poems translated into English, I felt a twinge of nostalgia.

The book was a slim but sleek paperback; it was as exquisite as it could be, every poem embellished to the colourful accompaniment of an illustration.

The poems inside -- I was no stranger to them, but bound together within the vibrant front and back covers, they looked too neat, too beautiful for me to put off the act of leafing through them. Yes, indeed, I was drawn to them like a nostalgic is to a memento from the past.

If you were a reader of Star Literature back in the day, that one-page broadsheet weekly out in print on Saturdays (it still comes out on the same day in the same format), you might as well feel just like me. There was not much you could do in just one page, yet if there was one day that we the class-bunking bunch looked up to was the day when SL would be out. On some days there were essays and reviews while there were poems, short fictions and Bengali fictions in translation on some other days.

It was through reading this page that I became a fan of Kaiser Haq’s poetry, Wasi Ahmed’s fiction, Afsan Chowdhury’s research and Khademul Islam’s acerbic reviews. But what I’d always look for first was a small slot for Bengali poetry in translation.

In most cases, there would be just one poem. That small slot, which always had an illustration reflecting the theme of the poem, never failed to impress me because the contribution it made to the whole page was immense. Not that the designs and illustrations in the fiction and essay sections were not commendable, but there was always something about the poetPublished by Bengal Lights Books, November 2016 ry slot that always stood out like a Price: Tk 600 placid lake would in a deep forest.

The man whose translations were mostly featured in that slot was KhadeSunil Gangopadhyay’s “Better than writing poetry”, among others, are equally mul Islam. He was the editor of the page and undoubtedly the first person to successful examples of formidable translation. There are 25 poems and Islam give a literature page its aesthetic place in the English language. He is one of admits in his Translator’s Note that there’s actually nothing that unifies them. our best fiction and non-fiction writers, too.

“The poems in this book, rooted in idiosyncratic taste, therefore have The poems and illustrations this book compiles are taken from that slot; no overall specific unity of theme or design.” But he does not forget to add, only when they are put together in the form of this book, they have taken on “However, reading them again after all this time, it seems to me that they do the shape of a composite artwork made up of several individual parts. cohere on their own fragile terms. I was drawn to poems whose moods and I started with the translation of Mohammad Rafique’s “1390”. When I had rhythms I intuited – poetry, after all, arguably represents one of the higher first read that in SL, I was no stranger to the Bengali poet and his poetry. He is rites of intuition – would translate best into English, would yield something of not a popular poet. Far from that, his is a distinct poetic consciousness feeding their inner lives in a foreign language.” constantly and consistently on indigenous mythic and cultural elements. UnThe other poets whose works were translated included Samar Sen, Shaklike many modern poets of his time, his prosodic structure is always sophisti Chattopadhyay, Rafique Azad, Asad Chowdhury, Subhash Mukhopadhyay, ticated, albeit never rhyming. So, my understanding of Rafique’s poetry was Sunil Gangopadhyay, Rubi Rahman, Taslima Nasreen, and Shaheed Quadri. that it was untranslatable in the sense Tagore, too, is. Because if you comproThis is a collectible book, not only for academics and translators but also mised the prosody, or some other literary device rooted, say, in the seasonal for those who read Bengali poetry just for the love of it and who need it as cycle of Bengal, you risked leaving more than half of its beauty untouched. much as they need food to survive. l

If you were a reader of Star Literature back in the day, that onepage broadsheet weekly out in print on Saturdays (it still comes out on the same day in the same format), you might as well feel just like me.

There was not much you could do in just one page, yet if there was one day that we the class-bunking bunch looked up to was the day when SL would be out

Rifat Munim is Editor, Arts & Letters, Dhaka Tribune.

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ARTS & LETTERS

Poetry

Love n Azfar Aziz 1

I have gone inside you And become your muscles and bones If you touch yourself, it’s me touching you And you have come inside me And become my heart and my soul Now if I touch myself, it’s you loving me Verily you have become me and I have become you

2

The moment I forget myself I know you are here, As the fragrance of jasmine Wafting through the window Takes the mind to the night garden; And I start to sing your name in awed silence.

3

There has never been a night Without me watching over you, Sleeping by my side; So where will I go and how?

Tell me who I am without you, Where can I find myself Without looking into your eyes, Before you tell me to go away.

4

The way of the heart is not for the cowards.

If you are not ready to die, How do you expect to receive new life?

Only the moth knows how to love the flame, Light is not meant for the clever, Forever calculating.

If you want to possess and trade, Go find a market place, Don’t disrupt the peace of the flower garden.

There will never be a day When I am not here,

Jellyfish

Faces, memories

n Shamsad Mortuza

n Maleka Parveen

Do I know any among all these faces, known-semi known; Little known-unknown- or known yet somehow unknown?

These furtive faces that keep curiously surfing before my very Eyes of a surreal seismic sea like playful, plentiful frothy waves.

They giggle, and gurgle and then make it to one such infinite Invisibility as never ever to be felt, found, seen, or heard again...

Their flower faces gone, come their words weird pouring down In incessant streams, overwhelming my innocent unassuming being.

Those faces do not visit me anymore; only they take certain shapes: They become mere memories in my mind never to be forgotten again.

Angels in glass jars In a hall of mirrors They float Like in Klee’s painting Without any mass Hardly 3D Like in a screensaver Without any pause Dogged geometry With gaseous bubbles And translucent tentacles Jelly fish You spread your medusa hair To tantalize your audience To force them to pose for a while Before another comes by

They have made you alight the sea For us to see What floating angels do Garbed in grandma’s Fringe lampshades For us to hear What Nemo did Coming out of Nautilus And getting into a pixel animation Jelly fish You are spineless enough To fit any tale That has a tail Jelly fish My floating angels

Tripoli

n Sabrina Binte Masud I, Google, the word Tripoli And I, add words like, culture, Myth, legend, next to – before – And after Tripoli; images flood My screen with Tripoli; bodies Red and smoke, ash and almost Audible ra-ta-ta-ta-tat, from Tripoli – Lies in the womb of Mediterranean sea A leech inside and a name, that is,

Tripoli, mated in Sanskrit, and Arabic And Greek and the Romans who are gone From the land of Tripoli; Rat-ta-ta-ta-tat; Burns, a Tripoli, the olive lost in its travel From Khan-al-Saboun , the coitus with Honey, burnt, as patrol burns, in Tripoli.

And the Churches on Church Street, Speak of crusades, and the Hammam allows men, only, and the city burns

Irrespective of gender, tomb and I, sigh, over the ice-cream that is also centuries old and Al Mina stands silent, her eyes gone sore from dust that has gathered in the corners before the medieval world echoed, echoes, rat-a-tat-a-tat 21st century Tripoli.

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Bengali poetry in translation

Rights of the tiger n Asad Chowdhury (Translated by Afsan Chowdhury)

The first man I met at the zoo was actually a human being he was feeding peanuts to the monkeys, the loitering kids were picking up the bits and pieces trampled on the ground.

Pointing with his fingers he showed me the tiger cage.

Disappointing everyone, the tiger slumbered on, A large chunk of meat dozed in front of him, The children were unhappy and did their best to mimic a tiger’s roar.

The adults hadn’t expected such manners from the big cat either.

I had some urgent business with the tiger.

But I was tense that it would be in a foul mood, and also because I hadn’t learnt tiger talk very well.

Never expected the tiger to be asleep at all.

One day as I was going over my questions written on a piece of paper one last time, which I wanted to ask the animal, I was aroused by the happy shouts of women and children — the tiger was finally displaying its blood red tongue.

I was impressed with it all. But the problem was getting close enough to the tiger to ask anything.

But then amazing me, the tiger itself sauntered close and calling me up asked, “Well, you could have gone to the Sundarbans you know or spent some money and visited some tiger sanctuary away somewhere else to meet a tiger — but ah, well anyway, what’s your point?”

I humbly said, “Sir, your tiger rights are being violated all around. We have been fighting to establish human rights.

If you permit, we can try the same for all the tigers of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Hearing this the tiger howled with laughter just like a scary villain of the tinsel world.

“Didn’t you once write a poem to heal all the unwell green of this earth? “ I had to agree, nodding my head sheepishly.

“Please leave tiger rights alone for some time and try curing yourselves for a change.

Man and earth are seriously ill, in case you noticed.”

He seemed really disturbed at it all, and that’s how I got rid of worries about tiger rights.

[Asad Chowdhury is a poet, writer, translator, radio and TV personality and journalist. He is a former director at the Bangla Academy, Dhaka, and has worked as an editor at the Bangla service of Deutsche Welle. He was a contributor and broadcaster at Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra in Kolkata]

I want

n Mahadeb Saha (Translated by Arunava Sinha) Today I want full-throated laughter I want a summer storm, want madness I do not want whispers and scandals I want you to say it all out loud Not tears or moisture, I want arid heat I want burnt bridges and gaps that grow I only want distance today, not intimacy I don’t want cooling shade, but a searing sun Today I want baked clay, bricks, wood, iron Mud and wild flowers, these are what I want

Today I want the roaring seas, violent waves I want an earthquake that shatters the earth I want a breast as open as the sky I want fierce courage and infinite spirit The tumult of the swift mountain river I want a wild torrent, an explosion I want separation today, not union I do not want bonds, I want freedom No more veils, I want to see and listen I won’t be anchored, I want to swim forever.

Consistency

n Shaheed Quaderi (Translated by Marzia Rahman) The lover will be united with his beloved, for sure But they will get no peace, no peace, no peace.

The wild boar will find the dear mud, The kingfisher will get the desired fish, The dark nights will turn white in dripping rain, The peacocks will show its dance in dense forest.

The marches will end in barracks after barracks,

The hungry tiger will find the blue bull,

The breezes in village after village will bring the sweet sound of some girls singing—And you two will find your place in an abode.

The lover will be united with his beloved, for sure But they will get no peace, no peace, no peace.

The lone traveller will return home, At the bottom of empty vessel, the white rice will simmer like a galaxy of stars, The long lost lyrics of some old song will find its way to your voice.

The lover will be united with his beloved, for sure But they will get no peace, no peace, no peace.

9 DHAKA TRIBUNE

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ARTS & LETTERS

Review essay

The ginger merchant of history: Standing in the shadows of ‘giants’ n Naeem Mohaiemen

P

hotographs of a surrender ceremony encapsulate the dilemma of a particular, linear, preordained war narrative. This is the arc of the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war that has focused primarily on the role of the Bengali guerrilla army in fighting the Pakistan army. The photographs trouble that story, while also containing their own occlusions. The images are of the cease-fire of December 16th, 1971. Signing for the Pakistan army, humiliatingly defeated after a full-force Indian offensive, is Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi.

The signatory for the Indian army is Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Arora.

In a telltale sign of how recent the partition of India was, both Niazi and Arora had graduated from the British period Indian Military Academy. Both went on to fight on behalf of the British empire in the Burma campaign of World War II, where Niazi was a decorated soldier, earning the nickname “Tiger.” After 1947, the two men found themselves serving the opposed armies of Pakistan (Niazi) and India (Arora). This new “enemy” status led them to be on warring sides during the 1965 India-Pakistan war, and finally in direct conflict in 1971, culminating in this seated surrender ceremony.

Newspaper reports of that time ventured into “house divided” framing during the 1971 war, underlining that the two Generals came from the Punjab province that had been bifurcated in 1947. But there was something much larger (and yet somehow invisible) within this photo’s dominance by two former academy classmates. The surrender ceremony was to ratify the independence of East Pakistan as the new country of Bangladesh. Yet there were no official representatives from the Bangladesh forces at the ceremony. The only small ad hoc representation comes from Group Captain A. K. Khandaker, standing in one corner of the crowd behind the table, in civilian uniform.

Khandaker’s presence too seems fluid and unstable; in several photographs

These photographs are a useful starting point to think through how the Bangladesh independence war has almost always been framed as yet another regional struggle between India and Pakistan of the same ceremony, he is either pushed aside (in his biography, he writes it was “difficult for guests to stand” [p 211] in the jostling), or cropped out of the final image (for example, in several versions that are on official or private Indian military websites). Twenty five years after Nehru’s “tryst with destiny” speech, this was a second bloody tryst with the main actor absent from the table. In one sign of the Bangladeshi unease with this tableau, Khandaker’s biography 1971: Bhetore Baire (Prothoma) repeats an anecdote often cited in Bangladeshi memoirs– that Niazi and Arora, in spite of being on opposite sides, “exchanged crude jokes in Punjabi,” (p 208), freezing the Bengalis out of pre-ceremony, sexual banter.

The confusing provenance of photographs of this ceremony add another layer of silt and fog to the event. Various images of the surrender are widely reproduced, either with names of photographer missing, or, more often, with the incorrect name attributed. The same image of the ceremony surfaces with credit given to “Indian Military,” “Official photographer,” and that most prolific of lensmen: “Source: Internet.” For Bangladeshi audiences, the most well known image is probably one taken by Aftab Ahmed (Drik Calendar, 1996), fol-

lowed by others taken by Kishor Parekh, Raghu Rai, and to a lesser degree, Abbas. In the Aftab Ahmed photograph, you can see a hand gently nudging aside a journalist in black who has moved to the front row– from the positioning of the hand, I wonder if it was Khandaker (standing behind the journalist, also in white shirt and black jacket) making space. Identifying the origin, and sequence, of these photographs continues to be challenging, and Khandaker also reproduces surrender images without captions. When I met Khandaker for my own research, he pointed me to a photograph that was in the collection of the Arora family, where only five people, including Khandakar, were formally posed. However, a visit to India and a conversation with Arora’s daughter led finally to an image that was also of a large group. The special photograph Khandaker cited seems to have been lost, discarded, or misremembered. Commenting on the jumble of contradictory information on the photographs, Drik director Shahidul Alam told me, “It opens up another box entirely, about how different people (with different politics) will photograph the same event.” *** These photographs are a useful starting point to think through how the Bangladesh independence war has almost always been framed as yet another regional struggle between India and Pakistan (often explicitly called “the third India-Pakistan war”), with pivotal (and at times, also fumbling) superpower interventions by the United States and the Soviet Union. Two earlier books on the 1971 war, by Gary Bass and Srinath Raghavan, look at the conflict primarily through these optics of regional and superpower dialectic. A third book by Salil Tripathi circles back to the Bangladesh side, but the readers’ own biases and borrowed lenses may cause this book to also tilt toward a topheavy narrative.

There is a Bengali phrase adar byapari rakhe na jahajer khobor (the ginger merchant knows not when the ships arrive), which suggests that the small cogs of human society self-limit themselves into narrow spaces of interest.

Since the individual merchants’ load for the day is minuscule, it supposedly concerns him little whether the ship arriving is of British, Russian, or Chinese origin. Something of a similar viewpoint, with a debt to what W.R. Connor calls “commander narratives,” suffuses the scholarship around the 1971 war.

This war even had, in its finale, a superpower face-off on the high seas–the US initiative of sending the Seventh Fleet from the Gulf of Tonkin was countered by the Soviet dispatching of a nuclear-armed flotilla from Vladivostok. Therefore, war scholars may feel a strong rationale to focus on the commanders, at the high seas and in oval offices.

Both Bass and Raghavan are committed to this mode of war scholarship– Raghavan in particular is a former Infantry officer in the Indian Army, with a Ph.D. in war studies from King’s College London. Accordingly, the research parses in exhaustive detail the superpower maneuvering in the White House, and war strategy in the subcontinent. These narratives, and the archives that undergird them, are still the main ones in the academy after four decades of this nation’s existence.

Bass’ book pivots off a famous dissident telegram sent by Archer Blood from the Dhaka Embassy, in defiance of the Nixon administration’s support of Pakistan during the war. Bass secured access to declassified documents from the White House tapes, which present Nixon and Kissinger en flagrante in a manner familiar from the Watergate investigations. Raghavan focused on the Indian archives, detailing the Indian state’s negotiations with, and maneuvering around, the state players needed to form a coalition at the UN. This was essentially a coalition of the “mildly-willing,” offering enough diplomatic cover for a direct war between India and Pakistan on Bangladeshi territory in December 1971.

Both of these books do commendable work sifting through the American and Indian archives and synthesizing them into a coherent narrative. Bass’

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Review essay

General Niazi of the Pakistani Army signing document of surrender, while General Aurora of the Indian Army looks on. A.K. Khandaker (in civilian clothes) of the Bangladesh Mukti Bahini (guerrilla army) can be seen standing (second from left), and a hand appears to be moving aside the journalist (first from left) to make space for Khandaker to come forward Aftab Ahmed/Drik/Majority World storyline plays out as a struggle between the Nixon-Kissinger duo on the one hand, and principled “bravehearts” such as Archer Blood in the Dhaka Embassy and Keating in the Indian Embassy. We are told early on that Blood, a career diplomat, did not join the dissident group of Foreign Service Officers Against the War who wore secret protest buttons inside their jacket. We are perhaps meant to understand that he is not a transformed Nixon-era “peacenik” and, therefore, his horror at the bloodshed in Dhaka is even more principled. Unlike the Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, or the chastened Vietnam veteran John Kerry in Winter Soldier (dir: Winterfilm Inc., 1972), Blood still believed in the overall mission of Pax Americana even if not this particular enunciation.

Blood’s inverse is Nixon, presented here as pathologically unhinged, bristling at East Coast liberals, abhorring American adoration of Indian objects (from Hare Krishnas, to George Harrison’s sitar playing friend Ravi Shankar), and calling Indira Gandhi “bitch” and “witch” multiple times on White House transcripts. Henry Kissinger on the other hand is given to grandiose comparisons to the Second World War, and eventually locks himself into a depression when his carefully calibrated plans go awry. This particular duo dynamic is familiar to readers of numerous books that have appeared about this intensely documented (and lampooned) period in White House history, starting with the 1974 publication of Jack Anderson’s The Anderson Papers.

Raghavan’s new history of 1971 has strong and useful similarities with Richard Sisson and Leo Rose’s 1990 book War and Secession. Sisson and Rose’s book is still the earliest, and most comprehensive, history of the war. In particular, that research was conducted mostly in the 1980s, when many of the primary protagonists in India and Pakistan were still alive (in Bangladesh, many key

figures were killed during the three military coups of 1975, and a subsequent coup of 1980). By the time Raghavan begins his work, many other survivors have also died of natural causes; his book therefore mines the archives even more assiduously than the earlier Sisson and Rose work.

In both Bass and Raghavan, we gain a view into the power of “the Kashmiri mafia” within the Indian civil service, the contingency plan of transforming the Bangladesh war into a foray into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the contradictions of the Indira government’s assistance of the Bengali war against their own brutal policy of suppressing the Naxalites in West Bengal and insurgency movements in Nagaland, and the sprawling negotiations to build up a coalition of states that would support India’s efforts at the UN. We note, with foreboding, the Yugoslav government’s refusal to support the Indian effort, heralded

by Marshal Tito’s comment to the Pakistani Ambassador, “Over here in Yugoslavia, we have solved these problems once and for all. There will be no Balkan question ever again in the world.” (179) The feelings provoked by that quote are probably similar to the bemusement readers will feel at the last anecdote in Bass’ book. When discussing the final, feeble UN resolution that recognized the fait accompli of Bangladesh, Kissinger tells the UN Ambassador, one George Bush, “don’t screw it up the way you usually do.” to which Bush senior replies, “I want a transfer when this is over. I want a nice quiet place like Rwanda.” (324) As with Sisson & Rose’s book, Raghavan focuses on the war from the Indian perspective, and this matches archive logic because the Indian role, both from the Indian archives, and the UN proceedings, is contained in a dense body of documents. As Bass pointed out at his Brooklyn book launch, and as  See Page 16-17

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ARTS & LETTERS

Interview

‘The biggest issue is our workers are helpless against the system’ n Ruhina Ferdous

S

hahidul Alam does not need any introduction. He has worked with Bangladeshi migrant workers for a long time now. As part of a programme organised by Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), a collection of his photographs was displayed under the title “The best years of my life: Bangladeshi migrants in Malaysia” in the second week of December 2016.

It was held at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre and curated by ASM Rezaur Rahman. A book (with the same title) by Alam was also launched during the event. This interview was taken in the evening of December 12.

Rahnuma Ahmed

How long have you been working on migrant workers?

From 1990 onward, to be precise. I have worked in many countries during various phases of my life. The GFMD summit inspired me to take up the project. This exhibition is divided into three parts: (a) the migration process of the workers, (b) the life they lead in the host country, and (c) the people who control their lives -- owners, activists, brokers and politicians.

What exactly inspired you to work on this issue?

Migrant workers are subjected to many forms of humiliation, especially in the country to which they migrate as workers. In most cases, they are seen as “menial labourers” and not as human beings. So, I have tried to show the intricacies of their lives; I have tried to depict them as human beings with dignity, not just as “workers”. So, I have basically challenged the idea that their life has no other dimension other than being workers.

Along with many photographs, the exhibition also has video clips of and interviews with high-profile politicians, owners of foreign companies and brokers. How did you manage to do these gargantuan tasks?

Ruhina Ferdous is a journalist for Bonikbarta.

Translated by Hasnin Hassan

After three days, he called me and said they were locked in a room and released from the airport only after their families had sent some extra money to some airport officials there

It was done in many phases. I had to reach out to migrant workers to know their stories and connect with the other people involved in the whole migration process. I spoke to the former president of Malaysia,Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, and the high commissioner of Bangladesh in Malaysia, among others.

I try to have conceptual clarity on a subject before I start working on it. I’m working in alliance with the government in this case and I’m well aware of my responsibilities as a journalist. I believe it is possible to work with the government and find a space where you can question the government at the same time. This is a very difficult journalistic method.

order to pay that money back they find themselves forced to endure a lot of injustices done to them. People of our country sell everything they have just to migrate to another country via brokers. They earn a meagre wage abroad and it takes them 4-5 years to pay the brokers back. They cannot save up some money for future. An owner of a foreign company told me they always preferred Bangladeshi workers as they worked relentlessly and without any complaint for a long time. The truth of the matter is our workers are brutally exploited abroad.

We would like to know something about the particular photo taken inside the Bangladesh High Commission in Kualalampur.

Would you like to share with us some of your experiences while working on this project?

The picture is about a worker who is at the Bangladesh High Commission to renew his passport. Brokers are very powerful there and control everything.

When I contacted the Bangladesh High Commissioner, he was candid. He said they could renew at best 300 passports a day but they were simply inequipped to deal with numbersas big as3,000, so they dealt with it as best as they could.

I want to share an incident in this connection. Mamun, a fruit vendor from Dhanmondi 27, Dhaka, once told me he was going to Malaysia the next day. We boarded the same flight but once we got to Kuala Lumpur airport, the workers were soon separated from the rest and I could not contact him. After three days, he called me and said they were locked in a room and released from the airport only after their families had sent some extra money to some airport officials there.

People only believe what they want to believe. This exhibition has a photograph of a broker who I’m sure, thinks I admire him very much. When I met him in Malaysia he tried to bribe me though I had made it veryclear what I was doing. I am still not sure what thoughts he had about me.

While working on a project on Subhash Chandra Bose, I came to know one of the women soldiers (they were known as “queen of Jhansi“) who fought for Bose, was still alive. When I found her I discovered that her daughter has a factory and a good number of Bangladeshi workers work there. The relationship between workers and the owner was different there. The book which has been launched alongside the exhibition has a photo in which the factory owner is seen in a worker’s outfit. Through this photo I have actually sought to capture that all owners, all workers, or all circumstances for that matter, are not the same. This is one problem with journalism that we often oversimplify things and lose sight of the other dimensions that a subject has. I have tried to capture all these through this exhibition. The essential idea was to humanise migrants and restore their dignity. l

Is it because our workers are ill-informed and not aware of their rights?

Yes, that is one of the reasons but the main reason is that our workers are helpless against the system. Brokers take so much money from them that in

12 ARTS & LETTERS

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Book review

Sexual violence: The South Asian experience n Maitreyi

R

ape and sexual violence in Bangladesh exist in a curious context of victim blaming and cultural impunity. When a survivor of sexual violence finds the blame directed towards her, it becomes obvious the whole official and social culture is built around giving direct or indirect impunity to the attacker.

These issues of silence and impunity are precisely what a three-year-long research project – conducted by Zubaan, an Indian independent publishing house, and supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) – deals with. The Sexual Violence and Impunity project (SVI), which brought together researchers and academics from five South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka), is an attempt to unmask our hypocrisies on issues of gender violence. Through the political, legal, medical and social history and practices of these five nations, a body of academic papers have emerged that places sexual violence in its broader context. The research findings are put together in separate volumes for different countries; the Bangladesh volume is titled: Of the Nation Born: The Bangladesh Papers.

Edited by Hameeda Hossain and Amena Mohsin, and with contributions from Dina M. Siddique, Bina D’Costa and Ishita Dutta, and featuring a number of interviews, case studies and narratives, the book presents a narrative, from 1971 and beyond, of our multiple failures as a state in dealing with sexual violence.

Our culture is undoubtedly a patriarchal, hyper-masculine one, where men are seen as superior to women; where sexual violence, perpetrated by men, epitomises a form of control over women’s bodies and minds, and where violence against women is normalised in our day-to-day lives. To understand sexual violence and its deep roots, one must first acknowledge and explore the history of such violence and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of violence in the country. Through a critical examination of the gendered violence in 1971 by Pakistani forces and in the postwar period in the Chittagong Hill Tracts by Bangladeshi security forces, the case of the birangonas and the existing medical and legal barriers to accessing justice of violence, the Bangladesh Papers raises troubling questions. Why has sexual violence remained a taboo topic in society at a time when various international courts have termed sexual violence and sexual crimes as crimes against humanity?

Research shows that the majority of the women in the country are victims of harassment and violence from a very early age, yet there is no conversation, let alone an effective stance, against this. What are the structures that perpetuate violence on women’s bodies, and what role do state institutions play it?

Dina M. Siddique, in her article “Gendered States”, looks at how, in the post-war period, the experience of the biranagonas was one of shame and enforced silence, even as they – or precisely as they – were being officially recognised as daughters of the nation who had to ‘sacrifice’ their ‘honour’ for the country. Being a birangona, therefore, was a “double-edged privilege”. The society did not celebrate the valour of those who were brave to narrate their trauma, it stigmatised them. Even the film and media portrayals of the birangona either sexualised the women or cast them as having ‘lost’ their ‘honour’.

Amena Mohsin highlights the state’s silences and collusion as a “tool for control and domination.” From case studies of the Liberation War and CHT, she examines the power relations which promote a “culture of hyper masculinity and sexuality,” as she terms it. Her essay, “The History of Sexual Violence, Impunity and Conflict,” is a succinct examination of the national discourse, from the war-heroines of 1971 to the violence committed in the CHT by the Bengali military personnel and Bengali settlers.

Kabita Chakma’s poem and Shahidul Alam’s photo essay on Kalpana Chakma’s disappearance from the CHT are powerful reminders of how the nation has failed to confront – and indeed, in some cases assisted through systematic impunity – the targeted violence against women.

Bina D’Costa, on the other hand, takes a deep look into the discourse of the birangona. Citing the work of social workers, such as Nilima Ibrahim and Maleka Khan, and the oral narratives collected by Ain o Salish Kendra, she highlights a society obsessed with notions of pride, honour and shame, overshadowing concerns of the lived experience of those raped. She places the issues in the context of the social work conducted by state and non-state actors after the war, and within the more recent ICT proceedings, where the issue of war time rape has not been given its due importance, and the juridical environment was at times insensitive to the experience of women recounting their stories.

To understand sexual violence and its deep roots, one must first acknowledge and explore the history of such violence and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of violence in the country

Ishita Dutta’s essay explores the legal and medical structures in Bangladesh, which remain, for the most part, gender insensitive. That Bangladesh still uses the ‘two-finger technique’ to verify if sexual intercourse has indeed taken place and that a woman’s ‘character’ is a criterion for judgement in cases of violence against women is horrifying. The archaic definitions of sexual harassment and violation, and the near impossibility of proving rape in a largely patriarchal court environment point towards alarming institutional failures.

Overall, The Bangladesh Papers is a strong advocate on behalf of the silenced. Zubaan’s mission to “bring together the collective knowledge of South Asian academics, researchers and activists on the subjects of sexual violence and impunity” has given birth to an important public record. The book, and, indeed, the series, is important for social workers, development practitioners, feminists, activists, state actors and anyone who realises the need for institutional and cultural reform regarding the culture of impunity that perpetuates sexual violence in the country. l

Maitreyi reviews books for Arts & Letters.

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ARTS & LETTERS

Interview

Where the law of genre ceases to exist Sudeep Sen’s book, EroText, was launched in Dhaka on December 18, 2016. In this interview taken by Vibha Malhotra, Sen talks about different aspects of the book continent — its passion and politics, its beauty and fury, and its ability to ‘douse and arouse’. It explores the various moods that water and fluids inherently unravel.

As part of the Statesman’s ‘best books of the year’ picks, the novelist Amit Chaudhuri wrote: ‘I read Rain with considerable admiration and pleasure. It is a word-perfect collection and its subject matter is both the measure of the rain and the spoken line.’ While launching my book, Fractals, at Calcutta’s Oxford Bookstore, he further remarked, ‘Sen’s prose poems [or micro-fiction] are an important contribution that have added a new idiom to the history of English-language writing in India, [one that has] pushed its creative boundaries wider and higher.’

Why is EroText a book of fiction?

In Erotext, I have experimented with language like one would in the rendition of classical Indian raga, where the same piece of song or text can be variously sung or interpreted by different practitioners, albeit in a highly controlled and dexterous manner. So an old poem may have been revived or reincarnated as a prose text to convey a different angle of the same story, a happenstance, or another hidden moment in time.

Changing the form without at all altering the textual content can be very rewarding, albeit risky at the same time. But then, what is cutting-edge avant-garde writing, if there is no risk-taking. What is the point if one is not willing to bend and push the conventional boundaries of genre to come up with an alternate score or a variation, much like the formal play in classical music and jazz improvisation.

EroText is an avant-garde experimental book. It attempts to redefine or extend the standard genre-classifications of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I can tell you, from what I can see from the early market and critical response, that as a book of micro-fiction it is generating interest from an entirely different set of audiences who see themselves as consumers of general, commercial and literary fiction, and not perhaps of poetry. So that is a very healthy and positive sign.

Tell us about the ‘Disease’ or ‘BodyText’ section of the book.

The ‘Disease’ or ‘BodyText’ section of this book contends with private and uncomfortable areas of pain, illness and disease — an example of how a prolonged anesthetic medical experience can give rise to lyrical writing, inspired by and in spite of its sterile surroundings. Commenting on this, literary critic Pramod Nayar, wrote, ‘While excavating a set of images from physics, chemistry and biology, Sen does an extraordinary job of imbricating the corporeal with the natural elements and processes [in] a brilliant formalizing of these themes . . . the images are startlingly fresh and extremely evocative.’

The ‘Downpur’ or ‘Rain’ section has been called a “word-perfect” collection.

Tell us about this section of the book.

‘Downpour’ celebrates and reflects on rain as experienced in the Indian Sub-

Museum pieces for Camille Lizarribar When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.

I was in a museum — wrapped in a beautiful tussar sari given to me by a student — looking at two pieces of Indian art. They were in glass cases back-to-back. The architecture and proportions of the pieces, pitch-perfect.

I swivelled around — you had just arrived to visit. You were much older and your hair was all white and you were dressed in lighter colours. As we looked at the artwork, I turned to talk to you — and you kept getting younger.

At a certain point, you were back to your young adult self, hair all black, clothes all black — you suddenly seemed much taller. I looked at your feet to see if you were standing on something — in fact you were on a threshold. I looked up again at your tall

The eponymous section, ‘EroText’ is graceful and delicate. What is your view on erotic writing?

The philosophical, physical, textural and tonal aspects of desire have fascinated me for years. I find it truly baffling that in modern-day India, a country where the Kama Sutra was written and the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho, Konark and others were celebrated once, the practice of erotic literature is largely kept under wraps.

Admittedly, it is a difficult space to write in, a thin area where one figuratively skates on a razor’s edge. If one pushes it too much, then one could enter the pornographic space; and if one undercooks it, it could turn out as callow love poetry as it so often does by amateur writers.

So I took it upon myself as a challenge to write within this sub-genre. As a result, many pieces in the sections — ‘Wo|man’, ‘Lines of Desire’ and ‘Gaayika’r Chithi: Notes from a Singer’s Scoresheet’ — obliquely take on the provocation to create contemporary literary erotica with grace and lyricism.

Your final words on this book?

For me, Erotext is a considered meditation of the often publicly unexplored aspects and subtle grey areas of ‘desire, disease delusion, dream and downpour’. I desire for my readers — to peruse and rejoice — be moved, scarred and jolted — to feel, lust and celebrate — the finely calibrated text that is unrestrained and uncontained, devoid of boundaries, fully free in a map-less organic terrain. l

self — you were half leaning on a doorway.

The artwork we were looking at were two abstract designs — like the ones embroidered on my sari. They were sparse on a light background, and were made by points marked by beautiful gem stones in many colours — like a constellation or an outline of a body marked by points rather than lines, or pins marking spots on a map.

Each of the stones was from a different region in India. It was an exhibit after all, and I remember that there were small pieces of coloured paper at the bottom that would tell you where a particular gem was from. Each gem was a single stone, no two colours were the same, and the colours were all intense — I remember very vivid pinks, blues and greens.

And at the top of one of the designs there was a paisley shape in deep purple — round part on top, curling down and standing on its tip. That one had a beautiful dark pink stone at the very bottom, with other pinks, blues, turquoise, indigo, greens — and many many shades of lavender and purple.

Excerpted from EroText. See the full version online.

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Film review

Longest Night of the Year: A myth reversed n Farhana Susmita

I

n the enduring myth of the Indian Subcontinent, when god Krishna left his beloved Radha -- a mere mortal -- her suffering for the loss was immense. This tale has become an inspiration in art, and is adapted in various forms in music, painting and literature. Some adaptations keep the main story intact, telling the same story again and again. But, some prefer to step a bit further, choosing the path of experiment, showing the myth from a different angle, offering an alternative interpretation. Those who prefer a more authentic version of a myth might feel outraged if the story of Radha and Krishna is told in a reversed way in which the mortal is not a woman but a man, a poet to be more precise, who falls in love with a goddess that we all claim to hate but secretly admire. Longest Night of the Year, a short film directed by Mahbuba Yasmin Dipa and based on a short story of the same name by Abdullah Al Muktadir, will take its viewer to that realm where this reversal becomes a reality.

The seven-minute film opens with the older poet remembering a night many years ago in his youth where we find him playing the flute engagingly. Suddenly, he reminds us of Krishna with all his charms and youthful sensuality but soon we realise he is not Krishna. His music draws the “goddess of the night” towards him and he is instantly overpowered by her. But like Krishna, the goddess does not stay after they make love. She disappears immediately, leaving the poet in excruciating pain, the pain that inspires his best work of art -- the poem he writes about the night when the goddess appeared to him, “The longest night of the year”.

Those who are familiar with the popular myths, both Eastern and Western, know quite well that the divine male figure is always the dominating one, who either seduces or rapes the mortal female, consequently causing endless suffering and ruin as they abandon them soon after the ‘divine thirst’ of sexual desire is satisfied. In Greek mythology, we can remember the sufferings of Danae and Leda in the hands of Zeus, the king of Olympus. His equivalent figure in Eastern mythology, Indra, was no different. We all know the tribulations of Ahalya and countless other women who suffer immensely in the hands of this divine figure. The same narrative has been repeated so many times over the centuries that it has become an absolute and irreversible narrative.

In the story of Radha and Krishna, Radha’s pain has been romanticised and turned into almost a universal symbol for the loss of the beloved. But what happens when that “absolute” narrative is reversed? The absoluteness is shaken, a tremor takes place and views are challenged. The woman takes the man’s place and she is the mighty goddess who, much like Krishna, seduces the mortal man and leaves him in pain. The question is: How will she

be viewed? Can we accept her as a formidable divinity who has overpowered a man and who likes to do whatever she pleases to do – controlling her mortal lover and leaving him behind?

Or, being unable to accept her authority, will she be reduced to a femme fatale? This is exactly where the film hits hard, and as a result, not only the roles are reversed, our centuries-old notions are challenged as well. We have accepted Durga, Kali as goddesses, but can we accept this one? If we cannot, then we still have a long way to go.

The director of the film is an emerging artist whose experimental series of

painting titled “The Pink Myth of Hell” is her strongest feminist take on the female body. Her training in painting and passion for photography are apparent in the way she tells the story with her unique cinematography where colour plays a vital role. The script writer is a young academic and poet whose expertise in his craft is evident in the uniqueness of the story and the poetic spontaneity of the language of the film. He deconstructs a popular myth, and manages to express a subtle feminist stance, making it quite relevant for viewers. The film focuses a great deal on the lovemaking of the goddess and the poet. The viewer might experience a bit of shock because sex is still a taboo in the subcontinent. But, if we look closely, the viewer will see that those scenes bear resemblance to classical paintings of the subcontinent, which are visually stunning and poetic at the same time. The use of colour on the screen retains an aura of the mythic time.

Marina Mitu plays the goddess and Shaon Shah plays the poet. Their acting was so flawless that you could hardly tell both of them are new faces.

Thanks to the creative collaboration between an artist, a poet and two gifted actors, watching Longest Night of the Year becomes a rewarding experience.

The actors playing the poet and the Goddess, both did a commendable job.

Longest Night of the Year is a challenging work, both visually and thematically. It has some limitations, but it’s just a beginning for a group of young artistes who show all the prowess and commitment to go ahead and make their names in the art scene of Bangladesh. l

Farhana Sushmita is a writer, translator and film critic. She teaches English at Jagannath University.

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ARTS & LETTERS

Review essay Continued from Page 11

Standing in the Shadows of ‘Giants’

Raghavan also notes, the Pakistan archives of 1971 have remained closed off to date. The Bangladesh archives are generally open (although of inconsistent quality), but they are largely absent from both books. This is significant omission in both books– Bangladeshi history, without very many Bangladeshi voices. Some of this is linked to considerations of publishing “hooks” and marketing strategies. Equally important are the authors’ current political projects, and how the stories of 1971 can be made to fit that project. In public talks, Bass has cited UN Ambassador Samantha Power as a reference for how he thinks American diplomacy should be conducted, and the book includes a reference to the “special American responsibility to make amends to the Bangladeshi people.”

The relationship between Power and Bass is close enough that, as Samuel Moyn points out in a review of Bass’ earlier Freedom’s Battle, Bass calls the repression of the Greeks “A problem from Hellas” in a riff on Power’s wellknown A Problem from Hell. Bass’ 1971 book’s Manichean duality between an insecure, friendless, and intellectual hating Nixon, and the principled, educated, and selfless Archer Blood sets up a Cain and Abel origin story that fits with an idea of conflicts such as 1971 as only an exception to a more “principled” path for American power. Bass seems to suggest that the problem is not that American overseas power is destined to make spectacularly bad choices, but only that the wrong hands are sometimes at the helm.

Raghavan’s book is an insider look at Indian diplomatic and military maneuvering, and its locus is around when India intervened, and whether it should have intervened sooner. What the BenSource: images-na.sslgali rebel commanders wanted is given images-amazon.com/images/ less attention, and that reflects the naI/51%2BcUvOGl1L._SX322_ ture of Indian documents related to this BO1,204,203,200_.jpg period. The war planners inside Indira Gandhi’s government were partially motivated by considerations of Kashmir, Naxalite blowback, and which forces inside the Mukti Bahini (Bengali guerrilla army) were likely to constitute a future friendly neighbour, and the book reflects that reality. What is not present in either book is sufficient insight into the motivation and actions of the Bangladeshi protagonists, whether guerrillas, soldiers, politicians, refugees, or the peasants who were the ultimate cannon fodder.

The imbalance of sources is striking in all these books. In the 1990 book by Sisson & Rose, there were 32 interviewees from Pakistan, 49 from India, 39 from the United States, and 12 from Bangladesh. As I have noted elsewhere, Sarmila Bose’s polemic Dead Reckoning contains an equally unbalanced list. In the Bass book, Shahudul Haque is the one Bangladeshi interviewee I was able to trace, although there may be others. In Raghavan’s book, although Liberation War Museum director Akku Chowdhury is thanked, the significant Bangladeshi interviewees appear to be senior lawyers Kamal Hossain and Amirul Islam. However, a laundry list of untapped sources does not automatically suggest a path to future research. A more comprehensive set of Bangladeshi sources, if they privilege the elite experience, will also erase the peasant and working class mobilization within the pre-war and war effort. Salil Tripathi’s recent book on 1971, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (Aleph, 2014), goes deeper into Bangladeshi sources– but some of his sources are titans of current civil society and therefore the problems of top-down narrative remain in spite of his efforts.

Tripathi’s book is a significant and welcome shift from the earlier books, focusing much more closely on the Bangladeshis’ own experiences of their war. The one other new book that carries a comparable focus on the experience of 1971, as experienced and memorialized inside Bangladesh, is Nayanika Mookherjee’s Spectral Wound. As a longtime journalist, Tripathi brings a focus

on oral sources and interviews, and his selection of sources inside Bangladesh takes him through Dhaka, and then to the regional cities of Chittagong, Khulna, Noakhali, Kushtia, Bogura, and Sirajganj. With over sixty five interviewees inside Bangladesh, as well as people in the European diaspora, the book definitively inverts the focus of Bass and Raghavan– away from Washington DC and New Delhi and closer to Dhaka (Dacca in 1971); away also from the war room and toward the civilian experience of violence and resistance.

When the book was first announced (in first imprint by Aleph / South Asia in 2014, followed by Yale in 2016), I presumed the “Colonel” in the title would be a Marquezian Pakistani officer who did not, even today, regret the brutality of 1971. In that sense, he would be an inversion of sorts of the Pakistani officers interviewed by Yasmin Saikia for Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh (Duke, 2011). In that work, the officers who served the Pakistan army talk of their own experience of violence as perpetrators (this fits with recent scholarship about the trauma faced by perpetrators as well as victims).

Saikia deployed the concept of insaaniyat (Urdu for humanity) and placing that phrase anywhere near the Pakistan army was one of several controversies that scuttled the book’s republication plans in Dhaka.

I expected Tripathi to venture into similar territory, but the Colonel of his title is actually Farooq Rahman. Lieutenant Colonel Farooq was the Bangladeshi army officer who was one of the planners of the brutal 1975 coup that murdered the country’s first Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (“Bangabandhu”) and his family. As a young reporter, one of Tripathi’s breakthrough assignments was in Dhaka, where he managed to secure an interview with Colonel Farooq.

As political alignments shifted, the coup plotters lost their immunity and in 2010 Farooq along with four other accused were hanged. Tripathi’s interview now sits as a testimony in which the Colonel freely admitted to carrying out the murders– he did not, at that time, repent. By beginning the book with Farooq’s confession, and following it with his eventual hanging, the book extends the frame of the 1971 war to take in its’ unraveling– the violent coups of 1975 that wiped out most of the wartime leadership, both civilian and military. Having prevailed against the Pakistan army, Bangladesh’s stability was fatally damaged by the fratricidal killings of the 1970s.

Tripathi follows this opening with a deep dive into the Bangladeshi experience of 1971 and its aftermath. Here he seems to offer a corrective to my issues with the two earlier books, focusing on the experience of many Bangladeshis in rural settings. Yet, there is a way that the inclusion of certain voices will always carry more weight, and this has to do with which ones have been the most frequently interviewed within the writing of 1971. Among Tripathi’s interviewee list, I noticed especially the following members of the civil society elite: Kamal Hossain (framer of the constitution and the country’s first Law Minister), Mahfuz Anam (editor of the largest English newspaper), Meghna Guhathakurta (director of Research Initiatives Bangladesh), Mofidul Hoque and Akku Chowdhury (both trustees of the Liberation War Museum), Abrar Chowdhury (director of a leading migrant rights NGOS), Anisur Rahman (member of the country’s first Planning Commission), Sultana Kamal (director of Ain o Salish Kendro), and Prof. Anisuzzaman (President of Bangla Academy).

Although Tripathi interviews others as well, the above names do stand out and begin to define the tone and focus of the book (whether Tripathi intended to or not). One issue here is that many of the core war leadership was killed during the violence of 1975 and afterward. These remaining eyewitnesses are often the only remaining protagonists who could speak first-hand to what hap-

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Review essay pened in a room. In that sense they are part of what I have called elsewhere the forces on the ground that Sheikh Mujib was responding to, and perhaps “M.R. Akhtar Mukul history”– a type of oral history of crucial events which are even trying to corral and contain? Was he shadowed by the specter of radical impossible to cross-check, since all protagonists of a remembered exchange student leaders who had already raised the flag of “independent Bangla Desh”– are dead. Many of the people Tripathi met have been interviewed many times on the university campus? Was he responding to a radicalized Bengali urban (for magazines, special issues, commemorations). There is a practiced ease to population that wanted to go faster than parliamentary negotiations allowed? their storytelling–this does not render it inauthentic, but does give it an enThe fateful negotiations, whose breakdown led to the brutal war of 1971, hanced citation value. were always conducted with one eye on the negotiation partners (Yahya, Moreover, because these individuals were crucial figures in this country’s Bhutto) and the other on a roiling urban and rural countryside. Those turbuhistory, their anecdotes and memories are not commonplace, and certainly lent street forces are absent even in the Bangladeshi archive that also focuses not anywhere close to a subaltern experience. Rather the stories are often on grand narrative and brinkmanship negotiations– with the notable exceptaking place in the same room as Ministers, Generals, and Presidents, furtion of Afsan Chowdhury’s oral history research. Simply shifting Raghavan ther reifying the achievements and struggles that went on at the very center or Bass’ focus to Bangladesh interviewees (as Tripathi has done) would not of events. Kamal Hossain, whom I have interviewed for my own work, is an resolve all the issues of submerged narratives. As Anjali Arondekar has pointexample of this centrifugal effect. He was, after all, the constitutional expert ed out, gaping absences in the archive can be used to look at the process of who was part of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s negotiation team with the Pakistan subjectification made possible by building that record. If the radical peasant army (demanding that he be allowed to become Prime Minister of Pakistan fighter was left out of official records, what national aspirations and excluas per the landslide election victory of sionary fears among the record-keepers 1970), the man arrested and sent to Paguided such a process? History’s “ginger kistan alongside Sheikh Mujib when war merchant” was far more crucial in the broke out, the co-author of the constibuildup and conduct of this war than is tution of independent Bangladesh, and acknowledged, and a next step for rethe man who began to piece Sheikh Musearchers can be to begin to read into, jib’s Awami League political party back and against, the many absences in Bangtogether from exile after 1975. As such, ladesh’s history ledgers. l his view was always ringside of the core circle, and his memories, along with sevThis essay is reproduced courtesy of WdW eral others, have had a dominant effect Review (Witte de With Center), and expanded on Bangladeshi history (they cannot be from an earlier version in International considered hegemonic because he is no Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge). longer a member of the party in power).

“Flying Blind: waiting for a real reckoning on Recently, when I met Hossain again, 1971,” Naeem Mohaiemen’s comprehensive he mentioned in conversation that Stuart critique of Sarmila Bose’s ‘Dead Reckoning,’ Hall had been a student at Oxford at the was printed in Economic & Political Weekly same time that he began his law studies.

(Ram Rahman ed.), Daily Star Forum (Kajalie Intrigued by the possibility of an undisDifferent editions of Salil Tripathi’s book Shehreen Islam ed.) and Lines of Control: covered Afro-Asian linkage at the heart Partition as Productive Space (Hammad of Bangladesh’s foundational struggle, I Nasar ed.). His other essays on 1971 include asked him at length what he remembered of Hall, and whether they had stayed “Muktijuddho: Polyphony of the Ocean” (Daily Star, Mahfuz Anam ed.), analyzing the in communication after Oxford. The answers did not yield what I had hoped risks of blocking historical research through the proposed “Muktijuddho Obomanona” for– they had known each other, but had not worked on any extensive camlaw, and “Simulation in the Afternoon: A ‘Documentary’ in the Field of Evidence Quest” paigns together; nor had they managed to stay in touch after Hossain returned (Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Ravi Vasudevan ed.), about simulations in to Pakistan. Kamal Hossain and others have been such a strong presence in the Tareque & Catherine Masud’s ‘Muktir Gaan.’ Mohaiemen is a Ph.D. candidate in Historical writing of 1971 history, even a chance encounter in their life may transform in Anthropology at Columbia University, New York.) the readers’ (and researchers’) eyes into a momentous occasion. Tripathi has 1 I first wrote about this image for the paper “A Missing General, Indian Jawans, and definitely corrected the absence of Bangladeshi voices in these earlier books, Submerged Narratives of Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War,” presented at the but at least some of the voices he has selected are commanding presences at the “India in the World” conference at University of Michigan, January 2014. It was center, which can continue to occlude voices on the margin. later presented at “Peaceworks” at Seagull Foundation, Kolkata, December 2015.

Both the dense archives available in the United States and India, and the op2 Khandaker, A.K. 1971: Bhetore Baire [1971: Inside Outside], Prothoma Prokashon, tions of oral history, usually throw up these significant, central figures (living 2014 and dead). We are therefore now used to scholarship and reportage on the larg3 Bass, Gary J. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, er-than-life figures occupying the world stage during the war. Richard Nixon as Knopf, 2013. pathological paranoiac, Henry Kissinger as smooth mandarin, Indira Gandhi as 4 Raghavan, Srinath. 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, Harvard shrewd operator, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as determined negotiator, Zulfiqar Univ. Press, 2013.

Ali Bhutto as nervy obstructionist, and General Yahya Khan as drunken mav5 Tripathi, Salil. The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its erick–these are portrayals that often suffuse narratives of the war. What conUnquiet Legacy, Yale, 2016. tinues to be underexplored are the Bangladeshi actors, at the granular level, 6 Moyn, Samuel. “Spectacular Wrongs.” The Nation (October 13) (2008): 30-36. in their own war. Sheikh Mujib’s negotiation strategy, led by his legal advisor 7 Bass, Gary J. Freedom’s battle: the origins of humanitarian intervention. Vintage, Kamal Hossain, was documented in Sisson & Rose and resurfaces in Ragha2008. van (though less so in Bass). But what were the ground events to which these 8 Power, Samantha. A problem from hell: America and the age of genocide. Basic players were responding? To take just one example, Sheikh Mujib’s decision to Books, 2002. arrive at one negotiation meeting flying a black flag was framed as an insult by 9 Mohaiemen, Naeem. ‘Flying Blind: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971’, Pakistani military witnesses, leading to a “breakdown.” However, what were Economic & Political Weekly, 46(36), pp. 40-52.

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ARTS & LETTERS

Exhibition

The game of dice n Abdullah Al Muktadir

“A Abdullah Al Muktadir is a poet and short story writer. He teaches English at Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University.

rt is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” – Oscar Wilde That the exhibition is titled ‘Chhokka’, which in Bengali refers to dice, is misleading in the sense that the artworks inside the gallery were very sincere and serious. Artists behind this spectacular show are very young. So they preferred a simple, playful title to anything complicated and too academic. Six emerging artists of the country who have very recently completed their studies at different departments of Dhaka University Fine Arts Faculty exhibited their works at Zainul Gallery from November 14 to 19, 2016. From paintings to wood carvings, almost 30 works were displayed for six days.

Creating memory is very poetic and creating poetry is more than memorable which this group of artists somehow managed to do. Exploring their works on the floor and the walls of the gallery could easily be compared to a journey from romantic to post-modern poetry. The Wordsworthian human-nature relationship works as a recurrent theme for the watercolours by Jinnatun Jannat and Sushmita Saha Rimi. Using vibrant colours, they intend to foreground what we have forgotten: nature can always be a

Continued from Page 20

source of power and inspiration for humans.

Rimi’s ‘Entity of Freedom’ and Jannat’s ‘Monpakhi’ series, along with other works, celebrate flowers and birds in an attempt to avoid the modernist depiction of alienated human feelings. Akhinoor Binte Ali’s lithographic prints represent modernist attitude towards life. Her works, ‘Lay of Memory’ and others, at the same time serve as very strong narratives of nostalgia. Anik Bhowmick and Prince Kumar Shil, with their wooden crafts, present two opposite points of view regarding our world. Bhowmick revisits the folk tradition of this part of the world in his own style, in ‘Family’, for example; whereas Shil follows a western minimalist tradition. His ‘Deer’, a wooden sculpture, is apparently very simple but a second look would change the viewers’ idea regarding the work. Simplicity, not necessarily, always refers to simplicity. Mahmuda Siddika’s woodcuts added another dimension. She reminds the viewers of the prints by Goya. Unlike Jannat’s colourful birds, her owl creates a sense of fear. One of her works, ‘Observation-2’, looks nightmarish and creates a surreal sort of reality.

Through a single exhibition with different layers, a group of young artists created a new anthology of visual poetry. Above all, they have shown real promise they will continue to grow in their journey of artistic pursuit. l

Driving with Murad

“You go for parachute jumping?” I asked wide-eyed. What an interesting guy!

Nausheen exclaimed “Wow!” And we both asked at once, “Why?” He nodded. “Life has become so boring! I need adrenaline rush. But yes, with you, it almost seems like I am in the middle of a battle field. God knows when and where you’ll turn next. . . . Look where you’re going! That’s a grandmamma! She will kill you if you scratch her car.”

I blushed. And at the back seat I could hear Nausheen laughing her head off. He was so blunt, and yet he was great company. He kept on shaking his head, “please don’t make that kind of a turn. I’m not so young any more. I might break my neck. My wife is 25 years younger than me. Do you know what will happen, if I break my neck?”

I just stared at him. Why in the world would he have a wife who is 25 years younger than him?

“I will have to divorce her,” Murad confided. I wondered why. Then I hit the brakes again. Hell, this man was outrageous!

“And why is that? Asked Lizzy.

“Because he is an arborist. He works with those noisy instruments, and has lost his hearing. His ear-pipes are jammed and he can’t hear anybody else.”

By now my tilapia fillets were ready. I pulled the baked fish and veggies out and announced, “Dinner is ready. And yes, that’s what Murad said: ‘keep away from those guys with big machines in hand. They never listen to your honking because they are making too much noise themselves.’” I paused and added with a mischievous wink, “He also advised to keep away from grandmamas.

Apparently, they are the worst drivers.”

Donna, another sweet lady who lived on the second floor, was chopping her root vegetables on a table on one corner of the kitchen. Both Elizabeth and Donna were in their mid to late sixties. Both replied hastily, “Well, we are not grandmas yet.”

Nausheen and I grinned. It seemed everybody wanted to be in Murad’s good book. ***

*** In the evening, Elizabeth, our favourite housemate asked, “So, this Murad—is he as amazing as Sohana made him sound?”

We were all in the kitchen and I had tilapia and veggies baking in the oven.

Nausheen said gleefully, “One hundred percent and more. I think I will go with them on the next session too. I have never met anyone like him. My driving instructor was great, but this guy is just crazy! All Sohana’s karma,” she winked at me. “I don’t know how she comes to meet all the crazy and entertaining people.”

Elizabeth shook her head and smiled, “So what did Murad do today?”

I listened half-smiling as Nausheen went on regaling our friends with Murad and his outrageous comments.

“You know, now I know why Gary never listens to us,” she said laughing.

Gary was another housemate, loud and raucous. During our house meetings his behaviour was irritating and sometimes disruptive.

The day of the road-test was approaching. I was nervous. To make things worse, Murad was gone. He had left for home in Turkmenistan to visit his elderly mother and children from a previous marriage. I was working with another instructor. To be honest, he was not bad at all; did the usual drilling and practices. But as I got down from the car one day, I felt sad and down. I realised that I missed Murad. Being away from home and country was taking its toll.

He was supposed to be back two days before the test. But he didn’t show up.

On the morning of the driving test, I suddenly realised that even if I failed the test, it did not matter. Murad had taught me something vital, much more important than driving a car. He actually showed me how to go on with life, to enjoy it to the fullest, regardless of all that’s negative. Driving an automobile was only one little particle in this vast line called life.

I looked at the mirror, at the surprised face staring back at me. I smiled.

Finally, I was ready. l

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Exhibition

Glimpses of life from the backwaters Jamal Ahmed’s exhibition “Sands of Time” was held at Gulshan’s Eden Gallery from November 12-25, 2016

n Takir Hossain

R

ealism was a movement in the early 19th century in France that aimed to represent people and their everyday reality based on precise observation. It challenged centuries-old tradition of idealising pictorial forms and grand subjects. In Bangladesh, realism has been put into practice since the inception of the new art movement in the early 1950s. In the ’60s, however, artists diversified their modes of expression into other forms of modernism. In the post-independence period, realism made a comeback and Jamal Ahmed emerged as one of its most promising proponents.

After graduation from the Institute of Fine Arts (now the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka), he went for higher education in Poland and Japan.

Over several decades, Jamal has been successfully documenting Bengal’s scenic beauty. Men and women from the lower tiers of society -- gypsy women, oarsmen, boatmen, flood-affected people, riverine people, bauls, mendicants, working class people -- feature abundantly in his works. Pigeons, fishermen and disadvantaged people, and their daily chores are recurrent themes in his paintings.

Space plays a very significant role in his paintings. He has a great ability to draw a subject in meticulous details without compromising its emotional dimensions.

For an art aficionado, his paintings bring a new, eye-catching look, and provide one with a sense of great pleasure. Most of the times, his paintings have a great similarity to photographs, which can be considered a genre of photo-realism.

Jamal frequently meets new people from different social backgrounds. He observes them for gaining insights into their lives. His drawings and sketches are lively and have the right kind of restraint.

He has a great ability to draw a subject in meticulous details without compromising its emotional dimensions

Takir Hossain is a senior journalist who writes on the arts scene of Bangladesh.

Smoothness is another noticeable feature in his works and his paintings are easily comprehensible because of the subject’s simplicity, malleable ground and subdued tone.

Apart from rural life and people, Jamal is an accomplished portrait painter.

Realism is his forte; his acrylic paintings can capture the exact skin tone of a man or woman. He has achieved mastery in capturing the quality of light and shade.

His calm and deeply meditative landscape alludes to harmony in nature.

He has painted the Cox’s Bazar sea beach and the poverty-ridden people along it from many different angles. He has always evinced an in-depth understanding of landscape. Some of his compositions convey a great sense of rapture.

Many of his shadowy drawings (charcoal-based) are lyrical and spontaneous.

His sketches are powerful in their tone of lines and serenity. The charcoal sketches, in particular, are very lively and thought-provoking. His intimate study of human beings and nature allows him to get to the core of his theme.

Jamal’s sweeping brush strokes along with malleable textures give his canvas a vivacious and spirited look. In the paintings displayed at the “Sands of Time” exhibition, the artist has used acrylic, pencil, charcoal and watercolour on both paper and canvas. Looking at his works critically, one gets the feeling that his acrylic follows the typical watercolour tonalities -- soft and seemingly transparent. Tranquility is one of the vital components in his works. By making excellent use of the interplay between light and shade, he conveys the joys and woes of his subjects.

Jamal always chooses a vivacious language to tell his stories. In the paintings of “Sands of Time”, Jamal’s use of colour has reached such a perfection that it has rendered his realism an air of surrealism at the same time. l

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ARTS & LETTERS

Non-fiction

Driving with Murad n Sohana Manzoor

“G

Sohana Manzoor writes fiction and nonfiction. She teaches English at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.

o, go, go, go, go! What are you waiting for?” yelled the man sitting in the passenger’s seat. I was at the wheel wondering if it was my turn, or if I should allow the car coming from my left to go forward. The urgency in his voice made me go forward and turn left. Murad shook his head in frustration and spoke in his thick Russian accent, “You are too afraid. Why are you so afraid? What do you think will happen, huh? If you drive like that, you will never go anywhere.”

Murad was my driving instructor. He was a great guy, full of fun and humour. He was quite motivating and an excellent driver too. Unfortunately, I was an awful learner and possibly also the worst pupil he had ever had to teach driving. I busted one of the front tires of my friend’s car the very first day I dared to be out in the streets. I sat behind the wheel for the first time in my life in August 2015. I was as nervous and frisky as a kitten and the instructor from the Driving School in Newton made me drive around a parking lot.

He suggested that I practice at the parking lot with a friend, and preferably in some streets with less traffic before signing up for my next session.

I did as he had suggested, but only in the parking lot. My best friend and housemate Nausheen was terrified of my driving skills, and naturally, did not dare to accompany me in the streets!

My second session was with Murad. He was a little late, and came cursing under his breath.

Apparently, he got the wrong address from the driving school, and realized the mistake only after calling me. God, he was not only a great instructor, but a great entertainer as well. He was in his mid-fifties, good looking and in very good shape. He also talked incessantly. Every time I made some blunder, he yelled in a good natured way. “ N e x t time, I will bring my shot gun,” he told me once, after I made a frantic turn ignoring all other drivers on the road amidst a jumble of hooting and honking. “I can shoot all those people down, and you won’t have to worry about running them down, you know,” he said grinning.

“You have a shot gun!” I gasped. “What do you do with a shot gun?”

He was nonchalant. “I’m a licensed fire arms instructor.”

“Fire arms instructor?” I blanched and stepped on the gas paddle instead of the brake. Murad quickly pressed on his safety brake and tsked, “You can’t do that. You have to learn to converse while driving.”

He guided me to a rather quiet area in West Newton. I was driving very slowly, and cautiously. Murad coughed and asked, “What is the speed limit?”

“Er…thirty-five.”

“What is your speed?”

“Twenty,” I replied sheepishly.

“It’s like riding a donkey, you know,” he held out both his hands in front of him as if he held the reins of a donkey. Something told me that he had rode on donkeys too. ***

eran from the Vietnam War. Retired and in his early sixties, he had the air of a consummate playboy. He was not bad, I suppose. I would probably have fallen for him if I were a teenager. Arthur would have flirted and praised how pretty I was. So at one point I said a little too sweetly, “But I’m an awful driver, don’t you think?”

Poor Arthur looked flabbergasted and belched, and then admitted that I was not the best driver in the world. Satisfied, I switched the topic to Murad, saying I really liked his techniques. As you can probably guess, Arthur immediately turned around in his seat. “Yeah?” he peered over his sunglasses and asked, “And why is that? What’s so great about Murad? He’s shell shocked; I hope you knew that?”

“Is that so?” I glanced sideways, as I was driving through an intricate intersection. The drivers of Massachusetts are awful; little wonder that the people of the neighboring states are terrified of them. Just because of that reason perhaps I would get my driving license in the long run -- I tried to convince myself.

“Murad had worked with the Talibans at one point of his career,” said Arthur.

I gulped and exclaimed, “Talibans! You are not serious, are you?”

“I wouldn’t joke about something like that,” replied Arthur very casually.

“He used to work as a spy for the American Government. He is originally from Turkmenistan, you know. And he is fluent in six languages. So, yes, he was the perfect guy to be recruited.” He paused dramatically and added, “I guess at some point they suspected his secret and hence tried to cut his throat and left him for dead.”

I gulped again. *** When I told Nausheen and the rest of our housemates about Murad, they were all shaking uncontrollably.

Nausheen was noncommittal, “No! This is unheard of! He was really with the Talibans? I have to see this guy!”

So, there she was standing with me the next day as I waited for Murad to show up. He looked at Nausheen carefully and he asked, “Have you seen her drive? Do you trust her with your life?”

Nausheen laughed, “I don’t trust her. But I trust you! Surely you won’t let her do anything so drastic?”

Nausheen can be absolutely adorable, and Murad melted. “Hop in,” he yelled. “It will be fun.”

After passing through the busy traffic of Newton I asked him, “Hey, I heard that you worked with the Talibans. Is it true?”

He turned his bright eyes on me and lifted his left hand drawing my attention to his middle finger.

“You see this moonstone?” he asked, displaying a ring with a yellowish stone. “The Talibans gave it to me. I stayed and prayed with them for three entire years. Crazy fanatics. I almost died.”

“It’s true then, that they tried to slit your throat?” I asked horrified.

Murad shrugged. “Nah, I was not referring to that. I almost died because there was no woman.” And then he shouted, “Look where you’re going. Eeks, you’re something out of this world! But yes, if I have you driving with me, I won’t need to go for parachute jumping any more. I have already given up coffee!”

After two successive sessions with Murad I found myself with Arthur, a vet-

 See Page 18

20 ARTS & LETTERS

DHAKA TRIBUNE

SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 2017