Cross-posted from Caravan]
Know Thy Neighbour: On the Bangladeshi literary giant Humayun Ahmed
By Aruni Kashyap

Humayun Ahmed, by Caravan

And then a year ago in Minnesota, one of my Bangladeshi friends, Shahed, started raving about the popularity and greatness of a particular Bangladeshi author.

“Did he create a character called Misir Ali?” I asked him. “I think I’ve read him.”

“Yes, he did! He also created a character called Baker Bhai for his tele-serial Kothay Keo Nei (No One’s Anywhere) , who was so popular that people took out processions in Bangladesh to protest his unjust hanging.”

We were talking on a snowy evening, at the university library. Shahed said, “My cousin participated in that protest. Humayun Ahmed is in America now—I heard he is undergoing treatment for cancer.”

I had never heard of a protest march in support of a fictional character before. So I’d been reading this author as a child in my grandmother’s house without a clue as to how influential he was. In the next few days, I plied Shahed with questions about Humayun Ahmed. Why didn’t you go to the protest? Recommend some of his literary novels to me, I don’t like reading mystery novels anymore. He didn’t have much to say, but assured me he would put me in touch with people who knew about Humayun Ahmed’s work.

In the next few days, he fixed meetings for me with every Humayun Ahmed ‘expert’ who lived in Minnesota. Most were immigrant students, ardent fans of his popular fiction. All of them told me about his mystery novels or the ones that had been adapted into films—so famous that everyone in Bangladesh knew them. But no one could say much about his literary novels. Neither could they tell me the reason behind his enormous popularity, why 200,000 copies of his 300-odd titles are sold every February at the Ekushey Book Fair in Dhaka and why his funeral in July 2012 was a nationally televised event, attended by thousands of fans. Eager to read more of his work, I turned to the internet, where free, digital versions of his novels had been uploaded onto a number of sites. Reading them, a picture of modern Bangladesh emerged before me, suggesting the reasons for his fable-like popularity.

Primarily a fiction writer, Ahmed also wrote screenplays, poetry and non-fiction. Though he had a successful teaching career, he later gave up his teaching to concentrate on writing and filmmaking. He wrote the screenplays for at least ten films, directing some of them such as Aguner Poroshmoni (Fire Sorcerer’s Stone of Fire), Sravan Megher Din (A Cloudy Day in Sravan), Dui Duwari (Two Doors), and Chondrokotha (Stories of the Moon). For television, he scripted popular dramas such as Ei Shob Din Rati and Kotho Keo Nei (which featured Baker Bhai). He also wrote columns for daily newspapers. During his treatment in the States, he began a column called New Yorker Akashe Jhokjhoka Rood (Bright Sunlit Skies of New York), expressing his admiration for Haruki Murakami in one of them.

In the late 1980s, he began publishing two detective series featuring Himu and Misir Ali. The eponymous Himu was so popular that after him it became a fashion among young men to wear yellow kurtas and walk barefooted on the streets. Misir Ali, Ahmed’s other detective creation, is a simple man, a university professor of Abnormal Psychology. He changes house too often and solves problems in the lives of people with his logical reasoning. What emerges from Ahmed’s successful forays into multiple genres is the image of a compulsive storyteller who used all kinds of mediums to circulate his tales. Isaac Bashevis Singer said that the purpose of great literature is to “entertain and to instruct”. Reading Ahmed, I often find myself wondering why his work wasn’t more questioning, and why his sole aim seems to be to entertain.

So what makes Humayun Ahmed’s literary output—especially his early books, which established him as a major voice by the 1980s—important? It might have been difficult for him to venture into other modes of storytelling, had he not earned success with his novels. Is he a significant writer because he wrote several novels on Bangladesh’s most important event—an event that will probably always haunt Bangladeshis and has been constantly revisited by its artists, scholars, novelists?

Many writers have produced fiction set against the Liberation War. Anisul Hoque’s Ma (Mother, 2003), Muhammad Zafar Iqbal’s Amar Bondhu Rashed (My Friend Rashed, 1994) and one of the most notable English novels to have emerged from South Asia in recent times, Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (2007)—are all set against the same event that preoccupies Ahmed. But there are other reasons why Ahmed inhabits the undisputedly pre-eminent position in the minds of the common readers of Bangladesh.

I see the rise of Ahmed intrinsically linked to the birth of Bangladesh as a nation. In 1971, Bengali-Indian writers dominated the bookshelves in Bangladesh: Sunil Gangopadhyay (creator of the famed Nillohit), Ashapurna Debi (who was a household name in both Bengals by then because of the widespread popularity of the first book in her trilogy Prothom Prutisruti [The First Promise]) and Mahasweta Devi. Bangladeshis needed a literature of their own, a literary hero of their own—which is the subconscious or self-conscious anxiety that accompanies any kind of nationalism. A newborn nation is like a person placed before a crowd to introduce himself but finds it difficult to speak. It is a fundamental human need to introduce oneself properly—in other words, narrate oneself. The same is true of a newborn nation and a newly emerging community. Ahmed gave voice to this desire. In a way, he introduced the Bangladeshis to themselves by writing their numerous biographies. His precise, dexterous enunciation of their yet ineffable identity ensured him a permanent position in the minds of the Bangladeshis.

In Nondito, the demented Rabeya, who roams around the neighbourhood, with safety pins on every inch of her sari because she doesn’t know how to cover herself, dies after a failed attempt to abort after she was raped. Shongkhoneel startles the reader in the first chapter with the death of the main character Khoka’s mother, Shirin, during childbirth. Both deaths lead to tumultuous changes in the single family featured in both novels, uncovering dark secrets to do with incest, rape, and past loves, which Khoka must grapple with. In Nondito, mentally imbalanced Rabeya was impregnated by Master Kaka—Khoka’s father’s unmarried best friend who lived with them all his life. This person had even brought up the children of the house.

When this shocking secret is revealed to the family, Khoka’s step-brother Montu kills Master Kaka with a boti (chopper); the novel closes with Khoka and his father waiting outside a prison holding a letter addressed to the jailor that will allow them to lay claim to Montu’s body after he is hung to death. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, between 200,000 and 400,000 women, according to varying estimates, were raped by Pakistani armymen, leading to between 25,000 and 30,000 forced pregnancies. It cannot be coincidental that two significant novels written soon after 1971 had birth and abortion as their chief motifs.

1972 was perhaps too early for a young Humayun Ahmed to deal directly with fresh wounds. He may have needed a certain distance to fully internalise the birth pangs of a nation, which is perhaps why he began to directly address the war only in novels he wrote in the 1980s and why it was only in 2004 that he published his war epic Josna O Jononir Golpo.

What he portrayed discreetly in his first two novels, he deals with greater detail in his novel 1971. A slim book, it is a gripping narrative about the torture inflicted on the people of a remote village called Neelgunj by ‘Majorsab’ of the Pakistani army, who enters the village suspecting the presence of muktijoddhas (liberation war guerillas) in the nearby forest and subjects the inhabitants to all kinds of humiliation including physical and sexual assault. Aziz Mastar, the only poet of the village, is incarcerated in the school where he teaches, with a battered, bruised and bloodied imam, who wonders if the Pakistani army will give him some water to wash himself so he can read namaz.

Nilu Sen, the only person in the village who owns a transistor, is shot dead without warning and Majorsab holds a kangaroo court to solve a long forgotten case concerning the murder of Chitra Buri’s (the beggar of Neelgunj) son. A man called Moti is deemed to be the culprit and put to death. The Major’s companion is a Bengali officer, Rofiq. He witnesses the torture of his own people and gradually starts to reason with the Major, resulting in him being shot by the latter. Just before he is shot, Rofiq tells him that he is sure the Major won’t be able to return to West Pakistan, that he will die before he can get there. Though he is fully armed and has unleashed terror in the entire village for the whole day, the Major starts sweating in fear—an image that ends the novel.

What also emerges from these early novels is a clear picture of contemporary Bangladeshi urban life, a picture that reaffirms the resilience of a people after a bloody war. In Nondito, Khoka’s aspiration to turn himself into the financial pillar of his family by doing well in his masters exam was perhaps a desire familiar to young people in the newly independent nation. Khoka’s story could have been the story of every urban, middle class (Bengali) youth—most of whom get a job, move up the social ladder, get married and help parents. Khoka is especially worried about his mother; he wants to give her a little respite from the daily housework that she has been doing all her life. He wants to take her for an outing to a place called Sikakundo, but he is unable to pay for it. Once, on finding his mother weeping, he consoles her,  saying, “I want to do a lot more for this family than my Baba has done.” After he gets a job at a government college with a monthly salary of 420 takas, we cheer for him when his mother says “besh ekti Lokhimoto meye aante hobey” (You will have to get a good wife like Goddess Lakhshmi).

In Shongkhoneel, similar ambitions are present but the main character here, also called Khoka, is trapped in his circumstances. He is unable to break away from a family whose dynamics are rapidly changing, whose past he is discovering which makes his present difficult. In Debi, the first book in the Misir Ali series, we find Neelu and Beelu, sisters who are exposed to a modern education in the Dhaka of the late ’80s or early ’90s. They constantly read fiction—mostly Indian-Bengali authors like Nimai Bhattacharya and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay. They go to restaurants, watch Bollywood movies, go out for dates, enjoy life in Dhaka to the fullest.

During the mid-1990s, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin achieved global attention for her provocative and dark critique of patriarchy and religion in her country, which forced her into exile. Suddenly, a country of millions was disproportionately represented, globally, through the translated works of a single author, monopolising popular perceptions of Bangladesh. In Guwahati, I remember seeing Nasrin’s books being sold near railway tracks or vendors of her books sitting under black umbrellas and vying for attention with sellers of fish and vegetables. There were new almirahs in my grandmother’s house then and even they were adorned with copies of Nirbachito Kolam (Selected Columns, 1991) and Nosto Meyer Nosto Godyo (Fallen Prose from a Fallen Girl, 1992). The controversy surrounding Taslima Nasrin’s works had circulated only one story about Bangladeshi women, often overshadowing the reality of lives like Ahmed’s Neelu and Beelu, even if these were the lives of a privileged few.

Ahmed’s fiction creates space for various stories about Bangladesh, challenging the gloomy single story that is prevalent. His propensity for this variety is best seen in his novel Josna O Jononir Golpo. About 450 pages long, it follows the fate of a large cast of characters from diverse backgrounds: among them are Shah Kalim, a poet; Irtazuddin, a religious man; Nazmul, a gallant freedom fighter and so on. They witness the breakout of the Liberation War and live through the horror. Ahmed’s intention to include as many narratives as possible is perhaps movingly reflected in his lament in the foreword to this novel about the absence of representation in Bangladeshi fiction of the contribution of Indian soldiers to the war. He mentions how he made a long list of names of Indian soldiers who were killed during the war. Eventually, he says, he had to exclude that list because it would have extended the length of the book by another 100 pages.

The Assam Agitation (1979 to 1985)—the six year long mass movement against illegal migrants from Bangladesh—loomed large in my life when I was growing up in Assam during the ’90s. Neighbours who came over for a casual chat conjectured how we would soon become a minority in our own land. Assamese dailies and weeklies often predicted that we would soon have a Bangladeshi chief minister if the voters’ lists kept swelling annually with the names of alleged Bangladeshis. The (documented or undocumented) immigrants who came to work in our homes and pulled rickshaws on the streets of Guwahati worked for much lower wages than the local manual worker and created the image in our minds of the abject Bangladeshi. In this climate, there was no space for positive and multi-layered images of Bangladeshis.

Towards the late ’90s, things became worse with Taslima Nasrin’s books appearing alongside Assamese bestsellers at book fairs and bus stops—jostling for space with illustrated sex manuals, mythological tales and glossy periodicals. The hapless illegal immigrant and Nasrin’s courageous, deeply critical depiction of Bangladesh only fortified the belief that Bangladesh was the other, that it was very different from us, that we weren’t like them. Fiction about Bangladesh was limited. Bengali books did appear on the bookshelves of serious readers, but these were mostly by Indian-Bengalis; Humayun Ahmed was read by a select few.

The riots between immigrant Bengali-Muslim settlers and Bodos broke out on 20 July last year, a day after Humayun Ahmed had passed away in New York. The ensuing debate in the Assamese media and Assamese households was often ugly. Personal exchanges turned bitter if one challenged friends who supported mass killings and deportations. Deportations? If there are fifty lakh Bangladeshis in Assam, it’d take 250,000 trucks to deport everyone, I told a friend, hoping he would understand the absurd nature of such a demand.

Just as terrifying was the deep-rooted prejudice. After Humayun Ahmed passed away, I made a trip to Panbazar, Guwahati’s book market. There, I met another friend and told her I was looking for some novels by the Bangladeshi writer Humayun Ahmed to refresh my indistinct memories of reading him in high school. Looking displeased, she asked me sarcastically, “So, why this Bangladeshi-preeti suddenly?” My friend, an avid reader, who is often seduced by the narratives of writers who live seven seas and thirteen rivers away, didn’t know of one of South Asia’s most widely read authors who had died just about a week earlier.

Whenever Misir Ali received a letter, he had the habit of reading it at least thrice to understand the author properly. He knew the importance of language, the way it dehumanises as well restores dignity. Jyotiprasad Agarwala, modern Assam’s most important poet, embraced East Bengali immigrants as “new-Assamese” (noo-Axamiya) in his poetry. Of late, the spectre of uncontrolled immigration under alleged political patronage has eroded this liberal outlook to a great extent in Assam. Perhaps, only stories and poems can heal this. I wonder if discussions in Assam would have been so polarised, if Bangladeshi-preeti would be considered a crime, had Ahmed’s books been sold on the footpaths of Guwahati, and if through these wonderful novels people in Assam had come to know our closest neighbour better.

Aruni Kashyap is the author of the forthcoming novel The House With a Thousand Stories (Viking, June 2013), and has translated Indira Goswami’s The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar.

More on Humayun Ahmed from AlalODulal:

Contrarian Thoughts on Humayun Ahmed

Humayun Ahmed (1948-2012)

Kakababu choley gelen: Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934-2012)

Shaon and our society

The Novelist and his upcoming novel

Image of Jamal Nazrul Islam © Nasir Ali Mamun

Jamal Nazrul Islam and the Ultimate Fate of the Universe
by Tibra Ali

For Nargis Naaz Islam

[Originally published in “Prothom Alo” on 14 April, 2003. Translated into English by author on occasion of Professor Islam's death.]

I imagine that a long and enduring conversation develops with the person who becomes the object of one’s utmost adoration and admiration. When that person is sitting in front of you this conversation takes the form of an external dialog, but when he or she is absent it takes an internal form. Over the last six years or so, I have been having such a conversation, sometimes external and sometimes internal, with Professor Jamal Nazrul Islam.

The setting for getting to know Professor Islam and his wife Suraiya Islam was Clare Hall, one of the many colleges of the University of Cambridge, over the course of their frequent visits of varying lengths to that place.

By profession Professor Islam is a theoretical physicist. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he finished the Mathematical Tripos. (The Tripos derives its name from the three-legged stools that the examinees at Cambridge in historical times had to sit upon while taking their exams. The Mathematical Tripos happens to be the oldest surviving exam in the world and has the reputation for being also the most difficult in mathematics.) After completing the final part of the Tripos (known as Part III) with distinction, Jamal Islam became a Ph.D. student at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, or DAMTP as it is often referred to, under the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Cambridge. After his Ph.D. his career as a researcher and a teacher has taken him to various distinguished places such as Maryland, Caltech, Princeton, ICTP, Cambridge, The City University of London etc. In the eighties he came to Chittagong University and founded there the Research Centre for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (RCMPS) of which he is now the director.

Although he started his career working on quantum field theory, he has worked on many different branches of theoretical physics and sometimes even outside physics.
Rather than presenting that long list of topics I think that it’s more compelling to say a few words on one of his most important contributions to the field of cosmology. In the sixties and the seventies, the field of cosmology went through a resurgence and witnessed many important discoveries. Cosmology is the branch of theoretical physics which deals with the birth, evolution and the future of the universe. Naturally, this field stands upon the important discoveries and theories in all the different branches of theoretical physics; This is so because the universe is a dynamical and complicated physical system and results from different branches of physics become relevant in describing the different stages of the evolution of the universe. For example, important results from elementary particle physics, stellar astrophysics, the physics of many body systems, black hole physics, etc. are called upon for an accurate description of this complex physical system that we call the universe. Here, as a side remark, I should mention that the word krishno-bibor which is the Bengali term for a black hole was first coined by Professor Jamal Nazrul Islam in his popular book on the subject in the Bhasha-Shaheed Grontho-Mala (“The Language Martyrs Book Series”). When I congratulated him on this fine choice of words he told me that he got the idea from the Hindi word for black holes which had been coined by his long-time friend and Cambridge-era contemporary Jayant Narlikar, the famous Indian cosmologist.

According to the standard model of cosmology, the universe started its life in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The universe continued to expand after the big bang thanks to its impulse. Whether the universe will expand forever or not depends on the average density of matter in it. If this average density is greater than a critical value then the gravitational attraction of matter will eventually put a stop to this expansion and the universe will start to contract, and will meet its demise in the so-called Big Crunch. However, if the density of matter is less than or equal to the critical density, the universe will forever remain expanding — and until recently, people believed that this rate of expansion will decrease although it will never reach zero. This scenario of an ever expanding universe is known as the open universe. In the last few years there have been some important changes made to this picture. Based on new observations, scientists have concluded that not only is the universe expanding, its rate of expansion is increasing. They have concluded that the cause of this accelerated expansion is some antigravitating force whose origin is not yet understood. In short, it appears that the universe is indeed open and will go on to live forever. What is the ultimate fate of such an open universe? To my knowledge the first person to address and give an answer to this very important physical question was Professor Jamal Nazrul Islam.

In 1977 he published an article on the ultimate fate of the universe in The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Later, in 1983, he turned that article into a book titled The Ultimate Fate of the Universe published by Cambridge University Press (CUP). Incidentally, he has two more books from CUP, one of which is An Introduction to Mathematical Cosmology. This later book is a wonderfully written textbook suitable for advanced undergraduate or graduate students of physics. When I first went to Cambridge as a graduate student I learned the necessary cosmology from this book. I have heard that Professor A. M. Harun ar Rashid of Dhaka University is going to translate the second edition of this book into Bengali. (It was Professor Harun ar Rashid who introduced me to Professor Islam.) Coming back to The Ultimate Fate, although the book is written in the format of a popular science book the main idea contained in it is a non-trivial addition to theoretical physics. It is my opinion that The Ultimate Fate ought to be translated into Bengali.

Here I shall attempt to give a summary and a simplified version of the future evolution of the universe that Professor Islam presents in his book drawing on the results from many different branches of physics. When all the stars in the galaxies eventually die out they will each become one of the following three: a brown dwarf, a neutron star or a black hole. A galaxy made almost entirely of such ‘stars’ (here by a ‘star’ I mean one of the three final states mentioned above) will eventually lose most of its members through a process of evaporation. The stars that are left will eventually collapse to form a supermassive black hole. It may also happen that several such neighboring galaxies will merge to form an even bigger mega-black hole. The time scale required for this to happen would be about 100 million million million years (10^20 years). Eventually even these supermassive black holes will evaporate through Hawking radiation. It’ll take about 10^100 years (i.e., if you say the world ‘billion’ eleven times after 10, that many years) to complete this evaporation process. Beside these processes there will be many other subtle processes happening to other physical systems over these time scales. In the end, however, the universe will become a dark and dreary place. To get a full picture of the complex and intricate processes that the universe will go through to reach that fate one will have to read the whole book by Jamal Islam.

His 1977 article inspired his friend and the famous physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) to work on this field. Dyson raised the further question that in a universe, as predicted by Jamal Islam, what are the possible forms that life would take? You see, in that far future of the universe the free energy necessary for life will become an extremely rare commodity. In such a universe life as we know it will no longer be possible. The forms that life would have to take in order to survive in such a universe is still an open question. The fact is until we are able to figure out the physics of life and consciousness the debate will remain unresolved. However, the evolving backdrop against which those distant acts of the drama of life will play out was first fleshed out for us in great detail by Professor Jamal Nazrul Islam in his visionary work.

Professor Islam is fond of saying, always with an amused smile, that with age instead of deepening his knowledge about a handful of subjects, his interest has spread out over many different ones. One such subject is biology. In the conferences that he has organized in Chittagong, besides distinguished physicists like Abdus Salam and mathematicians like Roger Penrose, he has had famous biologists like Louise Johnson (late Salam’s wife) come and give lectures. Proteins, which are long molecules which reside inside the body of every animal, get folded into compact forms before they can take part in various biological processes. The function of each protein depends crucially on the details of this shape. It was from Professor Islam that I first learned how this protein folding process is a non-trivial problem of geometry and combinatorics. By introducing me to the work of his friend Roger Penrose he also got me interested in the physics of consciousness. Perhaps due to his deep friendships with Amartya Sen and James Mirrlees, he became interested in mathematical economics and social choice theory. I have seen that he has an unpublished manuscript of a textbook on mathematical economics and it contains a geometrical description of Arrow’s theorem of social choice theory.

In the seventies, Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle pioneered an incredible branch of physics known as quantum cosmology. It was an attempt to give a quantum mechanical description to the origin of the universe. I should hasten to add that this attempt has so far remained unfulfilled. The central equation in this field is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. The aim of this effort was that this complicated equation would describe the birth and evolution of an entire universe. In its form this equation is very similar to another very important equation in physics: the Yang-Mills equation. This latter equation is the central equation of particle physics. Although all of particle physics is based on approximate solutions to the Yang-Mills equation, the exact solution to this equation has not yet been found. Many years ago, the famous physicist Richard Feynman set down in a paper some intuitive ideas regarding an exact solution to this equation. For many years now, Professor Islam has been working on verifying Feynman’s ideas and he believes that the work is almost complete. Unfortunately, that work is still in manuscript form. It is one of my deepest hope that Professor Islam would finish this work soon and publish the results.

Professor Islam and I are physicists from different generations. My field of study is string theory. Naturally I have tried to talk string theory with him at various times. But he doesn’t think too much of string theory (although his nephew Belal Baaquie works on string theory in Singapore). The fact is all the progress made in elementary particle physics till today have been facilitated by quantum field theory, but so far the mathematical foundations of quantum field theory has remained mysterious. The new generation that is so enthusiastic about string theory isn’t really familiar with these unresolved issues of quantum field theory. Professor Islam’s take on this is (and I tend to agree with him) that one shouldn’t get wrapped up in string theory at the expense of ignoring the deep issues of quantum field theory.

I have seen that whenever Professor Islam and his wife Suraiya Islam visited Cambridge it always became a joyous occasion for their friends there. For some time now Suraiya Islam has been a distance education Ph.D. student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She has even submitted a draft of her thesis. Her field of study is the Bengali Muslim intellectual society of the nineteenth century. I have a deeper reason for bringing up the topic of her thesis: in a sense both Professor Islam and his wife are natural products of that historical Bengali Muslim intellectual social milieu. In the early part of the twentieth century Professor Islam’s mother had translated Rabindranath Tagore’s drama The Post-Office from Bengali into Urdu. The famous Tagore scholar Abu Sayeed Ayub is related to both of them (and in fact, Suraiya Islam was named by Ayub). Abu Sayeed Ayub learned the Bengali language by carefully reading and rereading Tagore’s novel Gora. I have seen Professor Islam reread Gora many times, taking notes and carefully underlying many of its parts. I don’t know if this fascination with Gora is a coincidence or a family tradition.

Above I have described each visits by the Islam family to Cambridge as a joyous occasion for their friends. But I think it would be more appropriate to describe the atmosphere in their rooms as a festival of intelligence. In his thinking Professor Islam shows unusual clarity and humanism. That science is a humanist discipline – this is a truth I have learned from Professor Islam.

Professor Islam has a deep passion for music. In gathering of friends he likes to sing on the piano two of Tagore’s songs, amaro porano jaha chai (“what my soul desires”) and amar shonar bangla (“my golden Bengal”). As a student he used to play the sitar. At some point someone taught him a raga by Ustad Amjad Ali Khan. Later he arranged it for the piano. One of his dreams is to play that raga on the piano for Ustad Amjad Ali Khan one day.

I have chosen the life of a wandering physicist. It is very likely that this life will take me through trying times and many an unfamiliar night. But I have in my arsenal the most effective weapon against that night: An internal, intimate and unending conversation with Professor Jamal Nazurl Islam and Suraiya Islam.

[Tibra Ali is a theoretical physicist living and working in Canada. He is a graduate of Dhaka University and the University of Cambridge.]

Professor Jamal Nazrul Islam worked in the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (later amalgamated to Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge) from 1967 until 1971. Later he worked as a researcher in California Institute of Technology and University of Washington. During 1973-1974 he served as the faculty of Applied Mathematics of King’s College London. In 1978 he then joined the faculty of City University London until he returned to Chittagong in 1984. Until his death he was serving as Professor Emeritus at the University of Chittagong. He was a member of the advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and a member of the syndicate at Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology. He also served as the director of the Research Center for Mathematical and Physical Sciences [RCMPS for short] University of Chittagong, Chittagong, Bangladesh.

Mr. Zillur Rahman, The President of Bangladesh, recently passed away while undergoing treatment in Singapore. May his soul rest in peace. His role as a trusted lieutenant to Bangabandhu Mujib and later to Mujib daughter Sheikh Hasina is laudable. He was rewarded for his loyalty, specially for staying loyal to tradition during post 1/11 days.  He was a better human being than most in political scene in Bangladesh.

He also is the first sitting President of Bangladesh who could die a normal death. He however is the 3rd Rahman who could become president and is the 3rd one to die a president of Bangladesh, as both other Rahmans who could become President also died in office. This reason of this post, however, is not to speculate who would become the next President of Bangladesh. Phantombd is there to do these sort of speculations.

This blogger wants to use this occasion also to bring back to memory another post he did 7 years ago. The post is over the fold.

Air Ambulance to Singapore

Our sick President was flown to Singapore for further treatment. One news told he was in coma, one news told he had chest pain. But there has been no clear press briefing from a medical person about the real conditions.

Last week co-blogger Shafiur mentioned that Communist Party  leader Saifuddin Ahmed Manik was also in Singapore for treatment.

What a testimony to our healthcare system! Even our head of the state don’t have the trust in our healthcare system and travel to foreign land for for an emergency critical treatment.

Our prime minister goes to Saudi Arabia for her knee treatment.

Our opposition leader goes to Singapore for treatment of her ear injury.

And every hour, hundreds of thousands of people die in Bangladesh with diseases which were easily preventable.

Recently I wrote a post about the remedy of our politicians’ power lust.

One remedy was to bar government leadership and politicians, law makers from going abroad for treatment.

That will help in multi-prong way.

1. One our leadership will be sincere in cleaning the mess in healthcare sector in Bangladesh.
2. Leadership positions hopefully will be less tempting
3. According to good old friend rafiq ahmed, it will help in this way, ” Actually another net benefit of barring medical treatment abroad, or forcing treatment at home, is to allow government officials to die natural deaths, ther by cleansing the system a little at a time”. I like this one.

Shanu Lahiri is no more. A great and rare soul has left Kolkata and the earth.

I remember she was so generous with her time, and always curious about the next generation. I was in Kolkata preparing for a solo show at Experimenter gallery. Her daughter Damayanti (Dodo) invited me to her house, via our mutual friend Annu.

Shanu-di kept asking what forms I use. Photography, film, together, separate, mounted, projected? She wondered about these new forms of work making where brush never touched paper. She wanted to understand how I “made work” on a computer. What did it mean? Did I feel satisfaction? What about the fact that the files always went to someone else? Your hand may never touch the finished work? What does that mean for your generation? She asked me if I didn’t get tired of always working on a computer. “Haat byatha kore na? Chokher jonno’o to kharap?” (Don’t your hands hurt? It’s also bad for the eyes.)

A dedicated and tireless activist, she insisted I take all the pamphlets home and study them carefully. She made a whole stack, and then handed them over carefully. “Don’t read them now, later when you go home. Now you will eat with us”

Her anti-nuclear pamphlets were done with so much care and intensity. I imagined her going from site to site, giving those out. When did she have time to paint? But I also know she did, always, make time to paint.

A total artist and a total activist. The kind so much rarer today.

Wish I could have talked to her again.

© Shanu Lahiri

Related Links

Noted painter Shanu Lahiri passes away

Shanu Lahiri – Wikipedia

Shanu Lahiri, a well known painter of the Bengal School

Shanu Lahiri, the Renowned Bengali Painter Died at 85

Sometimes you wait your whole life to meet someone properly.

First time I met Chittagong Armory raid famed Binod Bihari Chowdhury was in 2004. My documentary on persecution of Ahmadiyas was screening at Chittagong Press Club. Everyone was tense. Chittagong was considered less sympathetic to secular forces. They were having difficult time finding a chief guest who would speak. Binod dada agreed, without hesitation. He walked to the stage, I think he was still quite firm, and gave a firm speech. Everyone was relieved, they knew his presence had calmed the situation.

We talked for some time, and I made a mental note to come back one day and interview him. I also knew, this was one man who was not forgotten in Bangladesh. Meeting him was almost a pilgrimage for anyone with left politics, and visiting Chittagong. So I also felt, even if I did not meet him soon, he was being recorded. Each year, his birthday or armory raid was observed in one newspaper or another. Probably not enough, but at least some residue was still there.

These words from another comrade, Udayan Chattopadhyay, are relevant here: “I had a chance to meet him in Bangladesh in 2001. Wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that after an hour-long conversation he re-affirmed my faith in humanity. Erudite yet not patronizing, forceful yet gracious, confident but not arrogant, and unspeakably polite. Despite my probing on some subjects of the day (the elections were about to come up and he had been targeted in a smear campaign by one of the main parties) I didn’t hear a negative word from him about any individual or party. I specifically remember he asked his “kajer chhele” his opinion about something we were discussing as we were being served mishti and that turned into a good 10 minute exchange of thoughts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in any household I’ve visited in India or Bangladesh. Why did we lose these values in our leaders in subsequent generations?”

Last summer, 2012, I was back in Chittagong screening another film. A friend took me to his house. A relative came out, and said, “uni to nei.” (he is not here)
We paused, “mane…” (meaning..?)
“Na mane, he is in Kolkata, he will be back, some back next month.”
A sigh of relief, he was still around. Over 100 years old, and still going.

We could not come back, never got to see him one last time.

But his work lives on. Salute comrade Binod Bihari Chowdhury.

Chittagong armoury raid hero Chowdhury is dead

Binod Bihari flown to Chittagong

Binod Bihari is given state honour

চট্টগ্রামে বিপ্লবী বিনোদ বিহারীকে শ্রদ্ধা

© Daily Star

The Great Eternal Silence
By Aquinas T. Duffy

1
Missing in the darkness,
vanished without a trace,
with only the memories and photographs,
to fill an empty place.

2
Frequent prayer and fervent cries,
is there anyone there?
But the only sound
was the silent eternal fanfare.

3
For a long time
its deafening sound
subdued by a path
through lost and found.

4
Laughter and sorrow,
anguish and grief,
all the moments of a life
but with no relief.

5
Everything and nothing
one within and between all,
gentle, loving, pervading,
the eternal silence falls.

(The above was written in June 2000, arising out of the disappearance of Aquinas T. Duffy’s cousin, Aengus, and the setting up of a Missing Irish People website. Sometimes, we do not hear answers to our prayers, only apparent silence. But within that silence, there is always more to be discovered.)

Riddle over the missing
Nine days into the Rana Plaza tragedy, how many people still remain missing is a question officials cannot answer.

Source: Internet

Omar Faruk Babu. Source: bbarta24.com

1. Tibra Ali for AlalODulal.org

Louis Ferdinand Celine one said that the good ones should have some kind of marking to set them apart from the rest of humanity. One of those good ones was Babu.

One of the first to run to the aid of those trapped in the wreckage of Rana Plaza, he saved many lives with his bravery. But soon afterwards Babu started to have nightmares of mangled dead bodies and other psychological problems.

Babu was being treated at Dhaka Medical College Hospital but then he went missing. His dead body was recently discovered there with marks around the neck. His family rejects the thesis that he may have taken his own life.

Why did we fail to take better care of Babu? Was it intentional or was he another victim of our systemic failure? I remember when I first saw his picture – that raw face on which you could see an anguished soul. A simple welder by profession, Babu confirmed for me that kindness and courage are instincts unencumbered by prudence.

His full name was Omar Faruk Babu. Lest we forget the name of one of the good ones.

2. From Anha Khan’s Facebook status, translated from Bengali for AlalODulal.org by Tibra Ali:

“Of the several hundred people who rescued the trapped workers from the clutches of death in Rana Plaza, we made a few of them into “selected heroes”. We raised our hands in salute to these selected ones. One of them was Kaikobad, another one was Babu. But suddenly, in a moment’s notice, both of them were dead. One of them, Kaikobad, died despite receiving the best treatment that this part of the world can offer, and was given a state funeral. Whereas no one knowns how Babu died. Babu, who had saved about 40 lives, went missing while he was under treatment in the veranda of ward no. 315 of Dhaka Medical College Hospital. Two days later the missing Babu turned up dead.

The treatment of Kaikobad was an exception concocted by the government. This example was concocted for the sole purpose of show – to avoid responsibility toward all the others. We can talk about Babu’s death today because we were able to hail him as a hero and salute him on Facebook. But who is looking out for the physical and mental well-being of the several hundred others who, overcoming horror, searched for the living in the wreckage? If they can’t lead even simple and normal lives, where is the value in hailing them as heroes? Who will bear their medical treatments and counselling?

Who will save the saviors?”

Her husband, Shomlal Das quietly preparing for her cremation. They forgot to bring sindhoor. She is a married dead. She must wear sindhoor, someone from the small crowd whispered. They opened the bodybag. Part of her face was smashed, there was barely any hairline. Shomlal sprinkled sindhoor on her face... He pauses and sighs, “the government officer just treat every dead as muslim.”

Even when they mourn, they mourn from the margin
by Nischintapure Nribiggani (Anthropologist in Nishchintapur)

Pramila Rani Das Dead!
Doly Rani Das Missing!
Tema Murmu Missing!
Benu Rani Das Missing!
Suravi Rani Das Missing!
Sushanto Das Dead.
Brazeshwar Das Missing!
Nishikanta Das Missing!

May 3, 2013.

Nine days after the collapse of Rana Plaza, Pramila Rani Das’s (22) body was recovered from the rubble. Her body was crushed. Like many other, she was holding the ID card tight to her chest.

New Bottoms Wave Ltd. Card: 3341. Sewing Assistant. Line A. Date of Birth: 01-Jan-1990. Joining Date: 17-March-2013.

On the back side of her card, she had a photo of her one year old daughter, Papia Rani Das.

Her husband, Shomlal Das quietly preparing for her cremation. They forgot to bring sindhoor. She is a married dead. She must wear sindhoor, someone from the small crowd whispered. They opened the bodybag. Part of her face was smashed, there was barely any hairline. Shomlal sprinkled sindhoor on her face. Silently, her father-in-law took the Kafaner Kapor away that came with the coffin. Rony Chandra Talukdar tells us, ideally, a married hindu woman should go to shmoshan as a beautiful bride wearing colors, not white. He pauses and sighs, “the sarkari officer just treat every dead as muslim.”

Later that evening, Rony leaves us with Leela at Adhar Chandra School premise. Her husband Suvendu Chandra Das is still missing. Rony is trying to prepare a list of all missing hindu workers from Hobyganj and Sunamganj. Some journalist promised to take the list to Suranjit Sengupta, Minister without Portfolio, and a parliament member from Sylhet. Leela has seen all the dead-bodies laying on the floor twice already. She wanted to see them again. In case, she has missed something.

She shows us Suvendu’s picture one more time, so we could memorize his face, and describes the shirt he was wearing that ill-fated morning. Sky blue shirt with small black polka dot. We walk from one body-bag to another. Unidentified: ready for DNA testing. Shireen: identified, brother went home to bring elderly guardian. Shamoly Rani Das (20): unclaimed.

As we walk pass Shamoly, the loud recital of Q’uraan become unsettling for us. To show their sympathy, Dhaka Metropolitan Police has arranged Q’uraan Teloat for the grieving family in loud speaker. Leela moves on, asked volunteer Noman to open the next body bag.

The faint sound of Hari-bol from the near-by temple and shmoshan ghat gets lost in the predominantly muslim soundscape of mourning.

Even when they mourn, they mourn from the margin.

Nischintapure Nribiggani is a collective of radical anthropologists.

Missing: Pramila Das. Husband: Shomlal Das

Source: BBC

ঋতুরাজ, ঋতু নির্বিশেষে (The King of all seasons, despite seasons)
by Gargi  Bhattacharya for AlalODulal.org

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead…

—W. H. Auden

The morning newspapers are replete with careergraphs, and legends of the transgeneric, transtextual and transsexual diva that Rituparno Ghosh’s being and becoming had chronicled, along with suitable scenario-anecdotes and photographs. And yet, there is a lack—a deadlock where grief has saturated the print profiles of the auteur and the consequent recession of a celebration of his life and living in terms most appropriate to his larger than life persona has doubled the angst of a guilt-ridden society, which is now castigating itself for bullying the foremost intellectual.

I remember feeling the same suppressed suffocation, the same bilious dose of the mundane yet hard-hitting truth paralysing me when I watched Unishe April (1994), that I had while reading Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). It had such literary underpinnings, such detailing of sentiments, of moments, that a heart-wrenching moment of epiphany had the same agonising echo in the audience as one had while listening to the faraway tunes of a Raindrasangeet, perhaps ‘তরী আমার হঠাৎ ডুবে যায়…’ that he made Srikanta Acharya sing for Noukadubi (2011). Fifteen years later, Abohomaan (2009), where he reached the zenith of his directorial skills, made me feel the same silence surrounding my being, the same need to feel tranquillity and quietude, in the transience of love, death and all that lies between.
The shock of his demise can only be surpassed by the dramatics of it. And hence, the drama-queen, the prodigal son of cinema, hastened his exit while the party lasted. He reminds me of one of my most favourite controversial characters of cinema—the indelicate and witty transsexual prostitute, La Agrado, in Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999)—who inventorised her ‘lady parts’ on stage before a live audience and remarked, “Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, ma’am. And one can’t be stingy with these things because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being.”

It is the dream of being that I see personified in him/her. What did he dream of being? Did he write a poem about it? Was there a favourite character from a play, a film? Did he love Agrado as much as I do? Was his personification of Chitrangada his ultimate self-expression? Much poeticism has been lost in dialogicism, and much beauty lost in conflict in the life of a man who wore his liminality proudly on his sleeve, celebrated his queerness, squeaked at detractors and ambushed unsuspecting spectators with sinister intertextual references concealed in his cinema. He was testing himself, as he was always testing everyone else around him. And all along, he lived with such brilliant, bedazzling pomp, such gaiety, such ostentation as to raze to the ground the exalted plebeian morals of a clannish, aspiratorially intellectual middle class.

I love him. I love the way he addressed the rest of the world as“তুই”—a syntax carefully culled to carry equivalence in a casual, if all-too-friendly, way—so much so that my friend’s father, unable to take the challenge of the address, once retorted to him, “তুই কি তোর বাপকেও তুই বলিস?” I loved the way he blasted Mir for imitating him on public television on his chat show, Ghosh and Co., all the while insisting he does not personally take offense at being mimicked but making his vulnerability all too apparent. I loved the way he wore his heart on his sleeves. His long, beautiful, bejewelled, princess-like sleeves. The mellifluous tonality of his scenes blend with the রাবিন্দ্রিক sensibilities of his dual self—he is Binodini of Chokher Bali (2003) and Chapalrani of Arekti Premer Galpo (2009) rolled into one. The named and the unnamed parts of him, the surreal superfluity of sexuality, and the softness of the eternal feminine was him. The প্রাণোচ্ছল-অ্যান্ড-ন্যাকা ‘Rituda’ was him. The distant dream of the dead, that scene from Shob Choritro Kalponik (2009) was him. The King of all seasons, despite the seasonality of it. Me, on a cloud-licked, melancholy weekday afternoon, sitting with two kittens, mourning the loss of an intellectual I hardly knew but on stage, is him.

I adored that economy of gestures that many a stand-up comedian made fodder of. And staying true to that gesture, I want to say, in the words of La Agrado:

“Just don’t disappear again. I like to say good-bye to the people I love, even if it’s only to cry my eyes out, bitch.”

Rituparno Ghosh, by Samir Mondal

Gargi  Bhattacharya is a Ph.D. scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a published, author and photographer. She wrote this obituary for AlalODulal.org

Related Links:

Indian media: Tributes pour in for Rituparno Ghosh
Rituparno Ghosh: Bengali filmmaker dies in India
Rituparno Ghosh – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

Rituparno Ghosh (1963-2013): “Mathura Nagar Pati Kahe Tum Gokul Jao”
by Seuty Sabur, for AlalODulal.org

I am not able to concentrate for the past two days. It has been pouring since Thursday. The rain nor sun affects my mood that much, wind does… and there were gusts of wind coming in circles…potted plants at my office windowpane committed suicide twice; they were too fragile to withstand the wind. It was raining when I was returning from my office, creating speckles on car window. While I was staring blankly I just noticed a man holding a half dressed (skinned) chicken: its feathery wings are stained with blood, dripping from its half hacked head. I wanted to look away. All I saw was a bloody orange sun setting against grey hued sky, Korail slam kids were happily cruising in the rain in the foreground. So banal, so morbid, and yet so much of life out there; just like beloved director Rituparno’s films.

I am trying to figure out why I am so upset with the news of his demise. I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Rituparno Ghosh. Yes, I have watched most of his films, much like many others. I even thought Aishwariya in ‘rain coat’ was insufferable. His tendency of name-dropping and chasing the big cast of Bollywood confused me at times. And yet, I would wait for films like ‘Dohon’, ‘Unishe April’, ‘Titli’, ‘Utshob’, ‘Chokher Bali’, ‘Noukadubi’ and others. His early talk shows with all his nagging (nyakami) and intellectual showing off (Atlami) were bit off-putting, until I watched his encounter with Mir (comedian-host of Talk shows). I was awed by his careful articulation of his politics without losing his temper even after being mocked at. No one in Indian cinema would risk wearing his/her homosexual-transgendered identity on his/her sleeves, not with such grace. And that is when my fictional love-affair with Rituparno quietly started.

When I first saw ‘Piya tora kaisa abhiman’, I knew that he was my man. I may not like Aishwariya in ‘Raincoat’ but how can anyone forget those verses and splendid soundtracks woven meticulously with stories. Who can tell those tales of waiting, unspoken love, ‘abhiman’-whirlpool of emotions with such subtlety and elegance? For days I would be high on ‘apne nayan se neer bahaaye, apni jamuna khud aap hi banaave, lakh bar usme nahaye, pura na huyee asnan’ (I let my tear flow, made my own Jamuna, in that I bathed hundreds of thousands bath, yet my bathing remains incomplete). There was my man, overwhelming me with his creations one after another.

I had to wait till ‘Shob Charitra Kalponik’ to find my version of Rituparno. It is not very difficult to see the transition he made in this film. He set implosive characters for a journey to discover inner ‘selves’. His stories gravitated towards middle class exploring their discomfort, dissatisfaction, anguish, love, joys, and above all ‘Abhiman’ (how does one translate this emotion in any language other than Bangla?).He admired/critiqued them with love. Rai’s journey in ‘Shob Charitra Kalponik’ is an amazing tale of an individual ending up in a poet’s world by marriage, negotiating with the mundane. An epic end arrives with her husband’s sudden death when she was about to divorce him and live her life with Shekhar, their mutual friend. Poetry happens to her when the poet was long gone. She fell in love with the female protagonist of the poem, got mad when she realized that he stole everyone’s (even hers) mundane (which he estranged himself from) life to create his poems. She travels in his make-believe world.

Only Rituparno can make the trivial look so beautiful, a beautiful so banal. Only he possessed a feminine heart which is beyond any male director.

The opening Shongkho of film ‘Chitrangada’ and rehearsal shot blew me away; it sent a shiver through my spine. I choreographed and acted as ‘Chitrangada’ when I was 13. That is a strange age to be – with hormones running through one’s vein, the wrong parts of the body growing aimlessly. All of a sudden, one becomes aware of the world that she had never known before, or dared to venture. It is the age when one finally grasps that the world is divided into two parts – tangible and intangible. In that intangible world one starts to live one’s fictional lives, with unsaid words. It is the age when a girl constantly runs away from hands (visible and invisible), and touches (familiar and strangers’). This is the age one stops loving one’s body.

Like Rituparno, I made my wishes on falling stars and eye lashes. A teenager who was desperately trying to fit into a man’s world by becoming one in order to fight back sleazy men around…as a naive 13 year-old, I also thought of growing balls, metaphorically if not literally.

It was ‘Chitrangada’ the dance drama that made me critique Robi Thakur’s brand of beauty. I would wonder why it is ‘Chitrangada’, the emasculated feminine protagonist who had to worship cupid for her beauty. Where is her dignity as a person? Why is she eager to surrender her power to Arjun? And needless to say, I hated Arjun in the drama. I would imagine my co-dancers in skinned colored gymnasts’ costume, using body binders for female leads with minimal make up to shred every possible bit of glamour from the drama. While playing the character, I realized that in this world is mine, as much as it is of any man standing before or after me. All I needed to do was to embrace my femininity, be the person I wanted to be, and reclaim my space. I loved the fact that Rituporno introduced the film ‘Chitrangada’ as a tale of ‘wish’/‘desire’ to be. I was in tears while his journey was unfolding in Chitrangada – his desire to be a woman, breaking free from the body barrier and finally opting for sex reassignment surgeries. In that short time span he managed to drag me into his life, live it vicariously.

When he articulates, ‘he doesn’t dance with his body but he dances from within’ he engages with the dancer that I once was. When he asks, ‘what is permanent ma? The body that we believe is permanent that too can change.’ He poses a question that is beyond any logic of performitivity. In my mid-thirties we had the same journey together all over again, and all this while I was thinking if one becomes what s/he wants to become then what will be left to live! Who knew his crowning wish would be granted; and that there won’t be any track remaining to trail and he would return to where he belonged.

Seuty Sabur is Assistant Professor of Department of Economics and Social Sciences at BRAC University, Dhaka. She blogs on AlalODulal.org

Editor’s Note: “Mathura Nagar Pati Kahe Tum Gokul Jao” is a song from the film RAINCOAT, written by Rituparno Ghosh. It is in Braj Bhasha, closely related to Hindi, and means, “O King of Mathura, Why are you returning to Gokul (place of your childhood)” or Mathura-r nogor poti tumi keno Gokul-e pherot jao?” in Bengali. It refers to Krishna leaving his kingdom and going back to the simple roots of his childhood / birthplace.  A full translation is available at http://bansuri.wordpress.com/2007/03/03/mathura-nagarpati/. Thanks to Udayan Chattopadhyay for the note.