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Readings Reviews from Syed Badrul Ahsan

Reliving annus mirabilis

Syed Badrul Ahsan
NOT much of fiction is to be had on the Bangladesh Liberation War in the English language. Indeed, the paucity of works in English, and not just in fiction but in the realm of political history and biography as well, has been glaring. Where writers in India and Pakistan, or of Indian and Pakistani origin, have in the past couple of decades carved a special niche for themselves in the English-speaking world, those in Bangladesh have clearly fallen behind.
Given such unpalatable realities, it is quite cheering to have before you a work of fiction, based on the War of Liberation of course, in excellent English. The work comes from Masud Ahmed, who by way of profession is a senior civil servant. Obviously, in this bureaucrat there is that dash of the literary that, had he not been part of the bureaucracy, would have marked him out for a high perch in the world of subcontinental literature in English.
The 1971 war being a defining moment for all Bengalis, Masud Ahmed appears to be informing his audience of the critical role the conflict played in a formulation of the modern Bengali ethos. If before the initiation of genocide by the Pakistan army the Bengali was societally prone to intense bouts of poetry and music, in the course of the war he witnessed, despite himself, the rise of a revolutionary within his being. That is the unvarnished truth about the war. In this work, Ahmed brings together in brilliant parallelism the fictional and the political in his telling of the tale. But, again, one cannot really be a stranger to the story Ahmed weaves here. The reason is pretty simple: millions who experienced the horrors of 1971, as also the period preceding the sharp and swift breakdown of the state of Pakistan in what till the end of March was its eastern wing, certainly relate to the tale Ahmed now gives us.
And what does Masud Ahmed give
us? It all comes in a package of history as we have lived through it. The conspiracy forged by the military and politicians in West Pakistan, the rising militancy of the Bengalis under the undisputed leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the long months of agony under Pakistani military occupation and, eventually, the dawning of freedom. What comes through pretty much patently in the work is the homework the writer evidently did before he embarked on writing his story. Unlike so many other writers of historical fiction in Bangladesh, he has steadfastly maintained a record of the times, to a point where in the episodes when he highlights the army, he is clear about the details of the battalions and regiments his characters belong to.
There are all the images of inebriation among some of the leading actors in the story. It is not difficult to understand that the President here is the hardly-ever-sober Yahya Khan. And if you study the character of the Nabab, you could easily guess that the man is no other than the arch conspirator Bhutto. So what Ahmed does in this historical novel is present his story from two particular angles. In the first, he portrays the junta and its henchmen whose collusion have led to the crisis in Bangladesh. In the second, it is the people, in internal exile as well as waging guerrilla war against the occupation army, who come alive. The writer puts it in perspective:
"In spite of the daily possibilities of death, bullets and suffering, Asad never forgot a certain issue. Still he had never raised it so far because the purpose of coming here was to take training and fight the enemy. . .the scene, the air, the blue sky and the total environment took his mind to Tagore's unforgettable lyric
'O my Bengal of gold,
I love you
Forever your skies, your air
Set my heart in tune
As if it were a flute .. .'"
Read on. And live your annus mirabilis all over again.
SYED BADRUL AHSAN IS WITH THE DAILY STAR