BANGLADESH IN A GOLDEN AGE

BANGLADESH IN A GOLDEN AGE

by: Jose K. Priya

The Bangladesh-born British author Tahmima Anam’s debut novel, A Golden Age won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for a first book in 2008. Published by John Murray in 2007, it has since been translated into twenty two languages. Like Jahanara Imam’s novel “Of Blood and Fire’’ this novel also deals with the untold story of Bangladesh’s War of Independence. Though she was born years after the actual struggle, Tahmima draws heavily from the memoirs of her parents and relatives who were actively involved in it. A social anthropologist by training, her doctoral thesis at Harvard which takes a subaltern look at the history of the Bangladesh War of Independence was an interesting prelude to the novel. Often compared to her contemporary, the British writer of Bangladeshi  descent, Monica Ali, she is different in that she deals with Bangladeshis living in their cultural milieu while the latter deals with characters who are expatriates living in the West.

A Golden Age is not a tale of many. A widow, Rehana Haque and her children Sohail and Maya are the protagonists. The novel opens with Rehana at the tomb of her husband blaming herself for losing her children and concludes with Bangladeshis celebrating freedom from Pakistan singing “Amar shonar Bangla.  How I love you my golden Bengal.” As each chapter unfolds, personal struggle is transposed by collective struggle. Her next novel The Good Muslim, a sequel to the first one, too looks at the life of these characters in independent Bangladesh in the shadow of the war.

Partition created new boundaries and drove a wedge across the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan and East Pakistan were stuck on two sides of India. This paper is an attempt to look at Anam’s   portrayal of how East Pakistan severed all ties with the mother country and emerged as an independent nation, Bangladesh, with a new identity and how as a language Bengali contributed to this process.

The first chapter of the novel titled “March 1971” begins with the protagonist Rehana Haque throwing a party to celebrate her triumphant return to Dhaka with her children Sohail and Maya. She had to give them up to her childless brother in law, Faiz and his wife after her husband’s death as a judge had ruled that “being a widow- No fate worse for a woman”(Anam178) she was incapable of taking care of them. She then builds another house named ‘Shona’, rents it out and armed with the money to bribe the judge she gets an order in her favour and gets her children back. Since then, they had been living “ordinary, unexceptional lives” (Anam 50) but it changes forever on that fateful day, 25 march 1971. Sohail is in love with Silvi, the daughter of their neighbour, Mrs. Chowdhury. She is to be engaged to a Pakistan army officer Sabeer Musthafa on that day and the neighbours are gathered at Mrs Chowdhury’s house for a small dinner to celebrate the event. But they realize that “a war had come to find them” (Anam 65) and the hysterical Mrs. Chowdhury insists that Sabeer  marry her daughter immediately and the marriage takes place with Rehana reciting the marriage verses from memory as the lights go out at precisely the same moment .Sohail has to act as a witness while on the table “Mrs Chowdhury’s lamb roast was a half eaten corpse with naked ribs and a picked over leg. The tomato was gone but the mouth was still open.”( Anam 56)

The following days witness a lot of changes in their lives. Sohail, a pacifist joins the resistance. Born in Calcutta Rehana had come to Dhaka after her marriage to Iqbal. Her sisters were living in Karachi. Now that Pakistan is at war with Bangladesh (East Pakistan) she finds her allegiance to the country questioned by her own daughter Maya who blurts out that Sohail must have been killed by one of ‘‘your’’ Pak soldiers (Anam 89).

Rehana who has a ‘diasporic identity’ shares an emotional connection with the old country. She had ambiguous feelings about the country she had adopted. She spoke, with fluency, the Urdu of the enemy. She was unable to pretend, as she saw so many others doing, that she could replace the mixed tongue with a pure Bengali one, so that the Muslim salutation

As-Salaam Alaikum was replaced by the neutral Adaab, or even Namoshkar, the Hindu greeting. Rehana’s tongue was too confused for these changes. She could not give up her love of Urdu, its lyrical lilts, its double meanings, its furrowed beat. (Anam 47)

“To prove that she belonged” (Anam 92) Rehana takes the saris that Iqbal had presented to her in the eight  years of their marriage and sews blankets out of them for the fighters and the refugees. Her house “Shona” is used as a guerilla hideout and she even nurses an injured Major back to health. They plant guns under her rosebushes. Her brother-in-law Faiz and wife Parveen come to Dhaka to “rid the nation of its dirty elements” (Anam 106).

Two nations are at loggerheads here and two languages are too. The Karachi- Dhaka, Urdu - Bengali conflict shows how language works as a tool of nationalism. Languages are the core makers of ethnic and national identity. Language is a secret territory shared with like minds, a refuge impenetrable by outsiders-an ideal weapon for resisting an invasive culture. But greater bonds than borders and language bind Rehana to those around her and by her actions she proves herself to be a true nationalist. Rehana soon finds the language which is so close to her heart aggressive when she goes to the meat market and the butcher talks to her in Urdu.

“How are you, madam?” he asked in Urdu, and saw her start . . . . Rehana realized how strange the language suddenly sounded: aggressive, insinuating. She saw now that it was the language of her enemy, . . .she tried to feel something else, some tenderness for her poets, . . . Rehana could see that he was afraid of her, and she was pleased, and then ashamed to be pleased . . . . ( Anam 119-120)

Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized says:

the difference between native language and cultural language is not peculiar to the colonized, but colonial bilingualism cannot be compared to just any linguistic dualism. Possession of two languages is not merely a matter of having two tools, but actually means participation in two psychical and cultural realms. Here, the two words symbolized and conveyed by the two tongues are in conflict; they are those of the colonizer and the colonized.

Furthermore, the colonized’s mother tongue, that which is sustained by his feelings, emotions and dreams, that in which his tenderness and wonder are expressed, and that which holds the greatest emotional impact, is precisely the one which is least valued. . . . In short, colonial bilingualism is neither a purely bilingual situation in which an indigenous tongue coexists with a purist’s language, nor a simple polyglot richness benefiting from an extra but relatively neuter alphabet: it is a linguistic drama. (107-108)

We find this linguistic drama unfolding when Language comes to her rescue and identifies her Pakistani roots when she speaks perfect Urdu to Col. Jabeen who has come to arrest Sohail. In order to know his whereabouts he threatens to hand over Maya to the waiting soldiers. Rehana gains valuable time when the colonel’s attention is captured by the perfect Urdu that she speaks and they capture the major mistaking him for Sohail. (Anam 260)

In his Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean Paul Sartre talks about how the mother country’s soldiers overseas may decide that the natives are not their fellow men because it is a crime to enslave, rob or kill one’s fellow men. The inhabitants of the annexed country are reduced to the level of monkeys so that they can be treated as beasts of burden. The natives are dehumanized and their traditions, language and culture are wiped out.We find this phenomenon taking place in the novel when during the time of the curfew, soldiers blare out from their microphones “Bengalis take down your flags . . . . you bastard traitors” (Anam 61).

Maya goes to Calcutta when she gets  news that her friend Sharmeen has been raped and killed by the Pakistan army, by Tikka Khan’s soldiers. War finds Mrs. Chowdhury when Sabeer is captured by the army.  Sohail requests his mother to get him released using Faiz’s influence. Rehana has dinner with Faiz and Parveen, hides her true feelings and manages to convince him to release Sabeer.  On the day of his release Faiz  becomes aware of her treachery when he comes across an article in the paper written by Maya. Now it is up to Rehana to secure his  release  as Faiz refuses to have anything more to do with them. The order for his release has already been issued. So Rehana goes alone and after many hardships manages to get Sabeer out from the prison. She confesses the dark secret in her life to the Major, viz., that she had stolen from a blind old man his dead wife’s ornaments and that “Shona” (gold) had been built with that money. She attains freedom from that guilt and rediscovers herself as a woman in the company of Major. The day the war comes to an end she goes to Iqbal’s grave to give him an account of her life in those difficult times.

Anam exercises a lot of control while describing the innumerable casualties of war. She never goes into the gory details but the readers are made aware of what has taken place. Sharmeen raped and killed by Tikka Khan’s soldiers, Supriya Sen Gupta separated from her missing family and discovered in the refugee camp, Sabeer appeared a red tipped bird whose his nails have all been pulled.  These and similar descriptions are pointers to the horror and trauma.

It is interesting to remember that UNESCO declared 21 February as the International Day of the Mother Tongue because of the efforts of Bangladesh.  When the Governor General of  independent  Pakistan Mohammed Ali Jinnah declared Urdu as the sole official language of the country the people of East Pakistan embarked on an agitation for the right to their mother tongue, Bengali. The government countered their move by outlawing all protests, but the movement gathered momentum and strengthened the Bengali sense of identity. It was the forerunner of the country’s movement for independence. On 21 Feb 1952 the police opened fire on a group of students who were on a protest march inside the Dhaka University campus. It is in memory of that 21 February that Bangladesh moved a resolution in the UN for an International Day of the Mother Tongue and carried it through. We find an echo of this incident in this novel too.

A Golden Age is a story of hope, revolution and unexpected heroism set against the backdrop of Bangladesh war of independence. A story of domestic loss is woven into the narrative of civil war and the writer deftly balances the story of a nation against that of a family.

Teresian Journal of English Studies - Vol. 3, No. 1 - October 2011 105

Works Cited

Anam, Tahmima. A Golden Age. Great Britain:  John Murray, 2007. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Print.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized.  4 rev Ed.U.K: Earthscan Ltd, 2003. Print.