Arts & Letters 15D

TSATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2016

My love affair with Bengali short stories16

Not fractional anymore

17Shakespeare celebration & book review

18INSIDE Send your submissions to:anl@dhakatribune.com

Rabindranath Tagore remained the only widely translated author of Bangla

literature and it was so for a century. Although big names such as Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, Ketaki Kushari Dyson and Kalpana Bardhan translated a few works of some other major writers, their translations could not, or perhaps were not intended to, touch the readership beyond the academia.

That trend, however, has started to change thanks to a new breed of translators who have injected new vigour and life into the translation of both classic and contemporary Bangali authors. This issue of Arts & Letters features one such translator and some excerpts from the introduction to one of his recent

translations of Bangla short stories.There is also a review of April,

a non-fiction book, written by two emerging writers.

Literary organisations and English departments at universities across the country will celebrate Shakespeare’s 400th death anniversary through programmes and conferences. This issue covers an interesting event that paid homage to the great poet and playwright through a cultural programme and a conference.

Non-fiction has been one of the main areas of our interest. On the occasion of English Language Day, it seems quite fitting that a young Bangladeshi writer explores his difficulties with English as well as his mother tongue.

EDITOR'S NOTE

That trend, however, has started to change thanks to a new breed of translators who have injected new vigour and life into the translation of both classic and contemporary Bangali authors

Arts & Letters16DT

SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2016

NON-FICTION

My love affair with Bengali short storiesA new anthology makes the reckless claim of representing the ‘greatest stories’ in the language

nArunava Sinha

One winter evening in Calcutta, when I was ten, we ran out of food in our third floor flat. It

was a freak concatenation of cir-cumstances, not poverty, that led to our predicament, but the fact remained that we had nothing to eat and no money to buy food. And so, to stave off my hunger pangs by distracting me, my mother decided to perform a heroic task. She read me a short story, one of her favour-ites.

My mother loved reading, but not aloud. She did not care for the drama that it involved. A short sto-ry, to her, was almost like a guilty secret, something she hugged to herself. She would consume these delicacies at a single sitting, unlike novels that stretched out intermi-nably. Naturally, these were Ben-gali short stories. It was the 1970s, Bengali literature was in its heyday – as it had been for some forty years – and who needed fiction in anoth-er tongue?

She began reading out loud a story of an ox and its misera-ble owner. As she read, her voice broke, though to my young ears the pathos seemed entirely unnec-essary, for I was much more inter-ested in the fate of the animal than of its human owner. But as she continued with the tale something extraordinary began to take place – I wasn’t so much listening to the

words as I was seeing and hearing all that was going on. I was right there in the very scene that was being described, not as an invisible observer, but as someone who was part of the story.

To this day, I cannot make a sto-ry my own unless it places me right in the middle of the action. And no novel can do this, for there is too much reflection, thought, shift of perspective, and other “distrac-tions”. But a short story, ah, now that’s one breathless ride. And so it was that night, when I even forgot to be hungry.

But when the fate of the beast was known, I felt the urge to repay my mother for her act of sacrifice. So I plundered the cache of coins I had saved up. All of them were foreign, except for two commemo-rative Indian coins, one for a rupee and the other for ten rupees. Those denominations were only availa-ble as paper currency at the time, which made the coins collectors’ items. But no matter, it was mon-ey well spent. I wanted my mother to get her favourite Chinese meal from the restaurant next door – chicken asparagus soup and prawn chowmein.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––From that night onwards, the Ben-gali short story has been my com-panion in grief and in joy. Take, for example, that glorious English summer day when I sat by a stream running through leaf and fern, almost certainly about to make

a sudden sally. On that day, on a university campus in Norwich, in weather as magnificent as a human being can expect, I was in great hu-mour and it was in that mood that I read one of the stories that feature in this collection: a story about a man who was quaking in fear at the prospect of an encounter with his son-in-law.

Or, to mention another time that a Bengali short story loomed large in my life, one evening, I was crouched beneath a desk to shut myself off from the world, loaded down with a despair whose origin I simply could not trace. In my hand was a copy of a tattered “little magazine” from Calcutta in which there was a story about a mother who refused to acknowledge that her Naxal son had died. My own sorrow was forgotten as I plunged into hers.

Only at the end of the story did I recollect an episode from my teenage years when I had gone to inspect a row of bodies gunned down by the police to check wheth-er a relative was among them. (He wasn’t.) So it is that I have my per-sonal story to go with every story in this collection.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––I am no scholar of Bengali litera-ture, but I have had a passionate relationship with it for some forty years now. That passion has giv-en me the courage, after all these years, to put together a selection of Bengali stories that I consider

among the greatest ever published.I must make clear though that

this is not a selection based on lit-erary eras, canons, trends, or any other form of critical sieving. Nor is it meant to be a representative cross section of the Bengali short story. These are, simply, stories I have loved and that have made a deep impression on me.

Somewhat fortuitously – I wish I could claim that it is by design, but, frankly, it’s not – the stories here collectively show the rich variety to be found in Bengali literature, in terms of form, voice, setting, and subject. In all of them, though, I find one particular quality that haunts the characters, and me.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––For all the stories in my mother tongue I’ve read ever since that day in my childhood when I was disabused of the notion that Bud-dhadeva Bose and the Buddha were the same person, I had only a fleeting notion of how the form came to be. It was not even emo-tionally wrenching when my un-cle, something of an unsung poet, informed me that Rabindranath Tagore was not in fact the inventor of the short story.

He did, however, assure me that the Bengali short story did not evolve slowly from a primordi-al swamp, but sprang up, more or less fully formed, around the same time as its counterparts in other languages around the globe. The first short stories in the language

I am no scholar of Bengali literature, but I have had a passionate relationship with it for some forty years now. That passion has given me the courage, after all these years, to put together a selection of Bengali stories that I consider among the greatest ever published

Arts & Letters 17D

TSATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2016

ENGLISH LANGUAGE DAYNON-FICTION

Not fractional anymoreThe world today observes English Language Day. To mark the occasion, we carry a non-fiction that offers an interesting take on English language in Bangladesh

nAzfarul Islam

A fractious thing, the English language is. To some it is utterly splendid, a barely–contained cornucopia of

possibilities, mutable through the ages, waiting in jitters for the next evolution with man and machine alike, vying for the pen. To others, it is mere-ly fractional, cobbled together with the mother language of choice in colourful, continuous cadence. And as for the remaining camps, menopausal minds flitter between anathema and ambiva-lence. And yet, you slyly wonder, could it merely be factional? Aren’t you, I, he, she, they and all the other pronouns -- aren’t they all there somewhere in that amorphous spectrum?

Imagine establishing the dendritic foundations of a language and losing the environment to develop your par-lance, especially that of the concrete variety. Instead, you find yourself out of place (and in a way, out of time) balancing an excess of one with another that just happens to be your mother tongue. For me, the English language was a cuckoo left behind in a comfortable nest, viciously eyeing the

feeble tweets of my fledgling Bengali and wondering. Just, wondering. And perhaps even plotting.

Moving from the UK to Bangladesh was an abject lesson in identity, with the brunt of that battle being fought on the planes of language. At first, it was a necessity. In an “English medium” school – a phrase that bemuses me to this day – there was a need to not only learn Bengali, but to achieve a form of academic acceptance. Suffice to say, my achievements were best hidden in a web of tall tales and perpetually deferred confrontations. Up to a point. Once the game was up, teachers were involved and parents were invoked, and I was at the epicentre of a churning storm. Hands were wrung and threats were made. I was shipped off, not to boarding school as initially threatened but, to the ubiquitous mainstay of Asian education home and abroad.

Going to a tutor was an utter embarrassment. A quiet rebellion took shape in the form of my cousin’s library of (English) novels and comics which I voraciously consumed. For every news-paper article I fumed through, I simply devoured a handful of children’s fiction. Despite my best efforts, competence

was achieved slowly, and when it came to moving schools (to a “proper English medium school” this time – the im-propriety of the previous school being tied up in things that only Adults with Their Problems understood and a tale for another day), I passed muster. The results were as such: English language, “excellent”; Mathematics, serviceable but strange (yes, British schools still suffer from this aspect); and Bengali: the dreaded “needs improvement” but acceptable. Finally, a tiny coup for academic acceptance!

The next few years passed with certain teething pains. For starters, remedial Bengali was the order of the day for a few fellow interlopers. It provided one with less training wheel than the tutor, and was sufficient to see me through to the next stage of school. However, this time, there was no hand-holding. Not being versed in teenage Bengali, I should ideally have remained a silent observer. Unfortu-nately, that has never been a strong point of mine. Painful as the utter-ance of each inanity was, it ended up compounded in a form of acceptance (notice the thinly-veiled repetition) and more likely, pity. A friend in particular helped me immensely and with great patience. Ultimately, there was one last hurdle: my Bengali O-level examina-tion. By then I had had cards flashed, vocabulary listed, difficult topics essayed and even a few good books delicately thumbed to the end. When confronted with the final villain taken shape as a free-form essay, I wanted to end things with a sense of irony (a trait in my writing that caused ceaseless consternation to my, yes, you guessed it, English language teacher). I decided to replicate, wholesale, the very same essay I had written during my school entrance exams almost a decade ago. The question is: had I really improved in those intervening years?

But goodness gracious me, look at the time as you are thrust – somewhat unceremoniously – into the future-of-then, the present-of-now. Confused, you must wonder if this story comes approxi-mately two months late. Not so. Through my struggles, I discovered a romanticism and richness, a verve and vision, that I would never be able to realise in Bengali. With the greatest respect to my mother tongue, I had stopped the childish rebellion and simply decided to embrace the cuckoo: this particular cuckoo which perceived that its neighbour helped define it in a way it had never expected. And it still does to this day. l

Azfarul Islam is a writer.

– which were probably the first in India as well – were not gritty slice of life accounts, nor did they reflect the reality of Bengal or the world in any meaningful way.

It was, in fact, only with the ar-rival of Tagore – he wrote almost till his death in 1941 – that the Bengali short story became a representa-tion of real life. Redolent with the lyricism of his poetry, the Versatile One looked as much at the inner lives and psychology of his char-acters as at their circumstances, relationships, and positions within the complex matrix of class, caste, religion and gender.

With Tagore’s shadow always looming large over his contem-poraries, it needed Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s rare combination of sharp societal observation and high emotional quotient to give the short story a new form. He brought his readers much closer to the people and situations he wrote about than Tagore did, even as he attacked orthodoxy and hypocrisy.

Two strands joined the Benga-li short story after this. From the Bandhyopadhyays – Bibhutibhu-shan and Tarashankar – came stud-ies of ordinary people, from both villages and cities, though each of them wrote in his own distinctive style. And other Bengali writers, living and writing as they did in an environment of relatively en-lightened education and ideas, responded not just to their home but also to the world. The anxie-ties of the World Wars, the freedom movement, and oppression of the downtrodden turned Bengali short stories into bundles of discontent, disillusion, anger and irony.

Gradually, short story writers turned their lens inward. They focused a merciless gaze on the flaws, inconsistencies and de-sires of individuals. As urban lives shrank into smaller physical, men-tal and emotional spaces, the short story became a powerful means of capturing the innate opposition between a degradation of circum-stances and the potential for hu-man greatness. From Satyajit Ray to Nabarun Bhattacharya, from Sunil Gangopadhyay to Sandipan Chattopadhyay, they narrowed the width of the canvas and dived deeper into the darkness of the mind and heart.

But even as this was taking place, other writers continued to create on a larger canvas, con-structing narratives laced with heightened political, social and gender consciousness and ideolo-gy. They adopted techniques like unreliable perspectives, authorial intervention, breathless mono-logues, narrators-as-characters, and other evolving forms of sto-rytelling. In the hands of power-ful writers and craftspersons like Buddhadeva Bose, Premendra Mitra, Ramapada Chowdhury, Ma-hasweta Devi, Ritwik Ghatak, and,

always, Ashapurna Debi, the Ben-gali short story became something of a panoramic marvel, spanning worlds without number.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––And so, welcome to an anthology of my personal love affairs. Like the one, for instance, from the day of my university convocation, when I was meant to be collecting my graduation degree. But I wasn’t present at the ceremony. Instead, I was knocking – my heart ham-mering louder than the sound of knuckles on wood – on the door of the master moviemaker who also wrote the most unusual short sto-ries. I had translated one of them, and this was the day he was going to pronounce judgement on the translation. What graduation de-gree could have been worth the thirteen minutes he spent with me, making three suggestions, offering his illustrations, and then showing me out?

Or, I could go back much further, to the day when I was perched in the crook of the friendly branches of the guava tree in my grand-un-cle’s yard, stealthily reading the short stories of the robed and bearded great-uncle of Bengali lit-erature, not willing to give my offi-cious elders the joy of knowing that I was enjoying them immensely.

As I eavesdropped on a little girl and her peddler friend from Afghanistan, there was the crack of a gunshot and the palpably hot whoosh of what turned out to be a bullet from an air rifle whizzing past my earlobe. My slightly short-sighted grand-uncle had mistaken me for a local urchin out to steal fruit, and let go with his weapon. This particular collection of short stories might not have come into being had his eyesight been better.

I was born and brought up in Bengal. My cultural, intellectual and emotional compasses were all set to their true north in Ben-gal. This collection is my personal statement of gratitude to the land which has given me a literature (of which the short story is the most important part) that has given me my life as a translator. Dhonny-obaad. l

[From the Introduction to The Great-est Bengali Stories Ever Told, select-ed and translated by Arunava Sinha, Aleph Book Company]

This is a truncated version of ex-cerpts that first appeared in Scroll.in. See Dhaka Tribune online for the fuller version.

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern, and contemporary Bengali fiction, non-fiction, and poetry from India and Bangladesh into English. More than thirty of his translations have been published so far in India, the UK, and the United States.

The month that bridges mindsBLB’s (Bengal Lights Books) first non-fiction title has hit the English writing scene. The voices in it are fresh, the perspective it brings is newnNiaz Alam

“April is the cruelest month”So begins The Waste Land, TS

Eliot’s famous early 20th century poem, as it draws the reader into a long philosophical meditation on spring and renewal, before it ends with the sublime Sanskrit procla-mation “Shantih, shantih, shan-tih.”

I was reminded of Eliot’s famed lines while reading April, a new non-fiction book written by Tulip Chowdhury and Andrew Eagle, and published by Bengal Lights Books. Their writing takes as its form a shared diary chronicling their lives at different ends of the earth during the month of April in 2015.

While Eliot’s work took years to complete and appears heavily influenced by his experience of de-pression, Chowdhury and Eagle’s book was born out of a fortuitous Facebook connection, and a shared desire to reach out to others and live life to the fullest.

Like all the best ideas, the beau-ty of their collaboration lies in its simplicity. Andrew is an Austral-ian-born writer based in Dhaka; he has been “adopted” as family by the people of Hatiya island in Noakhali. Tulip is a Bangladeshi writer whom circumstance and children have taken to live a new life in Massachusetts, US.

It seemed natural then for the pair to pool their thoughts online over their chosen month.

The way chapters and entries are organised chooses itself. Each writ-er pens one entry every other day and the pair then share thoughts via Facebook catch-ups, extracts from which intersperse the book’s daily entries.

What emerges out of this swift-ly formed online partnership is a work that transcends the time and place in which they write. April has a timeless quality that appeals far beyond its locus and contains more universal truths than its simple for-mat might at first glance suggest.

Hence on April 14, it falls on Tulip residing in Amhurst to remi-nisce about Pohela Boishakh cele-brations. At one point, she wonders how Andrew is enjoying the cele-brations in Dhaka. What thus start-ed as a “write it and see” experi-ment pays enjoyable dividends as the writers comment on each oth-er’s previous entries and take care to answer the mutual questions that arise as the month progresses.

Like ripples combining from two stones thrown in a pond, the sum ends up pleasingly being greater than its parts. It will not be an exaggeration to say, howev-er, the book’s best feature lies less in the undoubted quality and flow of their writing and more in the considerable life experience and

insight the authors bring to their diary entries.

Both authors, while very differ-ent in background, are well-traveled and share common experience of living and teaching in Bangladesh. Tulip’s childhood with vivid memo-ries of life in Yugoslavia and of being a schoolgirl in the erstwhile West Pakistan secretly fleeing to newly liberated Bangladesh, adds depth to her recollections of Bangladeshi culture and life as she adjusts to the cold winters of New England.

As an Australian who has cho-sen Bangladesh as his home, An-drew naturally feels the need to explain how and why he shares Tu-lip’s deep longing for Bangladesh. “If I wanted to meet Australians I would have stayed in Sydney,” he says succinctly. His is the more un-usual migration and he doesn’t shy away from talking about it.

Long before he remarks on “fresh off the plane” conversations overheard in Gulshan and reflects on his sojourns in Ukraine and Nicaragua, the reader knows he has immersed himself in the life of ordinary people in Bangladesh far more fully than most people who read his newspaper columns.

His Bangladesh is a land of en-counters on long countryside bus journeys, at mosquito ridden hos-tels, with apartment gatekeepers, or during grocery shopping in Dha-ka.

With his connections to Hatiya bringing regular gossip and visi-tors, his diary entries are replete with descriptions of local dialects and accents.

It makes for a valuable addition to the canon of non-fiction Eng-lish language writings by Western-ers about Bangladesh. Take away those largely about 1971, short travel stays or NGOs, and it is a tiny selection overly dominated by pol-itics and the lives of elites.

Like the English journalist Jer-

emy Seabrook in Freedom Unfin-ished (2001) and Betsy Hartmann and James Boyce’s seminal de-scriptions of village poverty in A Quiet violence (1983), he writes with genuine appreciation of life as it is lived by ordinary Bangladeshis. His deeper roots in the Bangladeshi society make his descriptions more compelling not least because they are so contemporary.

For her part, though hers is a not so uncommon migration, Tulip complements Andrews thoughts well. She clearly shares Andrew’s enthusiasm for the ‘’small things’’ in life, as we learn of her investi-gations into New England dance classes and how she helped out people in Mexican restaurants.

April is a rewarding read. It is short enough to inspire readers to stay up late and start their own diaries, profound enough for writ-ers to linger over their thoughts on everyday life and reverberate them in the mind.

In an age of globalisation, there must be a lot more opportunities for books like April, which publish-ers would do well to seek out. April is certainly an idea whose time has come. l

Niaz Alam has worked on ethical business issues since 1992 and is a former vice-chair of War on Want. He is Chief Editorial Writer at the Dhaka Tribune.

AprilBengal Lights BooksPublished April 2016

Page: 230Price: BDT 800

Arts & Letters18DT

SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2016

SHAKESPEARE CELEBRATION

BOOK REVIEW

2nd inter-university cultural competition at ULAB

nArts & Letters Desk

Jahangirnagar University won the best student paper award while East West University and North South University

jointly bagged the best cultural perfor-mance award in the 2nd Inter-Univer-sity Students’ Conference and Cultural Competition on Thursday.

The department of English at

University Of Liberal Arts Bangladesh organised the daylong programme to mark the 400th death anniversary of the British playwright and poet William Shakespeare. This year’s theme was

“Shakespeare: Then and Now.” Ten public and private universities

-- Dhaka University, EWU, Independent University Bangladesh, BRAC Univer-sity, NSU, JU, Stamford University, Daffodil University, Southeast Universi-ty and ULAB participated in the paper presentation session. Professor Nurul Islam and Professor Shaheen Kabir, dis-tinguished academics, were the judges in this session.

Nusrat Tajkia, a student of JU, won the competition for her paper “Re-in-vention of Shakespeare: The Doctor, the Witches and Words.” Sabah Tasnia Rowshon and Upoma Sanyal of East West University won the first runner-up prize while Tani Deepavali Newaz of ULAB won the second runner-up prize.

Six universities took part in the cultural competition. Renowned actress Sara Zaker and writer-columnist Rubana Huq were the judges in this session which was held in the evening. East West University and North South University jointly received the award

for the best cultural performance.George Mesthos, cultural affairs

officer at The American Center, Dhaka, attended the opening ceremony as special guest. In his address, he said research “constitutes the foundation of human activities.”

Barbara Wickham, country director of British Council Bangladesh was present as chief guest. She attended the closing ceremony and handed over the awards. She said she was amazed to see Bangladesh join 140 other countries that are simultaneously celebrating William Shakespeare’s legacy. She deeply appreciated ULAB for organising the programme, bringing together a cluster of public and private universities.

Imran Rahman, the ULAB vice chan-cellor; Kaiser Haq, departmental head of English at ULAB, also an eminent Bangladeshi poet; Shamsad Mortu-za, adjunct professor and advisor of English at ULAB, among others, were present at the programme. l

A student performing in a Shakespeare play PHOTO COURTESY: ULAB