Bangladeshi literature in English: A thrice born tradition

The use of the phrase “thrice-born” in the title of this introduction to a Special Focus on Bangladeshi literature in English has connotations of uneasy or interrupted beginnings. Perhaps we should start by clarifying that “thrice-born” here bears no relation to the Sanskrit word dvija or “twice-born” or the title of Meenakshi Mukherjee’s (1971) book on Indian English novels, The Twice Born Fiction. Dvija is used in the Hindu social system to refer to the elitism and privilege of the three upper castes: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. Mukherjee uses the term “twice born” to explain the derivative and hybrid nature of Indian English fiction, in which Indian tropes, thoughts, and dialogues are “translated” into the colonizer’s speech. In contrast, we have used the expression “thrice born” to suggest the evolutionary nature of Bangladeshi anglophone literature: that it has developed through three historical phases, during which the geographical territory that now constitutes Bangladesh has gone through several political rebirths and renamings: Bengal/East Bengal (1905–11),¹ East Pakistan (1947–71), and Bangladesh (1971–). To put it differently, although Bangladesh is a relatively new country, to gain a holistic picture of how the anglophone literary tradition has developed in this geographical space, one needs to look back to its beginnings during the British colonial period, take stock of English writings during the Pakistani phase, and, finally, investigate the state of the tradition and its challenges and achievements, especially after the country’s attainment of self-rule in 1971. This will help establish the nature of cultural continuity in a land that has gone through a political whirlwind since the colonial era and been subjected to changes of political identity on multiple occasions.

English writing in British colonial (East) Bengal

English, as we know, is an imported tongue brought to the subcontinent by English people in the late 16th century. The first Englishman to set foot in India was the Jesuit Father Thomas Stephens (1549–1619), who arrived in 1578 to escape “religious persecution in Elizabethan England” (Dharwadker 2003, 202). However, the first Englishman to travel through Bengal, especially East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), and write about his experiences was Ralph Fitch (1550–1611), who came to India in 1583 as one of a team of four people aiming to secure trading concessions from the Mughal Emperor Jalaluddin Akbar (Dharwadker 2003, 203–204).

From there on, the language continued to expand and spread, slowly but steadily, as more and more English traders arrived in that part of the world, mainly to work for the East India Company, founded in 1600. The situation changed radically in 1660 when Charles II empowered the East India Company to run its affairs in the subcontinent like a “virtual state” (Dharwadker 2003, 207). Two other historical events that further consolidated the position of the English language and helped its dispersion through the local communities were Robert Clive’s victory over the then Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and the introduction of the English Education Act of 1835. These events effectively ensured the future of English, to quote Salman Rushdie (1997), as “a naturalised sub-continental language”, much like Urdu before it (xi). By the end of the 19th century, Indians and Bengalis who had been exposed for over two centuries to the language and its associated culture through employment, interracial marriages, personal friendships, and religious conversion by missionaries were adequately confident and competent to transmit their imagination in this transplanted medium.

The first Indian to use English as a mode of creative expression was Din Muhammad, or Sake Dean Mahomed (1759–1851), a Bengali Muslim from the Patna region of Odisha, then part of British Bengal. He published his travelogue, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, in 1794 in Cork, Ireland, encouraged by his Irish wife, Jane Daly. This marked the beginning of a counter-discourse on India, contesting its British representations inaugurated by Fitch’s travel account that first appeared in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation in 1599 (Dharwadker 2003, 204). Muhammad’s solo effort in expatriation was followed by the emergence of a host of writers on home soil: Raja Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), Henry Derozio (1809–31), Kashiprosad Ghose (1809–73), Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–59), Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1827–73), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–94), Toru Dutt (1856–77), Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932). They were all Bengalis based in Calcutta (now Kolkata), as it was customary for wealthy, educated Bengalis, Hindu or Muslim, to settle in the city, which was then the capital of British India and heartland of the region’s commerce and culture.

However, from the above list, we know that Madhusudan Dutt and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain were originally from places that now belong to Bangladesh: Dutt from Jessore district and Hossain from Rangpur. Another writer in English, Humayun Kabir (1906–69), was from the Faridpur district of present-day Bangladesh. Therefore, it would not be too far-fetched to retrospectively claim these three writers as the pioneers of Bangladeshi anglophone literature.

Born in a rural area, Dutt moved at the age of eight to Calcutta, where his father was a prominent lawyer. He learnt Bangla, Sanskrit, and Persian in childhood and acquired English, Latin, and Hebrew at school. At 17, Dutt took up writing English poems and dreamed of travelling to England. In 1843, he converted to Christianity against his family’s wishes, christened himself Michael, moved to Madras, and married a Scottish woman, Rebecca McTavish. He published his only book in English, a collection of three long poems, The Captive Lady, in 1849. In 1858, Dutt married a Frenchwoman, Henrietta, which proved to be a turning point in his career, as his new wife, “deeply enamoured of Bengal and the Bangla language” (Dharwadker 2003, 228), encouraged him to return to Bangla. Dutt made the transition in 1859, condemning his anglophone counterparts as “[s]warthy Macaulays and Carlyles and Thackerays” (Haq 2015, 4), and became one of the most celebrated writers in modern Bengali literature, comparable to Tagore and the national poet of Bangladesh, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976).

Rokeya Hossain was the first anglophone Muslim writer in Bengal and Bangladesh. Her famous feminist utopian satire, “Sultana’s Dream”, in which she created a Ladyland, turning the Indian androcentric world upside down by putting women at the helm of the state and relegating men to the inner quarters of the home, was published in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1905. She wrote two other essays – “God Gives, Man Robs” and “Educational Ideals for the Modern Indian Girls” – and several letters in English. It is extraordinary that Hossain, who had no formal education in childhood and was forbidden by her dogmatic father from learning the “un-Islamic” languages of English and Bangla, became one of the pioneering writers in the English language.

Humayan Kabir was the youngest Bengali Bangladeshi anglophone writer of the colonial period. He was a brilliant student who obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from Calcutta University with first class and then moved to Oxford for further studies. Kabir was actively involved in the Oxford Union and was elected its secretary in 1930 and librarian in 1931. His first collection of English poetry, Poems, came out in 1932, and his novel, Men and Rivers, in 1945.

The anglophone tradition during the (East) Pakistan period

The paucity of Muslim names in the above list of anglophone writers indicates the negative attitude of Muslims, vis-à-vis Hindus, towards English at the time. The Muslim response to British rule and the English language differed radically from that of its Brahmo and Hindu counterparts. After their loss of power to the British, and particularly the replacement of Persian with English as India’s official language in 1837, the Indian Muslim community became insular and indifferent to all affairs of the state. They saw the use of English as tantamount to a form of collaboration with the British rule that had replaced the Mughals. However, Hindus perceived British victory as “a deliverance [from] Muslim tyranny” (Chakraborty 2011, 76) and readily accepted English as a means of subduing their “inferior dissolute other” (77), the Muslims.

After the partition of 1947, the Pakistani regime sought to rectify this situation and adopt a more pragmatic view of English. It felt that there was more to benefit from retaining than rejecting the language, as sacrificing English might bring some temporary cultural victory but would involve relinquishing the many kinds of modern knowledge in science, technology, philosophy, and literature that came with it. Besides, given the country’s linguistic ecology, in which all its provinces have their regional languages, such as Bangla, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Baluchi, English could act as a conduit among this diverse population and help in bringing the nation together. Moreover, the local languages would benefit from interactions with English, as languages do when allowed to coexist in a benign contact zone. With such constructive views in mind, English was retained as one of Pakistan’s official languages and used in different spheres of everyday life such as education and administration.

This changing scenario created a wholesome environment for English and aspiring writers in the language. However, to sort out the linguistic gap between the different provinces and ethnicities and enhance national unity and harmony, the Pakistani authorities adopted another policy move, which threatened not only the future of English, especially in East Pakistan, but also the very existence of the federation. At a public rally at Ramna Race Course (Suhrawardy Udyan) in Dhaka on March 21, 1948, the founder and then Governor-General of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, unequivocally declared Urdu the only state language of Pakistan, a view he reiterated at a gathering of students at the University of Dhaka on March 24, 1948. This created an outcry among the Bengalis of East Pakistan. The ruling elites of West Pakistan thought that Bengalis in East Pakistan would accept Urdu as the nation’s lingua franca as it was putatively symbolic of Muslim culture, in a manner similar to Sanskrit in Hindu culture. However, East Pakistani Bengalis could not fathom why they would have to sacrifice their mother tongue for an alien language, given that they formed the country’s majority population. This fuelled enough anger and resentment among East Pakistanis to start a language movement (Bhasha Andolon) that gathered further steam after the killing of several students by the police at a political rally in Dhaka on February 21, 1952² and eventually led to the dissolution of Pakistan and the formation of the new nation state of Bangladesh in 1971.

This movement, although directed against Urdu, made the people of East Pakistan so parochial and inward-looking in their identity that they rejected all languages, including English, in an effort to bolster their mother tongue. This nationalist ferment created a hostile environment for promising writers in English in East Pakistan. If they wrote in languages other than Bangla, they were made to feel contrite or threatened. Notwithstanding this oppressive milieu, English writing made some headway during the period, maintaining a somewhat subdued and veiled presence. The notable writers of the period include Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999), Syed Waliullah (1922–71), Ganesh Bagchi (1926–), and Sayeed Ahmed (1931–2010) – almost all of whom wrote under two flags, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and in both English and Bangla.

Among these writers, Chaudhuri is the most renowned. Of his many books, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) is considered a masterpiece but also controversial as it was dedicated to the memory of the British empire. His fellow literati ostracized him for his open advocacy for European culture and contempt for India. Partly because of this controversy, he left East Pakistan and settled in Oxford, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford in 1990 and an honorary CBE by Queen Elizabeth II in 1992. Bagchi also left the country – first for India and then Uganda. He published his collection of plays, The Deviant, and a second volume, Of Malice and Men, both in 1968. His autobiographical novel, No Room for Love, came out in 1999, and his autobiography, My Days and Ways, in 2014.

Ahmed was a playwright and deemed the pioneer of the theatre of the absurd in Bangladeshi literature. He wrote three plays in English: The Thing (1961), Milepost (1965), and Survival (1966). Waliullah was a prolific writer in Bangla but also produced several English works. His first English novel, The Ugly Asian, came out in 1958, and Tree Without Roots, a transcreation of his earlier Bangla classic Lalshalu (1948), was published in 1967. He also wrote two short stories in English, “The Escape” and “No Enemy” (both published in the 1950s), and has left behind an unfinished novel manuscript, oddly titled How to Cook Beans.

Anglophone literature in post-independence Bangladesh

English writing was already in a diminished and desultory state before independence, but it almost disappeared from Bangladesh’s linguistic and literary milieu in the immediate years after independence. This was mainly because of the violent circumstances in which the country was born. Bangladesh came into being in 1971 after a nine-month-long muktijuddho, or War of Liberation, in which the Pakistani forces committed heinous ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and genocidal rape. By some estimates, 269,000 Bengalis, including many leading intellectuals of the country, were killed, and 200,000 women were raped during this war (“269,000 People Died” 2008). After paying such a tremendous price for their mother tongue and motherland, it is no surprise that English became a pariah language, phased out of everyday life, and that Bangla was consecrated as the sole medium of education and administration in post-independence Bangladesh. Even the few English-medium schools in the major urban centres that acted as seedbeds for anglophone writing were converted to the Bangla medium. In that blinkered atmosphere, any creative activity other than Bangla was considered anathema, and militant nationalists regarded anyone going against the grain as a freak or traitor.

English and English writing dwindled for another reason: the country’s linguistic composition. As mentioned earlier, Pakistan comprises multiple ethnicities and languages, and the same is true for India, which has “23 official languages, spoken in different parts of the country” (“Languages in India” n.d.). Given such polylingual diversity, English enjoys an aura of “cultural neutrality” (Rushdie 1997, xi) in both countries, helping in interethnic dialogues, even to the point that, as Rushdie contends, “[i]n many parts of South India, people [ … ] prefer to converse with visiting North Indians in English rather than Hindi” (xi). However, that potential role of English in the nation-building process was unwarranted in Bangladesh as it is a largely monolingual society, with, as M. Obaidul Hamid and Md. Mahmudul Hasan (2020) affirm, “98 percent of [its] people speak[ing] Bangla or its regional dialects” (297).

Notwithstanding the exaltation of Bangla and exclusion of English from national affairs, English writing continued to flow in a thin, slow stream, mainly by those groomed in English-medium schools during the Pakistani era. Prominent among these writers are Razia Khan, Kaiser Haq, Niaz Zaman, and Adib Khan; the first of these wrote both poetry and fiction, the second excelled in poetry, and the remaining two made their names in fiction. Except for Razia Khan, who passed away in 2011, these writers are still active and maintain a strong presence in the anglophone literary scene, with Haq and Zaman writing from home and Khan from Australia.

Razia Khan, a decorated writer in Bangla, commenced writing in English in the early 1950s. However, her two volumes of poetry, Argus under Anaesthesia and Cruel April, came out in 1976 and 1977 respectively. She also wrote two novels, The Enchanted Delta and The Tamarind Tree, both published posthumously in 2020. Her works generally focus on gender, nationalism, and multiculturalism, expressing a deep sense of pride in Bangladeshi history, culture, and identity and a call for the empowerment of women.

Haq, a student of Razia Khan at the University of Dhaka and arguably the most internationally acclaimed Bangladeshi poet in English, embarked on his poetic career in the late 1960s, inspired by Brother Hobart, his literature teacher at school, and by D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake” (Haq 1997, 113). Haq’s first two poetry volumes, Starting Lines: Poems 1968–1975 and A Little Ado, came out in 1978. He has since published six more titles, including two collected editions: Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems (2007) and Pariah and Other Poems (2013).

Writer and activist Niaz Zaman has published three novels and three collections of short stories. Her debut novel, The Crooked Neem Tree (1982), made her the first acknowledged anglophone novelist in the post-independence period. Her other two novels, A Different Sita and The Baromashi Tapes, came out in 2011. Her short story collections include The Dance and Other Stories (1996), Didimoni’s Necklace and Other Stories (2005), and The Maidens’ Club (2015). Zaman (2021) highlights a critical problem for female writers in a conservative society like Bangladesh when she explains in an interview that men have the freedom to write about any subject, but women have to be discerning because “[p]eople will not say anything about male writers, but they will defame a woman” (264).

Adib Khan is a transnational writer and the first Bangladeshi to win international awards. His first novel, Seasonal Adjustments (1994), set in Australia and Bangladesh, received the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Book of the Year award in the 1994 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. He has since published four more novels, set in Australia, Bangladesh, India, and Vietnam: Solitude of Illusions (1996), The Story Teller (2000), Homecoming (2003), and Spiral Road (2007).

The situation with English and English writing began to change in the 1990s as the memory of the Liberation War gradually began to recede in the national psyche, and Bangladeshis came to recognize the importance of English as the emerging global language and the language of digital and information technology. With the advent of the Internet, satellite television, and social media, English began to penetrate widely and deeply into society, and it was no longer possible to look the other way. Therefore, English was reintroduced in government schools as a compulsory subject at all levels, and private English schools and universities began to proliferate in the major cities. As a result, English once again became a language of opportunity and status and the de facto second language in urban areas, although, paradoxically, it still had no official recognition or acknowledgement in the country’s Constitution.

To bring Bangladesh to the world and open up opportunities for young aspiring anglophone writers through interactions with those from abroad, a new literary festival in English, the Dhaka Hay Festival, was launched in 2011. It began as a trial at the British Council precinct on the Dhaka University campus but has since become a major literary event after it was rebranded as the Dhaka Literature Festival and relocated to the Bangla Academy – the custodian of Bangla language, literature, and culture – in 2014. This move marked a symbolic victory for English as it was coexisting with the national language for the first time. It also showed an acceptance by the establishment that an uptick for English was not necessarily a downtick for Bangla but rather an opportunity for both languages to flourish through reciprocity and cross-fertilization, transcending the discourse of animosity and binarism.

However, despite such positive developments, writers in English still face considerable challenges. For example, there is still no proper literary infrastructure for English writing. No reputable international publishing houses operate in the country, and a few boutique publishers who cater to local writers lack professional vetting, editing, and marketing facilities to ensure quality. Moreover, books (English or Bangla) published in Bangladesh hardly ever cross the border, even to India. This is a huge impediment to the growth of English writing in Bangladesh. It prevents writers from reaching and cultivating a global readership and building their international reputation. The readership cohort inside the country is also limited mainly to the students and graduates of the English departments. Besides, the quality of literary criticism is not up to standard, as only a handful of Bangladeshi critics have so far succeeded in publishing about the country’s anglophone writers in internationally recognized journals. What is more, Bangladeshi university curricula are old-fashioned and mimic the colonial model; very few, if any, local anglophone writers are ever taught in the classroom to foster and incentivize a home-grown anglophone literary tradition.

Yet, with the changing scenario, Bangladeshi writers are publishing at a continually increasing rate both at home and abroad, though more of them are established overseas. Most write fiction, and many have published only one book. The most prominent among these new writers are Monica Ali, Tahmima Anam, Zia Haider Rahman, Dilruba Z. Ara, Mahmud Rahman, Neamat Imam, K. Anis Ahmed, Ruby Zaman, and Shazia Omar – all of whom work in the genre of fiction.

British Bangladeshi writer Monica Ali is perhaps the most renowned in this millennium cohort for her successful inaugural novel Brick Lane (2003). She has since published three more fictional works, including, most recently, Love Marriage (2022), a riveting story about British multiculturalism, narrated in a rich, witty, and sensitive style.

Tahmima Anam, Zia Haider Rahman, Dilruba Z. Ara, Mahmud Rahman, and Neamat Imam are all non-resident writers, while K. Anis Ahmed, Ruby Zaman, and Shazia Omar live in Bangladesh. Anam, domiciled in the UK, is the author of four novels, a trilogy – A Golden Age (2007), The Good Muslim (2011), and The Bones of Grace (2016) – and The Startup Wife (2021). Her first novel, which explores the history of the Liberation War, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2008. Zia Haider Rahman, another British Bangladeshi writer, also probes the Liberation War in his only novel, In the Light of What We Know (2014). Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, this work was praised by Joyce Carol Oates (2014) as “a novel of ideas, a compendium of epiphanies, paradoxes, and riddles clearly designed to be read slowly and meditatively”.

Ara, Mahmud Rahman, and Imam live in Sweden, the US, and Canada respectively. Ara is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories: A List of Offences (2006), Blame (2015), and Detached Belonging (2016). Rahman has published a collection of short stories focusing on the effects of war, migration, and cultural dislocation, Killing the Water (2010). Imam’s only novel to date is The Black Coat (2013), depicting the political crisis in the wake of independence, for which he controversially blames Sheik Mujib, the Father of the Nation.

Among those writing from home, Ahmed has a collection of short stories, Mr. Kissinger and Other Stories (2012), and a novel, The World in My Hands (2013); Ruby Zaman, a novel, Invisible Lines (2011); and Omar, a short story collection, Like a Diamond in the Sky (2010), and a fictional narrative, Dark Diamond (2016).

Poetry has not fared as well and lags far behind the fiction genre. Nevertheless, some accomplishments deserve mention. These include, among those writing from home, Sofiul Azam’s Impasse (2003), In Love with Gorgon (2010), and Safe Under Water (2014); Sadaf Saaz’s Sari Reams (2013); Shamsad Mortuza’s Barkode (2013); and M. Shafiqul Islam’s Inner State (2020). Notable works by diasporic poets include Tarifa Faizullah’s Seam (2014) and Registers of Illuminated Villages (2018), and Nausheen Eusuf’s chapbook What Remains (2011) and the full-length collection Not Elegy, But Eros (2017), which contains a Pushcart Prize-winning poem.

Bangladeshi literature in English has made considerable progress since its inception in the colonial period. It went through a semi-muzzled period during the East Pakistan era and the early decades of the country’s political reincarnation as Bangladesh. However, there has been a surge of activity in the new millennium, with several writers making breakthroughs in the international literary scene and winning prestigious prizes. If this trend continues, the tradition promises a bright future, although to catch up with its South Asian neighbours, it needs more speed and energy to make up for the lost ground. A second observation, as hinted earlier, is that the tradition seems to be growing more rapidly in the diaspora than at home. To address this imbalance and to create a vibrant anglophone literary site at home, the country’s leadership needs to take appropriate measures to strengthen the state of English and its literary fabric. A robust English writing tradition will help bring Bangladesh closer to the world by sharing its history and culture with people of other countries in the global lingua franca, something that cannot be achieved if the national spirit is invested wholly in Bangla.

To introduce this tradition to international readers and researchers of postcolonial literature, we have included four articles and an interview in this Special Focus. In the first of these articles, “Panchayat and Colonialism in Humayun Kabir’s Men and Rivers”, Md. Mahmudul Hasan discusses the earliest significant English-language novel written by a pre-independence pioneer of the tradition. The article situates the book’s narrative in its historical background and within postcolonial discourse. As Kabir’s treatment of the colonial theme in Men and Rivers is implicit, Hasan attempts a detailed textual and contextual reading of the novel in order to locate its setting in British colonial Bengal. Drawing upon Frantz Fanon’s dialectic of decolonization and liberation, he foregrounds the novel in contemporary peasant movements led by A.K. Fazlul Huq and Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani and shows the importance of the peasantry in Bengal’s socio-economic structure. The discussion of the novel focuses on a specific aspect of peasant life – the indigenous panchayat system – which is contrasted with colonial rule in a way that highlights the egalitarian character of the former and the exploitive nature in which the colonizer applied economic and cultural force upon innocent peasants. Hasan ends the discussion by pointing to Kabir’s cosmopolitan credentials and, at the same time, his rootedness and interest in East Bengal peasant society.

In the second article, ‘“Here I’ll stay’: Kaiser Haq’s Poems and the Impact of Being at Home”, Kathryn Hummel investigates the sense of both physical and emotional rootedness in Haq’s poetry. Even though one cannot avoid the impact of temporal and cultural homelessness or diaspora, Hummel looks at Haq’s poetry through the lens of his physical presence in Bangladesh, from which he understands and interacts with the outside world. Referring to a range of Haq’s poems, she sees his sense of physicality as dynamic and developing (not static and predetermined), regards him as a “transnational local”, and associates him with identities that are not easy to pigeonhole or stereotype. However, Hummel shows that Haq’s situatedness in Dhaka is manifested in some poems that deal with contemporary, local issues.

In the third article, “Toxic Grace?: Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace and Pollution Trade”, Md. Alamgir Hossain explores the last novel of Anam’s Bengal trilogy in light of environmental degradation and risks to human life that stem from pollution migration from rich (polluting) to poor (polluted) countries – all in the name of development under the aegis of neo-liberal globalization. As the novel is partly set in the coastal zone of Chittagong, Bangladesh’s leading ship-breaking site, the article elaborates on the deleterious effects of global capitalist penetration in countries like Bangladesh on environmental subalterns who are the ultimate recipients of pollution burdens coming from the Global North. Exploring the relationships between literature and environment as depicted in Anam’s novel, Hossain questions the conventional notion of development and seeks to redefine it in line with the interest of the Global South and its ecology in order to thwart (environmental) injustices wrought by global (northern) capitalism’s corporate greed.

In “Beyond National(ist) Binaries: The Case of Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know”, the fourth article, Md Rezaul Haque examines a sensitive nationalist issue described in Rahman’s debut novel. Because of the dark history of relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan associated with the War of Liberation discussed earlier, a Manichean divide seemingly exists between the populations of these two erstwhile wings of united Pakistan. The vantage point of diasporic third space provides Rahman with a degree of detachment and objectivity, enabling him to see post-1971 affairs between the two countries through a new lens. Haque capitalizes on this to contest the jingoistic emotionalism and parochial rhetoric emanating from the nationalist discourses of Bangladesh and Pakistan. The article anticipates a relationship of mutual respect, friendship, and shared understanding between the two countries – an agenda Rahman fictionally sets up in his novel.

In “Delving Beneath the Surface: An Interview with Monica Ali”, Sadaf Saaz conducts a conversation with arguably the most prominent Bangladeshi writer in the new millennium. In the interview, Ali speaks candidly about issues related to her latest novel Love Marriage (2022), especially the cultural hybridity that is at work in the microcosm of multicultural families in contemporary Britain, which, according to her, is perhaps comparable to Jane Austen’s perceptions of inter-class relations in marriage. She also touches on her shift from the monocultural in her debut novel, Brick Lane, to the transcultural in Love Marriage. Other topics addressed in the interview include Ali’s writing process, her purpose in writing, the experience of her dual heritage, her thoughts on feminism, and her assessment of the place of class and race in today’s Britain.

The issue also contains four poems – two by Kaiser Haq and one each by Sadaf Saaz and M. Shafiqul Islam – and three book reviews focusing respectively on Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Bangla novel Khwabnama (1996), translated into English by Arunava Sinha in 2021, Numair Atif Choudhury’s novel Babu Bangladesh! (2019), and Bangladeshi Literature in English: A Critical Anthology (2021), edited by Quayum and Hasan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohammad A. Quayum

Mohammad A. Quayum is an honorary professor at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia and has taught at universities in Australia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US. He is the author, editor, and translator of nearly 40 books, published by, among others, Brill, Macmillan, Pearson Education, Penguin Books, Peter Lang, Singapore National Library Board, Routledge, and Springer. In addition, he has published more than 130 journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopaedia entries.

Md. Mahmudul Hasan

Md. Mahmudul Hasan earned a PhD in postcolonial, comparative literature at the University of Portsmouth and was a postdoctoral researcher at Heidelberg. He is currently with the Department of English Language and Literature at International Islamic University Malaysia. He has published extensively with the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Brill, Georgia Southern University, Orient BlackSwan, Routledge, SAGE, Wiley-Blackwell, and other presses.

Notes

1. Bengal was divided for the first time in 1905, but this situation lasted only for six years because of the mounting protests by the elite Hindus of West Bengal led by, among others, Rabindranath Tagore. His patriotic songs galvanized the Bengalis to fight for reunification, and one song later became the national anthem of Bangladesh. However, the map created in 1905 to separate Muslim-majority East Bengal from Hindu-majority West Bengal was adopted to create East Pakistan during the partition of 1947, and the same map now marks the national boundary of Bangladesh.

2. This day was declared the International Mother Language Day by UNESCO in 2002.