Picture Courtesy: Uttorshuri

The brilliance remains
Syed Badrul Ahsan

Jahanara Imam’s life ended thirteen years ago, in a blaze of glory. That is the truth. The courage she demonstrated in her final years of temporal existence remains an inspiration for all of us to follow.
When you consider the criticism she came under in her later years, from old collaborators of the Pakistan army to such men of the law who displayed little shame in mocking her after her death, you have that certain belief welling up in you that she caused imprints of her cause to be left behind nearly everywhere.

For a woman who had seen a son taken away by the Pakistanis, never to be returned, it was a monumental task taking upon herself the responsibility of waging an old battle in new form. For an individual who witnessed the swift decline and death of a husband who had survived, barely, degrading torture at the hands of the Tikka-Niazi hordes, it was sheer bravery setting bad memories aside and coming forth to inform her fellow Bengalis that not all had been lost, that indeed we had it in our power to point the finger at those who had once humiliated us in the company of their foreign masters and tell them that shame was writ large for all time on their dark lives.


When you reflect on the life that Jahanara Imam went through, you will have cause to recall the glamour that once defined her being. It was glamour that did not come with the glitter one associates with it. It was indeed a pattern of living, which once was emblematic of the urbanity and sophistication that came easily to Bengalis in the days when nationalism began to dig increasingly deeper roots in their consciousness.

Imam was part of a generation that saw in the resurgence of Bengali nationalism an inevitability that politics, Pakistani politics, could ignore at its own peril. With individuals like Sufia Kamal and Nilima Ibrahim already around to provide intellectual impetus to the nationalism idea in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was only proper to assume that Jahanara Imam and countless others would come forth as foot soldiers, at some point in time, to inject greater substance to the cause. And that time came soon enough.

As the Mukti Bahini waged war against Pakistan through the months of the war of liberation, it was Imam’s son Rumi who epitomised for her and for her family the shape of politics to come. It was one of those dark periods in history when bad men coming from a foreign land resorted to the bestial and the medieval. And into that chaos were sucked such good, patriotic Bengalis as G.C. Dev, Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, Fazle Rabbi and millions of others.

When Rumi and his father were taken away, to be mercilessly maltreated in the cantonment, life for Imam hovered between the shadow and the reality. Rumi died. His father died soon afterwards. The war moved along, quickened its pace, and Pakistan went through a natural burial in the land of the Bengalis.

And yet the ghosts of Pakistan, of the quislings it had organised in the year of the genocide, needed to be exorcised in free Bangladesh. Jahanara Imam, like so many others, knew that strong leadership had become an absolute necessity in order for the old values of the armed struggle for freedom to be revived and passed from door to door, from hamlet to town, in this country.

And so it was that, despite her reluctance to be at the head of the procession, she found herself in the role of an individual who could make a difference. She was the mother of a martyr. In essence, therefore, she spoke for all mothers, all parents who had seen their children march off to war, most of them never to return.

She was a wife who had seen her husband close his eyes on the world in supreme suffering. Beyond and above it all, she was a Bengali who had experienced, first hand as so many other Bengalis had, the molestation of history and the brutalisation of a civilisation. Who better than her to give voice to the 1971 Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee?

Even as physical infirmity claimed her, drop by drop, she went around the country reminding Bengalis of the cause their sons and daughters and parents had died for. That the men who had sided with the enemy, and had gone on a sinister campaign against Bangladesh across patches of ill-meaning deserts deserved no compassion was a constant refrain in her. That the genocide had not been forgotten, that Pakistan’s collaborators needed to be brought to justice, that the Bengali heritage called for a swift revival, were all music to our ears, a message that we needed to respond to.

And respond we did. From the far corners of the land the people of Bangladesh heard Jahanara Imam, lined up behind her, and stayed there until mortality claimed her. In a broad sense, they have stayed on, to reinforce her belief that life cannot be purposeful without a recapitulation of history and a retrieval of it.

In a landscape where icons are hard to come by, Jahanara Imam remains a symbol of the power of integrity against primordial evil. That is reason enough for us to keep a candle lighted in her memory.

(The thirteenth anniversary of the death of Shaheed Janani Jahanara Imam is being observed today).
From Daily Star

Ekkatoorer Dinguli