Tue 20 May 2008
Congratulations are in order. As many of you already know, Tahmima Anam has won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book for A Golden Age, her acclaimed novel about the Liberation War. This is a great honour, and we are certain that this will be only the first of many such accolades in her career. Tahmima’s novel has been translated into Bangla by Leesa Gazi, and this edition was released at the February Boi Mela in Dhaka. The Bangla title is ‘Shona Jhora Din’. The novel has also been transformed into a 30-minute playscript by the Drishtipat Creative group in London, and this has already been performed a number of times at various arts events in London.
Tahmima also writes regularly in the UK press, for the New Statesman magazine (where she is a contributing editor) and for the Guardian newspaper. Click to read her pieces.
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Congratulations also to Tanveer Islam, a regular writer in our Bangla blog, on the publication of his first heavyweight academic tome - Cyclone Wind Analysis and Disaster Planning - An Integrated Approach for the Bangladesh Coast. Tanveer is a specialist in urban planning and disaster management, and teaches and conducts research in the United States (on the Katrina-hit Galveston coast, among other places). He has the enviable gift of explaining complex environmental issues as they relate to Bangladesh in a clear and insightful manner. His ongoing series on the planning problems of Dhaka (and possible solutions) is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of our cities. We hope our policymakers are taking note of the valuable work that the new generation of Bangladeshi academics is performing in these areas.
To read Tanveer’s Dhaka series, click here (this is best viewed on Firefox).
May 21st, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Congratulations Tahmima and I am sure this is only the beginning. In today’s Bangladesh, there are quite a number of promising writers’ in English. Hope your success will make it easier for them to break the glass ceiling and help them make it to the big league.
Tanveer, we are avid readers of your bangla write up and didn’t realize that you already have a book under your belt. That’s great news and hope you will keep writing. We hope to send these to the off line media for a wider audience as well.
June 6th, 2008 at 6:29 am
A review in Outlook India. We discussed our image problem in India in a different thread. One reason we have this problem is because our creative efforts - books, movies, TV shows, music - are rarely allowed into the Indian market. I hope Tahmima’s book becomes successful in India.
Magazine| Jun 09, 2008
Review
Pickle Point
The spareness of writing, and clear-eyed descriptions of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, result in a narrative that is harsh and tender simultaneously
ANITA ROY
The human story behind the bitter and bloody war of independence that resulted in the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistani rule in 1971 has rarely been told, at least in English language fiction, and rarely been told so poignantly and well as in Tahmima Anam’s debut novel.
The author was born five years after the events she narrates, but has managed to recreate those turbulent times with an immediacy and intimacy which belies her relative youth. The book arrives in India already trailing clouds of glory, having won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ prize for best first book, and garlanded with rave reviews.
Anam in some ways fits all the tick-boxes for a successful South Asian writer: young, attractive female (see full-page author pic on the back cover), America-educated (Harvard, no less), Londoner (where she still lives), with the added fillip of a literary family (her father is the editor of the Daily Star, Bangladesh’s largest independent broadsheet, and her grandfather a well-known political satirist, Abdul Mansur Ahmed). But she—unlike the Monica Alis, Bharati Mukherjees and Jhumpa Lahiris of this world—has chosen not to write about immigrant life in the West, but instead set her story firmly in the subcontinent in a time of enormous strife, conflict and violence.
Her main protagonist, Rehana, is a mother and wife, and there are moments in the book where I feared that Anam might, like so many before her, be sucked into the quicksand of nostalgic domestic description—the textures and smells of mangoes, the tastes of home: ilish maachh and mango pickle. But Rehana is no mistress of spices and the pickle-making episode is actually part of a desperate subterfuge to mask her involvement with revolutionary activities.
Rehana is a reluctant revolutionary. Her daughter, Maya, and her son, Sohail, are both passionate nationalists, ready to risk everything in the struggle against Pakistani occupation. Rehana—an Urdu-speaking widow—is drawn into the maelstrom against her will. Her loyalties are tested again and again; and she emerges, scarred but strong, like tempered steel.
Joining her daughter in Calcutta, she becomes one of the millions of refugees (anywhere between 8 million and 10 million) who have fled the fighting. “They kept their hands in their pockets and a grateful smile stitched to their lips. They had unwashed hair and dirty shoes. Clothes that looked decent, but, looking closely she could see the ragged hems, the worn pleats…. Rehana found she could not bear to look at them; she was afraid she would see herself; she was afraid she wouldn’t see herself; she wanted to be different and the same as them all at once, neither option offering relief from the rasping feeling of loss, and the swallowing, hungry love.”
The spareness of her writing, and the clear-eyed descriptions of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, result in a narrative that is harsh and tender simultaneously. The politics of nationalism, of religion, of language are all present—not as grand rhetoric, but in the intimate and small spaces of the heart. Rather like Rehana’s complex, conflicted and hard-won love for her children, it is this that forms the backbone of the book and leaves the reader enlightened, horrified, and hopeful.