Drishtipat Blog

The Indian diaspora seizes any and all cultural signifiers (from American Idol to Spelling Bees to Harold & Kumar) and melds it to a narrative of cultural triumphalism. We can have a left/subaltern debate about whether that “India Shining” super-narrative is a healthy thing, but majority of Bangla diaspora (centrist/conservative/apolitical) has not rejected such a narrative for political reasons. Therefore, is the Bangla diaspora’s failure to capitalize on similar moments cultural ambiguity, hysterical blindness, or incompetence or…?

1. Monica Ali’s novel was one of the best reviewed south asian novels and went to #1 on UK bestseller lists. Yet Bangladeshi community “leaders” (who are these leaders, who elects them, and who do they represent) blasted the book and its portrayal of Sylheti Bengalis. In an 18 page letter, the Sylhet Council asked for the book to be banned. [Sylheti Bengalis as a misogynist, religiously obscurantist, self-isolating community?

2. Monica Ali wanted to return to Bangladesh to visit the scene of the novel. The London Embassy refused her visa because she “may be a journalist” who would create “negative imagery” for Bangladesh. Stung by the refusal, Monica Ali is yet to visit Bangladesh. Her million selling book was launched in every country, except Bangladesh. Some people have told me “well, she’s not one of our own” and point to Tahmima Anam’s reception. What does “our own” then mean? Is Monica’s half-white heritage at issue? Joya Chatterji received a similar blast of “what does she know” from Kolkata’s right-wing elements pointing to similar heritage issues. When people start talking “purity”, beware.

3. When Sarah Gavron was filming in London, community “leaders” forced shut down of the filming in Brick Lane. Not that BL needs money, with all the new tourist dollars flowing in, but once again the community furthers a reputation for insularity.

4. Perhaps gun shy after all these escapades, or stymied by our strangulation Embassy/Foreign Office (ever watched an Indian friend with a Hindu surname try to get a visa to Bangladesh? You will learn something about the nasty parochialism that has poisoned the diplomatic corps, which is in any case is destroyed by political appointees), the Bangladesh scenes were shot in India.

5. Now the film is out and I see a very strong, positive reaction from Indian-dominated organizations like SAJA, while Bangla community is again….asleep at the wheel?

1. BRICK LANE Special Screening
2. SONY Classics
3. Watch The Trailer
4. Khademul Islam on Monica’s Visa

Monica Ali denied Bangladeshi visa
On roots and moments of triumph
Khademul Islam

How can this be? How can Monica Ali be denied a visa to visit the land of her birth?

The answer, at least partially, has to lie in our London High Commission’s colossal ignorance about the vast gulf that exists between mere hired hacks and a genuine writer, between dozen-a-dime journalists and a hot young novelist who’s pushing Bangladesh to the forefront of fiction writing, an ignorance finally about the influence of celebrityhood in our satellite-stitched, global news culture.

What do our diplomats do sitting in that building in London? Play cards all day? Don’t they read British newspapers and journals? What is their level of knowledge about British society and culture, about London’s literary and artistic life? Ever since Monica Ali got onto Granta’s list of twenty best British writers, she has been given full blast, non-stop exposure by the British press. Her book has been widely reviewed even before its publication date, her photo has been on a lot of newspaper pages, albeit the better ones. How could our foreign service officers in London, presumably the cream of our diplomatic corps, have thought of her in terms of ‘planted’ journalists wanting to do a hatchet job on the government? By now, given the near-universal reach of Western media outlets, a huge slice of the world’s literate population, including Bangladesh, know about Monica Ali, know that her book “Brick Lane’ is about a Bangladeshi woman who comes to London, that Monica Ali herself was born in Dhaka, know that it is the most natural thing in the world for the Bangladeshi inside her, now that she is on the brink of genuine fame, to want to come here, to the land she left as a child, to see it for herself, to just taste it, to roam its streets, maybe to just stand in a rice paddy and draw in a lungful of Bangladeshi air. It is at the very moments of our triumph that our roots beckon the most. The pull is the strongest then. We should respect it.

Everybody knows that, except of course our finest, our thin blue line– ever so up on the latest things, so very much on the mark– in that sorry High Commission of ours.

One has to wonder, why would the term ‘writer’ bring about such a paralysis of judgement on the part of our government? Why this spasm of fear and anxiety?

While I do understand that foreign journalists/international media coverage and domestic politics have tended to intertwine in the recent past, that no doubt the poor devils in our High Commission in London must have been tersely put on notice about issuing visas to people with only partly credible journalistic credentials who then end up questioning Bangladesh’s commitment to secularity, good governance, social justice and fundamental decency, yet that risk has to be run.

That’s just the cost of doing business, the price we pay for having an open, democratic system. And nobody ever said that politics in Bangladesh has to be pretty. Like politics everywhere it can be a rough (we repeat, rough, not murderous) business. People wanting to discredit the government will want to plant the wrong news stories, will try to influence the media, even international media. But that does not mean that we should implement policies reminiscent of totalitarian regimes (the old Soviet Union, the present China), regimes reviled for persecuting writers, poets, film-makers, and other literary and cultural figures, policies of harassment, of visa denials, of refusing them their right of association, of freedom of travel, and by extension, freedom of speech.

There is also a practical reason why the government should reverse its decision: never, ever, bully a writer, especially one positioned crucially in the West. They have that strange power of a universal language, they have access to influential audiences worldwide, they can shape national images, the face we show to the rest of the world, in a way that is inconceivable to the dull minds inhabiting the upper reaches of rickety Third World states. Writers such as Monica are not toothless. They can sting you for decades. In other words, the very thing the present government wants to control, its image, may be the one it is least able to defend from an angry, popular writer. The whole world knows about the evils of the Narbada Dam simply because one seemingly frail, 5′ 4″ woman named Arundhati Roy got pissed off about it. More dangerous to the ex-Soviet Union than missiles in a certain sense were two men named Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov. So it is in the present government’s basic self-interest to do the decent thing and give her that damn visa.

But beyond all these considerations, of course, is the fact that she has openly embraced us. We should embrace her in turn. She is one of us. She is a gifted and sincere daughter of Bangladesh. She has written a novel in English and succeeded at a level the rest of us should aspire to. She has written in anguished terms about 1971. She should be issued a visa and then told: “Our apologies. Now go. Feel free to wander this land where you were born. Wherever and whenever you wish.”