In a discussion session at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary
Meet 2016, Ketaki Kushari Dyson complained that Indian diasporic literature
written in English has received world-wide acclaim while diasporic Bengali
literature has hardly received any recognition. The issue often snowballs
into a major critical debate. English is sometimes perceived to be the
medium to produce literary works of quality. Salman Rushdie’s comment in
The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997 reinforced the debate as he
unwittingly observed that the prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction
- created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving
to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been
produced in the 16 'official languages' of India, the so-called 'vernacular
languages', during the same time” (Rushdie; emphasis original). Unaware of
the quality of the corpus of works written in Indian regional languages,
Rushdie further made a blunder by observing that “this still burgeoning
Indo-Anglian literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution
India has yet made to the world of books” (Rushdie). In the absence of
adequate translation activities, it is of course difficult to keep oneself
abreast of the developments in bhasa literatures, not to speak of works
produced in regional languages in the diaspora. While Rushdie’s claim has
been widely contested, one needs to mull over the question of why Indian
English Writing, by now a well-known literary category, triumphs over the
literary works written in other ‘recognised’ Indian languages. Citing
Swapan Chakraborty’s opinion, Sumana Das Sur, the author of the
well-researched book under review, explains that the importance of English
in the globalised market is responsible for the better distribution and
dissemination of works written in English. This, she explains, does not
necessarily have anything to do with the ‘quality’ of literary works
(629-30). This is more surprising because there are, for example, a number
of Bengali writers (such as Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Alolika Mukhopadhyay,
Saleha Chaudhury, Golam Murshid and Daud Haider, among others) who are creatively
active in the diaspora, writing prolifically on aspects of diasporic
experiences in Bengali. Hardly had any scholar ventured into the field to
map the Bengali literary landscape abroad. In the context of the relative
ignorance about this, Das Sur’s book is a significant intervention in the
field – the first of its kind to identify Bengali authors working abroad
and assess the importance of their works. The book is the result of love’s
labour that spanned over a period of more than fourteen years during which
she visited various countries located in Europe and the North America,
consulting archives and interviewing authors. It is a detailed, scholarly
research work on Bengali diasporic authors scattered in the United Kingdom,
the United States, and Canada. It also discusses the works of two exilic
writers located in Europe – Daud Haider and Taslima Nasrin.
Das Sur’s book approaches its subject not from the
perspective of a nation, as is the case in most instances, but from the
point of view of a language that bridges temporal and spatial distance. The
focus is more on the linguistic and ethnic identity of the diasporic
Bengali community than on their national identity. She perceives the
crucial role of the Bengali language as a ‘home’ which is an emotive issue
in the diaspora studies – it is a metaphor for the ‘imagined’ space left
behind, a kind of metonymy for the lost space diasporic subjects try to
retrieve. Das Sur quotes Ketaki Kushari Dyson who stated in a poetry
festival organised mainly by the Bangladeshi immigrants in London in 2008
that writing in Bengali keeps her constantly in touch with the distant land
where her works are published and her publishers, editors and most of her
readers live. She observes, “By writing in Bengali, I remain informed of
the flow of the language, the distance is removed. The language is the link
that transcends the distance” (43; translation mine). This distance, as
Nabakumar Basu also maintains, provides a more neutral and disinterested
bird’s eye view of the Bengali literary scene in the home country (338) and
helps one in representing the society back home.
The linguistic/ethnic identity, however, gets problematic as
the national identity intervenes. The complicated history of the Bengali
community in the Indian subcontinent casts a shadow on the literary works
of the Bengali writers located both in the subcontinent and the diaspora.
Particularly in the diaspora where socio-culturally they interact more
closely than in the subcontinent and are recognised as ‘South Asians,’ the
history of friendships and acrimonies during the Partition back home come
back with renewed effect. Memories of travelling along the borderless land
of one’s own in the pre-independence period feature prominently in the
literary works. Memories of displacement and loss of lives and properties
too are staple elements in oral and literary narratives. The bloody history
of East Pakistan’s secession from West Pakistan – the birth of Bangladesh
in 1971 – too recurs in Bengali narratives. Stories of three nations –
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) – and the creation
of material and cultural borders in-between – what Amitav Ghosh calls
‘shadow lines’ – disturbs and disrupts the narratives of linguistic and
ethnic sameness. It is no wonder, therefore, that Lilia, the ten-year-old
second-generation girl narrator in Jhumpa Lahiri’s unforgettable story
“When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine,” should be confused by the cultural sameness
of Mr Pirzada, an East Pakistani expatriate in the US, with her
Indian-origin immigrant parents and the parallel discourse of their
different national origins. Das Sur’s analysis of the diasporic Bengali
writers’ literary works reveals the dilemmas and ambiguities of the
(ancestral) memories of the nation/s and the novel experience of
negotiating the new spaces that gives rise to new, hybrid cultural
identities.
The first chapter provides a theoretical discussion of the
concept ‘diaspora’ and a history of Bengali diaspora. Das Sur traces the
evolution of the semantic connotations of the term ‘diaspora’ over the ages
and how it now works intersectionally with several other ideas and concepts
such as Globalisation, Transnationalism and Post/nationalism. The concepts
of major theoreticians of diaspora have also been explored. The chapter
discusses the early history of Jewish migration and other forced ethnic
diasporas such as the African slave diaspora and Armenian diaspora. Indian
indentured diaspora (also called girmitia diaspora and coolie diaspora) has
also been briefly discussed. There is an interesting discussion on how
‘Passenger Indians’ spread across several continents and made their
presence felt everywhere. Sylheti migration responsible for the
establishment of a chain of restaurants in London is a unique component of
Bengali diaspora which forms an integral part of discussion that prepares
the readers to appreciate the discussion of Bengali literary works. The
second chapter, written mainly on the basis of her interviews with Bengali
diasporic authors (only some of them have been discussed in detail in the
following three chapters), provides a bird’s eye view of the many authors
who have been engaged in literary activities (including publishing
periodicals) in the three continents. She shows that the Bengali community
is not a homogenous community – it comes from different geo-cultural
regions of two nations (India and Bangladesh) and professes diverse
religions and opinions about things political, social and cultural. Some of
them even refuse to consider themselves as ‘diasporic authors.’
The three main chapters of the book – Chapters 3, 4 and 5 –
are structured on the basis of the countries/continents of the Bengali
authors’ settlement. It is true that immigrants move from one country to
another, as some dealt with in the book have done, but Das Sur selects for
the purpose of her discussion the countries they settled down for a long
duration and continued their literary activities from there. Their works
embraced multiple genres – poetry, novel, short story, drama, biography and
critical works on literary icons, immigration history, and so on. Some are
bilingual authors, but most of them write in Bengali. The third chapter
studies diasporic Bengali literature in Great Britain. She examines the
works of eleven Bengali writers of both Indian (West Bengal) and
Bangladeshi origin: Hiranmoy Bhattacharya, Abdul Gaffar Choudhury, Golam
Murshid, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Saleha Chowdhury, Shamim Azad, Urmi Rahman,
Nabakumar Basu, Amit Ranjan Biswas, Salma Nasser Dolly, Kamal Rahman. All
the major works of these authors are placed against their biographical
history and socio-cultural backgrounds. One, however, feels that parts of
discussion dealing with non-diasporic themes could have been either
curtailed or avoided in order to maintain consistent focus on the migration
theme. However, it also remains a fact that even these parts offer critical
insights in understanding the authors better. The corpus represents various
aspects of diasporic experience: Sylheti immigration and ghettoes that
distinctly mark parts of the topography of London; Sylheti restaurant
business that both sustained these immigrants and prospered to cater to the
customers of multiple ethnicities; tales of two lives of immigrants with
old wives/families in the ancestral country and the new wives, often white,
and hybrid families, in the UK; illegal immigration; gender oppression;
transformation of tradition-bound women; nostalgic narratives of home;
home-making in the new country and the like. Chapter 4 deals with eight
authors of Indian and Bangladeshi origin located in the US and Canada:
Dilara Hashem, Alolika Mukhopadhyay, Anjali Bhattacharya, Manisha Roy,
Aryanil Mukhopadhyay, Kaushik Sen, Mijan Rahman, Nahar Monica. The themes
they deal with are similar to those of the British Bengali authors – the
only difference is that the corpus does not include any theme on the
Sylheti immigrant experience and narratives of illegal migration is mostly
absent. The focus is mainly on the issues of home, nostalgia, acculturation,
broken marriage, women in diaspora, the worldview of the second-generation
children. The children who are born and brought up in the US are more
Americanised than their parents and look at their lives through a different
cultural lens. In Aloloka Mukhopadhyay’s story titled “Hriday Haranor
Golpo” (The Story of Losing the Heart), siblings – a son and a daughter –
even ask their mother to marry again (431) after the death of their father.
An interestingly feature of the diasporic authors in both the UK and North
America is that they include even white characters, immigrants or citizens,
in their narratives. This is a proof of the author’s confidence that
underscores their familiarity with the life-styles and experiences of white
people and those of other ethnicities.
I appreciate the inclusion of two exiled Bangladeshi authors
– Daud Haider and Taslima Nasrin – in a separate chapter (Chapter 5) as
exile represents an acute, painful state of displacement more akin to the
original connotations of the word ‘diaspora.’ Edward Said rightly observes,
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.
It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,
between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be
surmounted” (173). Said refers to
Wallace Stevens’ comment that a person in exile has ‘a mind of winter’ and
this comes out strongly in the works of Haider and Nasrin who had to leave
their country for writing against religion and living in the wintry
landscape of European cities. In a poem titled “Epitaph” the former writes,
“Write, after my death,/that he died/in an unfamiliar city far from his
mother and motherland,/primarily he was a poet, he too longed for/freedom,
democracy, equality, he too had a dream/as of a victorious fighter” (577;
translation mine). In her loneliness, Nasrin, a well-known feminist writer,
cries out nostalgically in a poem titled “Pherao” (Take Me Back): “It’s
high time, take me back. / It’s high time, give me back the dust, rivers
and wetlands, mustard fields and the Brahmaputra / Give me the gathering at
the village koltala [hand pump site], cleaned courtyard, hand-fan air, the
sounds on the tin roofs, frogs/Or / The entire rainy season full of
chirpings of cricket, steaming rice with the coriander leaf smell of magur
fish gravy. / It’s high time, remove my roots about to touch the body of
Scandinavia, help me live” (617). Das Sur critiques some of Nasrin’s
complicated, radical gendered location evident in some of her works. Her
analysis of the two exiled authors is insightful and it adds to the value
of the entire book. The concluding chapter demonstrates how the concept of
diaspora is changing with the changing developments in state politics and
policies, global economic developments, and of course the unthinkable
progress in science and technology. The growth of cyber world and global
transfer of capital have transformed our ideas of national borders. She
also provides a brief overview of the Indian diasporic literature written
in English and reiterates the factors that made it a force to reckon with.
At the same time, she strongly argues that the corpus of diasporic
literature produced in Bengali is of a high quality and demands its proper
recognition, discussion and appreciation.
The corpus of works Das Sur evaluates projects two
interesting diasporic locations of the characters which certainly mirror
the lived experience of the real-life Bengali immigrants. First, the exilic
mindset in the works of Daud Haider and Taslima Nasrin reflects a nostalgic
yearning for return to the roots. A section of immigrants belonging mostly
to the uneducated or less educated class, hailing from the rural heartland
of Bangladesh or West Bengal, has carved out a space for themselves in the
diaspora, living in ghettoes, mostly unadulterated by ‘foreign’ cultures
and largely divorced from the mainstream of British life. They usually keep
in touch with the land of their origin where their old wives/families still
live. Secondly, the people/characters who belong to this category, believe
in two-or-more homelands theory. This group comprises mostly middle-class
and upper-middle class people who are perpetually on the route. These are
the people who are truly cosmopolitan (the word etymologically means
‘citizen of the world’) in attitude. Their acculturation in the second or
third nation may take time but it nevertheless happens in most cases.
Dyson’s poem on the flower plant “Dolonchapa” symbolically speaks of the
pangs of transplantation (the plant was brought from Bolpur in West Bengal
to England), prolonged and painful wait, and ultimate flowering of the
plant after twelve years: “the language that remained dormant in her cells
for twelve years/ is now come alive, its voice is now distinct” (Das Sur
204; translation mine). Dyson speaks of the tension this location entails:
“Wherever we stay, the two countries stay with us, one before our very
eyes, and the other in a refined, mnemonic form” (172). Monisha Roy’s
assertion approaches the ‘citizen of the world’ sentiment: “Transcending
the East-West binary, I am fortunate to receive the passport of entry to
many worlds. Hence my roots are scattered in many countries” (Das Sur 451).
Hybris cultural lives of such subjects evolve over the years and decades.
Sumana Das Sur’s book Boishik Bangali Ebong Diasporic Bangla
Sahitya (Global Bengali and the Literature of Bengali Diaspora), in short,
brings out the multiple dimensions of diasporic Bengali lives and their
literary representations. This ambitious project-turned-book introduces the
wonderful expanse of diasporic literature written in Bengali about which
most of us are ignorant. It has created an updated archive and interested
scholars may be guided by the vast information, useful documentation and insightful
arguments. It is a work of solid scholarship. This reviewer only wishes
that the author’s interviews with the diasporic writers and field study
details were attached as Appendices at the end of the book. He also hopes
that the author’s researches on other diasporic writers, particularly those
located in the continents other than three dealt with in this book, will be
published soon. The readers will be keenly waiting for that.
Works
Cited
“Ketaki Kushari Dyson on Poetry – Kolkata Literary Meet
2016.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ghZ0izB2lA
Lahiri, Jhumpa. “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.” Interpreter
Of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond by Jhumpa Lahiri, Harper
Collins, 1999, pp. 23-42.
Rushdie, Salman. Introduction. The Vintage Book of Indian
Writing 1947-1997, edited by Salman Rushdie, Vintage, 1997, pp. ix-xxii.
Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile
and Other Essays by Edward W. Said. Harvard UP, 2002. 173-186.
