1This article discusses the ambivalence of the concepts of “Renaissance” and “rebirth” in the context of the history of Bengal. I demonstrate how the teleological view that usually underpins our understanding of these concepts is redefined in the cultural history of modern and postcolonial Bengal. To do so, I focus on two novels by women who write, several decades apart, on the transformation of East Pakistan, which till the 1947 Partition formed part of the Bengal province of undivided British India and became the independent nation of Bangladesh in 1971. Their novels show how and why the creation of Bangladesh was spurred on by a resurgence and a questioning of nineteenth-century Renaissance movements in Bengal.
2The notion of “rebirth” refers to a second birth or a new life and is positively connoted. It can be synonymous with “revival” and “renewal.” The word “revival,” in some instances, might simply define an attempt at restoring a prior state-of-being or at making something fashionable again. However, like “renewal,” it also evokes an improvement in the condition and strength of something. Owing to the lingering traumatic impacts of the bloody 1947 and 1971 Partitions on today’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, one might question whether the positive, at times even celebratory, term “rebirth” really fits the transformation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh. In fact, the concepts of “rebirth”/ “renaissance” presuppose some form of prior death – which in the present case meant human casualties as well as cultural, social, linguistic, political and economic loss. Yet these terms also suggest that new possibilities are given that can not only make up for or, at least, counterbalance previous loss, but also delineate a less negative view of the past. In the four decades following the birth of India, Indian national historiography mostly offered such a vision. Independence was defined as a break from former colonial oppression accompanied by new political and social gains (Sarkar 2009, 11).
3But Partition studies, which developed in South Asia in the early 1990s under the influence of the Subaltern Studies’ revisionist historiography and feminist work, undermined grand national narratives by showing how they focused on elite and bourgeois figures, downplayed the role of the masses, and marginalised the traumatic violence of Partition to consolidate the Indian secular nation-state. Subaltern historian Gyanendra Pandey argued that national historiography was characterised by a form of “collective amnesia” and called for a recuperation of neglected fragments of history (1992, 33). As for feminist scholars, they focused on silenced minorities such as women, lower castes, children (Das 1990; Menon and Bhasin 1998; Butalia 1998). Partition studies showed that the birth of India and Pakistan was not a neat departure from the past. Instead, they supported a recovery of traces of the past to help South Asian populations face present and future cultural, social and political challenges. Looking back to the past appeared as a requirement to reassess the achievements and limitations of independence, and move forward.
4Yet, the field of Partition studies had its own blind spots. Firstly, it focused more on Punjab, due in part to the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. India was also a central focus, while Pakistan remained marginal and Bangladesh was almost neglected. However, over the last two decades it has been increasingly observed that assessing the long-term consequences of 1947 on today’s South Asia requires further analysis of the history of Bengal, in particular Eastern Bengal and Bangladesh. More recent criticism thus explores together the legacy of the 1947 and 1971 Partitions to mitigate the “amnesias” which marked the Bengal region in the aftermath of the two national fractures, owing to psychological and political imperatives. Ananya Kabir coins her exploration of this double erasure and of the cultural productions it led to “Partition post-amnesias” (2013). The concept elaborates on Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory.” Originally applied to Holocaust studies, postmemory refers to “the relationship that the ‘generation’ after bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up.” For Hirsch, the connection to the past is not mediated by memorial recall but “by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.”1
5Applied to the history of East Bengal and Bangladesh, and reconceptualised as “post-amnesia,” the term does not merely focus on the haunting presence of the past for generations who did not directly experience the traumas of Partition. It also qualifies a “recovery” of the past (Chaudhuri 2008, 39), in particular in cultural productions that “braid the politics of memory with the poetics of place, where the latter is manifested in vernacular histories.” For Kabir, “Post-amnesia’s retrieval of lost places dialogues with paradigms of secular modernity inherited in the wake of decolonization” (2016, 26). Building on these critical concepts, I will argue that if “post-amnesia” originally qualifies cultural productions by those who were born after the Partitions, to some extent, it could also apply to the creative “recovery” of those who lived through these traumas but reimagine them in their work some years later.
6This article examines Fireflies in the Mist (1994), by Indian writer Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007), alongside A Golden Age (2007) by Bangladeshi-born British writer Tahmima Anam (1975-). The two novels draw differently on Bengali Renaissance thought and culture to fictionalise the history of Eastern Bengal and Bangladesh. I will demonstrate that while looking back to the Renaissance and pre-Partition pasts might seemingly undermine the very notion of “rebirth,” the novels’ recovery of the past is in itself a creative renewal of that notion. I will first introduce the novels and show how their respective contexts of production impact the representation of national “births” and “rebirths.” Through the concepts of “disowning” and “recovery” (Chaudhuri 2008, 41), I will examine how both narratives use vernacular literatures and languages to evoke the Renaissance and return to times, places and cultures seemingly erased by the two Partitions. I will argue here that the “recovery” of the Renaissance is an act both of creative recuperation and of critical reassessment, which bears similarities with the revisionist work undertaken by Partition studies in the 1990s. This interpretation helps understand how the idea of national “(re)-birth” itself is redefined and reconciled with the traumatic loss and death that accompanied independence.
7Fireflies in the Mist (1994) is Indian writer Qurratulain Hyder’s English self-“transcreation” of her Urdu novel Aakhir-i-Shab ke Hamsafar (Kabir 2015, 122), which was originally published in 1979, a mere eight years after the birth of Bangladesh. The first chapters of the novel had already come out as a collection of stories in the Urdu journal Guftogu in 1966-67 (Hussein 2008, ix). The various publications of Hyder’s text, twice in Urdu then English, constitute in themselves multiple births and renewals, since each publication led to creative transformations – in genre, content, length, and language. In her English publication, she added a first section, “Caledonia,” to “foreground […] the colonial connection between Britain and Bengal” (Hussein, xii). Her work was published in various locations with different readers in mind. The Urdu novel came out in Bombay, Aligarh, and Lahore while the English text, targeting both an Indian and international Anglophone readership, was published by Directions in Delhi and New York.
- 2 Born in an aristocratic North Indian family, Hyder (1927-2007) was raised by parents who wrote and (...)
8Strictly speaking, Fireflies in the Mist is not a post-amnesia narrative, as it is an account based on the author’s lived experiences of the 1947 and 1971 Partitions.2 Yet, the many years that elapsed between the 1947 Partition and Hyder’s novel in Urdu (1979) and then her transcreation into English (1994) testify to processes of erasure and an involuntary “disowning” (Chaudhuri 2008, 41). For Chaudhuri, “disowning,” the first step of a cultural process that characterises the work of modern Indian writers and artists, is followed by “recovery.” The process refers to English-educated Indians who, after leaving behind aspects of Indian vernacular cultures (Chaudhuri focuses on Bengali high culture), move away from English and turn, usually serendipitously, to Indian language(s) and culture(s). Qurratulain Hyder figures in the list of modern writers in whose work Chaudhuri finds this pattern. She is quoted alongside writers who departed from the learning or teaching of English to recover vernacular arts and languages (2008, 46). I reframe “disowning” here to refer to the turning away from the traumatic past of Partition(s), which was both linked to the political imperatives of the 1947-1971 period, and to the necessary time needed to psychologically and emotionally process the trauma of the successive Partitions. And I define “recovery” as a creative recuperation and reinvestment of that past.
9Fireflies in the Mist spans four decades of Bengal’s history from 1939 to the late 1970s. Some chapters stretch even further back in history to discuss events that transformed Bengal’s social, political and cultural composition: the 1757 Battle of Plassey when the British overthrew the last Muslim Nawab of Bengal, the 1857 Mutiny, the 1905-1911 partition of Bengal and Hindu and Muslim Renaissance movements. The novel folds into three parts: the first two are set in colonial times, while part three portrays the post-1947 Partition period and ends on the bloody aftermath of 1971. The narrative focuses on individual experiences through which it portrays the many intricate layers of identity that make up the diverse Bengali culture and society. The novel also shows how these “layers” may be “scatter[ed],” transformed and recuperated into a new configuration when times abruptly and drastically change (Orsini 2017).
10The bulk of the novel takes place in Dhaka (the capital of Bangladesh in 1971). Focalisation shifts between multiple characters and in particular between the members of four families who come together in the 1940s: the families of Kayastha Romesh Babu Sarkar, of Muslim Nawab Nurul Zaman Chowdhuri, of Rev. Paul Mathew Banerjee and of expat Charles Barlow. Their fates intertwine through the friendship of the college girls Deepali Sarkar, Jehan Ara Chowdhury and Rosie Banerjee. As WWII unfolds, the narrative follows Deepali and Rosie’s turn to radical Marxism, their “communist study circle and underground activities, the […] caste dynamics between Indian Christian groups, the […] progressive politics and class snobbishness of modern women like Uma Roy,” and the attraction Deepali feels to Comrade Rehan Ahmed (Orsini 2017). The latter introduces Deepali to the life of the rural deprived.
11Through Deepali and Rehan, Hyder explores the growing tensions between Bengal’s Hindus and Muslims who had once shared a multi-layered and rich culture. At the same time, the novel dexterously depicts the interaction of protagonists, who despite different and complex religious, social, linguistic and educational backgrounds, share vernacular sensibilities, and in particular a love for high Indo-Persian and Urdu culture, but also for Bengali folk culture. The narrative ends in the late 1970s on overall disillusionment as former revolutionary Rehan has joined the new exploiting tycoons of Bangladesh while Deepali has withdrawn to far-off Trinidad. On returning to Bangladesh, after twenty-eight years abroad, Deepali feels both bitter and out of place as she wonders whether she, Rehan and their comrades were the “real rebel[s] of Nazrul Islam” (Hyder 2008, 358). The younger generation of revolutionaries, embodied by Rehan’s niece, Nasira, recalls the “inferno” of the liberation war, the thousands of rapes, all the killing and suffering, and feels nothing but disdain and rage towards the country’s new leaders, the “affluent criminal classes” (354).
- 3 The Good Muslim is mostly set the 1980s. The narrative shifts from Rehana to her two children. They (...)
- 4 The story revolves around Zubaida Haque, adopted daughter to the native Bengali family, Haques. Zub (...)
- 5 Born in Bangladesh in 1975, Anam grew up travelling the world due to her father’s work as a journal (...)
12A Golden Age (2007), Tahmima Anam’s debut novel, is the first volume of a Bengali trilogy which includes The Good Muslim (2011)3 and The Bones of Grace (2015).4 It was awarded the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. The novel is a good illustration of both the postmemory work described by Hirsch and “post-amnesia” as conceptualised by Kabir: from an early age, Anam was told stories of her grandparents’ involvement in the Bangladesh War.5 A Golden Age mostly centres on the months leading up to the creation of Bangladesh. After a brief prologue set in 1959, the plot opens in Dhaka during the March 1971 Operation Searchlight, which started the civil war, and ends with the proclamation of the new nation on 16 December of the same year. Prior to the 1947 partition of the Bengal province, it was still believed that Bengal’s strong and long-standing geographical identity and linguistic cohesiveness could nurture a unifying cultural nationalism. The bloody Partition which tore the province apart thwarted that belief as Hindus massively fled Eastern Bengal, while Muslims migrated either to East or West Pakistan. The British hastily drew the 1947 borders along religious lines. The precipitated transfer of power seemingly answered Indian nationalists’ demand for autonomy and the Muslim League’s call for an independent Muslim nation, but it actually increased communal riots and provoked horrific violence. The 1947 Partition led to an estimated one million deaths and around 75,000 rapes (Butalia 1998, 3).
13The creation of the incongruous Pakistani wings split apart communities and families but also triggered inner identity conflicts which are well embodied by the female protagonist Rehana Haque. Born in a Calcutta family, Rehana loses custody of her twins after her husband’s death and is forced to stay in Dhaka (East Pakistan) in 1959 while the children live with her brother-in-law in Karachi (West Pakistan). From the onset, the novel interweaves the national and domestic levels. The narrative tracks Rehana’s progressive involvement in the liberation war and reframes the commonly male nationalist construct through a feminine perspective. Despite her original uneasiness with passionate revolutionary sentiment, Rehana ends up supporting the freedom fighters to protect her twins, Maya and Sohail, who have both turned to Communism. Rehana hides the freedom fighters’ weapons, as well as their commander, the Major. On the whole, she is assigned domestic roles as she supports the fight by sewing kathas and making pickles. In that respect, Anam’s characterisation of this female protagonist does not renew traditional representations of women. After harbouring the Major for three months, Rehana lets him be taken away by the Pakistan Army in place of Sohail. The novel’s conclusion is bitter-sweet. As the treaty officialising the end of the war is about to be signed, Rehana recalls the numerous casualties of war, friends, neighbours, relatives whose brutal deaths were, at times, recounted during the narrative. Military violence, torture, rape, bombings, burned cities, plundered houses and destroyed families weigh heavily on the celebration of independence.
14The final lines of the novel take the form of one of the many letters Rehana addresses to her dead husband. The letter opens on a mournful tone, yet it ends on Rehana’s determination. This shift is emphasised as the past tense gives way to the future. The change marks both Rehana’s resolve to keep living on as well as the resilience of the country, despite the many horrors of the war: “Niazi will sign the treaty and I will walk into the streets […] a boy will sell flags […] fists will wave in the air” (Anam 2012, 286). However, can such a narrative be not just about survival, but about renewal and rebirth? And does the celebratory concept of “rebirth,” at the national level, fit the dreadful circumstances in which East Pakistan was transformed into Bangladesh? The immediate aftermath of independence, evoked at the end of Hyder’s novel, was marred with authoritarian policies. Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman passed constitutional amendments that suspended fundamental rights, and the political crises that ensued worsened when famine broke out in 1974. Bangladesh’s political scene remained extremely volatile for nearly two decades, as the Presidential era (1975-1991) saw the rapid succession of authoritarian leaders, repeated coups by the military junta and assassinations of leaders.
15If Anam’s narrative ends in December 1971, the ambivalence of her novel’s ending foreshadows the challenges awaiting the new-born nation. Still, despite all the deaths and suffering that darkened the birth of Bangladesh, the ending does signal a rebirth in its use and renewal of Rabindranath Tagore’s famous patriotic song: “we are spellbound, love-bound, home-bound, singing ‘How I love you, my golden Bengal’” (Anam 2012, 286). The Renaissance nationalist poet’s best-known lines are not merely invoked nostalgically. Reinscribed in a postmemory and post-amnesia narrative marked by two Partitions, this song gains new meaning. It becomes part of a cultural “recovery” whereby South Asians, whose past was in various ways partly erased or buried by the successive traumas of Partition(s), reconstruct the past to imagine the future. This progressive direction is indicated in the adjectives “spellbound, love-bound, home-bound” and the ternary rhythm of the sentence that echoes the beat of marching feet.
16In A Golden Age and Fireflies in the Mist, post-Partition reconstructions of the past rely, in different ways, on Renaissance iconic figures, movements and literatures. This recuperation of the Renaissance is also a renewal articulated through processes of “disowning” and “recovery” (Chaudhuri 2008, 41). Renaissance socio-historical and political achievements are reassessed and undermined, but Renaissance literatures are recontextualised in the Post-Partition narratives and renewed through pre-modern and modern vernacular poetics. The recovery of pre-modern and modern vernacular poetics helps understand why returning to the past and its buried traces does not necessarily impede progress.
- 6 Rammohun advocated Hindu religious reform, the abolition of social oppression and educational refor (...)
17The ideas of “rebirth,” “renewal” and “revival” seem to unquestionably apply to nineteenth-century Bengal’s “flowering of social, religious, literary and political activities” (Sarkar 1979, 1) and “the emergence of humanism and modernity in nineteenth-century Calcutta” (Chaudhuri 2008, 64). It is estimated that the Renaissance started in 1815 when the “father of the Bengal renaissance,” reformist Rammohun Roy (1772-1833),6 arrived in Calcutta, and ended with the leadership of Gandhi in 1919 (Sarkar 1979, 14; Kopf 1961, 300). However, critics have highlighted the Renaissance’s “social contradictions” (Dhar 1987), and some have even questioned the relevance of the term “Renaissance” in the Bengali context. Poromesh harshly criticises the Bengali intelligentsia’s promotion of Western education, although the bhadralok, the members of that class, “claimed to have pioneered the so-called Bengal Renaissance” (1995, 670). In fact, when put alongside other Renaissance movements, the Bengal Renaissance was not a clear “break from the past in a progressive direction” (Sarkar 2019, 1). Contrary to what happened in Russia for instance, where the intelligentsia rallied the masses through a movement of “going to the people” and bypassed bourgeois liberalism to adopt a socialist ideology, the Bengal Renaissance remained “confined within a Hindu-elitist and colonial framework” (Sarkar 2019, 23, 2).
18Yet, while the term Renaissance seems to be an elitist, upper-middle-class construct “identifying too closely with British ideas of ‘progress’,” it has led to enlightening debates, especially on Indian modernity (Chaudhuri 2008, 64). Bengali reformers found inspiration in Western reformist and revolutionary movements (the Italian Resorgimiento, the French Enlightenment, the 1830 French revolution) and Bengali nationalism was influenced by Bolshevism and Marxism. But the part the Bengal Renaissance played in the cultural history and intellectual tradition of Bengal needs to be problematised to highlight the fact that what happened in Bengal was not a mere copy of European Renaissance movements.
- 7 The dates match the publication of Bengali poet Madhusudan Dutt’s epic poem Meghnadbadhakabya (1860 (...)
19To move away from Western historicism, Chaudhuri relocates Indian modernity (1860-circa 1981)7 within the transactions between Indian, and in particular Bengali, high and low cultures which themselves occur through processes of “disowning” and “recovery.” For him, these poles are constitutive of the modern self that emerges during the Renaissance. They mark Bengali/Indian writers’ “turn” from English to previously “disowned” Bengali/vernacular literatures. “Recovery” also involves a form of reworking where Western and vernacular influences intermingle (2008, 41–42). I believe that, more generally, Bengalis’ relationship to the past, and in particular (pre-) Partition pasts, is also articulated through processes of cultural “disowning” and “recovery.”
20If Qurratulain Hyder figures in the list of modern writers in whose work Chaudhuri finds this pattern, in Fireflies in the Mist, “recovery” is a multi-layered linguistic renewal as her text turns from Urdu to English via Bengali. The novel goes back to the Renaissance movements only to undermine their polarisation along religious lines. This subversion does not lead to a break from the past, but rather to a creative reconstruction of both Renaissance arts and (pre-)modern vernacular arts and cultural practices which form an integral part of the diverse Bengali culture the novel portrays.
- 8 Addas emerged in Calcutta, presumably first among the bhadraloks, as gatherings during which though (...)
21Fireflies in the Mist looks back to Bengal Renaissance movements’ development along religious lines in a heated conversation opposing two long-term family friends, the elderly Muslim Nawab, Sir Nurul Zaman Chowdhury, and the young Hindu woman Deepali Sarkar. The scene is set in the 1940s, when Partition is in the air, and it is reminiscent of Bengali addas, animated conversations among friends.8 Addas recur in Hyder’s novel on multiple occasions, especially when friends discuss political issues. They contribute to the novel’s multi-centredness through which the conflicting viewpoints of Bengalis of diverse socio-cultural and religious backgrounds are brought together. The discussion analysed here unfolds over several pages as Deepali challenges the Nawab’s pro-Partition stance. The latter refers her back to the Muslims’ adhesion to the 1905 Partition and the Hindu terrorist attacks Muslims suffered in retaliation, and to the nineteenth-century separate revivalist movements. The setting further emphasises the Hindu-Muslim divide. Two majestic portraits of Ahmed Khan and Tagore adorn the library, but they are discursively drawn apart: the former is called the “Father of the Muslim Renaissance” (136) while Tagore is referred to as one of the “leaders of the Hindu Bengali Renaissance” (Hyder 2008, 145). Ultimately, even the claim to Bengal’s “cultural unity” is dismissed. While Deepali argues “in Bengal Hindus and Muslims share a common culture” (147), the Nawab recalls the nineteenth-century language controversy supported by the Hindu Bengali press which excluded the Muslims from Bengali language and literatures.
22However, no sooner has the conversation reached a deadlock than a “recovery” of the compromised cultural unity appears through the distant notes of a Sufi song coming from the garden. At first sight, the Sufi lyrics merely mournfully reiterate the communal divide, and they also ominously foreshadow the 1947 Partition: “My neighbour lives in a house of glass/But I have never seen Him. A deep river separates Him from me/How I wish He could come to me” (Hyder 2008, 148). The “deep river” evokes Bengali water and deltaic landscapes but also marks a seemingly unbridgeable rift between neighbours. Given the context, the song acquires new meanings. The neighbours seem to stand for Bengali Muslims and Hindus who might soon be further divided as Indian and Pakistani nationals. But this interpretation is renewed through young revolutionary Rehan Ahmed’s eyes. Deepali recalls how he had sung that same song and commented on the syncretism, “humanism” and “social consciousness” of Sufis:
“In Bengal the Hindu sanyasis and the Madari [Muslim] fakirs fought together against the Company’s forces in 1770.” He had proceeded to talk about Bengal’s great singing Sufis Sheikh Madan Baul, Shatolan Shah, Hasan Reza, Lala Shah whose lyrics had inspired Tagore’s poetry and music … (148)
While Renaissance artists Nazrul and Tagore had previously been evoked merely to polarise Hindu and Muslim Bengalis, here, Tagore’s art is reinterpreted through the prism of both revolutionary rhetoric and pre-modern syncretic imagery. This undermines what had appeared as Tagore’s Hindu posture. In fact, Tagore had a much more ambivalent stance; according to Chaudhuri, he critiqued the “bhadralok self” and the Renaissance of which he was “at once […] product, […] spokesman, […] inquisitor” (2008, 24, 74).
23The plot then immediately shifts to a portrayal of Bengali syncretic theatre traditions as Deepali recalls the many Bengali plays once performed in the Nawab’s private theatre hall: “The plays reflected the intense patriotic fervour and Bengali nationalism of Hindus and Muslims alike” (Hyder 2008, 149). The richness and diversity of this theatre is emphasised in the depiction of forms of high and low culture involving Bengalis of all classes: “The villagers had their folk troupes, the urban middle-classes their dramatic clubs, the landlords their private concert halls called jalsa-ghar” (150). This is just one of several instances in which the novel minutely depicts Bengali culture and its syncretic influences.
- 9 Hyder might have expected some of her Anglophone readers to be familiar with the genre thanks to re (...)
24Bengali cultural elements abound in the novel: songs, poetry, theatre, addas, architecture, sculpture, clothes and crafts (a chapter is devoted to “weavers” and Balucher saris), painting – for instance Mughal miniature, etc. The extent and variety of everyday-life cultural aspects give a quasi-encyclopaedic dimension to the novel. While the “recovery” process tracked by Chaudhuri implies a turn to a formerly disowned vernacular past, Hyder’s plurilingual transcreation complicates this process. This is perhaps why references to cultural practices are often followed with explanatory comments or historical background. For instance, a parenthetical line explains the meaning of jalsa-ghar: “(‘Jalsa or musical soiree was also a relic of the Mughal regime’)” (Hyder 2008, 150).9 Meant for the reader, such explanations point to the author’s self-reflexive transcreation from Bengali to Urdu, and from the latter to English.
- 10 The dastan tropes were already used in the Urdu original. Dastans are oral narratives of Arab and P (...)
25The Bengali culture she portrays is both syncretic and protean. In contrast with the dichotomic Renaissance movements, her novel posits Bengali culture as both rooted in intermingling ancient traditions and languages – (Indo-)Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit – and resolutely modern and flexible. This malleability is best expressed in the novel’s mixture of genres, ancient and modern, which come together as part and parcel of Bengali culture. So, if Renaissance thought and artists are recontextualised through ancient vernacular poetics, pre-modern and modern vernacular cultures are also renewed in the narrative. For instance, Hyder deftly modernises the traditional dastan, a form of oral narrative (Mukherjee 2006, 603).10 She uses several dastan tropes: lost love, voyages and crossings, disguises, masks, and progressive revelations of identity. But these are adapted to modern-day Bengal and subverted, in particular through revolutionary politics, when young Muslim Ahmed Rehan dresses up as a Baul fakir then as a Vaishnav monk (Hyder 2008, 118). Lost love no longer simply applies to romance, or entails a longing for spiritual elevation, but it encodes exile from one’s home, one’s culture and one’s past. Here a Sufi/Bakhti trope is also renewed, vihara, which expresses “separation from one’s lover, who could stand in for guru, saint, or even god (or God)” (Kabir 2015, 124). The trope has been redefined in post-Partition narratives to express the trauma of the Partition exile, severed physically and/or emotionally and psychologically from the past.
26In addition, modern vernacular cultural practices are redefined through references to the Renaissance. This is best illustrated in allusions to Nazrul, the pioneer of a new Bengali poetic tradition imbued with revolutionary ideals. Deepali is an acclaimed singer of Nazrul Geeti, songs which incorporate revolutionary notions as well as spiritual, philosophical and romantic themes. Her vision of the world also merges mysticism with realism. In the narrative, this sometimes leads to subtle shifts from socio-realism to magic-realism or fairy tale, and vice versa. For instance, after being asked to comment on a bhatiali song – the Song of the Volga Boatman – Deepali pictures her coachman as the Volga boatman: “Under-nourishment had aged him fast. Abdul-Qadir and his horses had become one, mystically-speaking. Just as the Padma Boatman and his Song and his Canoe were one” (Hyder 2008, 31). Bhatiali, a form of folk music, is a river song sung by boatmen while going down the course of a river. The genre knew its greatest fame during the 1930s-1950s. The main themes include nature, the body and spirituality. Here the bhatiali is renewed through Deepali’s love for Nazrul Geeti as the coachman’s toil and suffering are both asserted and mystified. In this intermingling of genres, tones, literary forms and languages, and the modernisation of old vernacular literatures, the text becomes hybrid. In both form and content, the novel explores interstitial spaces of cultural encounters “that entertain difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha 1994, 5).
27Anam’s novel, A Golden Age, does not possess the rich lyricism or the complex linguistic texture of Hyder’s prose. She belongs to a contemporary generation of (mostly diasporic) Anglophone writers who promote “opening Bangladesh to the world” and to “English-language world literature” and encourage the translation of Bangla texts into English (Ahmed 2013, 45). As co-organiser of the Dhaka Hay Festival in 2012, Anam invited renowned British publishers to “bring in conversation writers, readers, publishers and booksellers” (47). The translation of vernacular languages and literatures and their adaptation, or reworking, in another language, particularly in English, have been concerns of the postcolonial field since its inception. Rushdie’s claim that “the prose writing […] 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 […] so-called ‘vernacular languages’” caused an outcry (1997, viii). Postcolonial theory had precisely started to subvert such hierarchies.
28Translation into English can undeniably give Bangla literature a broader international outreach, but a translation is always also a transcreation. Hyder’s transcreation, her multi-layered borrowings and renewals of Bengali cultural elements give the Anglophone reader access to a vernacular “sensibility” (Chaudhuri 2008, 46). Inspired by Chaudhuri, I understand the vernacular as referring not merely to language but also to specific (here Bengali) ways of life and visions of the world. So my concern is not with English-vernacular cross-fertilisations but rather with the ways in which old and modern vernacular literatures and poetic tropes dialogue and renew one another in the two novels examined. In this instance, Chaudhuri’s reframing of colonialism as “a phase of self-enquiry and self-redefinition” in India, instead of a mere clash between foreign and native cultures, is particularly enlightening (2004, xix). His analysis shows how modern Bengali language and literatures, forged through interactions with Western culture during the Renaissance, shaped bourgeois secular consciousness and transformed the latter’s relation to the past and to older vernacular literatures (2008, 46).
- 11 The Indian anthem, “Jana Gana Mana,” also adapts a Bengali song by Tagore.
29What about Anglophone writers, like Anam, who primarily write in English? How and why do such writers keep conversing with their “rich literary tradition […;] Tagore […,] Nazrul Islam” (Ahmed 2013, 47)? Chaudhuri provides an answer when he observes that “the reason why readers continually revisit Tagore […] is for a renewing sense of how writing remakes language and culture as a habitation, a dwelling, which the reader, too, has occupied in India in the last century” (2008, 31). I believe that in revisiting Tagore’s poetic tropes, A Golden Age and Fireflies in the Mist give Anglophone readers a dwelling in Indian/Bengali culture. In this renewal, the texts bring readers closer to an understanding of Bengalis’ relationship to history and tradition, and to Bengalis’ ways of seeing and experiencing the world. The title of Anam’s novel, A Golden Age, echoes Tagore’s best-known revolutionary song “Amar Shonar Bangla” (My golden Bengal) which was to become Bangladesh’s national anthem.11 In the novel, the song gains new meanings through its multiple occurrences. It is first hummed by Maya in an act of patriotic defiance as Tagore’s songs were banned by the Pakistani government in 1971:
she had learned her mother’s ghazals, but her politics had turned her to the banned songs of Tagore, and these suited her better. For they did not demand the plaintive, mournful tenor of forsaken love but rather, a more innocent form of sentiment, which Tagore, uncomplicated lover of God, of earth, of beauty, had delivered in such abundance. (Anam 2012, 79)
- 12 In the immediate aftermath of the 1947 Partition, the central Pakistani government tried to impose (...)
30Beneath the surface of revolutionary politics, Maya is drawn to Tagore’s lyric depictions of nature and the divine. Recontextualised in 1971, this subtle shift from politics to poetics hints at one of the main themes of the novel: the politicisation of Bengali and Urdu languages and literatures. This politicisation widened the gap between Pakistan and East Bengal, and among Bengalis, in the 1947-1971 period. By 1971, Bangla had been given the status of an official language, but this victory had cost many lives.12 If the novel does not directly portray the 1947 Partition, its lasting impacts are shown in the linguistic divide that estranges family members and leads to inner identity conflicts. This is best illustrated through Rehana Haque’s experience. Having settled in Dhaka (East Pakistan), Rehana rarely meets her relatives, who have moved from Calcutta to Karachi. On one such occasion, Rehana’s sister derides her Bengali-accented Urdu:
Marzia had behaved as though Rahana had betrayed them all; she had said things like, ‘Your Urdu is not as good as it used to be; must be all that Bengali you’re speaking.’ She pronounced it Bungali. And when she had referred to the servants at her house, she had said, ‘yes, we’re very lucky, we have two Bungalis […].’ (Anam 2012, 18–19)
Linguistic nationalism, which had played a fundamental role in Bengali nationalists’ opposition to the 1905 Partition of Bengal, strongly re-emerged after 1947. In late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century nationalist articles, essays, and literatures, Bengali language had become an anticolonial weapon. In the 1947-1971 period however, Bengali linguistic nationalism drove Pakistani Bengalis and Eastern Bengalis apart. The excerpt above undermines this politicisation of language in the characterisation of Marzia. Her claim to a refined and authentic Urdu is subverted by her snobbish mispronunciation of the word “Bungali.” Under the veneer of cultural pride, the text reveals her disdain for the seemingly less cultured and lower-class Bengalis. Through Rehana’s perspective, the narrative further illustrates how, in 1971, both Urdu and Bangla were weaponised. Former neighbours turn into enemies when Rehana is told to beware of Dhaka’s Urdu-speaking butchers known for collaborating with the Pakistan Army (122–23). Rehana herself feels conflicted since despite speaking “the Urdu of the enemy” (49), she cannot renounce her love for “its lyrical lilts, its double meanings, its furrowed beat” (50).
31By returning to Tagore, the narrative moves away from the linguistic polarisation that – along with Pakistan’s centralisation of political, administrative, economic and military power – encouraged the 1971 Partition. Tagore’s song “Amar Shonar Bangla” is repeatedly sung in the novel for its revolutionary content. However, through this song, the narrative also renews one of Tagore’s major poetic tropes, the trope of “light.” With this renewal comes a new understanding of South Asian populations’ relationship to their past after the Partitions. This is illustrated in the ambivalence of the phrase “golden Bengal.” Tagore is known for turning away from early nationalists’ nostalgia for the supposedly “golden” past of India (Chaudhuri 2008, 70). In the 1830s, this nostalgia prompted Louis Vivian Derozio to write the sonnet “To India – My Native Land,” which inspired both radical and moderate nationalists. The fact that this “golden” past was based on Orientalist reconstructions and that it was rooted in Hindu epics and myths which presented Muslims as the enemy was left unquestioned. Tagore was more inquisitive and self-critical. In his poetry, “light” metaphorically refers to “the advent and reign of logos,” or the Bengali modern self, and the latter’s awareness of its problematic relation to the past, shaped as it was by colonial constructs (Chaudhuri 2018, 18).
32Given Tagore’s legacy, Anam’s use of the Bengali poet in her post-amnesia narrative of 1971 cannot be merely read as nostalgic longing for an irretrievable pre-traumatic Bengali culture. In the novel, the phrase “golden age” is reassessed through a network of references to “light” that problematises the connection to the past and, at the same time, redefines national (re)birth. The earliest redefinition comes from the name Rehana gives to the house she builds to have enough money to claim her twins back. She names it “Shona,” for gold, in memory of the heavy price she paid and the “precious things she wanted never to lose again” (Anam 2012, 16). The heaviest price she paid was not money but a moral sacrifice in the name of motherly love – she stole a necklace from an elderly blind man. This first sacrifice foreshadows the more terrible one she makes in 1971 when she lets the Pakistan Army take away the Major to whom she had offered shelter in Shona, in order to protect Sohail.
33Tagore’s song resonates again at the end of the novel, on the day of the proclamation of independence, as Rehana pictures people chanting in the streets: “‘How I love you, my golden Bengal’” (Anam 2012, 286). The national victory echoes Rehana’s bitter-sweet victory in getting her children back; she feels both proud and guilty when gazing at Shona. Similarly, the celebration of the nation’s (re)birth is darkened by death, loss and the guilt of survivors. Tagore had felt that the Indian past was both “his own and the Other” – the colonist’s (Chaudhuri 2008, 70). The end of the novel also indicates South Asians’ alienation from their own past, a “disowning” caused by the multiple subconscious or imposed erasures that the two traumatic Partitions triggered (41). Still, just like “Shona” / gold indicated Rehana’s determination not to lose anything precious in the future, the fact that the novel ends on Tagore’s song can be read as the nation’s resolute march towards its future, however perilous it might be. So the multiple meanings of the term “shona” and its resonances with Tagore’s poetic ambivalence towards India’s “golden” past redefine the idea of national (re)birth.
- 13 Hindustan classic melody usually sung at dawn.
34National (re)birth is further marked in Anam’s and Hyder’s novels through references to the light of a new “dawn.” The last section of Anam’s novel opens on the lines: “The flowers she had planted at the start of the war now studded the green. […] Dawn was just breaking over the horizon” (Anam 2012, 281). “Dawn,” the start of a new day, metaphorically indicates the beginning of a new era. Similarly, Hyder’s novel ends on a breaking dawn. Staring out from the plane taking her back to Trinidad, Deepali recalls the lines of Bengali Sanskrit poet Yogeshwar, then various melodies of the Raga Bhairav,13 and she finally starts humming a “Bengali hymn to Shankar,” a Hindu God, as she observes the “dawn breaking” (Hyder 2008, 378). The recovery of Sanskrit poetry along with Hindustan classical music provides a new understanding of the past, history and (re)birth. Even if the birth of Bangladesh is marred with blood, loss and disillusion, the poetic imagery and musical rhythm used here thwart a linear perception of time. In this recuperation of older vernacular forms, renewal is infinite: “For millions of years the sun has been rising and going down and rising again and going down again and rising…” (378). That is why, despite the bleak future that both Fireflies in the Mist and A Golden Age seemingly end on, the transformation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh can still be read as a rebirth.
35Can one talk of actual rebirth when the old and the new intermingle so much that the new might seem eclipsed by the old? This is a question to which I believe Fireflies in the Mist and A Golden Age give an affirmative reply. The novels redefine the idea of “national rebirth” in a fashion comparable to the way in which the Bengal Renaissance has been reinterpreted. Instead of historiographies, readers are given individual and family stories that illustrate how the two Partitions shape South Asian populations’ relation to the past, but also how their reconstruction of the past impacts their vision of the present and the future. From socio-historical and political perspectives, one expects the “rebirth” of a nation to imply a definite turn from the past and a move in a progressive direction. However, the novels are creative reinvestments of the past. They “recover” and recontextualise Renaissance literatures and arts but also older cultural forms and tropes that are brought to Anglophone readers from different perspectives. While Hyder’s self-transcreation of Urdu into English relies on rich and diverse forms of low and high Bengali culture, Anam’s vernacular sensibility is articulated through discrete poetic tropes. Despite major differences in style and tone, the two novels’ post-Partition recovery of the past can be read as a poetic rebirth in so far as they do not mourn an irretrievable past but rather open up a fictional space to imagine alternative futures, outside of the usually teleological national narrative.
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