Curious to know some of the experiences that went
into the making of “A Golden Age”, Emile Chabal
decided to meet Tahmima Anam in Cambridge. She
came to read excerpts from her book for
’Wordfest,’ Cambridge’s annual literary festival,
alongside debut authors Paul Torday and Jeremy
Page. It was an unusually warm spring day and the
discussion ranged far and wide - from the
intricacies of contemporary Bangladeshi politics
to the meaning of intellectual engagement.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: What is the relationship between
your Ph.D on the Bangladeshi freedom fighters’
movement and the novel?
A: I was already an undercover writer
in the guise of being a doctoral student, but I
wasn’t one of those people in their 20s who could
just write. I felt I needed to build up my
confidence. It’s proven very useful because the
book is political in Bangladesh, and having a
Ph.D allows me to reply to those who would doubt
my legitimacy because I’ve grown up abroad and
not lived through the war.
Q: One thing people are unlikely to
grasp fully outside Bangladesh are the political
ramifications of the book. Do you feel like
you’ve written a political book?
A: Mostly what I wanted to do is take
that historical moment away from politics and
talk about how ordinary people lived through the
war. Whether this is political or not, I’m not
sure. How, say a widow, a housewife or a refugee
survived the war and how it changed their lives.
Whenever people in Bangladesh ask me, ’What’s
your national aim?’ I reply that I want people to
be able to own this part of history and remember
it as theirs.
Q: Do you feel that you are doing
something new? Because of the relative lack of
literature in English surrounding 1971, who did
you take as your inspiration?
A: My Bangla is poor and much of the
literature I’ve read about 1971 has been in
translation, but I know there is a lot of
literature on the subject - in fact, all
Bangladeshi literature is about 1971 in some way,
so it is not so much writing an unwritten history
as translating it for a wider audience. In terms
of inspiration, however, I admire not only the
’greats,’ like Rushdie or García-Márquez, but
younger authors as well, among them Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie, whose latest book Half of A Yellow
Sun also deals with a war from the perspective of
characters who were not major players.
Q: How did your status as an outsider
affect your perceptions of the ’national goal’ of
1971?
A: I feel very implicated in
Bangladesh. I don’t have an immigrant’s viewpoint
and therefore don’t have stakes in a place other
than Bangladesh. Nevertheless, I definitely wrote
the book from an outsider’s perspective and
that’s why the novel is told from Rehana’s point
of view and not that of her children since she,
too, is an outsider. Part of the book is about
Rehana discovering where her loyalties really
lie. And for me too, I think, writing the novel
was a way of trying to belong to a place that I
don’t always belong to - sometimes I feel I
belong and sometimes I don’t. Now that I’ve
written this book, I feel I belong so much more;
people come up to me and say, ’Now that you’ve
written this about your country, we embrace you
as a citizen.’
Q: Your book ends on a note of
defiance and hope. To me, that seems peculiar
since the story of 1971 is both tragic and full
of unresolved contradictions.
A: It’s funny you say that because
when I talk to people about the war, they never
think of it as a tragedy, though, to be fair,
there is a big difference between the way the
rich and the poor talk about 1971. The poor
generally talk about 1971 and their feeling of
being betrayed: they thought they were getting
something but materially their lives didn’t
change at all. When you talk, on the other hand,
to the elite or those who were student
revolutionaries, they very rarely think of it as
a tragedy, even if terrible things happened to
those they knew. For them, it’s a moment of hope,
the ’best time of their lives’, and I borrowed
that for the book. That’s also why I wrote about
1971: I wanted to say something uncomplicatedly
positive.
Q: Why were you not pushed to write a
counter-voice to this nostalgic story?
A: There is a dissenting voice in the
form of Silvi, who doesn’t believe in the premise
of the war, but if you’re talking about the story
of the violence committed by the Mukti Bahini
then, yes, that is absent from the novel.
Q: Is this something you have been thinking of writing about?
A: I think the Pakistani side is
completely different; it is the army’s side. I
think there is a big difference between Pakistan
and the Pakistan Army. It is a distinction I only
recently learned to make when I went to Pakistan
this year and met people who had protested
against the war; this was a transformative
experience for me. As for the Bihari story, I
think it is one that really needs to be told. I
didn’t put it in the novel by choice - partly a
narrative choice.
Q: Was that the first time you’d visited Pakistan?
A: No, some of my family moved to
Karachi in 1947, so I used to visit as a child.
Then, when I developed a sense of history, I no
longer wanted to and refused to go for 15 years.
I finally went back when I organised this
conference on 1971 in January, which was a very
moving experience as I got the chance to meet
people who had left the army or had gone to jail
for opposing the war. It made me realise that,
much as it is difficult for us to imagine having
a foreign force committing atrocities on us,
imagine what it would feel like to live in a
country that was capable of such a thing. Who
knows in future who the army might turn on?
Q: 1971 is certainly one of Pakistan’s great silences.
A: Yes, having said that, I feel
things are changing: 1971 has finally been
introduced into school curricula and there is now
a university course on the subject at Karachi
University. In terms of acknowledgement, I think
the problem is not just with Pakistan;
Bangladesh, too, was very quick to let go of the
past. While I don’t think being litigious is
necessarily a good thing for a national wound, if
you think about South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, it seems as if
Bangladesh has skipped a step. I think Bangladesh
has not only ’forgiven’ Pakistan but, in some
ways, has a longing to be more Pakistani, more
Islamic.
Q: How do you feel perceptions of
Pakistan are changing in Bangladesh?
A: I know some people who refuse to
go to Pakistan and have a lot of anger towards
Pakistan. But you’d be surprised at how few they
are. There is so much fighting about what
happened in 1971 that it is hard for those locked
in the debate to focus their energies outwards.
Q: Did you consciously try and
incorporate some of the big themes - rape,
refugees, guerrilla fighting?
A: Most of these things did happen,
certainly if you take the perspective of a
middle-class woman from Dhaka like Rehana. But
there are also a lot of things that do not appear
in the book: for instance, there are no battle
scenes, no politicians and the peasant story is
not told. With Rehana, I wanted us to be able to
see the war through a mother’s eyes; this seemed
to me the most authentic way of telling the story.
Q: As an author, are you comfortable in the role of ’spokesperson’?
A: If I were English, or from
somewhere else, I could simply say that I only
write fiction, but I have real stakes in the
future of Bangladesh and I can’t retreat behind
the mask of an artist. Being an artist in a
country like Bangladesh means you have to have
opinions. In the subcontinent, being a writer has
always been a political act; this idea that the
novel is ’outside’ the workings of the world is
very European - and, even then, it is inaccurate.
Q: And what’s next?
A: I’m writing the story of Rehana’s
father - a Muslim zamindar in Calcutta at the
turn of the century - and it ends in 1947. It’s
actually part of a trilogy. A Golden Age is the
second book. The first will deal with the
Partition of Bengal and the last will focus on
modern-day Bangladesh.