A RECORD IN her grandfather’s Quran marks Noorjahan’s birth in Katakhali on 14 March 1938, the first of four daughters and two sons. Birthdays were seldom recorded in rural areas back then, but Noorjahan’s Dada’s inscription on the Quran strikes a subtle blow against a deeply embedded cultural norm. A second blow dispelled the common Bengali practice of calling a woman by the name of her first son. So late was Noorjahan’s first brother to arrive in their family that their mother, in a turn of events that would symbolise the rest of their lives, instead came to be called by the name of her first daughter: Johora became Noorjahan-er Ma.

Noorjahan’s childhood was marked by visits to her maternal grandfather’s house, Mia Bari, in Tungibaria, also in the Gangetic delta. There, generous servings of halwa, morobba and pitha awaited, alongside games of blind man’s bluff and chasing fireflies with aunts and uncles in her mother’s family courtyard. It was a time of showers of mangoes, of listening to stories in her paternal grandparents’ southern garden during summertime, of climbing those coconut trees, and of catching fish and playing soccer and hadudu with the neighbourhood boys in Katakhali. She travelled away from home, alone, again and again, to stay with relatives in Patuakhali, Phelabunia, Moudubi and Barisal so she could continue an education that was inaccessible for girls in her village. 

“Dada was the first to object to this,” Noorjahan writes of one of her host families’ preconditions that she wear the burqa while staying in their house. As a Quranic hafez, who had memorised the holy book, her grandfather pointed out that wearing burqas was not explicitly mentioned as a rule for women in the Quran. “Everyone was astounded that my Ma would send me so far away to continue my studies,” Noorjahan recalls. “Because of my Ma’s constant battle, I became the first girl from my entire area to finish high school, and I went on to get a higher degree also.” 

Men arrived before youth did. At the age of ten, a grandmother’s brother-in-law promised her money and land with a marriage proposal sent through an uncle – the first of many to come. At age twelve – “one of my uncles started touching my breasts.”

The early sections of the book spell out in brief, jarring episodes how silence shapes a large part of a young woman’s experience in Southasia. Noorjahan suffered trauma from both sexual and sectarian violence in the time after the riots in the 1950s. You witness, experience, tolerate, move on. How do you articulate the shame and confusion you feel from sexual assault when no one has yet discussed sex with you? How do you explain that you do not quite know why this thing being done to you feels wrong? Would anyone believe you if you spoke up? 

In young Noorjahan’s case, these impositions resulted in literal, bodily outbursts that seemed to speak back to the abuse in a way that words could not. “I was so shocked that I didn’t scream,” she writes. “From that day on, vomiting became a language of protest in my life. … Shaving off my hair felt like an act of rage about what I had witnessed. I understand now that it was also rebellion against my gender, my developing female body, my pedophile uncle, and all the men who wanted to possess me.” 

In recounting these events, Noorjahan very simply puts the onus on the men who were committing the abuse. She does not bother to sanitise their actions. The language is not sentimental, and she does not draw any gendered blame onto herself. She makes an important distinction between feeling fear and shame at the moment, and later finding the courage to talk about this as she witnessed other sexual abuse survivors gaining strength from her candour. 

As the text moves on, contradictions emerge in the portraits of the people filling up Noorjahan’s life. We see them with their rough edges, their murky and cruel moments layered onto the kindness, courage and open-mindedness that reside in their personalities. The same grandfather who sheltered Noorjahan from having to wear the burqa suddenly marries a 13-year-old girl who had come to work in their house after being displaced by floods. The family begrudgingly makes its peace with the marriage, but Dada’s decision repulses his young granddaughter. 

After Partition, East Bengal, where Noorjahan’s family lived, became East Pakistan, where the majority spoke Bangla. The Pakistan government, under the control of leaders from Urdu-dominated West Pakistan, decided that Urdu should remain the national language, even as students in East Pakistan demanded that Bangla should also be given equal status. When, in 1952, Noorjahan rallied her school mates to walk out of classes and join a procession in solidarity with the martyrs killed in Dhaka for protesting against the imposition of Urdu, the school’s headmaster threatened to beat her for her insolence. But after the chaos of the Language Movement settles down, the anti-imperialist in him admits that he would have been proud to have had a daughter like Noorjahan. 

Years later, when Imadullah, Noorjahan’s first husband, dies of smallpox, and her mother-in-law declares it plain that a “skinny little girl like [Noorjahan] could hardly take care of her grandson,” Noorjahan feels the coldness of the exchange. “Both of us women were ravaged by the loss of our beloved Imad,” Noorjahan recalls. She remained with her in-laws until she found love again in Swadesh, who was not only a Hindu but also her late husband’s closest friend. Despite the upheaval this brings, she wanted her son, Jaseem, to stay connected to the love of his grandparents.

None of the portraits, however, are as tender or as vivid as that of Noorjahan’s mother, Johora – “an ordinary Bengali girl: small in stature, with dusky skin, big doe-like eyes that seemed full of water, and a head full of thick curly hair that fell to below her waist.” Noorjahan-er Ma, who did not talk much, had eyes that expressed a silent language. She wore simple clothes but wove baskets and prayer mats with intricate leaf patterns. She cried often, filled her parents’ house with laughter when she visited, fought relentlessly for her daughters to go to school and avoid early marriage. She slapped the young Noorjahan hard across the face, for the first time ever, when the child asked why her mother was fasting to mourn Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s death when he had been a Hindu. “How could a child born to me say such a thing?!”, Johora screams in a rare moment of rage. “I never taught you to distinguish between Hindus and Muslims. I never want to hear anything like that from you again.” Her quiet, resilient way of protecting her daughters’ freedom shapes the ethos of the book, just as it evidently shaped the character of its author. 

Admittedly, it is an adult Noorjahan who compiled all these memories, but that she remembers even her earliest relationships with such nuance reveals the storyteller and the activist nascent in her from a young age. It also reveals an eye for scrutiny, and a mind wired to accommodate contradictions in people and in situations. It is this spirit that remains consistent throughout the book’s retelling of events, and which makes reading her story such a pleasure. 

AT A BOOK LAUNCH and reading in Washington DC last year, Monica Jahan Bose, Noorjahan’s daughter and the editor of the book, shared the journey it has charted across multiple forms and languages. The text was first serialised in Bangladesh’s Janakanthamagazine and then compiled into a Bangla book, Agunmukhar Meye,in 2009. The book became a bestseller in Bangladesh, winning Noorjahan Bose the Ananya Literature Award, given annually to exemplary women writers in Bangladesh. In 2016, the book won another prestigious accolade, the Bangla Academy Literary Award in the “autobiography” category. Rebecca Whittington, a scholar of Southasian studies with a deep interest in modern Tamil and Bangla literature, went on to translate the book into English, at which point it was represented by her agent, Kanishka Gupta, who has also represented several other Bangladeshi authors. Multiple versions of the text exist across its five editions to date, Monica explained – an Indian edition in Bangla, for instance, elaborates on the refugee experience while Noorjahan was in West Bengal. 

The past month has seen a resurgence of interest in Bangladesh’s political history in light of the July and August student protests, which rallied against quotas reserved for government jobs and resulted in overthrowing the Awami League government’s 15-year-long regime. Daughter of the Agunmukha is in dialogue with books that many have been revisiting, particularly oral and personal history texts such as Jahanara Imam’s Ekatorer Dingulee (Days of 71), Anam Zakaria’s 1971: A People’s History from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and Tahmima Anam’s novel A Golden Age, which explore Bangladeshi history through the lens of individual memories. While some of these books expand on their characters’ experiences as shaped by the Bangladesh Liberation War, Agunmukha casts a wider net, spanning a larger timeline in Southasia. It offers briefer accounts of political history, and gives more space to the psychological and emotional spirit that goes into living through those events. 

In a story written with less care, the book’s long series of events, recounted through its many subsections and swift transitions, could have felt tiring. But here, there are in fact sections where the reader might wish Noorjahan would linger for a while longer, share more about what she thinks and feels beyond the immediate moment – especially when she possesses such an evidently fascinating mind.

This is noticeable in the subtle ways she manipulates her control over the story, how she communicates the slow trickle of her own character development through the years. The book begins with a passive, quiet and acutely perceptive child who witnesses history and forms generous, nuanced impressions of the people around her. If the adults in her life are barred from the funny, blunt judgments of her mind, we readers are fortunate to get insider access. By the time love and violence arrive in the story, we are in the hands of a woman who takes pleasure in witty retorts, who takes action, who takes charge and often puts herself at risk for it. The text constantly resists lyricism in recounting these events, which lends it clarity and prevents it from romanticising or flattening out pivotal moments in the history of the Subcontinent. 

The few instances where the style falters appear where the text struggles to offer complete translations and cultural context to readers unfamiliar with the Bangla language and Bengali customs. There are inconsistent digressions – sometimes the text pauses to translate, contextualise and address important political or business titles a character will go on to acquire later in life; at other times it relies on superscript numbers that lead to an extensive list of notes at the back of the book. In a work that so deftly weaves together personal and political histories to portray female and individual autonomy, these interruptions in the text seem to break character: they cater too much to an outside world in a way that the book’s characters do not. 

What is most fascinating about the book is perhaps the most unplanned of its characteristics. In the preface, Noorjahan describes how, as a child, she heard stories about the Agunmukha, or “the mouth of fire”, a river that has six other rivers flowing into it. It is a body of water that engulfs others, and through the force of this alchemy shapes the lives that take root on its banks. The book, like the river it is named after, similarly engulfs a host of stories born of female autonomy. It was Johora, Noorjahan’s mother, who pushed Noorjahan to notice the ways that sociocultural norms discriminated against the women around them. Noorjahan carried that gaze forward, educating women, making space for their experiences in the major narratives of war and development that typically dominate the history of her era. 

At the book launch in Washington DC, Noorjahan shared with the audience the story of how, decades after the events she relates in her text, her granddaughter said to her, “Nanu, you have to tell this story to the world. Only you can tell this story.” At the age of 85, presenting the book to a North American audience, Noorjahan Bose described the process of writing her memoir as akin to a difficult pregnancy. Daughter of the Agunmukha is the youngest of her babies.