Manzu Islam’s Godzilla and the Songbird stands as a mosaic of myth and modernity in which the protagonist’s life can be an allegory of the journey of post-colonial East Pakistan to Bangladesh.
Bangladesh
India’s western frontier with Pakistan may generate more headlines but India’s eastern border flanking both Myanmar and Bangladesh is arguably more complex. Both neighbors have long been unstable and have both at points in their history found their territory being used by rebels waging war against New Delhi. It is not just neighboring countries that pose a challenge: internal borders too are at play. The Indian government for decades has had a complex, often tumultuous relationship with its northeastern states. The inherent complexity of the region means a wider, more expansive approach to political analysis is needed. This is precisely what Avinash Paliwal’s new book seeks to do.
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), aka “Dukhu Mia” and known as the “rebel poet” of the Bengalis, was born in Churulia, a village in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal. A litterateur, lyricist, revolutionary, communist and freedom fighter, he was declared the national poet of Bangladesh in 1987. These Collected Short Stories are a joint endeavour of editors and translators from India and Bangladesh.
“How,” starts the marketing literature for Noorjahan Bose’s recent autobiography, “does a girl from a tiny Bangladeshi island end up reading Tagore, Marx and de Beauvoir and become a leading feminist campaigner?” How indeed?
South Asia is bound by a strong cultural currency. It is not uncommon to find restaurants run by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in the diaspora marketed as serving “Indian” cuisine, freely expressing shared roots and ways of life. It is also not uncommon to find citizens of the three nations to welcome each other into their homes and endear them with great hospitality. Given this healthy cultural exchange, what is unusual is their common perception of each other’s political orientation as antithetical to theirs. In Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Century, historian Joya Chatterji investigates whether the region’s nation building practices are really all that different from each other’s.
Negotiating Borders and Borderlands, edited by Gorky Chakraborty and Supurna Banerjee, delves into the intricate dynamics of India’s borders and the everyday experiences of those living in its borderlands. It features a diverse collection of articles contributed by various authors, aiming to analyze and portray how borders have influenced the destiny of countries and their inhabitants.
The Rohingya population, from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, are a community almost living entirely in exile, whether in refugee camps in Bangladesh, or working on boats throughout the Indian Ocean. The Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is now the world’s largest.
In this remarkable debut, Kaamil Ahmed tells the story of the displacement of the Rohingya from their home in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state and their ongoing search for refuge. This is not a new story, but Ahmed puts the spotlight firmly on the Rohingya perspective and allows them to tell their own story in their own words. The book is an impressive mix of history, political analysis and extensive reportage from Myanmar, Bangladesh and Malaysia.
“I saw my first dead body on November 9, 2013. He was five. He was lying in the rubble of a demolished church that had entombed eight of its faithful in Tacloban City, the ville-martyr of this impoverished region in the Philippines where a violent typhoon had hit only a day before.”
Hungry Bengal is the story of Bengal’s man-made famine in 1942 which killed two million people over a period of eighteen months to two years, all while Imperial Britain’s leaders in London looked on unconcerned. It was the British who provided both direct and indirect causes of the famine. When the War with Japan broke out the “little yellow men” proved far doughtier warriors than ever envisaged by Whitehall. British troops were swept aside as the fortress of Singapore fell and the Japanese swept northwards through Burma towards Imperial India.
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