All quiet on the eastern front
Tahmima Anam, who like the artist formerly known as Prince has her own first-name domain, read from A Golden Age tonight at Harvard Book Store. She says she intended to do the Bangladeshi War and Peace, but realized she was much more interested in writing about the impact of the war on ordinary people and personal relationships. The book grew out of her two years doing doctoral research in anthropology in Bangladesh. Anam says male war heroes were eager to talk, while the women grew silent and asked her to turn off the tape recorder. Their lives seemed more damaged, by the death of loved ones, by rape, like India’s Partition.
She says Bangladesh has left the war unresolved: no war crimes tribunal, no demand for an apology from Pakistan. So Nixon’s stance on the Blood telegram is far down on its list of things to work through. With the novel she’s hoping to popularize the impact of the war, presumably like The Kite Runner. Her dad, like mine, once gave her Nehru’s From a Father to a Daughter, letters to Indira from prison; at that young age, both of us found it like rukhi roti. Someone asked her the Rushdie question. She pointedly noted she’s a fan of his early work.
There’s always an uncle type who exercises age and filial piety to hold forth uninterrupted, and tonight was no exception. He pressed Anam on why the protagonist, based on her grandmother, spoke Urdu; she said language is political, and many Muslims in Bengal learned Urdu rather than Bengali as a status marker. She plans on writing the next book on colonials in Calcutta during Partition, and the final one in the trilogy on contemporary Bangladesh.
I flipped through the novel at the signing. At first glance, it seems written in a simple, direct style. It has a paisley-inspired cover design of leaves. The author wore a kurti and read behind a tie-dyed blue tablecoth. She was funnier and more relaxed during the Q&A than the reading. As she spoke my eyes drifted to a bookshelf behind her. Staring back was Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. But there was no incense and no sitar.
on Thursday, January 10th, 2008, 10:03 pm in Bangladesh, Events, History, Literature, Military, Photographs › 
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She is right, Midnight’s Children was Rushdie’s best work..can’t help noticing how beautiful she looks.
Wish I could have joined you! My Amazon wish list grows. And she’s absolutely right about Muslims in pre-1971 Bangladesh wanting to speak Urdu instead of Bangla.
Small aside: of all the places my parents could have ever found Bangla neighbors is their latest stop in Iowa. They’re quite a contrast, these young, fashionable, upper-class Dhaka-ites who recently made the Hajj, next to my staid, “bobo-ghoti,” [that’s code for Western Bongs] secular parents. Though, I don’t think they could have asked for better neighbors in spite of all the bitterness of past generations.
She’s HOT by the way!
Very interesting. The same dynamic exists in Lahore today with Punjabis speaking Urdu as a status marker.
check out the guy wearing the neon blue topi in the audience. is he the pious uncle?
hey! russians spoke french as a status marker. indians speak angrejhi has a station marker. UB speaks javabeans, html, cots, bats and all sort of tags and !’s to separate from us knuckledragging 8080A programmers.