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This collection of short stories, poems and plays commemorates fifty years of Bangladeshi writing since February 21, 1952, the first "Ekushey," when the language movement had gained its first martyrs. Every February, the people of Bangladesh renew their pledge to their national language Bangla, and offer homage to the young men who had sacrificed their lives for their mother tongue, under the krishnachura (gulmohar) trees in Ramna Park. Translated from Bangla into English, and edited by Niaz Zaman, the texts in this anthology affirm the vital role of language and literature in the national imagination of Bangladesh.
   Several poems in the volume recall the bloodshed of "Ekushey." "I Have Not Come Where They Laid Down Their Lives" by Mahbub Ul Alam Chowdhury, "Can I Forget the Twenty-first of February" by Abdul Ghaffar Choudhury and "When the Month of Falgun Arrives" by Asad Chowdhury are poems that invoke the trauma of this defining moment in the history of the nation. The language issue surfaces poignantly in Daud Haider's "My Bangla," Jahanara Arzoo's "I Am Born with Words," and Abul Hasan's "Mother Tongue." Collectively, these poems demonstrate the fusion of language and national identity in the mainstream culture of Bangladesh, but they elide the multilingual reality of a nation that actually speaks in many tongues.
   The most intense evocation of political sentiment occurs, perhaps, in the works that deal with the Liberation War of 1971. Shamsur Rahman's "Liberty, You Are. . ." is a meditation on freedom. Sanaul Haq's "Ramna Green" and Nirmalendu Goon's "I haven't come today to ask for blood" are inspired by the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. "The Chariot of Dhamrai" by Jasimuddin decries the communalism that underwrote these political upheavals.
   Clearly, as editor Niaz Zaman claims in her introduction, "[t]he Bangladeshi writer, like other third world writers, has a strong social commitment and feels that writing must have a purpose." For though the pieces in this anthology display a wide thematic and technical range, most of them reveal a deep sensitivity to socio-political issues.
   Social trends come under scathing satiric scrutiny in "Wives of a Few Bureaucrats" by Abdul Ghani Hazari and "This Meeting Proposes" by Humayun Azad. Gender issues form the central theme of Sufia Karnal's "Mother of Pearls":
   One day, she breaks away from me,
   as I, an oyster, lie covered in filth,
   or my sludge-smeared body dries out
   on the sandy margin of the shore.
   Even so, this life of mine gleams in
   fulfillment :
   I am the mother of the pearl, I am an
   oyster
   in my heart is engendered a harvest
   of pearls.
   Taslima Nasreen's "Character" speaks ironically of the male gaze:
   You're a girl
   and you'd better not forget
   that when you step over the threshold
   of your home
   men will look askance at you.
   This vein of social comment coexists in the volume with much that is traditionally "poetic." There are some exquisite evocations of landscape bringing to life the topography, and the flora and fauna, of the region. Love is explored through a range of nuances, from the erotic to the abstractly spiritual, in Shamsur Rahman's "Odalisque," Mohammad Nurul Huda's "Woman," Abid Azad's "Her Eyes" and Al Mahmud's "The Golden Marriage Contract."
   The short stories in the collection are intended by the editor to reflect "the political and historical background of Bangladesh from colonial days to the present." The protagonist of Shaukat Osman's "Khan Bahadur" covets the honour of a title promised by the British Raj, only to realize that the price to be paid is too high. The trauma of Partition is addressed in "Death on the Night Train" by Hasan Hafizur Rahman. Communal oppression during the Liberation War is represented in "Suryamukhi, the Sunflower of Ratanpur." Hasan Azizul Huq's "The Daughter and the Oleander" narrates the impact of political turbulence on the lives of ordinary people.
   Such narratives constitute a retelling of the history of successive turbulent stages through which Bangladesh emerged as a nation. As Niaz Zaman points out, while Bangladesh is a new state, Bangla Desh, or the land of Bengal, is an ancient place, with a literary tradition dating back a thousand years. Yet, Zaman would affirm, the literature of Bangladesh is "new twice over," reborn once after the creation of East Pakistan in 1947, and again in 1971, when Bangladesh was formed. This "thrice-born literature," according to the editor, shares a common tradition with the literature of West Bengal, yet differs from it in terms of the
   complex political awareness generated among Bangladeshi writers by the specificities of their own national
   history.
   While some of the stories address this chequered history, others engage with contemporary social issues. Makbula Manzoor's "We Shall Overcome" and Selina Hossain's "A Modern-Day Granny" depict women's struggle for survival in a hostile world. "The Wet Nurse" by Syed Waliullah describes the desperation of a woman who tries to nurse another's child after having lost her own. In "Different," Nasreen Jahan explores the psyche of a deformed mother who envies the perfection of her daughter's body. Gender emerges as a key concern in these narratives.
   Class difference is graphically represented in "The Duet" by Akhtaruzzaman Ilias. Through an ironic parallel between a rich man's pet dog and his hanger-on Asgar, the story explores the network of dependency and exploitation that defines social relationships in contemporary Bangladesh. The Eater in Humayun Ahmed's eponymous story earns his living by impressing audiences with his voracious capacity for food. Prison conditions provide the setting for "The Madonna" by Aladuddin Al Azad and "I Want to Send a Letter" by Nayan Rahman. Religious hypocrisy is exposed in Munier Chowdhury's "The Wooden Sandals" while Shahed Ali's "The Photograph" offers a poignant critique of war. Questions of ethics and conscience surface in "A Counterfeit Coin" by Najmul Alam. Taken together, these stories present a probing analysis of the contemporary social milieu in rural and urban Bangladesh.
   There are five plays in the collection. "Kabar" by Munier Chowdhury depicts the fear of socialism that drove the authorities to acts of extreme brutality during the West Pakistan regime. Sayeed Ahmad's "Survival" adapts a familiar folk-tale to create an allegorical fantasy about the struggle for survival. In "Hargaj: A Katha Natya," Selim Al Deen deploys elements of the katha-natya to present a gruesome account of the havoc wrought by a cyclone. Momtazuddin Ahmad's "The Wild Kite" demonstrates the rampant greed that overtook people after the Liberation War. "The Song of the Stars" by Razia Khan is a surrealist portrayal of the psyche of a young woman forced to abort her child.
   This is an ambitious anthology, bringing together diverse writings produced over the last fifty years. Inevitably, in such a collection, the field is uneven and the items not always comparable. The quality of translation is also not uniform, for each entry has its own translator/s. No consistent approach to translation emerges from such a motley selection, but that, perhaps, is the intent of the editor, whose declared aim is to capture the versatility of contemporary Bangladeshi writing.
   Variety of theme is matched by an impressive diversity of approach. While some writers work in traditional genres, others are self-consciously experimental. Generic border-crossings may be seen in Sayeed Ahmad's use of folklore in his modern allegory, or in Selim Al Deen's reworking of the katha-natya in his documentation of a natural calamity. When dealing with writing in translation, it is difficult to gauge the extent of linguistic experimentation in the original text. Dialect and local nuances also tend to be flattened out in English translation. All the same, a few of the texts do manage to convey the process by which a writer of today wrestles with the double challenge of preserving the linguistic tradition as symbol of the national culture, even while making it new, to match the demands of a changing world.
   Niaz Zaman's collection is an important intervention, for it draws attention to national and localized features of Bangladeshi writing, even as it reasserts the need to place this vibrant literary tradition on the global cultural map. Under the Krishnachura also affirms the crucial role of translation in making such reconfigurations
   possible.
   This review was first published in The Book Review, June 2004
   Radha Chakravarty teaches English at Gargi College. She has recently published English translations of major Bengali writers, in her books Crossings, Chokher Bali and In the Name of the Mother.

I first met Makbula Manzoor when both of us were teaching at Holy Cross College. After she left to teach at University Women’s Federation College, I got to see her only sporadically. Not being familiar with contemporary Bengali writers, I was unaware of the other side of Makbula Apa: that she was also a writer.
   In 1992, Firdous Azim and I helped organize a Women in Literature, Society and the Media Seminar. Apart from papers, we also wanted a cultural evening. Nazmeen Huq suggested that we invite some women writers to read from their works. She offered to contact the writers and she did. One of the writers who read from her work that day was Makbula Manzoor. Afterwards, Firdous and I co-edited the seminar papers and included the poems and short stories read at the seminar. Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have included one of Makbula Manzoor’s short stories in the anthologies I have edited. Occasionally, I have suggested that we put together an anthology of her stories. Finally, we did, choosing ten of her stories, some that had been translated earlier as well as some fresh translations.
   In common with other third world writers, Makbula Manzoor believes in the social responsibility of the writer and uses the short story genre to write about social and political exploitation, about the war of 1971 and its aftermath, and, about the vulnerability of women in a patriarchal society. Manzoor tends to use irony and subtlety to get her points across, often using understatement to convey her message.
   Because a short story is fairly quickly written, it is often used to reflect on immediate political or cultural situations. In the hands of a good writer, however, a topical theme may be used in a manner so as to appeal to a larger audience even after the immediacy of the story is no longer relevant. Manzoor’s short story “The Vultures Are Everywhere” is a brilliant example of this achievement. In this short story, a rural couple are tempted by promises of biryani and a new sari to go to the city to swell an audience at a political meeting. At the meeting, however, the husband and wife are parted. The woman, searching for her husband and a means to get back home, accepts the offer of a lift from men in a truck. “We aren’t going to Amdanga. What do we do with that woman? Where do we drop her?” one of them remarks. “What do we do?” The driver laughs. “The goods are very attractive.” Manzoor leaves the rest of the story of what happens later to the woman to the readers’ imagination. The fate of the husband is simply told in the remark that a dead body was found after the abandoned political meeting. “A man who was severely beaten at the meeting died. The doctor pulled a white cloth over the unidentified body. “Poor fellow. Coming to a meeting to die..”
   Ms Manzoor has taken a typical situation where people are collected for political meetings and shown how, in a violent political climate, the lives of individuals are destroyed thoughtlessly and callously. The rape of the woman is also a real and present danger to women in Bangladesh – as perhaps elsewhere in the world. But in Bangladesh, several years after Manzoor’s story, what happened to Yasmeen – who was given a lift home by policemen only to be raped and killed – was a solemn reminder that, despite the danger of rape and murder, women do continue to venture out of their homes, sometimes to be raped and killed.
   While “The Vultures Are Everywhere” is not time bound, Manzoor’s story, “Kochuripana” – literally water hyacinth but titled “Flotsam” in English as hyacinth in English does not convey the same sense that kochuripana does in Bengali – is related to a definite period in the history of Bangladesh, the period immediately after the Liberation War of 1971. In the aftermath of the independence of Bangladesh, almost every writer was using the war and its aftermath to write short stories and novels. Manzoor’s story tells the story of a young woman raped by Pakistani soldiers during the nine-month war. Manzoor’s story, however, like many other stories written in the years after the war, not only exposes how women became targets of the enemy but also critiques freedom fighters and liberated Bangladesh itself for failing the women who were raped. Thus, if Rabeya, Manzoor’s heroine, has suffered for no fault of her own at the hands of the enemy, she has suffered doubly at the hands of her own lover who joined the war as a freedom fighter but did not accept her because she had been raped by the enemy. During 1971, Bengalis sang of a “Sonar Bangla/Golden Bengal,” and after liberation Rabindranath Tagore’s song, which had inspired Bengalis in their struggle for independence, became the national anthem of Bangladesh. However, Manzoor stresses that the liberation of Bangladesh did not give birth to a golden Bengal.
   Though Manzoor’s theme is a common one, her treatment of it is both novel and attractive. Thus, the story begins with the image of the flaming krishnachuras of Nilkhet.
   On both sides of the road leading from Nimtali Bazaar to Nilkhet, the krishnachura tress shamelessly flaunt their flame-coloured blossoms in the hot Baisakh air. They seem like fallen women draped in flimsy red nylon saris, their lips a matching scarlet, standing on the roadside to attract customers.
   The image of the flaming krishnachuras as shameless strumpets reflects on what Rabeya is not, despite what has happened to her. In Rizia Rahman’s story, “Izzat,” the heroine is not raped but manages to escape from the marauding soldiers. At the end, however, Rahman’s heroine realizes that, despite what she believes, there is no way for her to survive but by selling her body. Unlike Rizia Rahman’s heroine, Makbula Manzoor’s does not give in.
   Ms Manzoor refuses to call herself a feminist, despite her feminist concerns and her strong women characters. Thus, occasionally, she chooses to tell her story through a male protagonist and shows how men may be victimized because of poverty and lack of political power. Thus in her short story “Pathe,” translated into English as “On the Road,” the male protagonist, a day labourer, is powerless to withstand the treachery of the Chairman’s son who has an eye on his wife. Returning home one day, the man finds his wife in the arms of the Chairman’s son. Furious, the man attacks him. The result is inevitable: he goes to jail and the Chairman’s son makes the woman his mistress. The story is told in flashback. When the story begins the man has just been released from jail for the crime he committed. There is also a woman who has been released from jail. Her crime? Murder. She had killed her mother-in-law. Both freed prisoners try to go back home, but find that there is no home for them to go to. The story ends with the two on the road again. In this story, Ms Manzoor is not a feminist, but a humanist.
   While Ms Manzoor generally ends on an optimistic note, in some of her stories she seems to despair as in “Nagar Aranya,” translated as “In The Urban Jungle.” This brilliantly structured story, told through the perspective of the male Badal, narrates the parallel stories of two slum women who become the victims of lust. In the first story, Badal and his sister have to leave their village when the flood destroys whatever little they had. In the city the two take shelter in a slum, but the young boy is unable to save his sister from ruffians. The young woman commits suicide by flinging herself in front of a train. Years later, in another slum, Badal sees his sister’s story repeating itself. This time the young girl refuses to come out of her hut when the slum catches fire and is burnt to death. Powerless to save either his sister or this young woman, Badal walks away aimlessly.
   I have always enjoyed reading Makbula Manzoor’s stories and I believe that her writing deserves much more attention than it has received. I hope that with the availability of The Vultures Are Everywhere and Other Stories, an English-reading public will get to know her writing as well.
   Omni Books will be hosting a book launch on March 2nd at 6pm.