by Syed Badrul Ahsan

Fiction must have a place in our lives. When you weigh the question of how life goes along its fixed tracks or how it is influenced by works of the imagination, you cannot but try spotting a way out of the dilemma we are all caught in. The dilemma, of course, is one of being trapped, as it were, in the vast conundrum we poetically portray as the cosmic scheme of things. When we read fiction, or create it, we are in essence trying to get at the inner meaning — or meanings — of existence. No, of course we do not suggest that literature has anything to do with the way we go about our quotidian chores. It is all too often far removed from the things we do, the roadblocks we bump into as we try coming to terms with life as we know it. So why read fiction then? Why study literature? The simplest and yet more poignant of the answers we come by, as a response, is that while literature may not be the reality of everyday living, it is the stuff that could shape the way we carry ourselves in the world. In a very brief manner of putting it, the idea of literature is fundamentally the idea of life — of the emotions, the greed, the yearnings, the successes and the failures that we come by in all the stories told over millennia and that we seek refuge in.
   There are all the questions, sort of perennial ones, about what makes Saratchandra’s Devdas so enduring a tale for generations of Bengalis. Leave aside the fact that actors like Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai may actually have failed to do justice to the story, but what you cannot erase from your consciousness, your very Bengali ethos, is the psychological pain the man Devdas goes through in his search for the woman he has loved all his adult life. His final moments, before the home where the woman is prisoner to wealth and pointless aristocracy (aristocracy being a regularly meaningless affair), are a microcosm of how hordes of romantically defeated Bengali young men, indeed young men all across the subcontinent, have felt over the centuries. That is where the ability of literature to extract our everyday pain right from inside our souls and place it out in the hot noonday sun lies. Fiction, as it were, quite exposes us in all our nakedness before ourselves. And we do not mind that at all. For in fiction, in poetry come encapsulated all those thoughts we might have cause to entertain about our surroundings and about the contemporary nature of the world we share with our neighbours. When you let your mind wander, in sheer political terms, around the effects of such a devastating fact of our collective life as the partition of India in 1947, it is quite possible that your prejudices, your loves and your hates will come rough packaged, in almost crude form, before you. That is when a positive danger to heath, yours as well as that of everyone else around you, arises. But try looking at the vivisection of the land through the prism of literature. The chances are you will come away a much more informed, a good deal more brooding individual than you were before you started out on the difficult journey. Sadat Hasan Manto’s tales of bitterness, as also those of his contemporaries who went through the entirety of the trauma, create in the soul emotions, at once quiet, sad and burdensome, that you would hardly discover in an observation of raw politics.
   Why literature, then? Move on, without looking back. If you have picked your way through the gloom of Yarmouth as it shapes the world of a young David Copperfield, in that Dickens tale, you somehow are quite liable to follow the line of thought raising its tentative head here. That young boy could have been you, but it is not you. Once you begin to feel relieved that Copperfield is that other, unfortunate boy down the road, you know you have just arrived at a chance of observing the breaking and then the making of a life from a distance of dispassion. Detachment is all. Distance is as important in a study of literary characters as it is in an observation of real lives. In that boy who carries the message, from Barkis to Peggotty, about the former’s willingness to be married to the latter is an image of the many phases individuals go through as they plod through the underbrush of existence. That is a point fiction makes to us. Our sensibilities acquire a sharpness, indeed something of substance, through our study of the lives between all those hundreds and thousands of pages lying open on the table before us. Again, why literature? The answer could not be simpler. Because literature could be life. Because literature is life. Because with literature we arrive at a capacity to comprehend the complexities that make up our world. In a general manner of speaking, not much can be had through studying the life of Brutus, for Brutus in such a perspective is always a conspirator, an assassin to boot. But then along comes Shakespeare and transforms the nature of the man, so much so that in the play Julius Caesar it is not so much the authoritarian ruler who is the leading figure as it is his friend turned murderer who gradually becomes the repository of our sympathy. The persuasive power of fiction comes in its ability to hold up characters, warts and all, for us to understand and empathise with. Politics may fawn over men or condemn them outright. Literature does something deeper and richer: it evaluates and it arrives at a point where beyond plain black and white there is a third zone, the grey.
   And that is where we pitch our tents, in the rolling fields of grey. In fiction, we hear of men and women inclined to love or drawn to hate. And we learn something more, as Leo Tolstoy has been demonstrating all along. In tales like Resurrection, the purpose holds to go beyond the flesh and reach out to the human soul. One cannot have poetry bubble up in the heart without those strains of melody, sad and weeping, in the soul. When you remember this cardinal principle, you can only go back to Tagore, to the breaking heart in him as he sings Amar Je Deen Bheshe Gacche Chokher Jole. Place that in juxtaposition with Tennyson’s Tears, idle tears / I know not what they mean, and you can only come up with some morally acceptable explanations of why your emotions work the way they do, which often means their running away from you. And do not forget that fiction is not a mere matter of the printed word. In the movies, it comes, quite often, through visuals. Dilip Kumar’s caressing, per courtesy of a feather, the cheeks of Madhubala in the magnum opus Mughal-e-Azam goes miles beyond a simple tale of eventually defeated love. It is literature pure and true. It is sensuousness, maybe even sensuality, which we feel in our moments of private pain but are hardly in a position to give expression to. In that feather, in that caress lies the agony of millions of men and women who have loved intensely and yet who have failed spectacularly. Literature is about striving for the moon and then not getting it. Literature seduces us into singing to the moon but then lets us in on the harsh truth that the moon cannot be had. Beauty subjected to the tactile is molestation.
   Through fiction we learn of life. More importantly, in fiction we discover the limits of experience and how we can come to terms with realities we cannot quite go beyond. All our dreams and all our songs, all our hubris and all our pretensions go but in a single direction, to the cemetery. No one could have put it better than Thomas Gray. The paths of glory, said he, lead but to the grave. That being the unalterable truth, it follows that in literature sprout the seeds of ultimate religiosity. One may not have much time or patience for established faith; one may even be an agnostic or an atheist. But when one stumbles, in fiction, into the spectre of death and the misty regions of eternal silence in the earth, one knows once more that all beauty is fleeting. A walk through a country cemetery turns into a vibrant story of life and death when the one who does the walking has already passed through all those tales of the dead and dying in the pages and chapters of fiction. And death sometimes can be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous, as in Syed Waliullah’s Lal Shalu. In Majeed subsists an impostor, an individual who holds on to life through marketing the death of one he does not know. And because he does not know, it becomes a fairly profitable, amazingly easy job for him to present the unknown dead soul in the village he arrives at, Mahabbatpur, as a forgotten saint. But — and here is where we are led through a sense of déjà vu — God steps in again, in all His fury. The floods of Bengal, relentless and roused to righteous indignation, intervene to restore the balance. The waters take the grave out of Majeed’s grasping hands, thus bringing the humiliation of the grave to an end and perhaps creating in Majeed, for the first time, the feeling that he has sinned. Will Majeed be a better man, then? We really do not know, for as he walks back to his hut through the rising waters, literature withholds that secret from us. That is what fiction does to us. It forces us into thinking, into making our own presumptions about the way the stories might draw to a conclusion.
   Literature makes romantics of us, sometimes incorrigible ones. Think of Andre Malraux, of the depth of culture which informed the being in the man. At once a politician, a philosopher and fiction writer, Malraux understood the place of literature in life. Literature for him was life. He fought in the war to free France from the Nazi evil and he stood ready to fight again, this time for Bangladesh, in the year Bengalis waged war for liberty. What the pursuit of literature does to us then is give us a base on which we shape the ideals we wish to live by. Or die by, as Federico Garcia Lorca did in Spain. The immensity of wartime literature, in the form of stories as also poetry, to say nothing of the songs wafting forth from Shwadhin Bangla Betar, which today constitutes the core of Bangladesh’s historical legacy is part of literature on a gigantic scale. You cannot probe your politics if you do not approach it from the literary point of view. Neither can you get a hang of it if you ignore the landscape, the rocks or alluvial plains of nature that have held it up across the generations. When you know that, you most certainly know what it is about the poem Macchu Picchu that takes us closer to the world of Pablo Neruda, to an understanding of the idea called Chile.
   Literature is not about enjoyment. It is not about loud music belted out by a band of young men condemned, as everyone is quite aware, to quick oblivion. It is about real people inhabiting the real world. The sounds of rain, the onomatopoeic rhythm in the fall of a leaf, the thrill engendered by the sight of a woman’s ankles, the interplay of thunder and lightning in a monsoon sky are what literature is all about. And it is more. Literature speaks of revolutions consuming their heroes, of great fires gobbling up mammoth forests, of love nestling in the dark corridors of adultery. It is that — and yet a good deal more. But know, for now, that when we read fiction, when we recite poetry, our overriding goal happens to be a fiery desire on our part to link up with the past before we can go forth into building bridges to the future.
   On a parting note, the study or pursuit of literature is an absolutely individualistic ritual. That is where ecstasy comes in. Arundhati Roy or Taslima Nasreen, Julian Barnes or Gore Vidal — the choice is yours. You read them in the fading light of the lamp. And then you spread the Word.