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To brood over and marvel atThis is a worthy addition to the profusion of translations that are bursting forth from the subcontinent's rich cache of literature.
Karthik Venkatesh
Last Updated IST
Khwabnama
Khwabnama

Khwabnama, as the name suggests, is a chronicle of a dream. And the notion of the dream being at the centre of the work and of the many characters strewn throughout its pages is all-encompassing. But it is not as if dreams are at the centre of the plot or are frequently invoked. Not by a long shot. Dreams underlie the narrative and inform the book and its plot in many different ways.

There is the actual ‘Khwabnama’, the thing, a book that interprets dreams, in the possession of Tamiz’s father, that figures off and on in the narrative. There is Tamiz’s own dream of becoming a successful sharecropper and thus escaping the clutches of the poverty into which he was born and seems condemned to languish in. This being Bengal in the mid-1940s, there is also the dream of Pakistan that is held up before the Muslim peasants of the region as a sort of promised land, which would spell an end to their misery since they would no longer be in the clutches of Hindu moneylenders and an administration that supposedly discriminated against them. And there is the dream of the Tebhaga movement wherein peasants demanded two-thirds of the harvest they produced on the land owned by zamindars.

All of these angles blend together magically (literally so since there are magic realism elements in the narrative) in an epic that is both sweeping and lyrical in its language and treatment. At one level, the work is the tale of peasants eking out their living or attempting to do so, in ingenious ways. The instinct to survive appears to be omnipresent in all of them. But at another level, the folk mythology overlaid with hardcore politics appears to be taking the work in a different direction. And it is in negotiating these varied elements that Khwabnama truly reveals its splendours.

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No easy choices

The many characters who people Khwabnama’s pages —Tamiz, Tamiz’s father (who remains unnamed), Kulsum (Tamiz’s stepmother), Mondol (the landlord whose writ runs large over the area), Phuljaan, Harmatullah — are all representative of the different kinds of people who live in the countryside and whose lives change, often for the worse, owing to the decisions that city-dwellers make. There are the odd characters in the novel whom we can see are making the move to becoming city folk even as they continue to engage with the village.

And just as it seems that the countryside is on another plane of existence and marches to its own beat, Elias brings to the fore the larger political developments — the pre-Partition riots, the various political tussles, the larger questions of identity and nationality — which inevitably affect the situation and make or mar relationships. The stark reality of the mixed population of the countryside with its Hindus and Muslims living cheek by jowl also comes up for discussion at regular intervals along with the obvious question — if the country is to be divided on religious lines, what next for the ‘other’? Will they stay? Will they leave? There are no easy choices, as the narrative indicates. Whatever the choice, many are bound to get the short end of the stick.

Leisurely read

Akhtaruzzaman Elias (1943-97), one learns from the blurb, was a Bangladeshi novelist who wrote only two novels— Khwabnama, originally published in 1996 being his second. Claimed by cancer within a month or so after the novel’s release, he was a talent lost, all too soon. He is now considered to be an extremely important figure in the Bangladeshi literary tradition.

Given that this novel is set in the 1940s, Bangladesh, of course, does not feature in the novel at all as that story lay in the future. But there are hints of the language troubles that would eventually come to pass and result in the dismemberment of Pakistan. That Urdu is little understood is mentioned more than once even as some leaders of the Muslim League insisted on addressing the audience in the alien tongue.

The book is to be read leisurely over a longish period. There is much to brood over and much to marvel at since the language is masterly. The translation, done by the much-heralded Arunava Sinha, is truly a pleasure to behold and the kind that one could lose oneself in. At times, one even forgets that it is a translation. The careful sprinkling of Bangla words amidst the English is wonderfully done and serves to enrich the read a great deal.

Khwabnama is a worthy addition to the profusion of translations that are bursting forth from the subcontinent’s regional literature and enriching the staid world of ‘English’ literature.

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(Published 17 October 2021, 01:39 IST)