Blood and bonds: Review of Shahidul Zahir’s ‘Life And Political Reality: Two Novellas’

How does one write about something that is still a gaping wound for a community spread across two countries? How does one write about a tragedy, the hope and hopelessness of an entire nation?Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality, one of the two novellas in this book, captures the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh through the individual who is the universal, the personal which is the political. A villager with limited understanding of what is happening to the rest of his country narrates what he sees around him. For the reader, his village becomes every village of Bangladesh facing the suspicion and violence of the Pakistan state. Characters like the unscrupulous local collaborator Moulana Bodu, the soldiers on a rampage, the terrifying yet comical razakars (a voluntary paramilitary force working for the Pakistani army), are all representatives of the time and its people. A single grisly scene of men throwing away the corpses of women they have killed is enough to convey what violence looks like everywhere.Zahir’s writing conveys a sense of intimacy, which comes not so much from his familiarity with the places described or his attention to detail, but from the language itself. It’s as if he has chosen a muted, deadpan style to express in words a state of mind that’s overwhelmed.We feel this relationship between a place and a people and Zahir’s language in the second novella, Death of Abu Ibrahim, too. Being from a family that once had their home in Bangladesh — like so many Bengalis in India today — I have grown up listening to place names I would probably never see. Ibrahim adds to that visual imagination of Bangladesh and Dhaka.Translating a work of this literary value is challenging. It becomes even more difficult when much of its power is associated with nuances of language and local culture. The translation succeeds spectacularly in this regard. The descriptions of places cast a spell that leaves you wide-eyed, like a child listening to stories of faraway places.Life And Political Reality: Two Novellas, Shahidul Zahir, trs V. Ramaswamy & Shahroza Nahrin, Harper Perennial India,₹399The writer is an independent journalist based in Kolkata. Published - March 12, 2022 04:25 pm IST