This has been strengthened by the role of Bengali language as part of the Bangladesh state movement. Bengali to the literary class is more than a vehicle of communication but an object of religious adoration as well. It’s a trait rooted in religion whereby all liturgy is sacred and understanding of liturgy is not needed to gain piety. The historical state reality is a fact to reckon with, but the cultural reality continues to dominate the literati, as language is seen as sacrosanct. To many both are inclusive and to some never so. The battle is between what Bengal was and what Bangladesh is, very crudely put. They hold two realities in their hands, one is cultural loyalty and the other is historical reality and not many are sure to which one belongs. In this push and pull, many Bengali writers from Bangladesh may seem oddly schizoid. Nor does he, unlike many, subscribe to the mythical village as the sylvan ultimate, a deified space in a peasant graduated society. However, Wasi Ahmed is not trying to recover and discover his ‘reality’ from the imagined past. This past is decorated with aspirations of a newly grown underclass under the shelter of colonial wings. Most Bangla fiction writers draw their genealogy from the colonial tree and its expiry dated fruits. It is inevitably without the traditions that sustain much of Bengali literature today. His mind consumed that history, and his literature keeps holding up juxtaposed mirrors of the same. The world before 1971, scarily innocent, the ravenous raging war and life afterwards as people move on is what his literary world is largely made up of. This process of birth also produced the writer as we know him today. It’s this process, midwifed by a new cultural tradition organic to history not the colonial past, that dominated a new state. It was a bleeding, furious and enigmatic war that touched everyone in different ways. It gave them the intellectual space to grow unshackled by “Bengali” literary traditions as they moved towards Bangladesh.Ī set of rebellious minds met in a rebellious society, about to become a state. While much of it was typical undergrad swag, it is also true that they had no pre-set loyalties. Bengali literary canons were not their prime Dominant force, and some were openly disdainful of both the Western and Eastern traditions. Their rebellious spirit was reflected in their literary work as well. He was close to a literary circle at the Dhaka College where brash young lads were already planning to join the freedom war. His academically elite college was full of intellectual achievers who were not beholden to the traditions that identify many if not most contemporary writers of his land. He joined college in 1969 and by then his world was already in revolt. This historical sense makes him nearly independent of the Bengali literary past that most others embrace.Īhmed grew up in a tumultuous world that defines him and his literature. His history is very different as his consciousness took off from a different hill than those of his seniors and many peers. Wasi Ahmed doesn’t and is part of a handful of those who have written to mark his historical rather than linguistic cultural identity through his work. Many if not most writers succumb to this equation without questioning. The argument lies in the primacy of language rather than history as the producer of culture. The aspiration for an “undivided” Bengali tradition based on language is often the prime test of literary legitimacy in his land. But it’s his own history, deeply political, deeply influenced by the 1971 war and its consequences as well. It’s a bit ironic because Ahmed works almost entirely on history and its enigmatic consequences. Since he is an outsider, it is easy to ignore him as one without a history. It’s not easy to be an outsider in a literary world dominated by an agreed cultural history of the elite, almost religious in its assumptions. Though his status is now beyond any debate, his work remains in its own space without mingling with other literary genres common in the literary world he lives in. He has been recognized as a major writer for decades but not always as the writer who matters most for serious minds. Wasi Ahmed is not easy to peg into traditional categories, literary or historical.
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