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Twenty-five long years after the war that was supposed to liberate
Bangladesh and that instead, for far too many people, merely
brought fear, violence, and loss a young researcher arrives on the
doorstep of one survivor in Dhaka, Mariam, armed with a set of
questions that have no easy answers. How did Mariam and women like
her who lived through violence and rape survive the war? How did
the Pakistani army deal with women they found in homes, offices, or
colleges? Why did Mariam send her brother away to keep him safe
even as she stayed on? For Mariam, however, these questions are
irrelevant her demons are different. Could she have saved her
brother, she wonders? And what happened to the other men in her
life? What did the war do to them, and to her? A powerful novel of
shattering war and its aftermath, The Search tells of the
difficulty of picking up the pieces and moving on after personal
and national trauma.
Translated from the original anthology in Bengali. Throwing light
on the work and lives of unknown or forgotten Muslim women writers
of pre-Independence Bengal, when the state was not yet partitioned
between India and East Pakistan (today's Bangladesh), in 1947, this
anthology is like a rediscovery of their lives. First published in
Bengali as Zenana Mehfil: Bangali Musalman Lekhikader Nirbachita
Rachana, 1904-38, it compiles, for the first time, eleven Bengali
Muslim women's writings: essays, short stories, poetry, a novel and
some correspondence, each introduced and discussed separately. This
anthology also gives a glimpse of their lives that were not always
confined within the household. The writers include Akhtar Mahal,
Sayyada Khatun and M. Fatema Khanum, and other much more familiar
names like Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Shamsundar Mahmud. Among the
immensely valuable interviews are those of Mohammed Nasiruddin, who
devoted his life to the cause of Bengali Muslim women's
emancipation, his daughter Nurjehan Begum, the poet Sufia Kamal,
the writer Hameeda Khanam and Syed Mustafa Siraj, the celebrated
Bengali novelist who witnessed the social changes that were to
alter the Bengali Muslim world.
Dhaka may be one of the most densely populated cities in the world
- noisy, grid-locked, short on public amenities, and blighted with
sprawling slums - but, as these stories show, it is also one of the
most colourful and chaotically joyful places you could possibly
call home. Slum kids and film stars, day-dreaming rich boys,
gangsters and former freedom fighters all rub shoulders in these
streets, often with Dhaka's famous rickshaws ferrying them to and
fro across cultural, economic and ethnic divides. Just like Dhaka
itself, these stories thrive on the rich interplay between folk
culture and high art; they both cherish and lampoon the city's
great tradition of political protest, and they pay tribute to a
nation that was borne out of a love of language, one language in
particular, Bangla (from which all these stories have been
translated).
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