5/15/2020 Two Women Writers of the Bengali Diaspora: Ketaki Kushari Dyson and Dilara Hashem-- An Essay by Sumana

Sumana Das Sur [Parabaas Trans…

Letters to Parabaas
Translation Two Women Writers of the Bengali Diaspora:
Ketaki Kushari Dyson and Dilara Hashem

Sumana Das Sur

Parabaas
Essays/Memoirs/Interviews The present paper is a part of a large ongoing research project of mine, in
in English:
which I have been engaged over the last few years. I am working on the
literary writings and writers of the Bengali diaspora, and currently I am
# A Scrapbook of Memories
and Reflections
about half-way through this work. While I have collected the writings of
- Ketaki Kushari Dyson several authors, there is still some more to do in that respect. In the
summer of 2008 I went to England for six weeks with a small grant from
# A Few Sentences on the British Council to gather relevant data and do some field studies.
Translating Tagore’s Shasti There I met and interviewed a number of literary writers and scholars,
(A Translator’s Punishment) including Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Ghulam Murshid, and Abdul Gaffar
- Carolyn Brown Choudhury, who are originally from West Bengal and Bangladesh and
have now settled in various parts of Britain. I saw the surroundings in
# Remembering Lila Ray
How a daughter of Texas
which they worked and collected books and papers from them. The three
pioneers found freedom in authors whose names I have just mentioned are quite well-known names
Santiniketan in both Bengals, but there are many others earning their livings in various
- Anandarup Ray other professions, either employed by others or running their own small
businesses, who cultivate the art of writing in Bengali while doing their
# Buro Angla and Nils: A jobs. They run small cultural groups, organize poetry workshops or
tale of transmigration of literary gatherings. It is not that the work of every such person is of a very
stories
high standard, but through their literary activities in the mother tongue
- Chhanda Chakraborti
they nevertheless, in some way, find their sense of identity. While staying
# Lila Majumdar: A in England, I established contact, by means of telephone and e-mail, with
Granddaughter Remembers some Bengalis living in Continental countries such as France and
- Anu Kumar Germany. Most of those who have some connection with the world of
(Anu Kumar interviews Bengali letters tend to visit Calcutta from time to time, and I have
Srilata Banerjee) interviewed them at such times.
# Two Women Writers of the
Most recently my researches have taken me to the eastern seaboard of the
Bengali Diaspora: Ketaki
Kushari Dyson and Dilara
USA, to cities such as New York, Washington DC, Boston, Atlantic City
Hashem (New Jersey), and to Toronto in Canada. In this trip I have received the
- Sumana Das Sur assistance of Shoumyo Dasgupta, Taposh Gayen, Saad Kamali and others,
(adapted froma lecture given all associated with Agrobeej, a magazine of quality run by Bengalis settled
in Hyderabad, India) in America. They are all engaged in different professions in order to earn a
living, but pursue serious literary activities in the Bengali language. I also
# Translation: the magical received sincere cooperation from Iqbal Karim Hasnu, who is the editor of
bridge between cultures
the bilingual magazine Bangla Journal, published from Toronto. Dr Gouri
- Ketaki Kushari Dyson
(adapted froma lecture given
Datta of Boston (Massachusetts) has been running the ‘Lekhani’ group for
in Hyderabad, India) ten years despite her busy life as a medical doctor. The members of this
group are well-established in different professions, but meet one Sunday
# Tiger-Savant Long-Tail every month out of their love for the Bengali language. An anthology of
- Bankimchandra their work has recently been published from Calcutta. Dilara Hashem of
Chattopadhay Washington DC and Alolika Mukhopadhyay of New Jersey write seriously
(translation of and regularly in Bengali and publish their books from Dhaka and Calcutta:
Byaghracharya Brihallangul
they are well-known names in the Bengali literary world. There are many
by Sudeshna Kar Barua)
other Bengalis scattered in the USA, in New York and Chicago, in
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# Bathroom California and Texas, who write regularly in Bengali, or publish
- Buddhadeva Bose magazines in Bengali and keep in touch. Parabaas itself is one such
(translation of Bose's belles-
example of a bilingual magazine. I think that if we examine and analyze
lettres by Hanne-Ruth
Thompson)
the thinking of such people, as reflected in what they write, we can
construct a map of the mental world of diasporic Bengalis from the second
# Translation as recognition half of the twentieth century to the twenty-first century. That is the main
- Indira Chowdhury objective of my research project in the overall sense.
(on translating Ashapurna
Devi's Pratham Pratishruti) It was in the nineteenth century under British colonial rule that the
window to the West was opened for the people of India, including the
# Bengali Gastronomy people of Bengal. A benign human face of British imperialism was the
- Buddhadeva Bose
(translation of Bhojanshilpi
way it arrived as a harbinger of intellectual modernity, showing people
Bangali by the author how to liberate themselves from blind medieval prejudices. It follows that
himself) the West that was perceived as a source of knowledge and as a soil that
nurtured freedom of thinking triggered the eager, rising curiosity of the
# Sukumar Ray, Master of people of India, especially of the Bengalis. In his essay ‘Kalantar’
Science and Nonsense Rabindranath Tagore has explained the process beautifully thus:
- Zinia Mitra
(essay on Sukumar Ray) The coming of the English is an interesting event in Indian history.
Socially, as people, they remained even further off from us than the
# Sudhindranath, the person
I knew Muslims, but as the intellectual messengers of Europe, the English
- Damayanti Basu Singh reached us in an extensive and intensive way: no other foreign race
(personal memoir of poet has been able to come so close to us. The dynamism of the
Sudhindranath Dutta) European intellect impacted on the mental inertia that then
prevailed amongst us, just as rain falls on the earth from the distant
# Bengali Songs to the [1]
Goddess Kali sky...
- Sagaree Sengupta
Interest in the world beyond the seas and curiosity about it became so
For Bengali Books and intense that they soon broke down the prevailing taboos and fears about
Translations Visit
crossing the so-called ‘black waters’. In the first half of the nineteenth
Parabaas Bookstore century two eminent and aristocratic Bengalis sailed abroad and showed
others the way. One of them was Rammohan Ray, the distinguished social
reformer and the pioneer of the Brahmo movement, and the other person
was Dwarakanath Tagore, the grandfather of Rabindranath and an
extraordinary entrepreneur of the nineteenth century. The great zeal to
visit Britain that manifested itself among Bengalis after Rammohan and
Dwarakanath had shown the way was primarily to acquire higher
education, usually to study medicine or law, or to sit for the civil service
examinations in order to join the Indian Civil Service.

For books by Ketaki

Kushari Dyson and
others, visit
Parabaas Boosktore

Letters to Parabaas
Translation

[left] Ghulam Murshid's biography of Michael Ashar Chalane Bhuli (Ananda, 1995,
revised ed. 1999); and [center] Heart of A Rebel Poet: Letters of Michael Madhusudan
Dutt (OUP, 2004); [right] Gopa Majumdar's translation of Ashar Chalane Bhuli: Lured by
Parabaas Reviews in Hope - A Biography of Michael Madhududan Dutt (OUP, 2004)
English: It was with such ambitions that men like Michael Madhusudan Dutt,
Sayyad Ameer Ali, Umeshchandra Bannerjee, Satyendranath Tagore,

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# The Owl's Gaze— Satyendraprasanna Sinha, Taraknath Palit, and Surendranath Bannerjee
Everyday life in early went abroad. In 1878 Rabindranath Tagore too was sent to England by his
Calcutta guardians in the hope that he might sit for the civil service examinations or
- Anu Kumar
(review of a translation of
at least qualify as a barrister before returning home. Rabindranath did not
Kaliprasanna complete any course of formal education, but his letters home from
Sinha'sHootum Pnyachar England which were published in the magazine Bharati still amaze us.
Naksha) Europe-Prabasir Patra (‘Letters from Europe’) was published as a book
in 1881. Here we catch a glimpse of English social life as it was in the
# Maitreyi Devi's Tagore second half of the nineteenth century, through the eyes of a seventeen-
by Fireside year-old Bengali youth, and the picture we get is not only enjoyable as
- Anandamayee literature, but also a reliable historical document.
Majumdar
(review of a translation of
Maitreyi Devi's An important aspect of the Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century
Mungpute was the movement for female emancipation and the education of women.
Rabindranath.) Many of the educated and enlightened Bengali men of the new generations
wanted their wives to become their true companions in the fullest sense,
# Fantasy, Fiction, and impelled by this feeling, started to take their wives with them when
Fact:Magic and Realism they went abroad. Mention should be made of Gobindachandra Datta and
in Shirshendu his wife Kshetramohini, who went to Europe in 1869 with their two
Mukhopadhyay's The
Ghost of Gonsai Bagan
daughters, Aru and Taru, who pursued the study of both English and
- Sanjukta Dasgupta French literatures and gained fame at an early age by writing poetry in
(review of a classic English. Jnanadanandini Devi, the wife of Satyendranath Tagore,
children's novel.) Swarnalata, the wife of the doctor Krishnadhan Ghosh and the mother of
the famous Arabinda Ghosh, Suniti Devi, the daughter of Keshabchandra
# Naxalism--Views from Sen and the wife of the Maharaja of Cooch Bihar, went abroad with their
the other side husbands and were deeply influenced by the social customs which they
- Sumanta Banerjee encountered when abroad. Suniti Devi attended the coronation of Edward
(review of The Naxalites:
Through the Eyes of the
VII in 1902, wearing a Western costume. The
Police.. edited by Ashoke most noteworthy in this stream was
Kumar Mukhopadhyay.) Krishnabhabini Das, who accompanied her
husband Debendranath Das to England in 1882
# Let Him Speak in His and spent eight years there. On the basis of her
Own Voice experiences she wrote the remarkable volume
- Ana Jelnikar Inglonde Bangamahila (‘A Bengali Lady in
(review of three books by England’), first published in 1885. In this book,
and on Rabindranath
the first travel book written in Bengali by a
written/edited by Uma
Das Gupta.) woman, she described with care the society she
was scrutinizing, including rural and urban life,
# To Attain You, Oh the relationship of the sexes, elections for the
Freedom, &mdash The Parliament, and so on. The book contains some
Best Poems of Shamsur Krishnabhabini Das's book extraordinary documentation on Victorian
Rahman England, and many original observations. The two
- Shobha Rao women writers to be discussed in my paper, Ketaki and Dilara, could be
(review of Shankar Sen's
translation)
viewed in some ways as successors to Krishnabhabini. All of them have
related easily to their new environments, and like trees they have sent
# Anandamath, or The down roots in the new soils where they have found themselves. They have
Sacred Brotherhood: A derived sustenance from there, which has borne fruit in their creations.
Book Review
- Ketaki Kushari Dyson So it is correct to say that from the last quarter of the nineteenth century
(review of J. Lipner's the life of Bengalis in ‘prabas’ (meaning ‘abroad, away from one’s native
translation.) land’) began to be reflected in literature. In the twentieth century, this kind
of writing began to flow in numerous streams. Rabindranath Tagore’s
# Reflections on Clinton
B. Seely's Translation of travels in many countries during his long life and his interactions with
Meghanad-Badh Kabya many different kinds of people enabled him to acquire a cosmopolitan
- William Radice consciousness. This left its direct or indirect marks on his essays and
lectures, and his dramatic and musical compositions.
# Twice-Told Tales
- Susan Chacko
(review of three

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translations of
Upendrakishore
Raychaudhury's stories.)

# Yogayog (Nexus) by
Rabindranath Tagore
- Meenakshi Mukherjee
(review of Hiten Bhaya's
translation.)

# Selected Poems of
Buddhadeva Bose
- Sibnarayan Ray
(review of Ketaki
Kushari Dyson's
translation of
Buddhadeva Bose's
poems.)

# A Tremendous Comet:
Michael Madhusudan
Dutt
- Ketaki Kushari Dyson
(review of Ghulam
Amiya Chakravarty (left) and Buddhadeva Bose.(*)
Murshid's Lured by Hope
: A Biography of Michael Among the post-Tagore poets, Amiya Chakravarty lived and worked in the
Madhusudan Dutt) USA for a long time and travelled all over the world; it is not possible to
understand his creative work unless we take into account this extensive
# From the Hooghly to backdrop. Indeed it was he who introduced Tagore to many of the new
the Seine literary movements of the West. Life ‘abroad’ has played a role in the
- Susan Chacko work of Bengali writers such as Jyotirmala Devi, Sudhindranath Datta,
(review of Taslima
Buddhadeva Bose, Pratibha Bose, Annadashankar Ray, Syed Mujtaba Ali,
Nasrin's French Lover)
Syed Waliullah, Niradchandra Chaudhuri, Sibnarayan Ray, Loknath
# A Chronicle of Bhattacharya, or Alokeranjan Dasgupta. For a long time in Bengali, living
Discrimination abroad or even in another part of the subcontinent where one’s mother
- Fatima Husain tongue was not spoken was denoted by the general term ‘prabas’. In the
(review of Taslima second half of the twentieth century, with accelerated ‘globalization’, the
Nasrin's My Girlhood) term ‘abhibasi’ (‘emigrant’) came into vogue. In this period the existence
of migrant Bengalis, scattered like clusters of foam all over the world,
# How hard should we
began to acquire solidity and denseness. We now use the term ‘diaspora’
try? - Questions of detail
in literary translation about them.
- Ketaki Kushari Dyson
(text of a seminar Khachig Tölölyan, an American academic of Armenian origin and a
delivered at the SOAS, theorist of diaspora studies, goes in search of the origin of the term
London) ‘diaspora’ and comments:
# Divergent Rays The famed Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Susan Chacko
(reviews of two books by
(1910-11) has no entry for the word “Diaspora”. The 1958 edition
Satyajit Ray) of the same Encyclopedia identifies “diaspora” as a crystalline
aluminium oxide which, when heated, sheds or scatters flakes from
# On the Wings of its surface, and thus takes its name from the Greek verb
Hummingbirds, [2]
Rabindranath Tagore’s “diaspeirein”, to “scatter”.
Little Poems: An
Invitation to a Review- The word ‘diaspora’ became a term of the social sciences even later in a
cum-Workshop gradual process. Initially the term was applied to ancient Greeks and Jews
- Ketaki Kushari Dyson who had left their homelands and to Armenians who had done the same
(a review-cum-workshop from the eleventh century onwards. From the end of the sixties Western
on William Radice's
latest translation)
scholars began to apply the term to all people who had left their native
places and had spread their roots in other geographical locations. This
# Kingdoms, Cats and concept of ‘diaspora’ acknowledges how groups of people have scattered
Crypts: Back to the

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Classics all over the face of the earth and exist as minority communities in different
- Susan Chacko countries.
(reviews of three
children's fictions)
Literature written by South Asians from diasporic locations has also
# Selected Short Stories received international recognition, but only if it is written in English.
of Rabindranath Tagore ‘Indian English Writing’ has become a much-pursued topic in the post-
(ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri) colonial studies of the contemporary academic world, especially since
- Rajat Chanda Salman Rushdie got the Booker Prize. But in most seminars and
(review of the first of the symposiums or research papers those writers of the South Asian diaspora
Oxford Series of Tagore who have chosen to write in their mother tongues do not get a mention.
translations) Their existence tends to get obliterated from the map of diasporic writings.
Even a professor of history and scholar like Judith Brown comments:
# Outcastes and
Oppression “Literature is yet another way of listening to the experiences of migrant
- Susan Chacko South Asians, and there is a growing body of work by authors of South
(review of Breast Stories Asian descent, writing in English outside the subcontinent, which provides
by Mahasweta Devi and a [3]
collection of short stories entry into the world of diasporic South Asians.” Most Western scholars
tr. and ed. by Kalpana do not seem to be aware that a more reliable entry into the inner worlds of
Bardhan) South Asian migrants might be provided by the literary works they write
in their mother tongues.
For Bengali Books and
Translations Visit As already indicated, in Bengali the tradition of writing ‘from abroad’ is
over a hundred years old. Among Bengalis who have received acclaim for
Parabaas Bookstore
their fiction written in English from locations outside the homeland are
first-generation migrants such as Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee,
Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Sunetra Gupta, and Amit Chaudhuri who
shares his time between India and England, and the next generation such
as Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali. Writing in English, they do often deal
with the lives of Bengalis living at home or abroad, or use Bengali details
or associations to give an exotic flavour to their narratives. Alongside such
writers there are those who continue to write in Bengali from a diasporic
position. It is not an easy task to carry on writing in the mother tongue in a
completely different environment and while immersed in the currents of a
different language, but for those who do it, the task is an essential part of
their sense of identity and self-esteem.

The first serious discussions of diasporic writing in Bengali were done by

Ketaki Kushari Dyson in two of her essays. The first one, expanded from a
presentation she had made at a conference in Texas in the summer of
1999, was entitled ‘Bangla Sahityer Diasporik Bhuban: Ekti Bhumika,
Kichhu Prasongik Byaktigoto Sakshyo o Bhabona’ (Jijnasa, 20: 3, 1999).
The title may be translated as ‘The Diasporic World of Bengali Literature:
An Introduction, Some Relevant Personal Testimonies and Thoughts’. The
second one was called ‘Desh aar Bidesh: Bangla Diasporar Kayekjon
Sahityik’ (Bangla Journal, April-August 2002). This title can be translated
as ‘Home and Abroad: Some Writers of the Bengali Diaspora’. Even
before these, in 1996 she had published an essay in the autumn issue of the
magazine Korak, entitled ‘Ekjon Abhibasi Kobir Jibon: Kichhu
Byaktigoto Kotha’, i.e., ‘The Life of a Poet Who Has Emigrated: Some
Personal Reflections’. It is interesting to observe how her terminology
evolves and leaves its marks on the titles of her essays, progressing from
the idea of emigration to that of diaspora. One can see that she has been
re-thinking the relevant issues. As Ketaki is herself a member of the
Bengali diaspora, her gaze is penetrating. Her essays encapsulate many
issues arising from the experience of living and writing in a diasporic
situation, especially in the context of Bengali: questions, debates, and also
possibilities. And she writes not just about her own experiences as a
writer, but also cites with care the various activities of other writers of the
Bengali diaspora scattered in Britain, the European Continent, the USA,

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Canada, and Australia. In ‘Desh aar Bidesh’ she concludes: “There is no

doubt that the writings of Bengalis who have emigrated have come a long
way. We can say without any hesitation that this stream of writing has
enriched Bengali literature and is bringing new material to it.” We can see
that she is sufficiently confident and optimistic about the future of
diasporic writing in Bengali. Yet intriguingly some writers, themselves
members of this diaspora, including some whose names have been
mentioned by Ketaki with due seriousness, question the very existence of
a diasporic stream of Bengali literature. For instance, in an interview given
to Shoumyo Dasgupta and published in the autumn 2005 issue of the
magazine Kabisammelan, Shahid Kadri, a poet settled in the USA, says: “I
repeat, it doesn’t seem to me that there has been any significant creation of
literature in Bengali from locations abroad. But I think poetry and fiction
of quality may emerge in the future from the experiences of diasporic
life.” Ketaki protested against this comment in an interview given to the
magazine Agrobeej (1:1, June 2007), adding that a somewhat similar
opinion had been expressed by Abdul Gaffar Choudhury at the conference
in Texas in 1999 already referred to. I too had a similar experience when
in the beginning of 2008 I interviewed Alokeranjan Dasgupta in
connection with the present project. He too did not believe that there was
such a thing as a literature of the Bengali diaspora. Although he has lived
in Germany for a long period, he does not wish to include his poetry in
such a category. In a Bengali gathering organized by ‘Muktodhara’ in the
summer of 2010 in New York, Syed Shamsul Haq, one of the important
poets of contemporary Bangladesh, said to me that in the case of Bengali
literature he did not see any good reason for having a separate category for
‘diasporic’ writing. He regarded Dilara Hashem, present in that gathering,
simply as a Bengali writer. Yet Dilara herself, when I interviewed her,
identified herself vigorously as a diasporic writer.

One wonders what could be the origin of such a denial of the obvious. Is it
a reluctance to stand against the stream, an uncertainty about the medium
of self-expression, or a fear that admitting a diasporic status might mean
that the country of origin is being viewed as ‘the Other’? Interestingly, all
three whose opinions have been quoted in this respect are senior male
writers. Is there perhaps some gender bias here?

Both Ketaki and Dilara are indeed very conscious of their identity as
diasporic writers and confident about it. Perhaps women do have an
intrinsic power to strike roots in a new environment, to extend kinship, to
make what was unknown their own stuff? Without going into any ‘-ism’ or
theoretical elaboration, one can say that the gaze with which these two
view the world around them is a woman’s gaze. Whatever emerges from
their writings or what they consciously depict therein, from managing the
household to research or other intellectual pursuits, their identity as
women is never denied. This is one reason why I have chosen to write
about these two writers in this paper. But a more important reason is the
wide-ranging, expansive nature of their works. Though they have spent
most of their adult lives ‘abroad’, they are very well-known in their home
territories, West Bengal and Bangladesh, where they are claimed by the
literary mainstream and have been honoured by several literary prizes.
These two women writers belong roughly to the same generation, but their
methods of construction in their fictional works are different. Dilara builds
faultlessly neat plots. Ketaki is less interested in telling a story as such, as
she does not see life as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but
more as endless conversations. Accordingly she is more interested in
exploring historical, social, and political skies on the intellectual wings of
her characters. In Dilara’s fiction the backdrop keeps shifting, whereas
Ketaki, without changing the locations of her main characters, shows
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others through their eyes – people who have come from other corners of
the globe, with different languages and cultural baggages. But in both
cases, their readers are enabled to view the wide world through the
window of the Bengali language. Therefore both a certain unity and a
certain diversity mark the literary works of these two authors, but for the
purpose of close study, I shall select one novel by each author.

Ketaki Kushari Dyson was born in Calcutta in 1940. But she has family
roots in East Bengal and retains vivid childhood memories of that region.
Her father worked initially for the old Bengal Civil Service and after 1947
was inducted into the new Indian Administrative Service. Her school
education and the first phase of her university education took place in
Calcutta. The literary heritage of Tagore and of post-Tagore poets such as
Buddhadeva Bose, Sudhindranath Datta, and others, had already struck
firm roots in her consciousness by then. After graduating from Calcutta
University in English Literature in 1958, at the age of eighteen, she went
to Oxford for further studies in 1960, and was already a promising young
poet in Bengali by then. After completing her studies at Oxford, she
returned to Calcutta and taught there for a short while. In 1964 she
returned to England after marrying an Englishman and became a British
citizen in 1965. Later, she did a doctorate at Oxford. She has been a full-
time writer and researcher for a long time.

Ketaki is one of those rare and exceptional writers who write equally
skilfully in both English and Bengali. She writes in many different genres
with ease: poetry, fiction, plays, literary criticism and translation, and
research-based scholarly works. She writes poetry, essays, and research-
based books in both languages. She also translates between both
languages, in both directions. But her fiction and plays she has so far
written in Bengali only. She believes that every language is a window to
view the world and encapsulates a weltanschauung. At the same time, she
knows that languages are not static, but are continuously evolving. When a
thought is expressed in the medium of a particular language, when a
character is imagined and shaped in the context of that language, it is
something unique: it would not be quite the same in any other language.
She has so far published some thirty-three titles, out of which ten are
collections of poetry, six in Bengali and four in English. She has been
writing poetry since childhood. When she was studying at Oxford in the
sixties, her Bengali poetry used to be published regularly in the magazine
Desh. She started writing poetry in English only after settling in England
on a permanent basis. She has commented on this development thus:

A combination of circumstances gradually conspired to shape me

as a bilingual poet. I was living my adult life amongst people who
spoke English as a mother tongue; my children were growing up,
and English was the language of my new home; I was interacting
with the other young mothers whose children were going to the
same school as mine. The natural poet in me felt the need to
[4]
express myself at a deeper level in English.

Why does she feel that she can write poetry and scholarly books in both
her languages, but not her novels and plays? To that question she has the
following answer:

Nowadays poetry is written for a small audience of aficionados,

but fiction is inevitably written for a bigger ‘market’. Each
language embodies a certain gaze. When I write poetry in English,

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I feel in touch with my potential audiences, wherever they may be.

When I write a research-based book in English, I know that I am
addressing a small peer group of fellow scholars. But I don’t know
how I would position myself in order to write an English-language
novel ‘for the market’. This particular market is driven by much
bigger commercial forces. I fear that I would have to change my
focus. I am scared of being inauthentic, of being constrained, of
having to edit myself, having to cut out references and
intertextualities which come naturally to me – because they might
be inaccessible to readers and unacceptable to publishers’ editors.
[5]

If one studies Ketaki’s published poetry collections chronologically –

Bolkol (‘Bark’), Sap-Wood, Sabeej Prithibi (‘The Seeded Earth’), Jaler
Koridor Dhorey (‘Along the Corridor of Water’), Spaces I Inhabit, Katha
Boltey Dao (‘Allow Me To Speak’), Jadukar Prem, Jadukar Mrityu
(‘Love the Magician, Death the Magician’), Memories of Argentina and
Other Poems, Dolonchampay Phul Phutechhey (‘The Ginger Lily Has
Blossomed’), In That Sense You Touched It – the outward aspects and
intimate details of her evolving mental world and the world of her
experiences gradually become clear to the eye. Her diasporic position is
implicit in the body of her poetry in symbolic patterns. For instance,
several poems spread over more than one collection tell the story of how
the ginger lily taken by her from India flowered in her home. When the
first bud appears on the ginger lily twelve years after it has rooted itself in
the soil of the new country, the poet sees in it an extension of her self, an
expression of her own being. Among her recent poems, published in
magazines but not yet gathered into a collection, there is a poem entitled
‘Duratva’ (‘Distance’), in which various kinds of distance merge:
geographical distance, the distance between the literary activities of those
who are in the mainstream and those who inhabit the margins, the distance
between youth and middle age. The diasporic poet draws lines and
connects the clusters of her scattered self.

Ketaki started writing prose from the mid-sixties. The essays and book
reviews of Shikorbakor (‘Roots’) and the autobiographical sketch Nari.
Nogori (‘Woman, City’) belong to this period. Gradually from this time
onwards she develops her characteristic art of looking with deep
compassion at the visible lives of fellow human beings and searching for
their past histories which are submerged under water like the bottom parts
of floating glaciers. Like a diver she dives under those glaciers, connecting
the lives of individuals with their social-anthropological dimensions and
the big historical canvas. She gained a special expertise in this kind of
work in course of her doctoral research at Oxford, which led to the
publication, in 1978, of the book A Various Universe: A Study of the
Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian
Subcontinent, 1765-1856.

It was the research done for A Various Universe that encouraged Ketaki to
write a novel in the format of letters and diary entries. Her first full-length
novel, Noton Noton Pairaguli (‘Those Crested Pigeons’), serialized in
Desh in 1981-82 and published as a book in 1983, is built in the form of
letters and diary entries written by a Bengali woman in Britain named
Noton. The canvas is crowded with details of the world around this
character, both human and natural, including Irish, English, and Algerian
characters, creating an attractive, multicoloured, multicultural pattern. Her
second novel, Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney (‘In Search of
Rabindranath and Victoria Ocampo’) was written over 1981-82 and
published in 1985. This is the novel I shall discuss in detail a little later. In
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Ketaki’s third full-length novel, Jal Phunre Aagun (2003, ‘Fire Piercing
Through Water’) the angle of vision is shared between two characters, a
Bengali man of mixed parentage and his more mixed daughter. The events
cover just one day and the location alternates between a town not far from
London and Calcutta. Though there is a fictional narrative structure, it is
very porous, allowing a massive influx of documentation, inquiry, and
analysis touching present and past times. In her latest work, Tisidore
(2008, ‘The Band Tied by Tisi’), her penchant for formal experimentation
in mixing genres reaches a new dimension. In the context of a Bengali
book she traverses the inner and creative worlds of two famous writers of
the post-Tagore era, Jibanananda Das and Buddhadeva Bose. Parallel to
this is an exploration of British working class and middle class lives in the
twentieth century, through the letters received by Honor Pope and the
autobiography of Margaret Clarke. Ketaki shows how these two women
became exceptionally strong through their inner resources and were able
to overcome social, political, and familial handicaps in their lives. The
narrative thread that holds these real historical characters together has only
a minimal admixture of fictional material. It seems that the author wanted
the narrative part to play the role of a thread weaving a garland, no more:
it looks as if she did not want it to make demands on us in its own right.
The last part of the novel is set in Venice, giving us the additional flavour
of a travelogue.

Ketaki has written three plays: Raater Rode (‘Night’s Sunlight’, written in
1990, premièred in 1994, published in 1997), Mozart Chocolate
(published in 1998), and Suparnarekha (published in 2002). The first two
have been staged in the original Bengali and in English versions prepared
by he author herself. In the Introduction to her English translation of the
first play, Night’s Sunlight (2000), she makes a special attempt to draw
attention to the mixed character of her creation. She wants her audiences
and readers to understand that what she creates is just as deeply rooted in
the social, political, and cultural lives of two countries as she is herself.
She writes:

Thus, I do not consider that this play of mine is really a ‘foreign’

play for this country. How could it be, when it is set in a living-
room in Britain? But what is more, whoever reads this play will
realize that it could not have been written by someone who did not
live here. Like virtually everything I have written in my adult life,
it belongs in a very real sense to Britain, of which I have been a
citizen since 1965, and where I live and work for most of the time.
It is British writing – but with a difference, because it is written in
Bengali, which links it to another cultural matrix, makes it part of a
distant literary/socio-cultural ‘polysystem’. In effect, like most
[6]
work I produce in any genre, it has two cultural matrices.

And again:

Bengalis can see that my play is ‘Bengali-but-with-a-difference’.

Those who see themselves as the moral guardians of theatre
criticism may not take to it as ducks to water, but with their feet
kicking, they may admit that at least it fits conveniently into the
slot of eccentric diasporic writing. Others perceive that it has an
international flavour without losing its Bengali pulse. I want to
show my British friends that the same text can also be read as
[7]
‘British-but-with-a-difference’.

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That Ketaki did succeed in a great measure in infusing this dual quality
into her play can be gauged from the following comment of Tom
Cheesman: “Ketaki Kushari Dyson herself is an almost prototypical ‘axial
writer’, one whose imagination and audience span far-flung societies
linked by migration history, and who commutes along the migratory routes
[8]
(‘axes’), both in mind and (when she gets the chance) in person.”
Ketaki’s characters may be Bengalis, but a little bit different from what we
might expect; they may be British, but again somewhat different from
what we might expect. She walks, as it were, along the raised ridgeway
between two fields. It is not surprising that outside the Bengali-speaking
world she is best known for her acclaimed translations of Bengali poetry
into English – I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems of Rabindranath
Tagore (1991, expanded edition, 2010) and Selected Poems of
Buddhadeva Bose (2003).

Yet it is interesting that she has always so far chosen to write her novels
and plays in Bengali. Questioned about this, she commented thus in a
recent interview given to me:

Whether my characters are Bengalis of the diaspora, or English, or

Irish, or Algerian, or mixed, if I view them ‘in Bengali’, my canvas
automatically becomes wide and inclusive, as though I was
covering what I was viewing with a wide-angle camera, and I can
spread my whole being in that expanse. If I write in Bengali, my
writing remains rooted within Bengali culture, yet I don’t have to
exclude anything I see; as a Bengali who knows the West, I can
present all my comments on the familial and social interactions of
the Western world through similes and metaphors in the Bengali
style, bringing out all the nuances. If I look at the same scene
through the lens of English, my viewing becomes limited; I then
have to suppress some of my Bengali reactions, exclude some of
the finer chiaroscuro of social analysis done from a Bengali angle
of vision, because it is not so easy to execute those chiaroscuro
effects in English, because conveying fine nuances depends very
[9]
much on the language being used.

Giving an example of how the ‘inclusive’ nature of the Bengali language

encourages the inclusion of fine nuances, Ketaki then went on to point out
the large storehouse of kinship terms in Bengali, compared to which the
[10]
terminology available in English is extremely limited. Ketaki’s
eagerness, as a diasporic writer, to relate to a different environment, and to
human beings in a new environment, seems to find a suitable vehicle in
Bengali and its word-hoard.

I would sum up in the following manner. When Ketaki’s innate rationality,

together with her love of intellectual debates and her positive curiosity
about the world and forms of life, nurtured by her heritage of the benign
universal consciousness of the Bengal Renaissance, spreads its branches
like a tree in the English sky, the fruit that it bears attracts us by virtue of
its sheer hybridity. I shall try to clarify this by a more extensive discussion
of her novel Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney.

The name itself suggests that it is not a run-of-the-

mill novel. As a matter of fact, the title of the
book does not suggest that it is a novel at all;
rather, it suggests that it is a research-based
scholarly book on the two famous personalities. A
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hint is given in the word ‘sandhaney’ (‘in search

of’, ‘in quest of’). The research that the author
herself did on the relationship and exchanges
between Tagore and Victoria Ocampo, one of the
distinguished female authors and thinkers of
twentieth-century Argentina, is precisely the
research that Anamika, the principal female
character in the novel, is also doing. This is not at
all an artificial, plot-driven construction, as
happens so often in science fiction or detective
stories. Ketaki constructs a new genre of writing
by mixing different genres. Tisidore, written much
later, can be put in the same category, except that
in Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney
Rabindranath o Victoria the fictional part and the research-based part are
Ocampor Sandhaney equally important. In her foreword to the book,
Ketaki informs us that when in 1981 Biram Mukhopadhyay, the editor at
Navana, requested her to write a short book on Tagore and Victoria, a new
novel was germinating within her. She felt the need to meet the demands
of both genres. As she puts it, “Gradually, through some hidden chemical
process of the mind, which I cannot fully analyze, the two themes became
[11]
totally stuck to each other in my consciousness.” A deep reading of
the text can enable us to analyze, to some extent, the interconnection of
the two themes. On the one hand, Anamika proceeds with her research,
consulting data scattered in different places, books and journals held in a
library, and unpublished letters held in an archival collection. She tries to
find out what the relationship of Tagore and Victoria was really like, how
it evolved and matured, what their personalities and inner worlds were
really like. On the other hand, she faces the challenges of her personal life,
eagerly meets and greets people around her, and does not hesitate to
respond positively to the call of a new relationship. Though Anamika’s
personal life and her research begin as separate tracks, at some point they
become complementary to each other, just as two rivers flowing in
separate channels can unite and then flow towards the sea in one stream.
This overlapping can be seen in the way the chapters are built too. At first
the fictional narrative and the research progress in separate chapters, but
gradually this division disappears. Anamika’s personal life and her
research become two dimensions of the same existence. There is no
ambivalence about this at all: rather, the two streams move rapidly
forward, giving pushes to each other. Through her discovery of Victoria,
Anamika passes successfully through two deep crises of her life; blended
with that passage is her examination of Tagore’s thoughts on the role of
women. Ketaki subsequently undertook the editing of the entire
correspondence between Tagore and Victoria, and wrote a full-length
study in English of the friendship between these two great personalities. In
Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria
Ocampo was published by Sahitya Akademi a few years later in 1988.

The second chapter of the novel is basically a book review. Anamika

writes a review of Doris Meyer’s biography of Victoria Ocampo and posts
it. The original version of this book review was actually published in the
journal Jijnasa, before Ketaki had embarked on her project to write the
novel. The review encapsulates a good, reasonably comprehensive portrait
of Victoria. Victoria Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires in1890 into a
wealthy and aristocratic family. As she grew up, she acquired fluency in
French and English: actually she did not start writing in Spanish until her
forties. Subsequently she founded the famous literary magazine, Sur,
wrote essays, gave leadership to the feminist cause, and had interactions

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with numerous distinguished personalities of her times – from Paul Valéry

to Virginia Woolf and from Albert Camus to Mussolini. Of course, this
incredible expanse of her contacts had an inner circle of close friends. In
the twenties three world-famous writers and thinkers stirred and
influenced her: Ortega, Keyserling, and Tagore. Her interactions with
Ortega and Keyserling were not always smooth. In this respect, Tagore
was an exception. Their relationship, throughout their lives, was one of
friendship and mutual respect. Not that they always thought alike or trod
the same paths, but they had no problem in carrying on a dialogue with
each other, with respect for each other’s thoughts. After Tagore’s death,
Victoria wrote an obituary in Sur, in which she said that she had
encountered this poet from the East three times in her life. The first
encounter was through André Gide’s French translation of the English
Gitanjali, which enabled her to survive a deep crisis in her personal life.
The second encounter was when she met Tagore in person in November
1924 and for two months had him and his English secretary Leonard
Elmhirst as her guests in the villa Miralrío. During moments of leisure in
those two months Tagore and Victoria discussed literature, Tagore
translated for his ‘Vijaya’ some of the poems he was writing at the time,
and both felt an electrical current of mutual attraction charging through
them. They met for the third time in France in 1930. Victoria arranged an
art exhibition for Tagore in Paris. Tagore hoped that they would meet
again in India, but that did not happen. In spite of Tagore’s fervent wish
that ‘Vijaya’ should visit him, she did not visit India. She finished paying
her homage to him in a tranquil gentleness of spirit.

But in her subsequent research-based book on

Tagore and Ocampo, In Your Blossoming Flower-
Garden, Ketaki quotes from unpublished sections
of Ocampo’s autobiography to show that there
was also a physical dimension to the attraction
that Tagore felt for this foreign woman. That was
very natural, very human, though in the end the
relationship did not flow in that particular
channel. As a matter of fact, Victoria loved
several men during her long life: those
relationships gave her strength, and sometimes
they also lacerated her, but she never allowed the
strong onward flow of her life to lose its way in
In Your Blossoming sandbanks.
Flower Garden
After the publication of her two books on Tagore and Ocampo, the novel
and the academic publication, Ketaki wrote, in response to some
comments in a review:

In this day and age, it must be said, with some emphasis, that for
Victoria her love life and the loves of her life were equally
important, equally demanding. ... The constant tension between
‘love life’ and ‘loves of life’ is at the very heart of Victoria’s life,
and unless one takes this into account, one does not understand
Victoria. I guessed this right from the beginning of my work, and
precisely because of that realization I introduced a similar tension
[12]
in Anamika’s life as well.

This tells us that Ketaki had gradually reached a reasonable certainty

about the chemical interaction that was taking place between her fiction
and her research. In her mental world, Anamika becomes a successor of
Victoria, and beckoned by Victoria’s amazing life and genius, she goes

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forward on her personal journey step by step. At some point she feels:
“The wheel has turned. One day that Argentine woman had found in
Tagore her friend, her guru, her guide. ... After all these days a Bengali
woman living in Britain is finding in Victoria a friend, a guru, a
[13]
guide.” Anamika not only does research, but drags the incomplete
dialogue between Tagore and Victoria to modern times, and keeps it
ongoing in the moments of her personal life.

Victoria’s personality is mesmerizing, but set beside her, the character of

Anamika is not lacking in fascinating qualities either. Once upon a time
when she was in Calcutta, she was a student of comparative literature. But
living in Britain with her psychiatrist husband Ranjan, her romantic,
delicate inner being fed on literature found a firm ground on which to
establish itself. In a favourable environment it gradually became evident
that the curiosity that lay in the very heart of Anamika’s being was eager
to reach out its hand to the world beyond the bounds of literature. From
helping her children with their French or German homework she moves
eagerly to learning Spanish herself, and with the same degree of eagerness
volunteers to be a guinea pig in some trials involving the use of the
contraceptive loop in the hospital where Ranjan works. Just as she
immerses herself in her researches on Tagore and Victoria, so also she
responds to the lyrical appeal of folk songs from different countries. She
discovers the attractions of the Spanish Flamenco style of singing,
dancing, and instrumental music, and soon thereafter accidentally
discovers Ladino folk songs in the flat of a Jewish friend of hers. Ladino is
the mother tongue of those Jews who were expelled from Spain at the end
of the fifteenth century. The exiles preserved with great loyalty their
spoken language and their songs. Anamika finds an Oriental turn in the
melodies of Ladino songs; the tunes seem familiar to her.

It is because of these many facets of Anamika’s personality, her eagerness

to express herself in different ways, that she does not lose her power to
stand on her own two feet after Ranjan’s death. After Ranjan dies from a
terrorist attack on a Belfast restaurant, she feels temporarily disoriented,
but when she recovers, she decides to bring up her children in Britain. For
Anamika knows, “Here a woman living on her own, whether she is a
widow, or divorced, or simply single, can bring up her children as she
wishes to, with her head held high. To put it briefly, the freedom to live
one’s life as one wishes to is much greater in this society, and Anamika
[14]
has always wished to live according to her own wishes.”

In this decision to live as she wishes to live, Anamika receives her greatest
support from another free-spirited woman, who has been battered by life,
but has not been broken: Emilia. After Ranjan’s death, Emilia looks after
her with the tender, loving care of an elder sister and gives her friendship
and companionship. Anamika had met Emilia through Ranjan. Emilia had
once suffered from depression and had received treatment for it from
Ranjan and his psychiatrist colleagues. During that time Ranjan had
realized that Emilia’s nature was that of fire smouldering beneath ashes.
After Emilia’s recovery, he had given her his and Anamika’s friendship.

The story of Emilia’s own life unveils a chapter of world history. She was
born in Turkey into a Sephardic Jewish family, those Jews whose ancestral
roots were in Spain. When Emilia was a child her family left Turkey and
migrated to Egypt. But they could not live in peace there for very long.
Soon the clouds of the Second World War gathered in the skies. Jews
became undesirable people in Egypt. Emilia’s family had to adopt
disguises and run for safety from city to city, from country to country.
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Finally they reached Paris. Before that young Emilia had fallen in love
with an Arab Muslim youth, had incurred the severe displeasure of her
father and been punished by him. She had been married off to another
Jewish youth and had had a daughter. She was expecting another baby,
when one day, in Paris, her husband disappeared and never came back. His
French had not been good enough to persuade German troops that he was
just French. Emilia’s second daughter never saw her father. But Emilia did
not admit defeat. She fought a lonely battle against her misfortunes and
won, becoming a businesswoman in Paris and bringing her daughters up
on her own. But when she reached middle age and had established herself
reasonably well in life, she had a nervous breakdown. The losses and
frustrations she had endured during her life became like a heavy rock and
eventually she suffered a landslide within her mind. Ranjan and his
colleagues heaved her up from the well of depression, as did her two
daughters, Dina and Sonia, and also Christopher, who was a blessing in
her life but brought the pain of unconsummated longing. He was an
Englishman returned from India whom Emilia loved with all her heart, but
he was already married and she could not have him for herself, which was
another hidden reason for her breakdown.

Emilia’s life-long rootlessness because of her Sephardic Jewish

background, being forced to wander from country to country during the
best years of her life, with her real identity concealed, having to surrender
the present and the future of herself and her family to a keen sense of
uncertainty and anxiety: in such details one may detect a modern
expansion of the classical concept of the Jewish diaspora. Khachig
Tölölyan, the theorist of diaspora studies, believes that because the word
‘diaspora’ was first used in connection with the uprooting of the Jews
from their original homeland, it has become associated with a history of
suffering:

The destruction of Judaea by the Romans, the loss of the homeland

and the ethnocidal violence of the Roman legions gave the term
“Jewish diaspora” its full and painful meaning. Specifically, the
Jewish predicament included the loss of redemptive proximity to
the religious center of Jerusalem. In time, the concept of
“diaspora” became suffused with the suffering that accompanies
many sorts of exile. The pain and meaning specific to Jewish
suffering in diaspora became conflated – especially in the literary
imagination – with the pain laymen of other peoples have felt and
expressed in response to individual exile, from Ovid to Dante and
beyond. Consequently, a definition of “diaspora” emerged
implicitly, out of consistent usage, and endured in a literature of
lamentation that emerged among Jews and, a millennium later,
[15]
among Armenians.

In this novel, however, Emilia traverses the periods of intense suffering in

her life and reaches a sense of having overcome her problems. Ketaki
shows that life becomes meaningful when human beings are connected to
one another, not when they are isolated from one another. Two human
beings who speak different languages, represent different cultures, and
were born in two different corners of the earth, may nevertheless think in
the same style and share a common world-view. With Ranjan’s help,
Emilia’s homeless psyche manages to stay afloat and reaches life’s shore
in a new way, and acquires a new dimension through frequent exchanges
with Anamika.

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Anamika’s close friendship with Emilia and her research on Victoria

Ocampo commence roughly at the same time, and this may seem
somewhat accidental, but there is a significant link between the two,
which Anamika herself discovers, to her own amazement. Victoria, the
daughter of a wealthy and aristocratic Argentine family, acquired a
remarkable fluency in French and English, as was the custom in her class
of society, but eventually had to learn to express herself in her mother
tongue, Spanish. Her magazine Sur and her essays in Testimonios testify to
that growth. And Emilia, too, was a Sephardic Jew whose mother tongue
was Ladino, descended from fifteenth-century Spanish. She also knew
English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and even some Arabic, Turkish,
Hebrew and Greek. Yet this knowledge of multiple languages did not give
her an extensive field of self-expression: she had to move from country to
country, from city to city, sometimes in her own and at other times in an
assumed identity, receiving knocks, till she reached middle age. Victoria
was an international personality: her incredible circle of friends has
become a myth. In Emilia’s case, her father deprived her of her first love,
the Arab Muslim youth; the Second World War snatched her husband; and
Christopher was reclaimed by his wife and children. Anamika is stirred
and moved by a certain symmetry between Victoria and Emilia. “Anamika
thinks of her Emi-di. Like Victoria Ocampo, Emilia did not get the chance
to go to university, and she too was an extraordinary woman. ... Anamika
knows that behind every successful Victoria Ocampo there are several
[16]
Emilias who have been denied opportunities.”

Emilia helps Anamika to make progress in reading Spanish texts and thus
aids her research. And Anamika translates some of the Ladino songs and
poems she hears from Emilia into her own mother tongue, Bengali. Giving
a rebirth to those songs from Emilia’s forlorn mother tongue, Anamika, in
a way, restores to Emilia her lost sense of identity. Emilia says, “You are
not a Sephardi yourself, yet you are so keen to find out more about our
traditional folk songs, handed down from generation to generation. You
are happily translating fragments of our lyrics into your mother tongue
from a far country. How do you explain the urge to do this, this attraction,
this sense of kinship? Ana, from that day when you explained to me that
no language spoken by human beings was a dialect or a patois, but was
just a language, I found a wonderful support within myself, on which to
[17]
lean.” This statement of Emilia’s makes us realize that the different
heritages of different languages need not act like barbed wire fences, but
can actually build bridges between people. All her life Emilia has had to
carry a burden – a sense of insecurity because of her minority identity, a
feeling of vulnerability, a degree of embarrassment – but she is able to
overcome this handicap. Tölölyan finds a new dimension of modernity
among diasporic people. He shows that those who have had to leave their
native lands for political, social, or religious reasons are moulded into new
shapes by the heat and pressure of their new environments, thereby
acquiring a new identity, and the entire modern world is moving precisely
towards that kind of identity. Therefore diasporic people should not feel
embarrassed about the fact that they are losing their ‘purity’ and acquiring
‘hybridity’.

Diasporas need not apologize for their alleged lack of authenticity,

for the hybridity of diasporan identity, as if it represented mere
decline from some purer homeland form. Rather – and there is an
inevitable element of utopian self-congratulation here – at its best
the diaspora is an example, for both the homeland’s and hostland’s
nation-states, of the possibility of living, even thriving in the
regimes of multiplicity which are increasingly the global condition,
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and a proper version of which diasporas may help to construct,

given half a chance. The stateless power of diasporas lies in their
heightened awareness of both the perils and rewards of multiple
belonging, and in their sometimes exemplary grappling with the
paradoxes of such belonging, which is increasingly the condition
[18]
that non-diasporan nationals also face in the transnational era.

In the novel Emilia’s life is like a line connecting two eras, beginning in
articulations of an uprooted existence, but finally receiving endorsement
from Anamika’s universalistic mindset. On the other side, Anamika learns
from Emilia the courage to pursue her struggle for survival with two
under-age children, in a world where no kinsfolk are near her, and the self-
confidence to build a new life for herself.

It is Emilia’s encouragement and moral support that propel Anamika in the

direction of Ashani. Anamika had known Ashani as a family friend. They
had first met in Delhi, and subsequently Ranjan and Anamika had got to
know Ashani and his wife Els more closely during a holiday in the Welsh
countryside. Ashani’s rendering of Tagore songs and his reading of one of
his own poems has left a mark on Anamika’s mind. In Ashani’s own poem
there was an image about a woman – “Companion of the sun,/ I had seen
you/ many centuries ago/ under the ornate arch/ of the Martanda temple, –
[19]
/ particles of sunlight in your hair” – which, with its echoes of Tagore
and Jibanananda Das, now suggests to her the figure of Victoria Ocampo
herself. Ashani works as a public relations manager for a German-owned
chemical company and is married to a Dutch potter. His personality
attracts Anamika.

The second phase of their getting to know each other begins after Ranjan’s
death, when Anamika has got over the first shock of her loss and is
returning to the normality of daily life. Anamika is sorry to get the first
hints of a breakdown in the relationship between Ashani and Els. Ashani
expresses interest in Anamika’s work on Tagore and Victoria Ocampo,
which makes the terrain of their interaction look more promising, full of
possibilities. Her feelings blend with her research work on Tagore and
Victoria and create a mélange of emotions within her.

Their exchanges continue through their correspondence. Ashani sends her

a prose poem addressed to her. She is touched, but certain lines trigger
sparks of doubt across her mind: lines such as “O you without a name, you
are not a temple, you are a woman belonging to the realm of delight and of
tears”, or “Girl whose conch-shell bangles are broken, throw away the
shells you are gathering. Those sea-birds with white wings – aren’t they
[20]
enough? O solitary woman, your searching eyes smart with salt ...”
Does Ashani then see her just as a widow, a woman without a husband,
who is keeping herself shackled in traditional ideas and customs, a woman
whom Ashani has to rescue from her predicament by means of his manly
prowess? She is disturbed, too, by Ashani’s comment on Victoria: “... to
me her most important identity is really as Tagore’s Vijaya; no other
identity is as big, or as important. I am not too bothered about whether she
was a feminist or not, about what might be the true nature of her feminism,
just as I am not bothered about whether you are a feminist or not, or what
[21]
might be the true nature of your feminism...” Anamika herself
believes that it is impossible to understand Victoria without taking into
account her feminism, and considers that intellectually she herself is
following in the same path. Though not in agreement with him on this

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issue, she does not add heat to the debate, because she knows that human
relationships are not cast in stone , but move forward and mature through
dialogues. After Ranjan’s death, she has filled her time with managing on
her own both the housework and looking after the children, and of course
her own research work, but nevertheless there is now a gap in one area of
her life. The companionship and friendship of a sensitive and
compassionate male friend are not undesirable things to her.

A somewhat accidental conjunction of events pushes their relationship

forward at one blow from the level of intellectual exchanges. Anamika
comes to Devonshire in connection with her archival researches, while
office assignments bring Ashani to Brighton. They meet. After dinner and
conversation in a Spanish restaurant Anamika spends the night with
Ashani in his hotel in Dartmouth. She feels no obstacle within her mind
about this, because she believes that it is possible for her to remain fully
committed to Ranjan’s memory and to the children, and still attempt to
build a new relationship. Eager and curious about everything by nature,
Anamika is keen to reclaim an area of life through a new relationship, one
that would lead to her further development and progress as a person. The
way Anamika thinks reflects some of Ketaki’s own thinking on these
issues:

The natural attraction between a man and a woman can indeed

occur within a friendship. It doesn’t mean that the friendship is
immediately ‘spoilt’. That additional dimension need not harm the
friendship; rather, it can enrich the friendship, provided we learn to
take it naturally and gracefully. Because of the way we are
socialized, various hang-ups about sexual matters tend to
accumulate in our minds and become fast-rooted there. These
become obstacles in the blossoming of friendship between men
and women. Removing them needs a kind of awakening of the
fountain. After such a discovery a ‘new man’ and a ‘new woman’
[22]
can be friends with each other in a richer sense.

Anamika is herself a ‘new woman’, as Victoria had been. But is

Anamika’s new male friend also a ‘new man’? Some aspects of Ashani’s
behaviour in their intimate moments together and some facts about his life
gleaned from him stick like thorns in Anamika’s mind. What seems like
modernity on one side – can it not sometimes display on its other side a
wilful licence to do as one pleases? After telling Ashani that Emilia refers
to Ashani as ‘Ash’, Anamika, at the moment of yielding to Ashani’s
embrace, murmurs the opening lines of Tagore’s poem ‘Ujjiban’
(‘Revivification’) from the collection Mahua – “O you with the bow of
flowers, leave your humiliating bed of ashes,/ and from Shiva’s fire,
reincarnate yourself in a fiery body.” This collection, Mahua, suffused
with the unseen presence of Victoria Ocampo, is where Tagore
reincarnated the god of love whom Shiva had, in the mythical story,
angrily reduced to ashes with the fire of his third eye. The poem ‘Ujjiban’
ends with the line: “O bodiless one, assume the body of a hero.” Anamika
too hopes that through friendship, love, and companionship the two of
them would be reborn. Even after seeing to their other commitments, they
would still have some private time for each other. But in reality no
‘awakening of the fountain’ happens. On the contrary, from the moment of
her getting up at the end of the night she experiences a different kind of
rupture of dreams. At first she tries to ignore the moments that are out of
tune, because she cannot imagine that all the love and attraction that this
intelligent, educated Bengali supposedly feels for her would exhaust itself
in one night’s dalliance. Confronted with contradictory, tattered clichés

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such as ‘But you can’t have me in bed, for love requires purity’ or ‘It’s me
who is not worthy of you’, she feels internally battered, but decides to
continue the dialogue for the time being, leaving the rest to the future.

Invited by Ashani to have a holiday in Brighton, Anamika goes there with

her son Saugato, to find that his daughter Mousumi and a friend named
Margrit have come with him. Margrit’s gentle and pleasant manner creates
no unpleasant feelings in Anamika. Returning from Brighton, she is able
to write to Ashani, “I’ve never demanded before that you will be
exclusively my friend, nor am I demanding it now. ... Especially at our
age, it makes no sense to regulate our loves on a ‘one at a time’ basis. On
the contrary, it is surely our task to keep alive, through careful watering,
[23]
those loves which fate has kindly enabled us to reach.” In writing this,
is Anamika somehow betraying a poverty of spirit, or is this receptivity
her strength, her modernity? Actually, Ashani and Anamika are looking at
the same thing from completely different perspectives. Ashani is hoping
that having learnt about Margrit’s existence, Anamika will push off,
whereas Anamika believes that generosity and the ability to acknowledge
the truth are the yardsticks of mature love. In the end, Ashani terminates
the relationship by writing a letter. But even there, he does not hesitate to
add: “... my regret is that you did not understand my sadhana, you did not
appreciate my tapasya built bit by bit. You have an appetite for sexuality,
[24]
but no appetite for silence.” Ashani has already regurgitated several
such clichés borrowed from outdated ideologies, but at this point his
hypocrisy is stunning.

Even in this critical period of her life, Anamika’s research work keeps
flowing forward. It is as if she was seeking in her work an answer, a
refuge, a successful voyage. The two stories, that of Tagore and Victoria
on the one hand, and that of Ashani and Anamika on the other, create a
most interesting contrast for the reader. Anamika’s research shows us that
Tagore did make many comments on the man-woman relationship which
were locked within his very personal theoretical framework, from which
men like Ashani could borrow words and idioms as they needed. Anamika
finds many such comments problematic from a modern viewpoint. For
instance, just a few days after his encounter with Victoria, Tagore writes in
Paschimjatrir Diary, “A man’s greatest development is in tapasya; in a
woman’s love the dharmas of renunciation and service are in tune with
that tapasya; when the two are together, they enhance each other’s
radiance. There is yet another kind of melody which can also play in a
woman’s love: the twanging of the bow of the god of love. That’s not a
tune leading to liberation; it’s the music of bondage. It ruptures the
[25]
discipline of tapasya and thereby kindles the fire of Shiva’s anger.”
Doesn’t the language of Ashani’s last letter seem very close to this?
Anamika gradually discovers how Tagore’s views on the man-woman
relationship change over the years. One of the reasons may be the fact that
in these theorizing writings he has addressed different audiences in
different countries. But even after taking into account the differences
induced by his target audiences, Anamika finds that a certain sense of
uncertainty tends to cling to his thinking on women for a long time. She
suspects that this is because Tagore did not have the personal experience
of living with a woman in a close relationship for many years, moving on
from youth to middle age and thence to old age. In his boyhood he lost his
mother; in his early youth he lost his cherished sister-in-law Kadambari
Devi; and when he attained maturity as a young man, he lost his wife. A
gap remained in his world of direct experience, which he tried to fill again
and again with theories.
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Victoria Ocampo came to his life, bringing a completely new flavour of

experience. Learned and attractive at the same time, she was very different
from the models of womanhood with which he had been familiar. When
he encountered and interacted with Victoria’s personality, there was a
change in his thinking also. In order to have a dialogue with Victoria, he
would have had to go beyond the models of a presiding goddess of the
home or an inspiring Muse: there was no other option. After leaving San
Isidro, he wrote to her on 13 January 1925: “Your friendship has come to
me unexpectedly. It will grow to its fulness of truth when you know and
[26]
accept my real being ...” What did last to the end, until Tagore’s death,
was this friendship – between a man and a woman with a big age gap and
living in two different hemispheres of the globe. Anamika explains: “In
the currents of the sixteen or seventeen years after their first meeting, just
as Victoria learnt to identify Tagore’s inner conflicts and contradictions, in
a similar way Tagore too managed to form at least a partial idea of the
modern intellectual woman, rebellious and wanting the liberation of
women, who dwelt within Victoria – in the same way as one can make out,
[27]
through the stained glass windows of a church, the sunshine outside.”
Anamika believes that Victoria’s personality did slowly bring about
changes in Tagore’s thinking on women too. When in the last stage of his
life he says, in his essay ‘Nari’ (‘Woman’) in Kalantar, that “the women
who dwell in our homes are everyday becoming women who dwell in the
world”, or “...at the end of an era women have assembled to perform their
share in what has to be done in the building of a new civilization –
everywhere in the world they are getting ready for the task. ...The human
community into which they have been born is becoming clear to their eyes
[28]
in every direction and every realm of activity” – then the subtle
shadow of Victoria that falls across such thoughts invest them with a
positive and modern significance.

Arrived at this point, Anamika’s personal life and her research work create
a marvellous contrasting pattern in front of the reader’s eyes, a pattern that
has many levels and planes. From one point of view, both are ‘discoveries’
for her. The novelist collects data from letters and other archival
documents about two famous personalities from the past, recreating their
relationship bit by bit. Side by side with this, she peels the layers of
diasporic Bengali life like an onion. On the one hand we see how the
relationship of Tagore and Victoria overcomes a huge geographical
distance and linguistic and cultural differences to reach an estuary of
tranquil friendship, because both of them have tried in their own ways to
understand ‘the other’, and Tagore has tried specially hard to do so,
changing some of his old ideas. On the other hand, the relationship of
Ashani and Anamika stumbles and collapses before it can take off in a
proper sense, because, as Anamika comes to realize, all of Ashani’s
activities, from living with a Dutch wife and having multiple relationships
with different women in different stages of his life, to reading literature
and writing poems, have remained at a shallow level. Interaction with
Ranjan and Emilia, and her own research work have together raised
Anamika’s world of awareness to a universalist level, where Ashani
cannot quite reach, or even if he does, he feels uneasy there. This is
because Anamika, although very much a Bengali woman, is unwilling to
perpetuate the archetype of ‘the Bengali woman’ when she expresses her
personhood. Ashani had wanted to see this archetype in her. Ketaki does
also destroy here the conventional pattern of diasporic life. Generally
speaking, people in diaspora like to maintain contact with those who
represent their homeland and language-group, and enjoy the pleasures of a
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gregarious existence. On this Tölölyan has this to say: “Diasporan

communities care about maintaining communication with each other.
Individuals living in various diasporized communities stay in touch with
kinfolk and with family and with often quite formalized obligation and
[29]
friendship networks in the homeland ...”

But of course there are exceptions to this model. Anamika is one such
exception. She is attracted to Ashani not because he is a Bengali, but
because he seems at first to be in her wave-length. The same self-
confidence with which she brings up her children on her own and does her
work as an independent researcher enables her to come out of the
relationship in which she is deceived. In this Victoria herself shows her the
way. Victoria says: “The union of a man and a woman is a human
achievement which has a touch of the miraculous, is almost a tour de
force, and even in the best of circumstances it cannot be attained without
perseverance and patience – I would almost say without the combined
[30]
heroism of two human beings ...” Tagore had this kind of heroism; so
had Victoria; and in Anamika too we see the glow of that heroism.

In this book the overflowing lyricism of the Ladino songs adds a special
flavour and dimension to the complex patterns of the two narratives, the
story of Tagore and Victoria on the one hand and that of Anamika’s
personal life on the other. Anamika translates the songs, bringing their
meanings home to the reader. In these songs we have the spontaneous
expression of the natural love of men and women, mingled with joy and
sorrow. Sometimes they give hints of a wandering life. Altogether, they
contribute a simple, spontaneous musicality to the peaks of a modern life-
struggle. When in the very last chapter Anamika bakes an apple pie and
sings a Ladino lullaby to her son, the simple spontaneity of the tune
becomes the keynote of that daily existence, suggesting a space where
human beings may breathe and survive.

Dilara Hashem was born in 1936 and grew up in Barisal in undivided

Bengal, now in Bangladesh. During the British days her father worked for
the civil service and after 1947 for Pakistan’s Jute Regulation. Her father’s
postings took her to various locations in northern Bengal and for some
time to Calcutta too. Experiences garnered in such locations appear in her
fictional work. She did her B. A. (Honours) and her M. A. in English
Literature from Dhaka University in 1956 and 1957, getting married in the
last stage of her university education. Her husband’s posting took her to
Karachi, where she lived from 1962 to 1970 and gained some experience
of working for the radio. At the time of the war of liberation for
Bangladesh, she quitted Karachi and went first to London, working for a
short time for BBC Radio’s Bengali service. In 1972 she migrated to the
USA and within a short time joined the Bengali broadcasting service of
the Voice of America, where she still works.

Dilara is a popular writer in Bangladesh. Though she has written some

poetry, she is mainly a writer of fiction. Her first novel Ghar Mon Janala
(1965, ‘Home, Mind, Window’) was made into a film and has been
translated into Chinese. She has published over thirty titles and like Ketaki
has received several literary awards.

A born story-teller, Dilara proceeds in her narratives with an eye on the

portrayal of character and the warp and weft of human relationships. From
her diasporic location she writes about remote rural regions in Bangladesh,
American urban life, and transactions between different cultures. In the
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first phase of her life in diaspora she has written more about the old
undivided and subsequently fractured Bengal. Perhaps because she had
already gained popularity before leaving her native land, she continued,
for some time, to write her novels against a tried and tested backdrop.
Four important novels from this period are Ekada Ebong Ananto (1976,
‘Once and Always’), Stobdhotar Kane Kane (1977, ‘Whispering to
Silence’), Amlokir Mow (1978, ‘Myrobalan Honey’), and Kakotaliyo
(1985, ‘Coincidences’). The author’s personality and womanhood are
active at the centre of all four. The central character in each case is a
woman, and we are invited to look at the world through her eyes.

In contrast, in a later period, Dilara places her stories against the backdrop
of more than one continent and throws light on the work-lives and inner
lives of diasporic Bengalis living and surviving at many different levels.
Anukta Padabali (1995, ‘Untold Verses’) is set in Bangladesh, London,
and the USA. Sitara comes to London with her husband and son at the
time of the Bangladesh Liberation War, but her broken marriage does not
mend. After her divorce, she goes to visit her elder sister in America,
where she meets Asad, previously known to her in Bangladesh, and an
understated relationship begins. That Sitara can go beyond the debris of
her broken marriage and respond to new love is due to her being away
from the land of her birth. Sadar Andar (1998, ‘Outer and Inner Rooms’)
moves between Washington, Boston, New Jersey, and Dhaka. The novel
opens with the sudden death of the successful businessman Ansar Ahmed.
We are gradually made to see that in fact many different personalities lived
within one man. He had disowned his only son for building a relationship
with a black girl, but had secretly kept a white mistress himself. On the
one hand, he had become a father-figure to a young Bangladeshi man who
had come to America in search of a better life; on the other hand, as soon
as he dies, his elder daughter’s patched-up marriage collapses.

Other daringly imagined locations feature in this phase of creativity,

stretching the horizons of the diasporic Bengali novel. Mural (1986) is set
in Aurangabad in Western India. Chandragrahan (2003, ‘Lunar Eclipse’)
is set entirely in Pakistan, making good use of some of the author’s own
experience of living in West Pakistan. In the Pakistani hill station Murry
Hills, there is a brewery established in British times. After the creation of
Pakistan the Murry Brewery passes into the hands of a Parsee family.
Alcohol is forbidden to most Pakistanis on religious grounds, yet poverty
forces many people to seek employment there. Such a worker is Shirin. On
one side of her is a conservative society, on the other bureaucratic
complexity. The conflict between the two pushes the plot. Among the
principal characters one is American, and the rest are Pakistani, but the
novelist’s angle of vision is Bengali, giving the novel a specially mixed
flavour.

Another such novel is Setu (2000, ‘Bridge’), set partially in Sri Lanka. The
novel could be regarded as an exemplar of that multiculturalism that has
built the USA and Canada with their mosaic of races and colours. Here the
principal characters are: a woman from India’s Lucknow; her husband
who belongs to an aristocratic family from Sri Lanka; a doctor of Indian
origin from Africa; and his girl-friend who is American-Jewish. Alongside
the stories of personal turmoil is the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict of Sri Lanka.
The novelist shows that despite murder and mayhem there are invisible
bridges between human beings which make life worth living.

One of Dilara’s major novels is Hamela (2001), where the story, unfolding
like a ‘Draupadi’s sari’, connects Boston in the USA with Patarhat, a
remote village in Barisal. Danesh Mirza, a respectable old man in Patarhat,
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becomes infatuated with the orphan Hamela, who is a great beauty, and
marries her as his second wife just when his grown-up son Basset, who
lives in Boston, returns for a visit to his native land with his wife Rubina,
whom he has met and married in Boston. The novel begins dramatically
with this situation and moves forward through these two locations, one
representing urban America, the other a rural setting sunk in blind
superstitions, both depicted faithfully. Basset and Rubina present the
image of an educated, modern couple, while Hamela, trying desperately to
cling to some man or other, is swept away like straw in flood waters. Out
of loyalty to his roots Basset returns to Patarhat when Hamela and her
lover Ramij die in a storm, to take charge of his step-mother’s two small
children. Dilara is good at drawing new locales in a few strokes,
expanding the horizons that are familiar to Bengali readers. And when in
those locales she packs, with humanity and sensitivity, the stories of a few
men and women, their strivings and yearnings, successes and failures,
loves and losses, the characters do not seem distant or unfamiliar to
Bengali readers, and the narratives flow forward with exceptional
smoothness.

The waves of migration that have travelled from South Asia to the
Western countries from the second half of the twentieth century onwards
contain many different categories of people – from university graduates to
poverty-stricken, near-illiterate villagers. They have sought a ‘golden
land’, a ground beneath their feet. Whatever their declared motives in
migrating, the real underlying motive is usually economic – the bottom
line of most migrations in the world today. The historian Judith Brown
confirms this: “For most migrants a primary motivation behind migration
was economic improvement for self and family, whether they were
indentured labourers travelling to sugar plantations or a later generation of
highly skilled information technology (IT) workers moving to
[31]
America.” Even when the avowed purpose of migration is the same,
differences in education, culture, and social status generate substantial
distances between migrants from the same country or linguistic territory:
chasms which cannot be easily bridged. Ghulam Murshid, himself a
diasporic writer and scholar originally from Bangladesh, explains the
situation with many facts and examples in his book Kalapanir Hatchhani:
Bilete Bangalir Itihas (2008, ‘The Beckoning of the Black Waters: The
History of Bengalis in Britain’). The book has created some controversy
among Bangladeshi migrants to Britain. There is no scope for getting into
the details of that controversy here, but it would be true to say that the
book gives us an overall history of Bengali migration to Britain. Murshid
shows that just as, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth, educated and aristocratic Bengalis cast off their medieval
prejudices as a consequence of the Bengal Renaissance and began to cross
the ‘black waters’ in their search for Western learning, so also, in a parallel
stream, some working-class Bengalis crossed the seas as ships’ lascars.
They were mostly men of the Chittagong and Sylhet districts, now in
Bangladesh. Many worked as lascars in the merchant navy during the First
World War. The work was immensely laborious and physically
demanding. For that reason, as soon as a ship touched the shore of Britain,
many of the lascars absconded. After a few days of surviving on scraps,
they would find some employment somewhere as unskilled labourers,
usually in shops or restaurants, sometimes as street vendors or pedlars.
This class of migrants had a very strong group loyalty. When a new
‘countryman’ arrived, those who were already settled in Britain would
give him shelter and help him to get work. As a result,, this stream of
migration never dried up, and many of the new arrivals started up their
own businesses, but not in diversified lines like the Punjabis or Gujaratis.

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Their business activities stemmed from pleasing the palate, providing

curries in restaurants and selling spices and other culinary ingredients in
specialized grocery shops. Their life-styles were utterly different from
those who came for higher education or for professional jobs requiring
proven expertise – from either Bangladesh or West Bengal. The result of
this particular stream of migration can be seen in East London’s Brick
Lane, where rows of restaurants, grocery stores, shops selling sweets,
Bengali books, cassettes, and CDs proudly proclaim the extent of Bengali
migration to Britain.

In Dilara Hashem’s novel Sinho o Ajogar (2006,

‘The Lion and the Python’) the two principal
characters, Shamsul and Rabeya, may be described
as the American equivalents of the migrants to
Brick Lane. Shamsul is the eldest son of an
agricultural family in Kishorganj in Bangladesh.
He has not studied beyond high school. Everybody
expects him to look after his father’s land, and he
begins doing that. But gradually he discovers that
many young men from his community are
emigrating to Dubai, or Saudi Arabia, or America,
and returning home with lots of money and all
kinds of amazing goods in their suitcases. He feels
Sinho o Ajogar
the excitement of it, and the idea of such an
adventure intoxicates him. Suddenly he wins a green card for emigrating
to America through a lottery system which gives a chance to such people
to migrate to the USA. He sees a door opening for the fulfilment of his
dreams. A marriage was in the process of being arranged for him – with
Rabeya, from the same village. Quickly he gets that done with and
proceeds with his wife to the ‘golden land’ of America to become a ‘rich
man’. Shamsul is the twenty-first century successor of those in the remote
rural districts of the old Bengal who once became lascars and crossed the
‘black waters’ in search of riches.

The novel is the story of how Shamsul and Rabeya struggle to survive in a
materialistic world. Science tells us that if substances are kept under
certain degrees of pressure and heat for certain lengths of time, they
undergo material and chemical changes. This truth probably applies to
some extent to human beings too. In an unknown and unfamiliar world
ruled by a completely different set of values, certain changes occur in the
personalities and mental worlds of Shamsul and Rabeya. Gradually,
another being is born within their simple rustic selves. The author has used
‘the lion’ and ‘the python’ as symbols of their inner world, which
sometimes asserts itself angrily and sometimes goes to sleep. When he
was in his homeland, Shamsul had no idea how his courage and ambition
could push him onto his dream staircase, nor how the dream itself could
assume a clear shape, like a distant source of light. Likewise, the village
girl Rabeya had never imagined in her wildest dreams that it was possible
to protest against her husband’s wishes, or that if they disagreed about
something, she could envisage an alternative course of action. The
transformation wrought by migration is thus not just external, but internal
as well.

Shamsul came to America after selling his share of his father’s land and
getting some dollars for it. As he was an unskilled labourer, he did not get
a reasonable job straight away. But he clung to his dollars, did not part
with them, and in the beginning managed to make ends meet by delivering
newspapers. Then he leased a shop-space and opened a grocery store,
buying a second-hand sports utility vehicle for fetching his supplies. Two
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years rolled on. With Rabeya at his side, Shamsul prospered in his
business. His customers were mainly local Bengalis, though most of them
were not from his own social class. Some were doctors, some engineers,
some worked for the World Bank, and yet others were estate agents. In
their professional expertise and income they could vie with the white
Americans, but when it came to pleasing their taste buds, they abandoned
the supermarkets and preferred to crowd into Shamsul’s shop. There they
could buy fish imported from Bangladesh, sturdy and muscular free-range
halal chickens, spices, greens, ‘Aladdin’s sweets’ in special packets.
Rabeya sat at the cash machine while Shamsul cut up the fish or meat with
an electric knife and weighed out rice and dal, spices and greens for his
customers. Within a short time he became an expert at managing his
business. In between his little jobs he would carry on pleasant
conversation with his customers or sneak in an extra piece of fish or a
mango into a customer’s shopping bag, showing his Bengali goodwill – he
could now do all that with full professional ease. To ambitious Shamsul,
all customers were important and of equal value, because he knew that
though he was close to his dream staircase, he might well need someone’s
help to climb to the top. By now Shamsul had learnt the central mantra of
the American way of life – time is money. He had no slots for leisure in his
packed work-schedule, spending almost twelve hours in the shop with his
wife, and coming home at night only to eat and sleep. The shop was closed
every Monday, but that day was spent in checking the accounts and in
fetching stuff for the following week. Shamsul had worked out where his
bird’s eye was, the target he had to hit. He was trying to save every dime
he was earning and felt that the rent of his apartment was money thrown
down the drain. As soon as he had saved enough, he would take a loan and
buy a house. He wanted to postpone having children until he had a place
of his own. In fact, having a child was also for him a step on the dream
ladder. He was overwhelmed by the idea that he could father an American
child: a child born in that country automatically acquired American
citizenship.

Trying to buy his own house, Shamsul was in touch again with an old
contact. Azam was an estate agent and took Shamsul to see houses in
affluent and middle class neighbourhoods. Shamsul kept all such visits as
secrets from Rabeya: he would buy the house and astound his wife.
Pushing to a corner of his mind his wish to own, in the not too distant
future, a house surrounded by a garden in an upper class neighbourhood,
for the moment he just wanted to buy a two-bedroom ‘condo’. Then he
would expand his business, and maybe he could sponsor and bring over
his brother Abdul to help him in that project.

Rabeya, on the other hand, had never dreamt of settling in America. She
did learn to read and write in her village school, but it was rare for her
even to read the daily newspaper. She thought she would get married to
one of the boys of her village and live the rest of her life there. But within
a short time after her marriage she crossed the seas, arrived in a new
country, and found her days packed with relentless work. At first she was
disoriented by this experience, but gradually got used to the new rhythm
of her life, bathing in a tub rather than in a pond, eating pasta instead of
rice, and pecan pies instead of sandesh. But she could not find happiness,
for she did not share Shamsul’s dream. Her aspirations were altogether
different. She did not like chasing groceries. She would rather have a baby
and relax at home. She loved sewing. She could sew clothes for her baby.
She would ask Shamsul to buy her a sewing machine. When Shamsul
came home, she would take the baby out in a pram for an afternoon stroll.
In other words, the summit of Rabeya’s ambition was to be a happy and
prosperous housewife. Nursing that desire in her bosom, she had to work
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as hard as her husband. Her mind clouded over with the pain of being far
away from her loved ones, as though with rain clouds.

Shamsul was an honest, enterprising man; Rabeya was a tranquil wife and
a good housekeeper. They should have been ideal partners for each other,
but a trivial event dents their relationship, and in writing about that the
author portrays, with a few fine strokes, the real crisis in the lives of
migrants. Shamsul had himself taught Rabeya everything she needed to
know to survive in her new life, both at home and in the shop. But it was
to fulfil his own need. He had assumed that Rabeya would never falter in
her unqualified self-surrender. It had never occurred to him that checking
the cash in the shop, using the microwave oven and the washing machine
at home, Rabeya could not remain the simple village girl for ever.
Shamsul’s Bengali upbringing had not taught him that unless he learnt to
share his thoughts and dreams with Rabeya, she would not be able to put
her heart and soul into her work. Like a typical Bengali male, he thought
that all decisions were for him, and for him alone, to take. Such thinking
did not hold water in a society characterized by individualism.

Sinking into a deep loneliness, Rabeya begins to feel that her husband has
no respect for any of her wishes. Piqued, she turns her face away from her
own household and looks around her. She discovers Medina, who lives in
another flat in the same apartment block. Medina has a husband and a son,
but she works in the local drugstore. She wears jeans and T-shirts, and
either drives or takes the metro to work. Sometimes she goes to the mall to
do her shopping. To Rabeya’s unaccustomed eyes, Medina comes across
as a ‘free woman’, someone who moves about unescorted by her husband
and ‘earns dollars’. Partly because she is annoyed with her husband, and
partly to bring some excitement into her monotonous life, one day Rabeya
goes to the mall with Medina. She takes some dollars from her shop cash,
justifying the action thus: if Shamsul had to hire a worker, it would cost
him quite a bit. Rabeya can lay a claim to a bit of cash in return for her
labour. But as soon as Shamsul realizes that the takings are less than what
they should be, he explodes with rage at his wife’s fecklessness. Rabeya
does not admit that she has done anything wrong and vigorously argues
with him. They spend the night in separate rooms and from the next day
Rabeya stops going to the shop with Shamsul. Her position is now clear.
“The shop is not mine,” she says, “it’s yours. You earn the money, you
count it, and you save it. I came here with you from Kishorganj to have a
[32]
family and run my own home, not to work in a shop.”

With Medina’s help, Rabeya finds herself a job in a fast food outlet. She
earns dollars for every hour she works and pays back to Shamsul the
money she owes him. Even with the help of a temporary worker, Shamsul
cannot manage the shop. Inside his chest his ego and his rage puff
themselves up like a lion’s mane. And Rabeya’s hurt and newly awakened
sense of self coil within her like a python. The little bit of time they have
to spend together at home they try to remain as quiet as possible, but
within them the lion roars and the python lashes its tail.

Alongside Shamsul and Rabeya, we see two other migrant Bengalis in this
novel. One is the real estate agent Azam. To keep up appearances for the
sake of his profession, he drives a Mercedes Benz, but is virtually
bankrupted by his obligation to pay alimony to his divorced American
wife. His sole gain from his wife is his American citizenship. Medina, on
the other hand, had come to America, risking a great deal, to reform her
husband, who was crazy about singing. But things did not turn out as she
had hoped. She could not make ends meet with what her husband earned

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from driving a taxi. That was why Medina herself worked. Their
adolescent son Taufik had developed an addiction to drugs when they
were in Washington DC. They have moved to Virginia to save him.
Shamsul had seen in Azam, and Rabeya in Medina, a picture of what they
wanted to be. But gradually they both find out in their own ways the
frustration and sense of emptiness lurking behind the apparent affluence
and independence of these two. Drinking at a bar in between his job
assignments, Azam empties his pitcher of life’s woes in front of Shamsul,
the Bengali youth who does not belong to his own social class. He tells
Shamsul that he is up to his ears in debt, that he had to hand over even his
house to his former wife, but does not have the money to buy even a
‘condo’ like Shamsul. And Rabeya discovers how pressurized Medina is,
how she has to struggle alone, managing her self-willed husband with a
low income and a son hooked on drugs. Taufik’s drug-addicted
companions from the past find him alone and knife him. He narrowly
escapes death. When he returns from the hospital, Medina decides that she
will go back to Dhaka with her son.

Gradually Shamsul and Rabeya discover that though the new country had
seemed so shining and alluring to them, not everything in it was smooth
and faultless. Rather, like the back of an idol, it also had a rough side.
Whether the fruits of affluence and independence were sour or sweet, one
had to pay a price to get them. The two of them do not just observe others,
they also see themselves mirrored in the eyes of others. Azam tells
Shamsul that he, Shamsul, is lucky. And Medina tells Rabeya that
Shamsul must be regarded as an intelligent man since in just two and a
half years he has established his business and bought a place of his own,
so Rabeya must count herself a fortunate woman. It’s the old tale of the
two banks of a river, each side yearning for the other. Nothing was final,
and there was no end to human desire.

After earning money for her own work, Rabeya was slowly gaining self-
confidence and the core of her personality was becoming strong, but she is
scared when she hears that Medina is going back to the homeland. Medina
was the person she had relied on in a kinless environment. Rabeya feels
that her carefully constructed defences are crumbling. Meanwhile,
Shamsul also receives a profound shock when one Sunday morning he
goes to open his shop and finds that there has been a big robbery there
overnight. The shock to his mind is worse than the financial loss. What
had seemed a smooth road for making progress suddenly resembles the
heaving back of a huge sea monster that could cast him aside any moment
and let him sink to the bottom. Shamsul is so upset that he sheds his ego
and rushes to Rabeya; the lion no longer growls within him. Rabeya too
asks her python to be quiet and surrenders herself to Shamsul.

Shamsul had dreamt of a ground floor ‘condo’ with two rooms. There
would be a small piece of land in front of it where he would grow red
spinach, green chillis, and a puin creeper on a trellis. The plants would
grow like him, remind him of the land left behind, spread roots in the new
soil and branches and leaves towards the sky. His father used to tell him
that one could not improve one’s lot unless one settled down in a place and
spread one’s roots slowly. But his father and mother were across the seas
in the country left behind; there was only one person who could water his
roots in the new country and fix the trellis with care, and that was Rabeya.
Equally, Rabeya feels that however great the attraction of earning and
spending her own money, or buying a ticket for going home, the grocery
that Shamsul had built bit by bit over the past two years had become a part
of her existence as well. Though she had told Shamsul that it was his shop,
she could not bear the thought of the shop coming to any harm. No matter
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how much she missed the homeland, she did not wish to return to it with a
basket of failures on her head. She overcomes her sense of hurt and
realizes that Shamsul is her true refuge; only he could provide her with a
home to return to.

So Shamsul and Rabeya stay together. They are a rustic couple who had
wanted to change, but don’t. It is because they do not change that they do
not abandon each other. They do not float away like straw in the strong
currents of a materialistic world, but clinging to each other, they survive.

In this novel, Dilara Hashem seems to surpass herself. She goes outside
the circle of her own social class and gives us a picture of the lives of
migrant working-class Bengalis which is both vivid and clear. There is not
a hint of anything artificial anywhere. Usually her novels are crowded
with well-educated, highly placed professionals. From that point of view,
Sinho o Ajogar is a notable exception. The novelist takes great care with
the language of her dialogues. We find three styles of speaking in this
book. First, Shamsul and Rabeya speak to each other in the dialect of the
Dhaka region. Secondly, Medina and Azam and other Bengalis speak in a
polite Bengali idiom, though Shamsul and Rabeya speak to them in their
own dialect. Thirdly there is some broken English with which Shamsul
and Rabeya manage their exchanges with the world outside the Bengali
circle. But it is the dialogues between Shamsul and Rabeya in their dialect
that occupy the most space. This creates quite a contrast between these
two characters and their surroundings, making the characters appear
sharper.

In this respect one could compare and contrast this novel with another
novel of our times which has created a stir: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
(2003). Though Chanu, the husband of the heroine, Nazneen, is very
proud of his education, Nazneen has come from a working-class
Bangladeshi family. Her sister Hasina works in a garment factory. The two
sisters correspond, exchanging their news and views. Amazingly, the texts
that Monica Ali assigns to Hasina are written in broken sentences, in
incorrect English. Most certainly, a girl from rural Bangladesh would not
write letters to her sister in London in English; she would definitely write
her letters in Bengali. The language might be colloquial, in their own
dialect, and she might make a few spelling mistakes, but why would it be
ungrammatical? If her language is represented by ungrammatical English,
does it not mock her? Does it not also entail the mockery of a whole group
of people who speak their language with a local accent? The rugged
particularities of their ethnic identity are thereby obliterated and levelled
by the bulldozer of a single language. And this is where Dilara’s novel is
different. The colloquial language that Shamsul and Rabeya speak reflects
their identity, personality, the grit of their character. Dilara thus makes a
special and original statement on migrant Bengali life in this novel.

The two novels by Ketaki and Dilara that I have chosen to look at closely
in this paper may appear more dissimilar than similar, but I have
deliberately chosen these two examples to indicate the range and variety
of experiences in the lives of Bengalis in diaspora. At the same time, there
are also some resonances between them in the interest taken in both works
in dialect. Dilara’s use of Dhaka dialect is matched by Ketaki’s interest in
Ladino: Anamika’s translation of Ladino folk songs into Bengali restores
Emilia’s pride in her mother tongue. The other point to remember is that
though this particular novel of Ketaki’s does not delve into working-class
life in the way Sinho o Ajogar does, her first, third, and fourth novels
engage with British working-class life in a significant way. All in all, I

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hope I have been able to demonstrate that the lives of Bengalis in diaspora
have added a whole new territory to Bengali literature.

[Developed from a presentation made at the International Gender Studies

Centre, Oxford, in the summer term of 2008.]

[1]
Tagore, Rabindranath, ‘Kalantar’, in Kalantar, Rabindra-rachanabali, the older
Visvabharati edition, Vol. 24, p 244. All translations from Bengali in this essay are mine.
The word ‘kalantar’ means ‘the end of one era and the beginning of another’,
[2]
Tölölyan, Khachig, ‘Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational
Moment’, Diaspora 5:1, 1996, p. 9.
[3]
Brown, Judith M., Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora,
Cambridge University Press, First South Asian Edition, 2007, p. 5.
[4]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, ‘The Practice of Bilingualism in Literary Writing: A Personal
Perspective’, in Dutta Gupta, Pranati and Ray, Susmita (ed.), Indian Writing in English:
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Vivekananda College, Calcutta, 2006, p. 21.
[5]
Ibid., p. 23.
[6]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Night’s Sunlight, Virgilio Libro, Kidlington, Oxon., 2000,
Translator’s Prologue, p. iv.
[7]
Ibid.
[8]
Cheesman, Tom, in the ‘Critical Opinions’ section of the play’s website,
http://www.nightssunlight.co.uk. Tom Cheesman was one of the organizers of the
‘Writing Diasporas’ conference at the University of Wales, Swansea, where the English
production of the play was premièred in 2000 at the campus theatre.
[9]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, interviewed by Sumana Das Sur, Agrobeej, 1: 1, June 2007, p.
270.
[10]
Ibid., pp. 270-72.
[11]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney, Navana,
Calcutta, 1985, ‘Mukhabandha’ (Foreword).
[12]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Amar Rabindranath-Victoria-bishayak Boidutir Sutrey’,
Chalanta Nirman, Dey’s Publishing, Calcutta, 2005, p. 184.
[13]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney, op. cit., p.
89.
[14]
Ibid., pp. 32-33.
[15]
Tölölyan, Khachig, article cited, pp. 11-12.
[16]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney, op. cit., p.
92.
[17]
Ibid., p. 112.
[18]
Tölölyan, Khachig, article cited, pp. 7-8.
[19]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney, op. cit., p.
74.
[20]
Ibid., pp. 116-17.
[21]
Ibid., p. 117.
[22]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, ‘Prachina o Nabina’, Chalanta Nirman, op. cit., p. 299. The
phrase ‘awakening of the fountain’ refers to Tagore’s important poem, ‘Nirjharer
Swapnobhango’.
[23]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney, op. cit., pp.
281-82.
[24]
Ibid., p. 300. The key Indian philosophical words sadhana and tapasya have been
left as they are.
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[25]
Quoted in ibid., p. 291. Key philosophical words have again been left untranslated.
[26]
At this point, in stead of re-translating from the Bengali in Ketaki’s Rabindranath o
Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney, op. cit., I am quoting directly from Tagore’s English words
as given in Ketaki’s In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and
Victoria Ocampo (Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, 1988, p. 392), the academic study where the
Tagore-Ocampo correspondence is gathered together and edited by her.
[27]
Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney, op. cit., p.
302.
[28]
Quoted in Ibid., p. 306.
[29]
Tölölyan, Khachig, article cited, p. 14.
[30]
Quoted in Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhaney, op.
cit., p 123.
[31]
Brown, Judith M., Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora, op. cit.,
p. 61.
[32]
Hashem, Dilara, Sinho o Ajogar, Maola Brothers, Dhaka, 2006, p. 70.

© Sumana Das Sur

Published March, 2011

(*) Photograph of Amiya Chakravarty and Buddhadeva Bose, courtesy Sumita

Chakraborty.

Sumana Das Sur was born in 1972 and received her B.A., M.A., and
Ph.D degrees from Jadavpur University ... (more)

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