Bangladesh’s growing pangs erupt in The Good Muslim

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By Tahmima Anam [2]

Rs 499

It’s been four years since Dhaka-born Tahmima Anam wrote her first book, A Golden Age, about the liberation and formation of Bangladesh through the story of a small middle-class family.
Her second novel, The Good Muslim, documents the rise of religious fundamentalism and the stark reality of Bangladesh in late 1970s and early 1980s under military dictatorship.

The story of Rehana Haque is now carried forward through the struggles of her children, Sohail and Maya, who get separated and estranged in the battle over their different ideologies as Bangladesh struggled with nationhood and nation-building. Tahmima, who has a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard, won the overall Commonwealth prize for Best First Book in 2008 for her first novel and she is a somewhat nervous about how The Good Muslim will be received after its launch in the last week of May.
“It is an easy sell to write about the Independence, this one will be a bit harder. People in Bangladesh love to read about the 1971 war, they are so nostalgic about it and they want to read about it, they want to read about their lives in that period and the same goes for the younger generation who are very curious about the period. I don’t know how this book will be received, but the last one got a fabulous response,” says London-based Tahmima, who is back from a trip to Iraq where she interacted with Kurdish writers.
Rehana’s story has been taken over by Maya now, but Tahmima is quick to point out that both the books can also be read as stand-alone novels.
“I didn’t want Maya to be heroic at all. I wanted to show that both Sohail and May were fundamentalist in their own way. She could not see her brother’s humanity, she could only see that he was turning to religion and she couldn’t bear it.”
The Good Muslim is the second part of a trilogy on Bangladesh that Tahmima started with A Golden Age, which was published in 2007. She has already started work on the concluding novel of the trilogy, set in contemporary Bangladesh, will focus on climate change.
“I hope to set my next book somewhere not in the city,” she says and confirms that the third book too will have the Haque family as its central characters.
The progressive politics and policies of the current Bangladesh government have made Tahmima very optimistic about the progress of her country.
The Good Muslim, which is being published on the 40th anniversary of Bangladesh’s war of independence, also highlights the controversial mock trial of the razakars (collaborators) in Bangladesh in 1994.
“It was a citizens’ trial – people put it together and they had real testimonies from rape victims. In Bangladesh, we too are guilty of not documenting and really not making that history unquestionable, which is why there are certain academics and certain people who deny that genocide in 1971, saying it is either inflated or it is not true,” says Tahmima.
“I think this trial is really important because we can say for once and for all that this really happened. Whether it is this number or that number, it doesn’t matter. The point is this was a very big moment in our history and it has to be acknowledged beyond questioning. It is illegal to deny the Holocaust similarly it should be unimaginable to deny the Bangladesh genocide.”
Tahmima, who grew up in Paris, New York City, and Bangkok as her father, journalist and publisher Mahfuz Anam, worked with Unicef at the time, prefers writing in English and has a master’s degree in creative writing. However, she faces criticism in Bangladesh over the fact that she writes in English rather than in Bangla.
“I have had people come up to me and saying, ‘You ought to be ashamed, you wrote your book in English. Your grandparents would be so ashamed,” she laughs, explaining the reaction of some of the older generation Bangladeshis.
Tahmima got her first book translated into Bangla for her readers in Bangladesh and she hopes to do that for her second novel too. “I had a wonderful translator, who is from London, and I hope she can do the next one as well. I don’t have the ability to do it myself. I think translation is like an adaptation. You have to find new ways of describing things, you can’t just translate word for word, you have to find the rhythm. My Bangla is not good enough.”
Tahmima was initially working on a trilogy, of which A Golden Age would form the second part and the first book would have dealt with the Partition of India and Pakistan, set mostly in Calcutta.
However, she changed her plan. “I still hope to write on this period, but it will be later and will be a stand-alone book.”