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Bad girls and middle-class morality
Rubaiyat Hossain shines a spot-light on the disturbing constructions of Bangladeshi womanhood to be found in the novels of Humayun Ahmed
In almost every Humayun Ahmed novel, the girls and women weep because of their guilt for experiencing some remote sexual desire like touching the man's face, holding his hand in the dark, coming into a room with him and turning the lights off, etc. This act causes them to feel pain and they label themselves as kharap meye. The line that is drawn here is one of acceptable societal norms, which I believe also plays a big role in making Humayun Ahmed novels appeal to a larger audience. Sexuality in his book is expressed in a diction of male fantasy, which is then sugar-coated with Bengali middle-class morality, that even parents do not hesitate to buy Humayun Ahmed books for their children.
Humayun Ahmed's trick is to hint towards sexuality, but then immediately cover it up under the hypocrisy of Bengali moral codes. This hypocrisy lies in the social morality around us which forces us to pretend like no one in Bangladesh actually has sex. Sex is made invisible from the public sphere and repressed to a degree that it can only peep out in novels, however, it is condemned to be explored.
I remember in the year 2001, Humayun Azad spoke at a book fair in New York where he complained: "Parents let their children read Humayun Ahmed because in his books the characters only go as far as holding hands with each other." Humayun Azad, a man who has written extensively on sexuality never managed to become as popular as Humayun Ahmed simply because Azad did not comply with the Bengali moral hypocrisy when it came to writing about matters of sexuality.
The average Humayun Ahmed female character is between the age of fifteen and twenty-five. Most of them are fair-skinned beauties. They are all very talented, but this talent is only channeled towards getting married to the man of their choice. This is how far the limits of Humayun Ahmed's female characters' agency stretch out to: managing to getting married!
It must be mentioned that a large number of Humayun Ahmed females come from very affluent families, and most of them somehow or the other fall in love with a man from a low-income social group. I am sure marrying a young, fair, timid Bengali girl with a lot of money is the fantasy a lot of struggling house tutors might have. When this fantasy is topped with the woman's secret habit of laying in bed naked or dancing in the rain naked (reference of Omega Point), sure it becomes a very delicious recipe for the sexually repressed Bengali middle-class man, struggling to make it big in the material world of money and success.
Rubaiyat Hossain is an independent film maker and Lecturer at Brac University.
