Bangladesh’s writers on Wikipedia: Abbasuddin Ahmed and Humayun Kabir
Although Wikipedia is generally not considered a reliable academic source, it shapes public knowledge about subjects of common interest. This attests to the value of the free-access corpus not just in terms of what topics it covers but also how it represents them. This essay makes a case that there are anomalies in how the virtual encyclopaedia describes writers with roots in Bangladesh.
We, the people of Bangladesh, regard our writers as iconic figures and cultural treasures and take immense pride in showcasing their creativity and literary legacy. Among writers we claim as our own are the novelist and essayist Mir Mosharraf Husain (1847–1912), the reformist feminist writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), our national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), and the singer and folk-song scholar Abbasuddin Ahmed (1901–59). However, Wikipedia identifies all of them as Bangali writers, which is linguistically true but geographically imprecise.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Bangla is the native language of the majority of the people in Bangladesh and in the Indian state of West Bengal in the same way as English is the main language in Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. Describing a writer from our land as Bangali creates the same confusion as when, for example, an Australian writer is classified simply as English.
In his essay, "The Novel of Bangladesh", included in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 10 (2019), eminent critic and Bangladesh's foremost English-language poet Kaiser Haq maintains that Bangladeshi writers "may be Bangladeshi citizens or of Bangladeshi origin, with ancestral roots in what is now the People's Republic of Bangladesh". Accordingly, I argue that it is important not to obliterate the term "Bangladeshi" when characterising writers with roots in what is now Bangladesh or those who were born and/or lived in this country.
There is another group of literary figures whom Bangladeshis regard as part of their cultural heritage but whom Wikipedia does not classify as Bangladeshi. For example, it categorises Golam Mostofa (1897–1964) as "a Pakistani Bengali writer and poet" and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri (1897–1999), Jibanananda Das (1899–954), and Humayun Kabir (1906–69) as Indian writers. The Bangla version of Wikipedia identifies Bangladesh's celebrated palli kabi (the poet of rural life) Jasimuddin as a Bangali writer, and the English version as a Bangladeshi one.
Largely considered the Wikipedia of Bangladesh, Banglapedia—edited by Sirajul Islam—covers Bangladesh-related topics and "has incorporated subjects deemed important in the context of Bangladesh as a nation" (Biswajit Chanda). This national encyclopaedia of Bangladesh includes entries on all the above-mentioned literary scholars, as it considers them Bangladeshi writers. Moreover, most of them are taught to Bangladeshi students at primary and secondary levels in order to familiarise them with the country's literary tradition. What is more, some of their birth and death anniversaries are observed and commemorated nationwide in Bangladesh.
The main reason for the anomaly in identifying such writers is the partitioning and re-partitioning and the mapping and re-mapping of the South Asian subcontinent. During the colonial period, what is now Bangladesh was part of the British Indian province of Bengal and Assam. In 1947, when British India was divided into India and Pakistan, Bangladesh became part of the latter, only to be separated from it in 1971. Since the year marked the new beginning of Bangladesh as a nation-state, there is confusion in describing writers who were born in the geographical area of Bangladesh before it.
If only writers born after 1971 are considered Bangladeshis, the people of this country will find their land bereft of its longer-than-1971 cultural tradition. It may not be fair to emaciate the literary tradition of a land because of spatial and temporal upheavals that it may have witnessed. Despite the name changes (from East Bengal to East Pakistan and then to Bangladesh), the land that we now call Bangladesh represents the same geographical spot. And this land has produced innumerable sons and daughters for centuries after centuries, and it is not appropriate to deny her the right to call them her own.
If such writers lived in, and contributed to the literary legacy of, other countries, I will offer a compromise and propose a hyphenated identity. I am ready to call some writers Bangladeshi-Indian/Indian-Bangladeshi or Bangladeshi-Pakistani/Pakistani-Bangladeshi in the same way we use the term British-Bangladeshi, American-Bangladeshi, or Australian-Bangladeshi. For example, according to Kaiser Haq, Humayun Kabir as a writer "can be happily shared by India and Bangladesh." So, we can call him an Indian-Bangladeshi or Bangladeshi-Indian writer.
However, it will amount to cultural dispossession or atrophy of the collective literary soul of the people of Bangladesh if the term Bangladeshi is completely erased when such writers are identified. What follows may help further clarify the above discussion.
Abbasuddin Ahmed is most remembered in Bangladesh for his songs and folk hits that are highly expressive, memorable, and reminiscent of a past era. He was posthumously awarded the highest national literary award of Pakistan—the Pride of Performance—in 1960 mainly because Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) was part of Pakistan at that time. For the same reason, his only daughter, the playback singer Ferdousi Rahman, also received the same honour five years later, in 1965.
The fact that, after the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, Abbasuddin Ahmed was given other posthumous awards such as Shilpakala Academy Award (1979) and Swadhinata Dibas Puraskar (1981) by the government of Bangladesh suggests the inseparability of his literary career from this country. Importantly, Abbasuddin Ahmed's first son, Mustafa Kamal, was Bangladesh's 9th Chief Justice and Kamal's daughter, Nashid Kamal, is a writer and vocalist in the country. Ferdousi Rahman and Abbasuddin's other son, Mustafa Zaman Abbasi, received Bangladesh's prestigious Ekushey Padak for their contributions to the country's musical tradition.
I can discuss many other writers who are strongly anchored in our land but are not described by Wikipedia as Bangladeshi. I will conclude by briefly considering the case of another writer.
Humayun Kabir was born and grew up in Bangladesh's Faridpur. His roots are clearly traceable in the district's Komarpur village. He adopted India as his homeland upon the 1947 British withdrawal from, and the partition of, the Indian subcontinent. But his imaginative preoccupations and literary-critical concerns are largely focused on what affects the people and land of Bangladesh.
Kabir's only novel, Men and Rivers (1945), is mainly set in Faridpur and its riparian areas on the bank of the river Padma. It depicts the Padma floodplain and the bonds of love/hate, fear, bravery, and courage between the river and her agrarian population. The novel describes, to use Kabir's own words, "the intimate relation between man and nature" that exists in many parts of Bangladesh. Accordingly, in his essay, "Precarious Cultures: Bangladeshi Novels in English and in English Translation" (2022), Kaiser Haq classifies Humayun Kabir "as a Bangladeshi writer on the strength of his English novel Men and Rivers".
A family successor of Humayun Kabir, Ananya Jahanara Kabir in Partition's Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (2013), discusses the centrality of Faridpur—even after the 1947 partition—to the people of the Kabir family scattered across borders. She says: "Whether or not they kept regularly in touch across new national boundaries, they were all able to return for the summer holidays to their family home in Faridpur". Even though 1971 marked the beginning of Bangladesh, Ananya Jahanara Kabir argues that "Bangladesh was fashioned in 1947, well before anybody could imagine an independent Bangladesh…Had there been no Partition there would have been no Liberation War [of 1971]". This indicates that the existence of Bangladesh does not necessarily date back to 1971. It goes far beyond.
Mohammad A. Quayum of Flinders University in Australia and I edited Bangladeshi Literature in English: A Critical Anthology (2021), where we identify Humayun Kabir as a Bangladeshi writer. Among the literary scholars who have reviewed the book are Shah Ahmed, Maswood Akhter, Goutam Karmakar, Somdatta Mandal, and Shamsad Mortuza. None of them questions our categorisation of Humayun Kabir as a Bangladeshi writer. That is to say, Kabir's identity as a Bangladeshi writer is established at the critical level and needs to be done so at the popular level.
In this essay, I have elaborated the cases of two writers, one of whom Wikipedia characterises as Pakistani and the other as Indian. I have argued that Bangladesh should be included in their identity even if in a hyphenated form. There are a host of other pre-1971 writers whose identity should not remove their geographical affiliation to what is now Bangladesh. I hope Wikipedia entry-producers and others will consider describing writers with provenance in the spatial (not temporal) boundary of Bangladesh as Bangladeshi.
Md. Mahmudul Hasan, PhD, is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Malaysia. He edits the Scopus-indexed journal Asiatic. Email: mmhasan@iium.edu.my.
Comments