Dhakas Answer To Tolstoy

Since this is a characteristic that the doyen of Bangladeshi fiction shares with predecessors and contemporaries as distinguished and diverse as Tagore, Bibhutibhusan and Tarashanker, one suspects the fault lies not with their respective translators, but rather with the oil and water differences between the two languages.

Certainly translator Osman Jamal does not do a bad job. Anyone who has read Shaukat in the original would feel the original phrases on his tongue as he flips through this collection. Yet, those who cannot follow Bengali, may find him convoluted. Yet, Osman is accounted a consciously simple author!

One basic problem for the translator lies in the commonly accepted structure of the standard Bengali short story. This is similar to the idiom generally favoured when writing an intimate personal letter. This intimate second-person narrative style is also common in middle Eastern fiction. It comes through as rather contrived in English.

However, Shaukat Osman, transcends those barriers by his sheer story-telling capacity. Its getting on for seventy years since his little vignette Abbas first saw the light of day in a school magazine. The author has survived through the turbulence of the Lahore resolution, the Bengal Famine, Partition, the Language riots of East Pakistan, the military regimes of Ayub, Yahya, Ershad and Zia-ur-Rahman. In between, he also witnessed the butchery of and liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 and the rise and fall of Sheikh Mujib.

Beside being an observant and thinking man, Osman is also a humanist who rose from poverty as a peasants son to the security of a government lecturers post. He is a humanist, a disillusioned Marxist one who owns neither Gods nor spiritual beliefs, but possesses strong moral convictions. His gift for words, allied to a rather bleak sense of humour, also makes him a formidable satirist.

A classic example of dramatic irony centred around his 1962 novel Laughter of the Slave. The slave in this allegory attracts the attention of the Great Caliph Haroun Al-Raschid who hears his delighted laughter in the presence of his beloved. Haroun brings him to court, wines him and dines him, and commands him to continue laughing. But the slave dies disconsolate, wrenched away from his beloved. While the novel won Osman icon status with the Anti-Ayub agitators of East Pakistan, Ayub gave him a literary award for it!

That ability to use the rapier rather than the bludgeon serves Osman well in this collection. The stories range in time from rural Bengal in the 30s as in Abbas, through the Bengal famine in Father Johannes to post-liberation Bangladesh. They range geographically from Leeds and Brighton, to a ship returning from Haj, to the fleshpots of Karachi and the rural backwaters of the Karnaphuli river. They feature sophisticates and peasants and the urban middle class.

They feature characters like Jodu Jalaluddin Bhattacharya, who becomes a fervent convert to Islam after dancing girl Jamila Kashmiri refuses to sleep with an uncircumcised man. They relate the death of a holy man, Maulvi Gorakhpuri in his plush first class cabin on the Haj ship Safinatul Malak. His three jealous wives argue about who has the greater right to sleep with him and dole out his medicine even as he suffers a heart attack. There is the diabolical revenge of Father Johannes consumptive servant Monsoor who spits in his food in order to revenge himself on the Jesuit priest.

You feel the rage of boatman Jahir Mia and his frenzied destruction of his sons books and educational future as he returns from an encounter with corrupt officials. There is the abandoned baby eaten by dogs even as locals debate the pros and cons of adoption. There is the madman Murari of the title story who tilts at the ultimate windmill God. There is the dutiful Dhaka fireman and the quiet provincial doctor who die or live through the Pakistani repression of 1971.

There are 23 stories in the collection not the only point of coincidence with Tolstoy. Like the Russian, Osman only exercises his writing skills when he perceives either an ethical problem or an absurdity.

Since the collection covers sixty years, it is also a very personal history of a mans vision. One drawback is the poor proofreading and sub-editing which has left glaring typos.