A lecture by Asif Iqbal, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oberlin College, the recipient of the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Research Award, on the impact of the Partition on the political transformation of East Bengal via an analysis of two novels, Shahidullah Kaiser’s Sangsaptak: A Bengali Saga (2001) and Akhteruzzaman Elias’ Khoabnama (2021).
Event moderated by Elora Shehabuddin, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Global Studies; Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley
ABSTRACT: The acceleration of the Pakistan Movement intensified the Hindu-Muslim hostility in the subcontinent, thereby, jeopardizing the locally evolved syncretic ethos permeating the lives of the subaltern classes in rural East Bengal. With political rumblings threatening the traditional Hindu-Muslim coexistence, East Bengal’s inhabitants, as witnesses to the crisis of nationalism, also participated in the political process. Subsequently, as characters in the Bengali novels, they project the tensions of Partition, offering the readers a testimony to their being impacted by the political transformation of East Bengal. Two such novels in translation, Shahidullah Kaiser’s Sangsaptak: A Bengali Saga (2001) and Akhteruzzaman Elias’ Khoabnama (2021), illustrate the anathema of communalism as politically entrenched. It also altered the rural social composition. These novels, with their focus on East Bengal’s Muslims—split between the promises of the emergent Pakistan nation and the drastic communal disharmony that endangers the lives of their Hindu neighbors—disavow communalism in the wake of Partition. My comparative evaluation of the translated novels suggest that the two great Bengali writers of the Twentieth Century invoke an unfinished struggle in anticipation of the emergent possibility of Bangladesh.
SPEAKER BIO: Asif Iqbal, the recipient of the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Research Award, is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oberlin College, Ohio, USA. He is currently working on his book project Two Partitions: Anglophone & Vernacular Cultural Imaginings of Postcolonial Bangladesh. Iqbal is widely published in peer-reviewed journals, such as the South Asian Review, and in edited volumes including the Routledge collection Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: Critical Essays of Literature and Culture (2022). One of his forthcoming articles is based on a major Bengali trilogy, Shawkat Ali’s Dhakkhinyoner Din (2016).
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The Bangabandhu Research Award allows us to bring one or two graduate students or early career faculty members each year from accredited institutions in the United States and in Europe to share their research on Bangabandhu and/or Bangladesh with the UC Berkeley community. This award has been established with the generous support of the US Bangabandhu Parishad, California.
Established in 2013 with a generous gift from the Subir & Malini Chowdhury Foundation, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley champions the study of Bangladesh’s cultures, peoples and history. The first of its kind in the US, the Center’s mission is to create an innovative model combining research, scholarships, the promotion of art and culture, and the building of ties between institutions in Bangladesh and the University of California.
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PARKING INFORMATION
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Event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Puneeta Kala at pkala@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
