Jan 21, 2011 (Asia Pulse Data Source via COMTEX) -- What strikes
first in Rashid Askari's book is the title ? The Wounded Land. It
imparts an air of sadness somewhat like Shamsur Rahman's Dukhini
Barnamala (Poor Alphabet!).We tend to enquire about the things that our
motherland finds deeply wounding even about four decades after her
liberation. Professor Rashid Askari has very well taken us to them.
We have known Professor Askari for quite a long time now who has by
now established himself as an author of outstanding merit. Among the
Bangladeshi writers after mid nineties, Dr. Rashid Askari is easily on
par with the major ones who obtained an identical and fantastic mastery
over both Bangla and English. When it comes to themes pertaining to the
emergence of Independent Bangladesh, the author seems to be as veritably
iconoclastic as a Doctor Muhammad Zafar Iqbal on Prozac. He is one of
those who were born in then-East Pakistan but grew up in Bangladesh with
a murky memory of the War and the days that went awry after Bangladesh
won freedom. His dispassionate (although the author has been modest to
diagnose his discourse ?as pregnant with emotion,? the text advocates
otherwise) approach to dealing with pressing national and global
concerns like dogmatism, political intolerance, religious militancy,
terrorism, and the like is the outcome of a marriage between his
passion for freedom and a quest for finding the spirit embedded in
opaque memoir of the Liberation War(1971) and the disappointment,
heartbreak and betrayal amidst incidents that followed via acerbic
assessment of the current and a vast reading of the past.
This book is a compendium of many essays, which Professor Askari
wrote in a time frame, spanning over a decade. What then should we
consider as a spine that clasps these ribs made out of multiple subject
matters? I would recommend his love for people of the land, which plunks
him on such a plane where he feels called to come up with such a book.
If latent messages of his essays are all synthesized and poured down
through prism then at the focal point of the beam we will find the dream
of a nation like one envisaged by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred
Years of Solitude, a vision of a group of people living in a landmass
free from all social, theological, and political bias. Dr. Askari?s
greatness of writing is this that he could cross Bangladeshi boundary
line by merit of what we may call ?the negative capability??the topics
he touched are homemade yet the implications, the inherent issues, the
very nature of mode of action and the thought process that formulate
them, as he demonstrates, are continental.
The book has been titled The Wounded Land aka the bleeding
Bangladesh, which in my opinion, is like a cow over-milked and under-fed
for centuries while its innocent inhabitants, the calf, remained devoid
of rightful claim. This skinny cow is now left with small flesh and a
saggy hide, which is what the enemies, the author, and we live with. As
the author has advised, these adversaries appear in multitude in many
colours and shapes with a solo mindset: in his language, ?dissect? the
Cow, domesticate the calf. Orbits of all isms: terrorism, fanaticism,
anti-secularism revolve around a single core: International Consumerism,
the heart of all darkness, which the author has ubiquitously hinted at
in page after page throughout the whole book. There is a postcolonial
undertone in the author's approach by way of debunking the ugly faces of
the petty-colonial power in the saddle after 1947, and awakening his
people to the realization of their own legacy as well. The book is an
eye-opener.
Source: http://www.zacks.com/research/get_news.php?id=023c3136&t=HIS
Muhammad Alamgir Toimoor is an Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Shah Jalal University of Science & Technology currently working on his doctoral dissertation in Canada
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