Dr. Rashid Askari: Bangladeshi Fiction writer, critic, columnist, teacher, and social analyst. His two Bengali books: Indo-English Literature and Others and Postmodern Literary and Critical Theory and one English book: The Wounded Land deserve special mention. He also writes short fictions in Bengali and English. His first short-story book in Bengali Today's Folktale.
Dr. Rashid Askari: Fiction writer, critic, columnist, teacher, and social analyst.
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The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
Dr. Rashid Askari is one of the handful of writers in Bangladesh who write both Bengali and English with equal ease and efficiency. Born on 1st June, 1965 in a sleepy little town of Rangpur in Bangladesh, he took an Honours and a Master's in English from Dhaka University with distinction, and a PhD in Indian English literature from the University of Poona. He is now a professor of English at Kushtia Islamic University.
Rashid Askari has emerged as a writer in the mid-nineties of the last century, and has, by now, written half a dozen books, and quite a large number of research articles, essays, and newspaper columns in Bengali and English published at home and abroad. His two Bengali books: Indo-English Literature and Others (Dhaka-1996) and Postmodern Literary and Critical Theory (Dhaka-2002) and one English book : The Wounded Land deserve special mention. He also writes short fictions in Bengali and English. His first short-story book in Bengali Today's Folktale was published in 1997. Another short-story book in English is awaiting publication. Currently, he is working on an English fiction.
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THE WOUNDED LAND: A REFLECTION ON TODAY'S BANGLADESH
ReplyDeleteDr. Askari’s book The Wounded Land’s title hits one’s eyes as a shooting star, a dart hitting the bull’s eye. It readily discharges an air of sadness a bit like Shamsur Rahman's Dukhini Barnamala (Poor Alphabet!). It makes us pry into what our motherland finds deeply wounding even about four decades after her liberation. Professor Rashid Askari has put us on top of heap of the injuries.
Past any doubt, Professor Askari by now has ascertained 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 matters relating to emergence of Independent Bangladesh, the author seems to be as veritably iconoclastic as 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 an amalgam 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, are after. As the author has advised, these adversaries appear in multitude in many colors 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.
Muhammad Alamgir Toimoor is an Associate Professor, Dept. of English, Shah Jalal University of Science & Technology currently working on his doctoral dissertation in Canada