Dr. Rashid Askari: Fiction writer, critic, columnist, teacher, and social analyst.

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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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Friday, May 18, 2012

Our literature claims Humayun Ahmed

Dr. Rashid Askari
Published in the Dhaka Courier, Thursday, May 17th, 2012

Humayun Ahmed is perhaps the only writer in Bangladesh who has the highest number of admirers and detractors. You will hardly find any literate Bangladeshi today who has not read his books, and, at the same time, you won’t find any literary critic who has not knocked his writing. An awful lot of people praise his books to the skies while a whole lot see in them the literary standards going down the drain.
But one thing is common in these groups at loggerheads —both read his books. It is an interesting feature of Humayun Ahmed’s books that, people love reading them regardless of whether they like the author or not. I have seen many critics, who have the gall to blast his writing in public, picking his latest arrival from the bookcase, and reading on the sly. And caught in the act, they, much to their embarrassment, give the pretext that they were in fact weighing up how bad it was as a work of art.

Humayun Ahmed is, now, easily the most popular writer in Bangladesh—a superstar author with a prolific following of fans. Most of the younger generations are Humayun-mad. They are passionate devotees of his writing. Not only do they read it voraciously, they also get influenced by it, and tend to act accordingly. Perhaps no other writers in Bangladesh could have exerted such a powerful influence on their readers as Humayun does. We have seen many youngsters leave home with empty pockets wearing yellow panjabi, and walk the streets at dead of night in bare feet following in the footsteps of one of his characters called Himu.

If popularity is the yardstick of a writer’s quality, Humayun Ahmed could be the greatest writer in Bangladesh, and one of the greatest writers of Bengali literature. But the connoisseurs of literature won’t sure see eye to eye with it. They are used to taking popularity mostly in negative connotations. They do not want to see Humayun Ahmed on an equal footing with Shawkat Ali, Akhteruzzaman Elius, Hasan Azizul Haque, Selina Hossain and the like. So, however popular Humayun Ahmed may grow, he will not be able to lay claim to real literary merit. At the very most, our critics would like to accept him as ‘a necessary evil’.

Does Humayun Ahmed’s writing really have no literary value? How to evaluate this? Is there any particular standard for judging the merit of literature and art which can be taken for granted? Is there any fixed criterion for assessing the ability of a writer? If there is, who would set it and apply to others? Who is the right authority to judge the quality of art? Writers like Shakespeare could not escape critical censure. Darwin found him ‘ intolerablydull and nauseating’. Did it diminish the importance of Shakespeare in the slightest?

As a matter of fact, there are no hard and fast rules about literature and literary judgment. Art is the oldest expression of human creativity, and gives birth to the written form of literature after the invention of letters. Literature is precisely nothing but the art of writing. It has come a long way and assimilated numerous changes into it. The modernists and the postmodernists have come up with a baffling variety of themes and contents, and this variety has been the spice of literature. Tagore’s personal letters have taken on high literary status, and his proofread matters have been accorded great artistic quality. If literature is thus unlimited in circumference, it will not be that easy to exclude Humayun Ahmed from the pure literary circle. Besides being popular is not always a bar to becoming genuine writer.

The man who could enter the Bengali literary arena with the ‘blazing inferno’ as a metaphor for life on earth, and connote it quite contrarily as ‘admirable’ at the tender age of 24 is not one to be sneezed at. Nondito Noroke (1972), Humayun Ahmed’s debut novel must have carried the seeds of a master literary craftsman. There may be no question about it. But whether the seeds are properly sowed, and the seedlings have properly grown and produced flowers may well come into question. It is true that Humayun becomes so exceedingly prolific that most of his later writing has been a pale imitation of the former ones. He is revolving around the same old and clichéd circle of writing, and dealing with the hackneyed human behaviours and eccentricities which are grimacing at himself.  It is not preposterous to smell a rat in his obsession with Mammon that prompts him to mass-produce reading materials.

But there is the other side of the story. Humayun Ahmed, as a writer, has done many things to his credit.  It is true that like a master craftsman, he could not exploit the literary devices in diverse ways. But he has his own sweet way to tell stories which is, too, fascinating. The most important thing in him is that he can obviously strike a chord with his readers. He is a man of luxuriant imagination and profound compassion. His imaginative empathy with his subject is so intense that it tugs at the reader’s heartstrings. This is where lies the secret of his popularity, and the grounds for his success as an author. To this has been added his use of language which is easy, simple, and direct and accessible to a wider reading public. His novels Nondito Noroke, Shankhonil Karagar, Jothsna O Jononir Galpo are valuable contribution to Bengali literature. His characters like Himu and Mishir Ali are not less important than Satyajit Roy’s Feluda.

Like a born artist Humayun has many strings to his bow. He is a playwright of high order. He did much to popularise the trends of soap opera in Bangladesh. One of his TV serials was so appealing that people took to the streets with an impassioned plea for saving the life of one of his heroes. In addition, he is an accomplished film maker. His Aaguner Parashmoni is an invaluable addition to Bangla films on our Liberation War. Of late, he has added another fresh feather to his cap which testifies to his versatility as a creative mind.

These are few manifestations of a creative mind named Humayun Ahmed who seems to be more sinned against than sinning to his critics. He is misunderstood both by his supporters and detractors. What his fans do is nothing other than claptrap, and what his critics do is unnecessarily patronising. There is no need to make a song and dance about him, nor is there any reason to frown upon his writing. A fair gauge of his achievements can place him in the right position.

Humayun Ahmed is inseparable from the present day Bangla literature. He has secured his position in the face of overwhelming odds. The odds are sometimes in his favour, and sometimes heavily against him. Currently he is fighting an uphill battle against a big killer called cancer. Reportedly he is on the road to recovery. We wish him a quick and full recovery. Our literature claims him.

Dr. Rashid Askari writes fiction and columns, and teaches English literature at Kushtia Islamic University, Bangladesh. Email: rashidaskari65@yahoo.com

1 comment:

  1. I have had the opportunity to read Dr. Askari’s “Our literature claims Humayun Ahmed” which came out in the Dhaka Courier, Thursday, May 17th, 2012 issue as Dr. Mamoon Askari kindly forwarded me the link. Dr. Mamoon Askari is a genuine computer tech savvy who most generously keeps me in mind while dispensing the links of Dr. Askari’s writings. I sincerely thank him for that.

    Dr. Askari has been very neutral about giving a real picture of Dr. Humayun Ahmed’s standing. He has diagnosed him correct: it is his sentence structures and word choice that have hit the bull’s eye. He became popular because he broke away from tradition set by Nihar Ranjan Gupta, Ashutosh, Falguni, Jorashandho, and Bimol Mitra and even from the style set by those who are big writers now in Calcutta. His case is plus or minus the case of Earnest Hemmingway who became immensely popular for his sentence structures word choice and brevity at time when Faulkner’s style was all pervasive. Sharat Chandra became popular for the same thing: book size compact, language easy, environment purely Deshi, less description of nature outfit furniture philosophy and more focus on story line and bringing out human frustration. People love these items. Humayun’s characters are dumdum and social failures yet all beautiful girls are falling in love with them. Although they are a bunch of self-complacent walk-junkies judging everyone around them doing practically nothing and arrogant as hell yet they are oppressed by bad guys. The most common thing in Humayun’s books is he is trying day and night to make his heroes earn sympathy of the readers. Humayun tries very hard to be a class mystery writer, yet sometimes his heroes turn out to be nothing but a complete buffoon and his mysteries not as complex, bordering on commonsense instead. A few have read Humayun’s books more carefully than I have. I am saying this because I wanted to know his use of verbs and conjunctions in a sentence and that is why sometimes I had to read one paragraph or a single page eight to ten times. Because in my opinion the toughest challenge for a writer in Bengali is to know the proper use of those two things in a sentence. On top, Humayun himself has written that he has laid relentless effort to shed of all sorts of redundancy from his writings, an item that the authors of Calcutta are never free from. Sometimes, it seems to me that the biggest quality of Calcutta writers is redundancy or irrelevant talks. His writings are especially the mystery ones are formulaic. This I am saying based on a critique, which I stumbled on in internet last year in which the critic has used Mishir Ali format and written a fantastic and hilarious piece and shown how the same thing is getting repeated on and on.

    I must say that Himu and Mishir Ali are much better than that Feluda character. Feluda character is just an imitation of hundreds of such characters created by English and French and German authors. S Roy does not deserve any credit for this Feluda thing; it is a very simple trite and banal character. I would say Gupta’s Kiriti is better than him, as he came before him. Yet, S Roy deserves credit for Prof. Shonku because this character is something unusual and unique. All children would unquestionably go for Prof. Shonku if choice is given, I guarantee.

    Humayun has also done one good thing that is in his books you will find all sorts of characters. He has left none untouched.

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