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
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.
ReplyDeleteDr. 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.