Issue #65 Traitors, a Mutable Lexicon

Traitors, a Mutable Lexicon

Naeem Mohaiemen

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Still of Bohubrihi (Multiple dimensions), one of novelist Humayun Ahmed’s serialized plays made for Bangladesh Television in the 1980s.

Issue #65
May 2015










Notes
1

Humayun Ahmed, Bohubrihi [Multiple dimensions], BTV, 1988. See also

2

Enayetullah Khan, “Sixty-Five Million Collaborators,” The Weekly Holiday (February 6, 1972).

3

Ekatturer Ghatak o Dalalra Ke Kothay? [Where are the killers and stooges of 1971?], ed. Ahmad Sharif, Quazi Nur-Ujjaman, and Shahriar Kabir (Dhaka: Muktijuddha Chetona Bikash Kendra, 1987), 6–7.

4

Khan, “Sixty-Five Million Collaborators.”

5

Quoted in Sharif et al., Ekatturer Ghatak o Dalalra Ke Kothay?, 142–144. The original Bengali text of the letter uses the incorrect phrase “Bengali Hindus, especially the Marwaris of Calcutta.” “Marwari” was​ originally used​ to describe migrants from Marwar​, Rajasthan,​ who were the trading class of British ​Calcutta. Over time, it became a slur for communities of businessmen​ and ​moneylender​s who were considered to be miserly and carpetbaggers. Since the category i​s​ not specific to Bengalis, ​conflating the two terms with “especially”​ may indicate that th​is​ letter was originally drafted by someone not ​completely ​familiar with Bengali ​communities​, i.e., possibly an Urdu-speaking administrator from West Pakistan.

6

Ibid., 157.

7

Philip Watts, Allegories of the Purge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

8

The title is an homage to Pasternak’s poem. For analysis of this novel, see Shabnam Nadiya, “Jibon Amar Bon,” Translation Review 80.1 (2010): 134–135. Mahmud Rahman provided information on the reception of Haque and Akhtar’s novels.

9

Taslima Nasreen, Jabo Na Keno? Jabo [Why won’t I go? I will go] (Dhaka: Kakali Prakashani, 1992).