Many have thought to point out to me that my mind tends to wander, that I tend to slip away to imaginary landscapes in my own mind and dream impossible dreams. I feel like going off to Neptune because I cannot stand the heat at all. I sit in my room and imagine that I have sprouted wings which will help me fly away. There are too many such dreams that hover just outside my reach, but the one dream I had never had the courage to dream was that I was going to be awarded the Ananda Puraskar one day. To everyone gathered here today, I confess that I am delighted and moved.
The book that has been awarded the prize is a simple and uncompromising statement against the systematic abuse and violence that women go through under religion, society and the state. Our scriptures and the rules governing our society would like to reinforce one primary fact: that women cannot have independence. But a woman who is not physically and mentally independent cannot claim to be a complete human being either. Freedom is primary and a woman’s freedom has now been put under arrest by the state, with religion being the chief impediment to her natural growth. Because religion is there most women are still illiterate, deprived of property, most are married off when they are children and are victims of polygamy, talaq and widowhood. Because men wish to serve only their own ends, they have defined and valourized a woman’s femininity, chastity and maternal instincts.
If these can be maintained, a woman is considered more valuable in society, and by value I mean she will not be considered an outcast or an untouchable. In nearly every major religion in the world the preservation of a woman’s chastity has been considered a big deal but nowhere has a similar emphasis been placed on a man’s chastity too. That implies monogamy is a necessary ideal only for women and not for men. Men have adorned women in numerous foul jewels. To enslave her he has established the family, society and the state, he has invented God who brought forth prophets and religious books besides numerous philosophies, epics and ballads, and he has instituted sociology, psychiatry and many other disciplines.
The primary objective of the drive towards women’s education that had swept through Bengal during the second half of the nineteenth century was not freedom and self-rule for women but the production of a superior breed of wife and sexual partner. The education of women was meant to primarily serve the self-interests of men. Marriage is a profession for women; it is still believed that the best recourse for a woman is a married and settled domestic existence. The greatest sign of a successful married life is the gradual transformation of a wife into a fleshy doll for the husband to toy with.
It is believed that woman was created from a man’s bent rib. Women are taught that their Paradise is underneath their husband’s feet and keeping him happy means keeping Allah happy too. Keeping wives obedient and always waiting on their husbands’ needs by fooling them with ideas of Paradise is a classic manoeuvre of religion and society. Bengali women learn to earn their blessings from the leftovers on their husbands’ plates. It serves a twofold purpose: to oblige the husband as well as religion. The only thing it does not guarantee is her nourishment. The only thing women are considered good for is being the object of a man’s sexual desire.
Almost all major religions have encouraged an idea of ownership of women as property. They have encouraged giving them gifts because they are valuable objects and condoned the rape and violation of the women of those defeated in war. While women are expected to display signs that mark their marital status, men do not have to bear such signs at all. Similarly, widowhood too is a woman’s burden; she is the one who has to observe a hundred prohibitions. Since the dawn of civilization, society and religion have controlled man’s fate and as the agents of the two, men have ruled since time immemorial. The most abuse that women have had to face, even more than from society and the state, has stemmed from religion and the only way to ensure her freedom, given the systematic social, economic and political repression she has to undergo is the complete overhauling of the social and administrative apparatus. Her freedom will be a distant dream unless she manages to break free of the shackles of religion too. This is what I have mostly written about, the suppressed, tortured and persecuted women in society and it has given me immense inspiration to know that my voice has travelled across the border so far and reached some of you. Usually when women speak, their voices don’t reach too many people or even too many other women for that matter. And because of this I am startled and humbled. I do not think of West Bengal as another country. We share the same language and the same culture, we partake of the same air and the same water, and our houses are by the same river. Whenever I come here I feel an acute pain in my heart, the pain of the partition. There are no barbed wires in my heart. We are Bengali, our language is Bengali and we are all related. On such a happy occasion let me sign off with a small poem for you:
While out gathering hay at dawn, my basket has run over with flowers
Had I even dreamt of so much!
Where do I keep them now, where do I sit, where do I go and cry!
When life was empty, at least it was!
And no one had to do anything.
But you have given me so much, beyond measure,
And drawn me close,
Did I truly deserve so much!
Do forgive me if you can.
I asked for forgiveness because I had dared to accept such an exalted award despite being such an insignificant entity, for having shown the audacity even though I was utterly undeserving. Who knew if anyone forgave me in the end! After the event many writers and artists came up to congratulate me and I spoke to people I had never imagined I would have the opportunity to speak to. The day after, the news of the award ceremony was published on the front page of Anandabazar Patrika along with the headline ‘Taslima and Bhimsen steal the show’. Celebrations were being held all around me.
Soumitra Mitra was very happy with how things had turned out and he was taking me to various places to meet various people. He surprised me with a visit to Rabindrasangeet exponent Kanika Bandyopadhyay. I was an ardent admirer of Kanika and standing in front of her was like a wave of euphoria had swept over my entire world. Ashesh and Mona, my companions during the Basanta Utsab trip, came to see me and took a bunch of photographs. I was suddenly an important person who no longer had to walk hunched along the corridors of Anandabazar and everyone knew who I was. Sagarmoy Ghosh offered me a chance to write a serialized novel for Desh. Floored by the offer I confessed I did not know how to write a novel. He smiled but did not rescind his offer. Nikhil Sarkar invited me to his Salt Lake residence and gave me a bunch of letters with which to go and meet a number of well-known people.
Dutifully, the small writer with the big award took the letters with her and hesitantly went to pay a visit to the big guns. Mahasweta Devi, Meera Mukhopadhyay and many others—stars one was meant to show respect to when reaching for the sky. Whether I was even near the sky or I was where I had always been, I could scarcely tell for sure; I stood in front of the celebrities with all my insecurities and remonstrations intact. There was a trend in Calcutta to touch the feet of senior writers and artists to pay them one’s respects. Unused to the custom, I could not help but stand stiffly in front of most people I met. I had never managed to grasp the Bengali Muslim version of the same ritual either, the kadambushi. Though my heart was full of respect, I refrained from touching people’s feet and this must have irked many a senior, made them think of me as an upstart. But there was hardly anything I could do about it. If I was suddenly asked to till the field was I not supposed to stand there dumbstruck? It was impossible for me to abruptly start doing something I had never done before.
Despite not being one for formalities, I loved giving the small gifts I had brought from Bangladesh to my friends and well-wishers in Calcutta. Aveek Sarkar had handed the Ananda Puraskar to me and it was only right that I gift him a small token in return. So I took the multi-coloured jamdani sari I had worn for the award function, got its ornate border cut and had it framed in the best golden frame f
rom a renowned framing shop on Park Street. When I reached the Anandabazar offices with my gift, Nikhil Sarkar was astounded by my daring. What I had failed to grasp was that for an art connoisseur and a man of such refined tastes as Aveek Sarkar, the limits of what he preferred among Indian art objects was probably defined by the Maqbool Fida Husain I saw adorning the walls. Otherwise, everything else was surely works by famous Western artists and painters. A jamdani sari border, no matter how beautiful, was not something that could possibly hope to be displayed in his room. I could not help but think to myself that the women behind such exquisite work were no less great artists, but the tasteful and the rich hardly considered them worthy of their attention. It was fortuitous that I had not turned up at Aveek Sarkar’s office directly with the framed piece of jamdani. Nikhil Sarkar advised that if I was bent on giving the gift to someone I should give it to Aveek Sarkar’s wife. Swallowing my discomfiture I did exactly that and managed to save Sarkar, the giant of Anandabazar, from any further embarrassment.
A leading bureaucrat of the Bangladeshi consulate invited me and some authors to his place, primarily in my honour. As soon as I arrived the poets and writers of Calcutta surrounded me and inundated me with questions. So many questions of so many kinds—renaissance, revolution, feminism, backlash, modernism, post-modernism, my literary ideology, political beliefs, class struggle and so on. They waited for me to reply with startling answers while all I could do was stare at them in wide-eyed wonder. The questions appeared incomprehensible to me and seeing my bafflement they too began glancing at each other in surprise. Embarrassed, I wanted to curl up like a snail and disappear from the star-studded gathering, simply vanish without a trace. I did not want to answer any questions because I had no answers to give.
I wished they would rather ask me to tell them about Rahima Begum who had cried from despair, disgust, worry and pain after having given birth to a girl. I could have cried like that for them if they had wanted me to. I was not an intellectual, I had not consumed fat books on the earth’s history, geography, politics, society, literature and culture, neither had I amassed unrivalled wisdom. I was not a speaker and I could never make a coherent speech. I could write with some effort, that too because the pain of those like Rahima Begum made me want to weep. I was not suited to speak at such illustrious gatherings; I was a simple girl who had grown up simply in an ordinary household of Mymensingh. Not being particularly intelligent, I had never managed to grasp philosophy either.
Dialectics
While numerous writers and intellectuals sent me their felicitations after winning the Ananda Puraskar, some sent me their hatred too. A radical organization opined that since I usually wrote against Islam the Hindu fundamentalist Anandabazar Group had conferred me with the honour. I had never heard that Anandabazar Patrika was a Hindu fundamentalist mouthpiece. In fact, most of the articles and columns I had read in Anandabazar and Desh were decisively critical of Hindu radicals. Some also alleged that once upon a time the Patrika’s role had been decidedly anti-Islam. Since I was not born then it was difficult for me to accept the responsibility of something I had had no role to play in. Editors change, publishers change, new journalists join the team and a newspaper’s ideology too undergoes alterations.
In Bangladesh the newspapers that once used to write against the freedom of the country were all pro independence because the old guard had departed, ushering in the new. The names and the addresses remained the same but the opinions were different and so were the ethical concerns. The second allegation levelled against me was that I was a RAW agent. One article in Inquilab accused me of colluding with the RAW and by the next day ten others had followed suit.
What was the RAW? Unable to grapple with this question any longer I asked Milan. ‘Milan, what is the RAW?’
‘Bubu, you don’t know what raw is? Raw is . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘For instance, take raw tea. If you don’t pour milk into your tea it becomes raw tea, doesn’t it? Or, for example, our company deals in raw material which is later used to make chemical products.’
‘But what does it mean, being a RAW agent?’
‘I think an agent that imports materials from abroad.’
‘But I am not working as an agent to import raw materials!’
‘They’ve just written whatever. Haven’t they written all sorts of rubbish about you already?’
‘But, Milan, why will they abuse me as a RAW agent? So many people buy things from abroad and get them shipped. They aren’t abused!’
‘Well, they’ve abused you. Maybe they think you are importing contraband.’
‘Contraband?’
‘You don’t even know what that is, Bubu?’ Milan shook his head sagaciously. ‘Not everything can be legally brought into Bangladesh. There’s some stuff which comes by way of contraband!’
‘Like?’
‘Like Phensedyl, the cough syrup. Children use it to get high. Smugglers sneak in Phensedyl from India. Now if you get Phensedyl won’t that be a banned good?’
‘But Phensedyl isn’t raw! It’s a medicine. It’s kept in bottles!’
‘What if you are bringing in the raw materials for making Phensedyl here? Say you want to make it at home.’
‘Then they could have called me a smuggler or an illegal businessman. What is a RAW agent?’
‘Maybe they think you are running a racket that smuggles in these raw materials. That you are part of an organized ring.’
‘But I’m not!’
‘Obviously! But it doesn’t matter because all they want to do is write against you. They are writing what they know will turn public opinion against you.’
Try as I might I could not set aside the ‘raw’ conundrum from my mind. I was a raw agent! Of everyone I knew there was not a single soul who had a business like that, so why was I being called such names? I stayed morose for a number of days, the unsolved mystery lying heavy on my mind. After nearly a month, one day when Khusro was visiting me I mustered enough courage and asked him, ‘Khusro bhai, what is the RAW?’ I had met Khusro through CS; Khusro was a businessman and had opened a factory for building a type of generator called an energy pack along with two other engineer friends of his. His office was in Motijheel and he used to come over to my place often, to check up on me.
‘Raw? Raw in what way?’
‘They have accused me of being a RAW agent.’
Exploding with laughter he told me, ‘They are calling you a RAW agent and you don’t know what it is? Is that even possible?’ I recalled Milan’s definition in a flash but before I could tell him all about it he continued. ‘RAW is the Indian intelligence agency. Like the USA has the CIA.’
‘Really!’
‘You must have known!’
‘I didn’t.’
‘What are you saying! Do you know there are Special Branch operatives tailing you all the time? They follow you wherever you go.’
‘No! How? But I’ve never seen any! As in the Special Branch of the police?’
‘Go and take a look, there’ll be someone strolling past your house. Keeping tabs on who comes here, who goes where from here, and everything in between!’
My body had gone cold. What had I done that they were calling me a RAW agent and the police was shadowing me? Try as I might I could not recall exactly what I had done to deserve this. Politics in Bangladesh had always been heavily reliant on anti-India sentiments. The more the hatred, the more the votes. There were no political strategists left to think about the people of the nation. I noticed the tail pointed out to me soon enough while on my way to an event organized by the Indian embassy. A white car followed my rickshaw the entire way, probably to record my movements for government use. Even if I were to go to the Shantinagar market to buy cauliflowers and puti fish, government agents followed me there too. The entire time I could feel someone breathing over my shoulder. I should have been afraid, except that I was not. I knew I was no one particularly important—I was a doctor and I wro
te when I had free time. Neither was I that important a doctor, nor was my writing that significant. A good doctor had to have an FCPS degree. A good writer needed to have boundless knowledge about all things pertaining to Bengali literature. I had neither.
Soon I made the headlines of Bichinta. ‘Stolen from Sukumari!’ My writings were not my own, they were someone else’s. I was ready to face any punishment for having stolen from Sukumari but the experts went further and argued that I had abused Islam in Nirbachito Kolam and I should have been persecuted and not rewarded. Since they were the same people who had pointed out that I had stolen from Sukumari Bhattacharya, I could not help but wonder why I should be punished. They still called for my punishment, that last fact having slipped their mind around that time. They would have called for the original writer’s punishment if it had come to that but their objective was to come after me.
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