Book Description

At the heart of Janani is the tragedy of a poverty-stricken mother, crushed between the conflicting claims of her devotion to her children and her honour. Hence the title Janani, the Bengali word for mother. Janani, Shaukat Osman’s first novel, was partially serialised in 1945-46 in a Calcutta literary magazine, and the book was published in Dhaka fifteen years later, in 1961, by which time Shaukat Osman had established himself as a major writer in East Pakistan (Bangladesh since 1971). In Janani, Moheshdanga, the archetypal Bengal village created by the author, is distanced from the city giving it a timeless quality. The novel’s perspective is implicitly that of a child and Osman’s method, in the early chapters, is one of building up, through a simple narrative, the details, often cinematically conceived, in the life of a peasant family. Azhar Khan is an orthodox Muslim, descended from a Pathan warrior, who settled in Moheshdanga as a fugitive from the revolt of 1857. His wife, Dariabibi, energetic and proud, has a natural dignity to which everybody defers. However, the world of Moheshdanga, like that of Greek tragedy, is governed by unquestionable imperatives and Dariabibi is to become a victim of these imperatives. The inter-relationships of the characters hold Moheshdanga in a stasis until the coming of the seducers from a more urban world in the shape of Yakoob and Rajendra. A word must be said about the historical background to the novel, especially because Moheshdanga, so remote from the city, the playground of history, would seem to be untouched by history. The early forties was a time of great turmoil in Bengal. The anti-imperialist struggle reached its peak in 1942 and 1943 saw the great Bengal famine. What was of even greater significance for years to come was the ascendency of religion-based politics. In 1940 the Muslim League demanded the partition of India. The actual partition, of 1947, following a series of inter-religious conflicts and blood-lettings, was still a few years away when Shaukat Osman started writing Janani. A quarter of a century later, the break-up of Pakistan would reveal the vacuity of the solution sought by the partition. But the politics of religion refuses to die and today in the wake of worldwide crisis of modernity, of the enlightenment tradition, it is once again raising its ‘reptile head’. The history we have failed to transcend remains a contemporary nightmare and the questions Shaukat Osman poses and tries to answer in Janani remain unresolved. What he tries to do can be put in terms of three questions. What is at the root of religion-based politics? What is the nature of intra-religious or sectarian conflict? Is it not possible for Hindus and Muslims to live together in harmony as they have done for centuries? Osman answers the first question in Chapter 22 where the Zamindars, Hatem Bakhsh Khan and Rohini Choudhury, in their selfish interest over the possession of a marshland throw the two religious communities against one another. In Chapter 25, the author gives a droll account of a quarrel between two Muslim sects – the Hanafis and the Majhabis. Osman explores the third question through the relationship between Azhar Khan, an orthodox Wahabi Muslim, and Chandra Kotal, a low-caste Hindu. In this experiment in the possibility of civilisation within the microcosm of Moheshdanga, the author does not make things easy for himself. Azhar and Chandra are by no means kindred souls. Temperamentally, Chandra is the opposite of stolid Azhar; Chandra’s joy of life enlivens the novel like an electric impulse. In their attitudes to life, they are poles apart. Azhar does not approve of his friend’s irreverence, his cavalier attitude to conventional morality, or his addiction to home-brewed toddy. Chandra dislikes Azhar’s timidity, his spirit of seriousness (in the Sartrian sense of the expression) and agrees with Dariabibi that he is ‘a quiet devil’. Yet we find their friendship entirely convincing, and more so for its occasional hurdles. Azhar feels isolated when Rajendra teams up with Chandra to set tip a folk theatre. Their friendship is further threatened when the zamindars incite communal frenzy. Even Chandra falls under its spell. It is a pity that, during this period, Azhar goes into self-imposed exile. When he returns, Chandra refuses to talk to him, but only temporarily. For Chandra has no closer friend, and Azhar returns from his last exile to put himself ‘in Chandra’s hands’. After Azhar’s death Chandra remains a friend of the family. Dariabibi, in purdah, never appears before Chandra, but it is to him she turns in need, and when she sends Amjad demanding his presence, even a drunken Chandra will hoist the boy on his shoulders and totter off across the fields. Shaukat Osman has devoted an increasing amount of his writing to the nation’s struggle against religious bigotry, social obscurantism and political oppression, taking on what he considers to be a writer’s inalienable responsibility. This has not always had a salutary effect on his fiction. janani, however, written earlier and free from any proselytising zeal, remains his most powerful novel to date, achieving something of the status of a modern classic.