Several novelists of the Indian subcontinent writing in English — both big names and lesser known ones — have often fallen back on magic realism to spur their creativity. However, that is not a guarantee of outpourings of a high quality.
Magic realism was introduced to us mainly by two of the Latin American founders of this genre, Márquez and Borges. The Latin Americans probably made a great impact because South Asians could not be closer to them temperamentally (volatile), geographically (tropical) and politically (venal).
All those frills
So it should not come as a surprise that Numair Atif Choudhury, the late Dhaka-based author, chose to infuse an element of the fabulous and the incredible in the novel (his one and only) under review even as he recounted the mundane life and times of the activist-idealist politician, the eponymous Babu Bangladesh, played out against the backdrop of the
Liberation War and the sanguinary birth of the tiny nation that fought for its mother tongue. All these frills notwithstanding, and in spite of Choudhury’s elaborate and occasionally tiresome confabulations, the novel fails to stir the reader’s imagination. The novelist doesn’t stint on realism via prosaic details of the protagonist’s milieu, but the leap of imagination necessary to deliver the novel to the realm of magic is beyond him.
Not for lack of trying. For Choudhury has endeavoured to introduce magic practically from the beginning, as he ushers in the edifice of Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban or National Parliament House of Bangladesh in Dhaka. Designed by the celebrated American architect, Louis I. Kahn, the magnificent edifice is invested with mysterious and miraculous properties, bordering on the spooky, that ensure wrongdoers get their just deserts within its hallowed precincts.
Familiar ploys
The alleged association of this architectural wonder with theurgy allows Choudhury to connect it with secret societies and unusual natural phenomena that form the pith of the novel. This acts as the background against which he traces Babu’s childhood and career and mysterious disappearance, a story that unfolds in the form of a diary that the “author” (the novel is written in first person singular) fortuitously gets hold of in a Bangladesh market — a familiar ploy.
As is the wont of many a novelist in this subcontinent, Choudhury sprinkles his sentences with words of Bangladeshi-Bengali origin — particularly ones associated with the flora and fauna and myths and legends peculiar to the region with its network of rivers and waterbodies — to add local colour.
He often chooses to use off-beat, learned and bookish words where their straightforward counterparts would have done very well. These big words contribute little to the book’s intellectual weight.
The “mythical” elements are not always faithful to the originals. Sampler: the goddess Ganga never sprouted a tail, as Choudhury claims she did. The iconography of this river goddess mounted on the makara is well-known. The word daini does not denote monster. It means ‘witch’.
Choudhury does not mind wearing his environmental concerns on his sleeve, and this turns out to be one of the main strands of this narrative. This, along with the novelist’s secular sympathies and the important role that student politics plays in shaping the novel’s form and content, give the work an undeniable topicality. However, while his accounts of the Bangladesh Liberation War, of the appalling atrocities that the civilian population, both Hindus and Muslims, had to suffer, and the bravery of those who resisted are historically correct, his ‘magic’ needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The netherworld is an organic part of the ecosystem that Bengali novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay evoked in his epic novel, Hansuli Banker Upakatha (‘Folk Tales of the River Bend’). In Babu Bangladesh , the tree that the Pakistani generals could not kill, the island that wasn’t, the pseudo-science, and other mumbo jumbo are as believable as the cheap CGI used in films today. Choudhury tries to conjure up “the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces... the great globe itself” but we end up in a dull sublunary world.
The writer’s latest book is Calcutta 1940-1970: In the Photographs of Jayant Patel.
Babu Bangladesh; Numair Atif Choudhury, Fourth Estate, ₹599
