Just opposite the lovely Bangla Academy where the Dhaka Literary Festival (DLF) is held is another of Bangladesh’s historic venues, the Race Course Maidan. And it was entirely apposite that on the final day of DLF 2017, a huge rally took place in the Maidan to celebrate UNESCO’s recognition of the famous March 7, 1971 speech of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from this spot, launching the country’s freedom struggle. The rally made the notoriously crowded Dhaka roads impassable, but the huge turnout at the literary festival was remarkable in a country that has more often been in the news in recent times for the murders of its bloggers. Turning it into a pleasingly significant triad that day was the award of the 2017 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature to Anuk Arudpragasam for The Story of a Brief Marriage , his wonderful and tender riff on a relationship set in the midst of the horrific Sri Lankan war.
Rebellious streets, a rally commemorating a historic speech demanding liberty, masses of people queueing up for books and seminars at a so-called ‘elitist’ event, the cautious advice to not advertise that we were visiting journalists — these and other familiar, mismatched skeins that make up the South Asian tapestry were all on view in Dhaka. And that the $25,000 prize money went to a novel set in one of the bloodiest civil wars of the region was fitting, as was the writer’s decision to share the prize money with, among others, the Rohingya, whose only ally in the region is ironically the economically beleaguered Bangladesh.
If poverty has been the leitmotif of South Asia, it has also been consistently defied by the incredible wealth of creativity pouring out of the region. Arudpragasam’s novel is an example. That he should see love in the midst of war is a testament to the “human spirit’s capacity for hope”, as Ritu Menon, the jury chair, described.
Earlier that day, actor Tilda Swinton read from John Berger’s Booker acceptance speech in 1972. Berger did what only he could — he traced the Booker’s genesis to exploitative trade in the Caribbean, part of the colonial enterprise that impoverished the region and forced thousands to migrate. The prize money, Berger said, would go to his project on migrant workers in Europe and to the Black Panther movement.
Before Swinton, William Dalrymple made a swashbuckling presentation on the bloody history of the Kohinoor. And when Arudpragasam read a passage from his book, it was one where the protagonist carries a young child with shrapnel-torn limbs to hospital, eerily recalling every image of children the refugee crisis in Europe has projected on the world’s conscience.
It was that kind of day — when the “raven himself was hoarse”. A day when history was revisited with irony over and over again. It seemed all we were left with were words to mock the hideous present. And so Arudpragasam, a Sri Lankan writer, was awarded an Indian prize in Bangladesh, for his “quiet eloquence”. And he, in turn, has decided to share the money with people fighting state oppression in Myanmar’s Rakhine, Sri Lanka’s northern provinces, and India’s Kashmir.
