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BOOKS
Djinns and Sins in Mymensingh
Taslima the girl poignantly
protests against Islamic rigidities
By
Gillian Wright
Perhaps Taslima
Nasrin has been a little disingenuous in calling this an autobiography.
It reads much more like an autobiographical novel, although not one of
the genre written by Indians in English, where the tedious events of their
adolescence are served up in a thick soup of adjectives.
There is nothing tedious about Nasrin-already
in exile- and My Girlhood contains enough dynamite to offend her family
for life. To put it mildly, this is a real cracker of a book and Gopa
Majumdar deserves the highest praise for the excellent translation.
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MY GIRLHOOD: AN AUTO- BIOGRAPHY
By Taslima Nasrin
Translated by Gopa Majumdar
Kali for Women
Price: Rs 350
Pages: 324 |
The girlhood Nasrin describes takes her up to
the age of 13. It is not just her story but that of her parents, grandparents
and the vast array of friends and relatives who made up her family circle.
Nasrin's family lived in East Pakistan, and in the first chapter, where
you might imagine she would describe her own entry into the world, she
avoids the predictable and instead starts with the birth of her country
Bangladesh when, as a small child, she and her family had to flee the
town of Mymensingh to escape Pakistani forces.
Nasrin is an expert at suspense and the twists
and turns of her family drama-from the period of the British Raj to the
assassination of Sheikh Mujib-ur Rehman-surprise at every turn. She has
no shortage of plot and so can keep her stories unfolding at a breathless
pace. She has no need to take refuge in descriptions of grotesque sex
or the artifice of magic realism. Instead, her observation of domestic
life in Mymensingh, together with the fertile ground of a child's imagination
and the colourful nature of the people surrounding her provide her with
all the inspiration she needs.
She portrays her characters in all their complexities
and they provoke sympathy, no matter how many beatings they give, who
they sleep with or how much foolishness they commit. Nasrin draws her
readers in, effortlessly making them feel part of her family.
 We
watch her mother from the age of seven as she revels in school, is forced
to leave her studies to get married, grows insecure because she is dark
and uneducated and her husband is fair and a doctor, and as she turns
to a superstitious brand of religion. Nasrin's father, son of a farmer,
loyal to his village, becomes more and more distant and, unable to communicate
his love for his children, tries endlessly, and fails, to make them live
up to his dreams by force. Her Nani, solid, reliable and intelligent,
has to cope with and control a wandering, hopelessly unworldly husband,
who would give away every last piece of property if he could.
Nasrin, of course, would not be Nasrin if she
were not controversial. The little girl in this book grows up just a little
and starts to question. She questions in particular not her father's Islam,
which is at home with modern science, but her mother's endless homilies
about Allah and the Prophet, about djinns and sins. Seldom have there
been more devastating portrayals of false gurus, than that of the hell-fire
breathing peer whose disciple her mother becomes. Without preaching too
much herself, the author illustrates how girls are treated by different
standards than boys, and little Nasrin questions this too. By the end
of what one must suspect is only the first volume of "autobiography",
the little girl has grown breasts and has become recognisably the Nasrin
who will be forced out of her country because she takes on those who cannot
countenance dissent.
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 Splendid
Plumage: Indian Birds by British Artists
By Jagmohan Mahajan (Timeless, Rs 2,500)
Sixty reproduced plates and lithographs plus an introduction to
18-19th century bird painting in India.
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 Branded
by Law
By Dilip D'Souza (Penguin, Rs 200)
What it means to be born in a community once branded "criminal".
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 Colonial
India and the Making of Empire Cinema
By Prem Chowdhry (Vistaar, Rs 450)
How ideologies were construed by films on the Empire.
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 Mitrachi
Goshta: A Friend's Story
By Vijay Tendulkar (Oxford, Rs 195)
A play on the nature of love-hetero and homosexual.
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 The
Sign of the Tiger
By Rudolf Hartog (Rupa, Rs 395)
Subh as Chandra Bose and his legion in Germany
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