Back when I was smaller, 1971 was a thing of paramount importance to me. This happened through my reading. Recent Bengali children's literature seems to suffer from a severe dearth of subject. The only issue it covers is the war of 1971 and the liberation of Bangladesh. Elaborate details of heroic deeds of young Bengali guerrillas is discussed with insidious facets of massacre, mass killing, assault, rape and violence done by the Pakistan army; this is done without providing any preceding historical references. As if all of this happened out of the blue.Back then, I was too small anyways to doubt or try-to-look-through anything that is printed and bound. So, I hated Pakistan.
Racism was inflicted to the unwitting mind of an adolescent with the ebony tentacles of half-finished-tales and history-in-fragments. History was hidden from me/us. Inaccessible. The politicians did it because they didn't need to rewind any far backward to achieve their goals of attaining popularity and the authors did it because they could not come out of their petty emotions. I cannot blame either much; the former, because I already ceased to expect from them and the latter, because the war had happened during their youth. Their [latter] closest ones had been murdered or raped or both. But they must come out of this. It is about time they give the children a comprehensive detail.
Why should a child live with an animosity towards his neighbor country, only because he chose to read? Who is to blame? "There are things which took place on the night of the March 25th [1971] which must remain permanently in the state of confusion"- Midnight's Children. Who is to blame? The only acclaimed literary giant, who spoke about the unsurpassed, unparalleled and unthinkable wrongdoings of modern political history, with comprehensive specifics of the three preceding decades, is banned in Bangladesh. The west, however, reaches out so far as to honor him with knighthood. Whether they do it out of appreciation for good literature or out of a sense of guilt, I doubt. Who is to blame? The religious fanatics? If so, why them; who made them, I ask.
The west condemns the East (largely Muslims) as religious terrorism. On the 3rd June 1947, Viscount Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the last British Governor-General of India, announced the partitioning of the British Indian Empire into India and Pakistan, under the provisions of the Indian Independence Act 1947. At the stroke of midnight, on 14 August 1947, India became an independent nation. And the partitioning – let's not go into the back-then- prevalent political ideologies – was done on the basis of religious identities of the peoples; the chain reactions that would follow should have not been unanticipated by the great political minds who entered these lands in the name of the "Lord". Now there are grown up men who write books justifying colonization; I doubt neither their motive nor their ethics; I doubt their faculty of logic.
Why should a youth intent upon knowing his history end up with an identity crisis; Who is to blame?
