Akhtaruzzaman Elias: The power of imagination

Had he been alive, he would have turned 82-year-old youth this February 12. I say "youth" because, in spirit, he remained ever youthful. He had a deep curiosity and interest in everything around him; he observed the world with the delight of seeing it for the first time. So, it can rightly be said that age never weighed him down—he was vibrant, fresh, and even when he was on the verge of death at 54 due to cancer, he did not give up.

After losing his right leg in an operation at a clinic in Kolkata, he practiced walking on crutches along the sidewalks of Park Street. I would watch from behind as his broad shoulders and arms moved rhythmically, supported by the crutches. After undergoing long rounds of chemotherapy, his hair had once fallen out but had begun to grow back—short, salt-and-pepper strands. I saw how much effort it took for him to walk on those crutches, sweat forming in beads on his head and shoulders. He walked with such intense willpower for one purpose only—to return to Bangladesh and walk the uneven red paths of Mahasthangarh, to gather inspiration for his last novel.

That’s how he wrote. Before sitting down night after night in front of an old typewriter on a chair and table, he would first travel to the place, the context of his novel, to gain a vivid understanding of the people, nature, and animals of the place, to learn its history and local folklore, he would go there, mingle with the locals, observe their manner of speech, and note everything down in his notebooks—even sketching maps of the place. Perhaps this is what a true novelist must do to achieve an authentic grasp of the time, place, and characters of their narrative. Through this method, and with the magic of his language, he could transform land, homes, trees, animals, customs, history, and legends into living, breathing entities. Time and place themselves became two distinct, vibrant characters in his work.

His lifespan was 54 years. For a creative, research-oriented writer, 54 is quite a short time. However, the number of writers who have achieved immortality in world literature with even shorter lives is not small. Even in Bengali literature, there are at least two—Manik Bandopadhyay and Syed Waliullah—who died younger than Elias. Many say his body of work is not very large—only two novels, a little fewer than two dozens of short stories compiled into five collections, one volume of essays, and two books written for children and adolescents. One of those children books retells a few classics of world literature in the form of stories for schoolchildren; the other is a small collection of essays for that age group. One of those essays is titled “The Joy of Reading”. Nowadays, in the age of mobile phones and the internet, children are increasingly turning away from books. But in our childhood, it was reading that gave us the most joy. Both of Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s parents had a passion for reading. Whenever his father traveled from Bogura to Dhaka, he would return with a few books. Gradually, two cabinets in the house filled up and formed a small home library. It included “Khirer Putul” and “Shakuntala” by Abanindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan’s “Am Antir Bhepu” and “Pather Panchali”, Manik Bandopadhyay’s “Putul Nacher Itikatha” and “Padma Nadir Majhi”, “Thakurmar Jhuli” and “Than Didir Thole” by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, a collection of Russian fairy tales, a Bengali translation of Dostoevsky’s “The Insulted and the Humiliated”, Pearl Buck’s “Mother” and “The Good Earth”; “Abol Tabol”, “Hazabarol”, “Khai Khai”, “Pagla Dashu” by Sukumar Ray, the ten-volume “Janbar Kotha” edited by Debiprasad Chattopadhyay, and many science books like “Sagor Toler Jagat”, “Akasher Rahosya”, “Mahakasher Thikana”—and so much more! Of course, works by Bankim, Rabindranath, Sarat Chandra, Tarashankar, and Mujtaba Ali were also there. These books shaped Elias’s inner world, expanded his imagination, and gave him an initial understanding of how to express emotions and describe things vividly.

It is through reading that children learn to imagine—and also how to convey that imagination through writing. That’s perhaps why Einstein used to say, "The more imaginative a person is, the more developed he is.” And that imagination is not just for writing poetry or literature; creativity in science, sociology, politics, economics—any field—requires boundless curiosity, the power of imagination, and the ability to dream. At the same time, to create something new—be it literature, music, or even industrial institutions—one needs imagination, extensive reading, and research.

Elias showcased the finest example of imaginative power in his two novels—"Chilekothar Sepai” (The Soldier in the Attic) and “Khowabnama” (The Book of Dreams). Both are political novels. During his lifetime, some of the most significant political events in our national history were the 1947 Pakistan Movement, the 1952 Language Movement, the 1969 Mass Uprising, the 1971 Liberation War, and the 1990 anti-autocracy movement. Of these, he chose the Pakistan Movement as the backdrop for Khowabnama, and set Chilekothar Sepai against the context of the 1969 mass uprising—just two years before the Liberation War. In both novels, he displayed an extraordinary use of imagination and, through that imagination, artistically captured two of the most important political movements in our national life within vast and intricate frameworks. For this reason, it can be said that with these two world-class novels, Akhtaruzzaman Elias will remain immortal in Bengali literature.

Had he not been afflicted with the terminal illness of cancer, he was preparing to write another novel based on our Liberation War, centered around Pundravardhana’s Mahasthangarh. He had even chosen a name for it—Karatoya Mahatmya—because the story’s backdrop would be the region along the banks of the Karatoya River. During the rule of the Pala dynasty in the 11th century, a rebellion of fishermen and peasants occurred in this region, known as the Kaivarta Rebellion. Kaivarta leaders Bhima and Dibyak defeated King Mahipala II and ruled for several years. Elias envisioned that this final novel would carry forward the continuity of the thousand-year-long tradition of rebellion, protest, and resistance by the ordinary people of the Barind region—including greater Rajshahi, Bogura, and Dinajpur—and would weave it into the narrative of the Liberation War. His aim was to make this his greatest novel—his masterpiece—and the final installment of a trilogy dealing with the three most critical, life-changing events in the political history of this country.

The history of this region is not merely a thousand years old—it goes back two and a half to three thousand years. It is said that excavations in Mahasthangarh have uncovered layers of civilization dating back to the Ashokan and Mauryan periods. Elias wanted to connect the Liberation War with the long-standing struggle for survival of the people living in this ancient land. Put another way, he sought to situate our Liberation War within a two-thousand-year historical context and thereby give dignity not only to human lives but also to time and place as a whole. For this, he wished to live just two more years. But nature did not grant him that time. And unfortunately for us, this was the very moment when Elias was at the peak of his creative powers.

Quite a few studies have been conducted on Akhtaruzzaman Elias. In our country as well as in West Bengal and Assam, some have written postgraduate and PhD theses on him at universities in Kolkata and Jadavpur. His short stories and novels are included in the curricula of universities there and in our country too. His novels have been adapted into plays, and his stories into films; however, none of these adaptations managed to make a significant impact. It is not that successful adaptations of one artistic medium into another do not exist—there are examples like the novels Zorba the Greek, Pather Panchali, The Last Temptation, and the short story Rashomon, all of which achieved great success when adapted into films. But perhaps to achieve that kind of success, a director working in the visual medium needs to be as gifted as the original novelist.

Many say Elias did not write much. However, he himself did not see it that way. He would often say that his short stories could be considered mini-novels, especially when compared to those popular authors who, under the pressure of Eid special editions, manage to write so-called novels in just a week or two. He also believed that one of his novels could serve as creative material for eight to ten novels by such authors. The effort he put into his writing—placing characters within their appropriate social contexts, crafting authentic dialogues to bring them to life, building intricate plots and dramatic tension, constructing vivid settings using subtle cues, and doing all of this while keeping his own opinions hidden—resulted in a brutally honest and detached portrayal of human lives. Reading his work—through the magic of his language, the layered metaphors, intricate plots, and the complex psychology of his characters—requires the reader to embark on a difficult but rewarding journey. So much so that, by the end of it, one feels Elias certainly did not write too little.

There is no shortage of world-class literature in the Bengali language. In fact, a writer from this very language won a Nobel Prize in 1913. Yet, Bengali is still largely regarded as a regional language. As a result, we rarely see our finest literary works translated into the world's major languages. There are around 6,000 spoken and written languages in the world. Many of these languages are becoming extinct as the last native speakers pass away. Several languages do not even have their own writing systems—they borrow the scripts of major languages to produce literary work. In this regard, the Roman alphabet has gained overwhelming dominance, since the majority of global literary works are written using it. I was surprised to learn from my former colleague, the prominent writer and translator Professor Abdus Selim, that not a single book written in Bengali—the world's seventh most spoken language—has been translated into as many as 20 languages.

Some of Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s short stories have been translated into English and published both in Bangladesh and in various collections and journals in India. His novel “Khoabnama” has been published in English by Penguin Random House India. Although Arunava Sinha’s translation is fairly faithful to the original, it feels mechanical due to the translator’s lack of connection with the land and people that Elias wrote about. There has been no known reader response from the English-speaking world or from non-Bengali regions of India to this translation. The translation of “Chilekothar Sepai” is currently underway at Columbia University in the United States. While translating this novel is nearly an impossible task, good translations of works by a world-class writer like Akhtaruzzaman Elias are essential for the sake of our literature.

Why the outside world shows little interest in our literature is also a subject worth researching. Perhaps unless a country becomes politically urgent or economically remarkable, its art and literature do not attract global attention. Moreover, we are not a multilingual nation. We have a 200-year history with the colonial English language, but even then, we have not truly mastered it. As a result, we have not achieved native-level fluency in English. Still, even if not in European languages, India itself has around two hundred languages. To my knowledge, Elias has not been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Gujarati, or any other Indian language. And even if translations into these languages were attempted, they likely wouldn’t be done directly from Bengali, but via English. The late journalist Zainul Abedin Khan, who lived in Bangladesh, did translate “Khoabnama” into Urdu and left behind the manuscript. There is a Bangla-Urdu Literary Foundation in Dhaka, and there exists a literate Urdu-speaking population familiar with Bengali. Joint language-based organisations like these could take on the task of translation. Without extensive translation into multiple languages, there is no other way to introduce internationally significant works written in Bengali to the world.

Khalequzzaman Elias: Professor and Translator