Two reviews from Syed Badrul Ahsan
A book, a flavour of culture . . .
Kabir Chowdhury is perhaps one of the last of our men of letters who have known history as well as have a hand in the making of it. He defies age (he is in his mid eighties) and he continues to make his presence felt when it comes to raising and popularizing issues of public interest. He has taught literature, has had a stint in government; and his has over the years been one of the loudest voices in defence of the demand for a trial of the war criminals in Bangladesh's war of liberation in 1971.
Chowdhury's essays in this collection reveal the agility which yet make him a driving force in the world of Bengali aesthetics. With altogether twenty seven essays here, he brings to light a good number of salient features of life, literature and history that have mattered to him, to his peers and in a large way to his students over the decades. Begin, though, with the very touching piece on his brother Munier Chowdhury, the very last one in this work. It is surely not a happy occasion for an elder sibling to reflect on the life and career of a murdered younger one, which is why every sentence on Munier drips with pain. Chowdhury recalls the childhood he shared with the rather large brood of brothers and sisters in the family and notes the particular passions that drove Munier into what appeared to be an endless cause in defence of democratic rights. Munier's intellect and his stupendous capacity for courage are today part of the Bengali folklore. Yet his brother gives them a new shade of meaning. The pain in Kabir Chowdhury seeps through the pages. You feel it when he writes about the scholar's gruesome end, ". . . Munier's body was not there. It was never found."
The essays are a collage of men and history, or you could call it history that some men moulded in their distinctive individual fashion. You get to have a fairly good grasp of the author's style and approach to his subjects as you pore over his assessments of Goethe and Tagore. The title of the essay says it all. The German and the Bengali, says Kabir Chowdhury, are two titans of world literature. Tagore, of course, is your usual cup of tea. But don't be too sure about it, for here in these pages Chowdhury takes you on a tour d' horizon of the poet's life, encompassing as it does his travels across the globe. For the Tagore enthusiast, therefore, there is yet newer territory to be discovered. But it is in the discourse on Goethe that the revelatory comes through for the Bengali student of literature. And bringing them together gives out an unmistakable message, which is that both these men are responsible, more than anyone else, for raising their nations to global heights. Without Goethe and Tagore, Germans and Bengalis would certainly have traditions to lay claim to. But perhaps that moral compass would be missing?
Kabir Chowdhury's deliberations are a pointer to the rich accumulation of experience which today defines his being. He sheds new light on Swami Vivekananda and sifts through Kazi Nazrul Islam in all his panoply of poetic brilliance. Move on, then, to Chowdhury's reflections on Lalon Shah and move back to Vidyasagar. Overall, the author brings forth a complex and yet at the same time mellifluous portrait of the Bengali cultural heritage. Mahatma Gandhi may be a household word, but Kabir Chowdhury goes a good many miles further when he presents the foremost South Asian Big Man of the twentieth century through the prism of literary criticism. One who teaches or has taught literature does have an advantage over others in his journey through the varied phases of history. Chowdhury dissects the Gandhi character with the same precision he would bring to a critical appraisal of Eugene O' Neill and Michael Madhusudon Dutta. The latter remains for him 'our pride and glory.' With the former, it is the Bengali translations of his works that the author focuses on and so reminds readers of the excellent work that has been at work in the translation industry in this country. When you observe theatre enthusiasts in Dhaka going ecstatic, you could tell yourself, just a little, that the process of presenting foreign literary works began in this country quite a while ago. Chowdhury brings you proof of it.
It is an intellectually enriching compendium (yes, you could call it that) which deserves a place on your literary table. Kabir Chowdhury's thoughts on Bangladesh's theatre movement are a powerful insight into a world that has redefined the country's culture, especially since the political liberation that came in 1971. Ah, culture! Chowdhury slices through the Hindu-Muslim divide and religious fundamentalism to vindicate the widely accepted belief that politics based on hate and intolerance have no place in the Bengali scheme of things. For within that scheme fall all things of lofty note --- our lullabies, our Ekushey, our poetry and flowers and, to be sure, a preponderance of nature on our world of thought and action.
You put aside the book feeling you are a better Bengali than you were before you went into a reading of it.
Reading books and murdering people...
FOR one with a humble, indeed inconsequential background, Joseph Stalin was an intellectually accomplished man. His library was exhaustive and so was his reading. Not for him a mere exploration and propagation of Marxist philosophy. Not for him a rejection of foreign culture being a means of bourgeois exploitation of the masses. He read Shakespeare, went into a deep study of Western poetry and easily threw what he had learnt at his comrades in the Kremlin. At the height of his power over the Soviet Union, he read other people's articles, edited them and made them printable.
That is part of the truth about Stalin. And yet there is the other part, a necessarily cruel one. In the 1930s, as he embarked on a long, ambitious plan to consolidate his authority as Lenin's successor, he was driven by the thought that plots were being hatched all around him, that the fellow communist magnates, as Simon Sebag Montefiore puts it, he was regularly dining with were men he could not trust. It was thus that the seeds of the Terror, which would effectively begin in 1937 and go on to the early 1940s, sprouted in his mind. Swiftly and without remorse, he would order the arrest and murder of such powerful Kremlin personalities as Kamenev, Zinoviev, Kirov, Bukharin, Rykov and a whole line of others. As his hold over the country grew, Stalin not only provided leadership to the Terror; he came to symbolize the Terror. He had his henchmen invent seditious and scandalous stories about his colleagues. Once that was done, these colleagues were picked up in the night, subjected to days and weeks of torture until they 'confessed' and then dispatched swiftly, with generally a bullet to the head.
And the Terror was not merely the end of his trusted comrades. It was expanded to include farmers who did not produce crops to Stalinist specifications; it covered Jews (the anti-Semitic was as much a factor with Stalin as it was with Hitler); it cast its shadows on Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Lithuanians, indeed everyone that the Soviet leader cast his gaze on. Millions were displaced and deported to regions as inhospitable as anyone can imagine; tens of thousands were done to death, the murders being part of a programme to be implemented by regional leaders. Nikita Khrushchev, the man who would denounce Stalin at the 1956 congress, heartily went into the job of carrying out the leader's wishes. Men like Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, all of whom would reveal their cannibalistic nature through eventually going after one another, cheerfully fulfilled their quota of murdering the 'spies' and 'imperialist agents' Stalin thought were endangering the Soviet state. It did not matter that Kalinin was officially president of the Soviet Union. His wife was carted off to prison, charged with spying. Even the oleaginous Molotov could do little when his wife was arrested and subjected to torture by Beria on Stalin's orders.
Unreal were the times when Stalin ruled. The poet Anna Akhmatova suffered at the dictator's hands. So did Osip Mandelstam. Stalin's children lived in terror of their father. His son Yakov died gallantly in the war against the Nazis; another son, Vasily, rose to a senior position in the air force but nevertheless saw his life dissipate through unbridled drinking and debauchery. Svetlana married a number of times and often it was Stalin who decreed who she should be marrying. He was a doting father but was never willing to demonstrate his affections in public. Between the suicide of his wife Nadya in the early 1930s and his own death in 1953, Stalin scrupulously avoided getting into romantic relationships with other women. There were the contradictions in him. He could eat a hearty meal even as he knew someone or the other of his comrades was being brutally tortured in prison. Morality did not matter. And yet he ordered moviemakers to abjure passionate love scenes in their films. Passion on the screen was morally repugnant for him.
And there was this huge need in him to be a world figure, a statesman. He felt happy in Franklin Roosevelt's company, but detested Winston Churchill. Yet when the need arose, he could forget his dislike of the British leader and go on to flatter him in unabashed fashion. He was dismissive of Harry Truman and did not get along well with Charles de Gaulle. For Hitler, he had little love. But in the times before the German Fuhrer turned on the Soviet Union, Stalin demonstrated a certain level of desperation in his attempts to keep Hitler in good humour. Ribbentrop and Molotov went through a deal, which of course was not to last.
Those of Stalin's colleagues who survived the Terror lived in constant dread of him. Anastas Mikoyan kept turning up at his dinners despite Stalin's message, conveyed through his minions, that he was not welcome any more. Bulganin never said anything that Stalin did not want to hear. Malenkov was content to be the sycophant he had always been; and Molotov knew he had to be around the Vozhd, as the Soviet leader was known to his acolytes.
In every sense of the meaning (and you have this from an authoritative Montefiore), Joseph Stalin was the Red Tsar. His courtiers did not merely kowtow before him; they knew their lives depended on his pleasure. As Stalin lay dying in March 1953, they restrained their impulse to go for a formal succession. What if he recovered? And, recovering, initiate a new phase of the old Terror that could claim the lives of those who secretly hoped the life would go out of him?
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star and in-charge, Star Books Review.
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