Saturday, May 30, 2009

Anisul Hoque on contemporary Bangladeshi literature

Ershad Kamol

•   Part 1
•   Part 2

Anisul Hoque is a popular contemporary writer. A journalist by profession, Hoque writes novels, short stories, TV plays, poems and many more things. For his distinctive writing style Anisul Hoque has a good number of fans.

In an interview with The Daily Star Online, he evaluates the contemporary Bangladeshi literature. He labels contemporary literature as a 'medium standards'. According to him, our literary canvas lacks quality successors.

He blames faulty education system for not developing individual talents, since the current education system has limited scope to introduce a person with world literature. Claiming classics writers such as Akhtaruzzaman Elias and Hasan Azizul Hoque as rare talents, Hoque believes there are still some potential writers in the country.

He claims that only a very few contemporary writers can take writings as a profession. The rests of the writers are writing for passion. So, he does not believe that commercialisation has any impact on writing skill.

But to evaluate him Anisul Hoque admits that he too could have produced even better if he would have written less.

Sharing his sufferings, Hoque says without reading his novels many label him as 'a popular writer'. But he believes only after reading his writings his potential should be evaluated.

In case of his TV plays, he claims that the directors make many a change in his scripts. And if the final product is not an attractive one, he does not want to take any responsibility. Similarly, he prefers to give credit to the director if the play becomes a success.