The birth and death of a state
Pakistaner Janmomrittu Darshon
Jatin Sarkar
Jatiyo Shahityo Prokash
The Bangla terms 'darshan' and 'darshonic' imply very grave meanings which are related to philosophy and philosophers respectively. The inner meanings of these terms are comparatively clear to students and teachers of philosophy. Ordinary men's understanding of them is of course rather different, perhaps even difficult. And yet ordinary people can understand 'darshan' easily when it means 'to look at' or 'to see'. But a 'seer' or 'onlooker' cannot be a 'darshonic' in any sense. The author of the well-known, notable prize-winning book Pakistaner Janmomrittu Darshon has rightly claimed himself as an onlooker of the birth and death of Pakistan and also as an expositor of the philosophy of its birth and death in light of the traditional socio-political history of our subcontinent.
The author has rightly claimed himself to be prematurely clever as he earned the favour of sitting and even gossiping with elderly people when he was only a minor schoolboy. This favour in a feudal oriented family pattern earned for him the chance to widen his mental horizon at an early age. Thus he acquired the ability to look at a wide stretch of village landscape and was able to read the minds of different individuals coming from different creeds, castes, religions and societies, with all their distinctive roles in forming different socio-political views on the varied transitional moments of history.
I have had the opportunity to go through some of the pages of the epic-like 'magnum opus' of Jatin Sarker when he was preparing it in long hand in 1988-90 in Mymensingh. Now I have come by it in Dhaka in its full form and have observed the author's keen acumen in reading the minds of unlettered village cultivators, folklorists of natural humanism, of village bards, of non-communal Hindus and Muslims prior to the birth of Pakistan which ultimately 'came to stay' with a fatal fate of dying prematurely due to the suicidal blunder of its creator 'father'. The magic charm of the 'father' soon evaporated on the question of the state language issue. None came to save the lone 'father' at the time of his depressed mental condition. The futility of the 'two nation theory' was proved first by the death of its creator father and then by the two historical murders, one of Gandhi's killing at the hands of Nathuram Godse and the other of Liaquat Ali Khan's assassination by a fellow Muslim.
Who planted the seeds of the destruction of Pakistan? It was the heroic political gambler, the father of Pakistan himself - a man of megalomania and idiosyncrasy. None of the giants of the Congress, the Communist Party or anyone from among the rank and file could stop him from doing what he wanted to do. The net result was a mass exodus from both countries - Pakistan and Hindustan.
Both the craze of creating Pakistan in the decade of the 1940s and the craze of destroying it were equal in balance. The first craze was of mass hypnotism engendered by the 'two nation theory', and the second one was a calculation from a utilitarian point of view, developing gradually from 1948 to 1971 through the language movement of 1953, the general elections of 1954, the mass upsurge of 1969 encapsulating the demands of autonomy and eventually leading to the birth of Bangladesh. All this epic history is depicted through a dialectical world outlook and proper analysis of party men and masses of different castes and creeds. As the author is well equipped with Marxism and Pavlovian psychology, he has no possibility of committing the fallacy of over-simplification in analysing the model character of Nasir Sarker or the unlettered " full many a gem of purest ray serene " in our villages.
The book is much cheaper than any middle class luxury prestige symbol in the drawing room, but far more valuable than any diamond. It is a must read for all, and especially so for the new generation.
Mozaffar Hossain, essayist and translator, is chairman of Bangladesh Literary Resource Centre.
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