I turned up at the Bangla Academy on 21 July, as the floodwaters were beginning to show up in the city's shantytowns and streets. The discussion was at 11 o'clock. Which was mystifying: who the heck would have time to attend (present writer excluded) a lit seminar on a Wednesday morning? The Bangla Academy grounds, without the crowded lanes and bookstalls of the Ekushey book fair, looked sweeping and green in the bright sunlight. A few men sat talking lazily in the guard booth, a couple more were engaged in conversation on the curving paths in front of the old building the same British Raj white as the High Court building and the DU vice-chancellor's residence, while beyond the lush green, in the middle distance water glittered quietly. All in all, had the brown men all been in peon khaki, and a few white men with a Fort William Orientalist's preoccupied air had been sauntering about, I would not have been amiss in thinking that I had ridden a time machine back a couple of centuries.

The first floor of the modern building at the back of the old one is sunlit. Not so the seminar room, with its heavy drapes pulled tight, and ceiling lights focused on the chairs and tables on the little dais, while the audience sat in the dark. A couple of bored looking students in the middle row and some women in the front row seats, chatting. Soon some more men, mostly middle-aged, came in. One of them, favouring the close-cropped, jawline-hugging Manfred Mann beard seen on American beatniks half a century ago, the kind that Maulana Azad once kept, bustled about self-importantly, obviously some well-known personage of the local lit circle. Soon half the seats were taken. Beside me was a very old man with some sort of mechanical tabzih in his hand, which he kept clicking throughout the whole proceedings, eyes closed. The dais people---the keynote paper would be presented by a Professor Khaled Hossain of Jahangirnagar University---filed in and took their seats. A Koran tilawat was followed by an introductory speech by an Academy official, and then we the assembled listened as the professor read out his paper. Nobody else in the audience seemed to be an academic, nobody from Dhaka University seemed to be there.

It was hard to make out his words. The unvarying monotone of his mumbling delivery, the noise of the air conditioner, the clicking beside me, the two youths at the back animatedly whispering about their female classmates all forced one to strain to hear the words..

It was a standard paper apparently tailored to Bangla Academy discussion specifications. The first part was a 'quickie' tour of British-Indian and Bengal history starting from the fakir and sanyasi revolts (1763 onwards), Indigo uprising, the Wahabi and Farai'zi movements through to the Sepoy Revolt, the founding of the Mohammedan Literary Society by Nawab Abdul Latif, et cetera et cetera , to the Bengal Partition of 1905, the founding of the Muslim League, and then working its way down to the 1940 Lahore Resolution and thence to the events of 1947. It was routine stuff, nothing that a couple of hours with history books wouldn't teach. Around me were people in various attitudes of listening. The slim woman announcer was sitting in the far corner, with the tilawat maulvi by her side, both with their heads down, both gazing deeply inward at what presumably were radically different interior landscapes. In the bright slits where curtains did not meet fully could be glimpsed green leaves dancing on branches.

I looked at Kaikoba's enlarged photo on the podium banner. A determined look on his face, as one would have to be to be a Muslim at that time, especially a Muslim poet at that. One of the pioneering few who ushered in the entry of Muslims into modern Bengali literature, one who, as Abdul Mannan Syed wrote in his introduction to the Kaikobad Rachanabali, almost single-handedly 'liberated Bengali Muslim poetry and poetic practice from the clutches of duvashi puthi.' With a symbolism almost too weighty to bear, Kaikobad was born in 1857, the year of the Sepoy Revolt. For just as the Battle of Plassey a hundred years back had meant that effective control of Bengal passed over to the East India Company, so too the Sepoy Revolt marked the end of formal Muslim rule in India. The British were ruthless to Muslims in its aftermath--Delhi and Lucknow, the twin centers of Indian Muslim civilization, were sacked. Muslim power, nobility, educational and civic institutions, employment and offices were ground to dust. 'In our ancient capitals once so well-known, so rich, so great and so flourishing,' declared Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to the above-mentioned Mohammedan Literary Society of Calcutta in 1863, 'nothing is now to be seen or heard save a few bones strewn amongst the ruins of the human-like cry of the jackal.' And in Bengal there began at the time, and continued till the late nineteenth century, a very strong current of Hindu revivalism, and which was reflected in the dominant Bengali literary production of the period. It was in this milieu, both its general and particular aspects, and against this dominant literary production with its biases, that from the margin Kaikobad wrote his poetry. And asserted his identity. And though the good professor's recitation of historical dates was informative enough, what he really should have done was evoke this milieu, this congruence of physical and intellectual histories.

And which maybe would have woken up the gentleman dozing beside me, his fingers clicking away.

The second part of the paper dealt with Kaikobad the poet--his works, his poetic temperament, quotations from his epic poems, all more or less interpreted as his struggle against the biased 'Hindu' production of Bengali literary works. Which is true---and while I had been coming across it in my halting reading of Bankim, I was startled to hear Ishwar Gupta refer to Muslims as 'jobon' or 'neray' (shaven head), his:

Morji tera kaaje bhera
Nera matha joto
Noradhom neech nai neradayr moto.

And that about the Sepoy Revolt he had written:

Chirokal hoi jeno British air joy
British er rajlokkhi sthir jeno hoi

Hmmmm, I thought!

And there were more of them, from the likes of Rangalal Bandhopadhya, Hemchandra Bandhopadhya and Nabinchandra Sen, all contemporaries of Kaikobad. And which is why it is easy to see why Kaikobad himself could write:

Du charti Musalman uccha pod ai achay,
Golam'er moto ferey Congress'ir pachay…

But this is not the whole story, which was the unfortunate impression left at the end of the reading. It is manifestly easy enough to compile such a list of quotations from the 'Hindu' Bengali authors and their literary products of the time, and no doubt to the Muslims who read them they stung like whiplashes, and still do, since by today's revised standards these lines are blatantly offensive---a thing of insults and slights, and more notably, absences, as when even in the 1967 edition of Calcutta University published The History of Bengal 1757-1905 edited by Narendra Sen, in the chapter entitled 'Bengali Literature in the 19th Century' written by the redoubtable Dr. Amales Tripathi, there is not one mention, not even a ghost of a whisper, of Muslim authors. And yet, it is a mistake on our part to read them in isolation, shorn of their proper context. Those writings were a product of the Hindu revivalism of the nineteenth century, something which was a more complex and much deeper phenomenon than perhaps is commonly realized, with strong emotional nationalist underpinnings. Perhaps in the good professor's defense it should be said that a general Bangla Academy seminar may not provide the requisite occasion, audience or venue for such in-depth exercises. But, if not Bangla Academy, who then? In any case, it felt improper for those authors to be quoted absent the above historical-analytical framework, because otherwise it just becomes a bunch of Muslims sitting in a dark room feeding off the emotion generated by such anti-Muslim lines.

And that the truth is more complex than a black-and-white recitation was hinted at in the paper itself, but not developed. That Kaikobad's model was Nabinchandra Sen, the fact that Kaikobad the Muslim found inspiration in a poetry that unabashedly reflected the Romanticist world view of the orthodox Hindu. And then Kaikobad himself wrote lines like

Aisho bhai Hindu, aisho Musalman
Aamra dui bhai Bharat air shontan…

I had a previous appointment, and so when the reading was finished, I got up to leave. But sat down again when a young man got up and recited a couple of poems of Kaikobad, one on azan and the other on Bangla language---whose meters and metaphors were that of traditional Bengali poetry and did not seem to represent any radical break with previous such forms. I finally left just as the principal discussant, a lady teacher from outside Dhaka came to the lectern---my appointment left me with no choice. Outside, in search of a copy of the paper, I met Jalal Ahmed, assistant director of the Academy, who kindly Xeroxed me a copy. And to whom right now in this piece I'm again going to say thanks. I went down the steps and out into the grounds, into the blinding sunshine, and then grinning to myself, no doubt to the consternation of observing eyes, tried to mimick an ancient Orientalist's mild-mannered stoop and shuffle over to the sales office situated at the far corner. I went through the turnstile, bought Volume I of the Kaikobad Rachanaboli in order to read Abdul Mannan Syed's introduction in peace at home, then walked out of the gates, hailed a rickshaw, and jiggered and jiggered over broken roads thinking of Muslim Bengali poets, the ones who in the now distant past, by dreaming their dream and writing their poems, in a way started us on the road to Bangladesh, to a separate, independent homeland for Bengali Muslims.

Not a bad way to spend a Wednesday morning! Not at all!

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star