Of Carnage and Krishnachuras

Khondakar Ashraf Hossain

Photo: Amirul Rajiv

Bangladesh witnessed the worst carnage of recent history in 1971. We were forced to wage a war of resistance that soon turned into a liberation war. Many of us had perished before victory came, and the whole country was left in an immense pool of blood. Flowers do not bloom on such a landscape; one does not expect to reap a harvest of carnations in a land strewn with bones. But the krishnachuras of hope germinated even in those darkest of days. The poetry of the post-war period recorded the traumas and travails of the time most graphically as it also celebrated the hopes of a nation emerging from them.

In the light of what happened in 1971, the post-1971 Bangladeshi literature can be called an orchestration of the notes of pain and lamentation: this is true at least about the literature of the seventies, more particularly about poetry. The poets recorded their agonized feelings about death and destruction experienced during the war in a keenly emotive language. The 'war-poetry' of Wilfred Owen, Sigfried Sassoon and others marked a definite genre in the post-First-War English poetry; a similar appellation might be appropriate for the body of poems written during, and after, the Bangladesh War of Liberation. These poems form a well-defined and easily distinguishable corpus, nothing like which will ever be produced again. Time has encapsulated and enshrined them in itself and, we surmise, will preserve them for eons, when this generation of ours will be swept away by oblivion and death. Emanating as they did from the deepest core of our national psyche, they will always be revered as the authentic recordings of our poets' sincerest feelings in the most trying of circumstances. Gone are those days of glory; the poets who had written them have aged; some have already crossed into that country from whose bourn no traveler returns. We can only read and re-read their verses, and try to re-live their experiences and emotions, well-nigh impossible though the latter task may be.

After the horrifying massacre at midnight of the 25th of March, 1971, people streamed out of the city of Dhaka: as though a million Aeneases were leaving the burning city of Troy in search of a safer place. This exodus, like all other exoduses in history, was full of tragic anecdotes, beset with tears and travails. Shahid Quadri's poem captures a snapshot from that enormous canvas of tragic waste:

By the side of the heaps of rubbles at the road-crossing, in the light of dawn, I saw Bangladesh lying like a broken violin. And that young lad, who had grown up with the wish that he would play it the way he wants, is lying beside it, donning his blood-soaked shirt. ('From the outlawed journal')

The vibrant image of 'the broken violin' speaks for the expressive might of Quadri's poetic language. A city-dweller and city-lover, Shaid Quadri resolves against leaving his milieu, come what may--

Everyone will go away leaving the city behind
(And they are leaving, in throngs).
But we, a few of us, will stay here till death,
touching this heap of rubbles,
in our native land,
amidst the corpses of our dear ones.

A more graphic description of the besieged Bangladesh can be had in Fazal Shahabuddin's 'A Day of April, 1971':

Every day every night at dawn and in the evening
in this suffocating blackout in the curfew-ridden city
our livers are torn away, eyes scooped out--
Bayonets pierce the Bangali's rebellious heart.

The following excerpts from Ahsan Habib's poem 'Search' depict the pall of darkness, of doom, that covered the sky of Bangladesh at that cataclysmic time:

'Halt', thunders the demon, Death, and stands in front,
His hairy, rough hands find their way into the pants' pockets,
Fish out a few coins, two flowers, a reel of thread.
The heavy hands now search the loins. No, nothing is there.

Having emerged from the search of the enemy soldier at a city street-corner, 'that juvenile fighter/ that godlike adolescent boy' walks on--
hiding in the depth of his heart
that noblest of weapons
which does not yield itself
to any demon's touch;
the rhythm of which beats drums in his soul
day in and day out:
'Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.'

The above-quoted poems belong to the category of generalised depiction of the war scenario and were written by poets who did not actively participate in the war but whose hearts were bloodied by the sufferings of the millions around them. The best among these poems is Shamsur Rahman's famous 'In order to get you, O Freedom', which he wrote in the besieged city of Dhaka and, reportedly, smuggled across the border. What makes the poem a startling specimen of our 'muktijuddho' poetry is its synthesis of despair and hope, death and rebirth, a sense of total annihilation and an undying belief in the indomitableness of the human spirit. Freedom in this poem is not just a vague concept; it is as palpable as the scenes of carnage that it entailed.

And above everything the poem is aglow with hope as it begins and ends with an insistent demand, 'Tomake Ashtei hobe he Shadhinata : Come you must, O Freedom', because--

In order that you would come, O freedom,
Sakhina Bibi's lot has become a wreck;
the vermilion mark is wiped out
from the forehead of Haridasi.
In order that you would come, O Freedom,
Olive-coloured tanks rolled into the city
bellowing like a monster;
In order that you would come. O Freedom,
Dormitories and slums were laid waste...
With a burning declaration reverberating from
one end of the globe to the other,
flying a new flag, filling the horizon
with the sound of a drum
in this Bengal of ours,
you must come, O Freedom.

The poems that were written in the battlefield form a distinct group. They are marked by the boiling passion of the poets in the actual battlefield, and thus have a kind of authenticity of tone and verve that is incomparable. Among these poets are Humayun Kabir, Rafiq Azad, Bulbul Khan Mahbub, Mahbub Sadiq, Abid Anwar, Abu Kaiser, Ashim Saha, Helal Hafiz, Altaf Hossain, Musharraf Karim, and Khondakar Ashraf Hossain. It will be noticed that these young poets of the time did not philosophize about freedom and its necessity; neither did they dream about any utopian future for their land. They were engrossed with the immediate realities of the fight, its strategies, deaths of the fellow fighters, their life in the trenches or in the hide-outs, guerrilla operations, and so on. Their poems are littered with a new breed of vocabulary connected with the war: 'ambush', 'grenade', 'bunker', 'rifle', 'surrender', 'barbed wires', etc. They have become a part of the Bangla language ever since. Take for instance Humayun Kabir's 'Grenade like a red ball':

The red ball of childhood, hurling grenade at ease
Automatic guns sound like the bright tunes of mouth organ
In the midst of the green backdrop of crops,
In grandmother's placid village, in the lighted streets
of towns with golden minarets

Leap up all on a sudden, throw a hearty invitation to the enemy--
Hurl your grenade, red like a ball.
Mahbub Sadiq's 'juddhobhashan', Abu Kaiser's 'Journal '71' and Bulbul Khan Mahbub's 'Carrying a wounded comrade on my back'-- all are vivid sketches of guerrilla action. We can quote these touching lines from Mahbub Sadiq's poem:

The mangled body of Asiruddin returning from the haat
with a hilsa fish in hand
lies prostrate on my consciousness.
I am pledge-bound to him.
I have been to Sakhipur--the charred dwelling
and the boundless grief of the boy
leaning against one of its half-burnt poles
gravitated me towards Sakhipur.
In the camp there the young boy Quddus
with a bandage around his head stood upright:
Bangladesh was burning in his distant gaze--
How can I forget him?
Wherever I go, Sakhipur goes with me.

The optimism that was born out of the ashes and the blood is recorded in the poems written by the younger poets of the seventies. The best representative of them is Rudra Muhammad Shahidullah, from whose poem 'Swajaner Shubhra Harh' I quote :

I will build my home here at this golden time.
Here the Aghraan fullmoon will shine all the year round
The long night of sorrow over,
The bloodshed of destruction over,
We meet again on the coral reef of woe.
The dear earth is awash with blood
White bones of the dear ones are abloom
like bright flowers.

Shahidullah wrote with anger and disgust about the widespread carnage of the war of liberation, the decomposing corpses strewn everywhere, the outcries of the widows and the orphans. But the waning of the values of the liberation struggle as was manifest in the infinite greed of the power-mongers and the resurgence of the anti-liberation communal forces immediately following the birth of Bangladesh saddened him all the more. Rudra's language is emotional, unadorned, direct and piercing:

Even today I smell the corpses in the air,
Still I watch the naked dans macabre on the earth;
I hear the outcries of the raped women in my sleep;
Has this country forgotten that nightmare, that bloody time?
…..
The same old vulture has clutched the national flag.
The pathos of the following lines written by Abul Hasan still wrings our hearts:
So many wars have passed,
So much blood has been shed,
The wind scattered gold and silver like wool in the air.
I do not see that young brother of mine,
I do not see my sister with a soft nose-ring.
I only see flags,
I only see flags,
I only see freedom.
Is my brother then that flag of freedom?
Is my sister then a fest on the altar of darkness?

Forty years have elapsed; forty summers and winters have heaped up the dust of oblivion on our memory. The generation who fought the war is fast dwindling in the natural course of time. The 'Muktijuddho' now lives on in the memories of those who still live and in the myths and metonymies ensconced in literature. The latter will ultimately be the place for any future retrieval, of those fires and tears that had once surged in millions of hearts in this land where krishnachuras bloom.

The writer is Professor, Department of English, Dhaka University.