Faiz Alam is renowned as a poet and postcolonial theorist. However, after reading his recent novel ‘Achab Banu’, I realised he is equally powerful as a novelist. Considering the narrative presentation, character development, language, dialogue, and underlying message, I want to say ‘Achab Banu’ is an important addition to Bengali fiction.
‘Achab Banu’ is not an ordinary novel like the other dozens of novels. It is a kind of postcolonial philosophical resistance, where language, religion, society, and human existence are all reconsidered together. Instead of the Calcutta standard Bengali language created by the scholars of Fort William College, this novel speaks in the language of the common people of Bangladesh, in the everyday slang of the common man. From this point of view, the language of ‘Achab Banu’ is not only a means of communication, but also a kind of epistemological liberation.
The novel breaks social and religious taboos, but for this, it does not have to make religion an opponent, but rather re-reads the entire society through a re-reading of the social interpretation of religion. This perspective breaks down the simplified ‘religion versus progress’ conflict of leftist thought and European modernity and shows that the problem is not in religion, but in its social interpretation.
The development of the character of Achab Banu herself is a kind of existential journey. Due to being infected with a contagious disease, her own family throws her out of the house. She sets out on a night into the unknown to die in peace somewhere far away. But she does not die, she lives deeply and fully. With the help of Mostara Begum, a spiritual figure from a remote village, she spreads her roots and survives strongly. She becomes an independent person. She even disobeys the social interpretation of religion and smokes during fasting. Thus, we witnessed the development of a self-conscious, revolutionary, and one of the most powerful female characters in Bengali fiction.
Achab Banu gets involved in a forbidden love and physical relationship with a married man, `Alauddin’. She does not consider this relationship to be a sin or a taboo, but rather a matter of personal choice. As a result, the outcome of the novel ‘Achab Banu’ becomes ‘extraordinary’ and unconventional. As a result, ‘Achab Banu’ is not just literature; it is a philosophical document that teaches us that the path to liberation lies within our own language, culture, and experiences.
The characters in the novel ‘Achab Banu’ are not confined to any predetermined framework. They have developed spontaneously. According to the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, people first come into existence, then create their own identity. The characters in this novel are the same; they develop themselves through their own decisions.
Bengali fiction has been going through a kind of comparatively declining period for long. This crisis has become more apparent due to the practice of entertaining fiction for several decades. In this situation, how we shall evaluate the novel ‘Achab Banu’ is also an important question. I can say without a doubt that ‘Achab Banu’ has created a unique height in the genre of Bengali novels. As Manik Bandyopadhyay’s tradition of creating strong characters based on predetermined ideas, like Hossain Mia in ‘Padma Nadir Majhi’, in the same way, in the political-social narratives of Akhtaruzzaman Ilyas, characters often become carriers of larger ideas. The same is true in the writings of Shahidul Zahir. But the characteristic of ‘Achab Banu’ is that here the characters are not made vehicles of any specific ideology; rather, the characters are created through their own experiences, conflicts, mistakes and self-realisation.
The novel proposes a kind of epistemological liberation through the use of language, the reinterpretation of social taboos, the humanization of religious interpretations, and the deep recognition of folk culture. For that reason, I consider Faiz Alam’s novel ‘Achab Banu’ as a postcolonial socio-cultural-epistemological journey of a revolutionary woman named Achab Banu. And that put the novel in a unique and powerful position in Bengali fiction.
