Bangladesh--A Review of "The Point of Return"

BANGLADESH
A review of The Point of Return by Siddhartha Deb
By Harpreet Singh Soorae

Silchar was a small Bengali island in the state of Assam, heavily settled by immigrants from the villages of East Bengal who had brought with them a sense of identity that allowed for neither growth nor change. They were defined not by what they were - that was uncertain - but by what they were not. They were Indians because they were not Bangladeshis, Hindus because they were not Muslims, Bengalis because they were not Assamese. They clung to their language fiercely, and yet they were not really Bengali, because they spoke a dialect that aroused only amusement and derision in the real centre of Bengali culture and identity, in Calcutta. (The Point of Return, P.78)

The subtlety and oblique narrative arc of The Point of Return suggests the unease that a conscientious writer must feel when writing about the legacy of partition, shaping his narrative and material nearly sixty years after the event. This careful and delicate sensibility of elision and suggestiveness, the slow revealing of secrets and history within a family, marks the novel from the start.

The first part tells in reverse the story of the relationship between Dr Dam, a veterinary surgeon working for the civil service, a partition refugee from Sylhet, and his son Babu. They live in the remote north-eastern hills, in a tribal region of Assam. The novel begins in 1987 as Dr Dam is taken ill, and the next seven chapters recount the tale of their family in backward sequence of years until 1979.

This technique has to justify itself. Each chapter reveals ironies as we learn of the failure of Dr Dam's scheme to rationalise milk distribution, the concussions of family life and rivalry, the unease and tensions between the descendants of partition refugees and the tribal people in Assam. As Deb unfolds the story in backward chronology, the painful awkwardness in the relationship between Babu and his father unravels as we see them interacting closely when he is a young boy.

The events of these chapters are half understood, with shaded explanations for events, obliquely connected. This reticence and angled relief traces the difficult contour of the relationship between father and son; withdrawn, perplexing, distant. But the reverse narrative also suggests disorientation, displacement, and fragmentation, the condition of Babu, Dr Dam, and his family, dispossessed from their ancestral land, struggling in the new. As The Point of Return becomes a novel of memory and reclamation of the past, this backward narrative strategy mirrors Babu's gradual exploration of the events of his childhood. This is how understanding comes to us, the novel suggests, through petty revelation, splintered recollection, gradual meditation in retrospect, recognising links in moments backwards, across and forward in time.

Early in the novel, we follow Dam and Babu as they visit the pension office:

Dr Dam had had difficulty walking since an accident some five or six years ago, but he still took on the steep slopes of the town every day. Shuffling slowly, a short, once broad figure now thinning with age, he moved in silence through people and neighbourhoods, submerged inside his own reticent world. If the grey eyes took in anything of the places he passed through, they restricted their attention to the non-human world: a sudden flower among the weeds, the damaged branches of a tree, a clogged drain that needed to be cleared.

It is suggestive of the eye of the novel as a whole, focussing on the marginal, the peripheral, the unseen and forgotten detail. The remoteness of the setting in the hills takes on significance as a metaphor for people's impression of themselves not possessing a whole being, the sense of being outside the centre, at its margins, flailing, vulnerable to a curse that partition engendered the collapse of a complete, self contained world. It also echoes the remoteness within families, the painful estrangement between generations and siblings.

History has given them raw nerves, and even if it is futile to expect that it is possible for anybody to possess a sense of themselves as being truly whole, the heightened exigencies of their displaced existence and the wound they feel transmutes into a crisis of sensibility and identity. This inherited sense of loss and confusion is what Babu carries, and is the emptiness that sits at the heart of the novel, around which Deb negotiates the recursive and moving narrative.

The marginal manifests itself in the politics of the hills of Assam. The state has been partitioned into tribal regions; special quotas are set for the native races of the hills. They feel colonised, and their rage against the outsiders, the Bengali settlers of 1947, is strong. A fascistic movement of harassment and intimidation is instigated against them. When Babu returns to the town he grew up in he is described, contemptuously, as a 'Bangladeshi'. To many of the hill people his family and community are viewed as interlopers, part of the great colonising chain of outsiders who settled in their land since the British. The novel describes the nature of politics and the tension in the administration of small town India, seething with ethnic hatred and contempt. Late in the novel, Babu, now a journalist, visits a minister in the area in which he grew up. He was brought to office on the back of the tribal nationalist movement that sought power through the murder of Bengali refugees and their descendants. He observes:

I thought it possible that the violence that had been hurled against us had some grain of idealism in it. But the language of purity, no matter how misplaced, could only be spoken on the streets; here it was only corruption, boredom, rot, no different from the oppressive shades of power to be found elsewhere in the country.

This is a microcosm of the corrupting urgencies of power and administration within the modern Indian state, a milieu and pressure also explored tellingly in Akhil Sharma's An Obedient Father. Both of these novels examine the lives of officers in the Indian civil service, administrating corpuscles in the vessels of the Indian body, and both books proffer an account of the culture and effect of this institution. This setting, the administrative nervous system of India, with its interplay of political parties, chauvinist politicians, corrupt civil servants all jostling for influence, provides an arena for the writer to explore, under the skin, the interstices of power and history in the Indian Republic.

Babu recalls some government intelligence officers visiting his father after he had hosted a party of Danish scientists on a research mission to a dairy farm he oversaw. The intelligence officers suspected them of being spies:

He dismissed the very notion as absurd, not understanding that paranoia was very much a part of the India he served so eagerly, and that the nation he imagined being shored up through the efforts of people like him was ultimately a fortress, that everywhere around him new battle lines were being drawn and fresh groups of people were being defined as outsiders, borders bristling with barbed-wire teeth.

The composition of barriers continues, this time within the Indian body. It is the implication of nation building and consolidation, and against it The Point of Return tells the tale of the aching bones of the displaced and their descendant. Travelling to Silchar on the plains from the hills, Dr Dam stops on the highway whilst transporting cement for the home he wants to build for his retirement. They pass close to the border, beyond which lays his ancestral village:

There was nothing particular about the place where they had stopped. It was like almost any other spot on the road travelled so far, the thinning, cracked tar running into the soft earth and a tattered sheet of dry grass and twigs before the ground fell away towards a thicker underbrush burrowing towards densely intertwined trees and stagnant pools of black water...'Bangladesh,' Dr Dam breathed, while the driver and his assistant stretched themselves on the grass, scratching idly. Nothing save the topography distinguished it, no flags, guns, signposts, nothing that was visible at this distance, not even the thick dash-dot-dash of the political semaphore of atlases.

Dr Dam apprehends the landscape. Somewhere amidst it lies the line of partition. But it is impossible to imagine this abstract demarcation, because of the 'densely intertwined trees' and 'cracked tar running into the soft earth', the 'stagnant pools of black water' that remind us of a primordial outlook; a conjoined, knotted, unbroken scene of soil and fauna. Dr Dam's muttered 'Bangladesh' is a mournful, helpless articulation, and in the panorama he surveys; timeless, irreducible, impudent to the proprietary rights of partitioned lands, it becomes a lament, a question, a request to the air and landscape for explanation. But the air and landscape are oblivious to Dr Dam. (Notice how he is described as having 'breathed' Bangladesh. The word is collated with the basic function of life. His contemplation of it, the land of his childhood, is elemental).

Late in the novel, Babu thinks of his childhood and father:

As human beings, we move against the flow of the world. What was before, when we were young, is also the point farthest from us so that our childhoods must, by this paradox, be the oldest, most ancient world we know, curled and stained by time like old black-and-white photographs.

I wonder if there was something that could have been recovered, whether there was no way for him to ease the burden that weighed him down constantly until the day he fell face forward in the passageway. No matter, it is all over now.

Perhaps, the trauma of partition was such that it engendered in the descendants of those displaced a heightened sense of loss, even as they lived within the new borders of the states to which their families repaired. The Point of Return is a novel that lies somewhere in the whispers of the marginal people that history and nationhood churned and forgot. Babu can see the new barbed-wire fences being erected around him, even as he surrenders the unknowable and un-consoled past that recedes from his grasp. It is, after all, part of literatures gift to lament what is lost, even if it cannot offer a salve or respite, to allow the weary sigh, and repudiate the abstractions of history, politics, nation, and religion. That is an act of defiance, to allow the dignity of the individual life to mourn, even if all he can say, in perplexed wonder, is 'Bangladesh'.

Harpreet Singh Soorae lives in Birmingham, England. A selection of his short-stories will be included in an anthology of new writers to be published by Tindal Street Press in August.

Agree with this take? Have a different point of view? Discuss this novel and Harpreet's reading of it here


home about contact policies submissions feature archives audio visual writing reviews forums art film & television food literature music society & culture elsewhere desilit parabaas sasialit sawnet upper stall	BANGLADESH A review of The Point of Return by Siddhartha Deb By Harpreet Singh Soorae Silchar was a small Bengali island in the state of Assam, heavily settled by immigrants from the villages of East Bengal who had brought with them a sense of identity that allowed for neither growth nor change. They were defined not by what they were - that was uncertain - but by what they were not. They were Indians because they were not Bangladeshis, Hindus because they were not Muslims, Bengalis because they were not Assamese. They clung to their language fiercely, and yet they were not really Bengali, because they spoke a dialect that aroused only amusement and derision in the real centre of Bengali culture and identity, in Calcutta. (The Point of Return, P.78) The subtlety and oblique narrative arc of The Point of Return suggests the unease that a conscientious writer must feel when writing about the legacy of partition, shaping his narrative and material nearly sixty years after the event. This careful and delicate sensibility of elision and suggestiveness, the slow revealing of secrets and history within a family, marks the novel from the start. The first part tells in reverse the story of the relationship between Dr Dam, a veterinary surgeon working for the civil service, a partition refugee from Sylhet, and his son Babu. They live in the remote north-eastern hills, in a tribal region of Assam. The novel begins in 1987 as Dr Dam is taken ill, and the next seven chapters recount the tale of their family in backward sequence of years until 1979. This technique has to justify itself. Each chapter reveals ironies as we learn of the failure of Dr Dam's scheme to rationalise milk distribution, the concussions of family life and rivalry, the unease and tensions between the descendants of partition refugees and the tribal people in Assam. As Deb unfolds the story in backward chronology, the painful awkwardness in the relationship between Babu and his father unravels as we see them interacting closely when he is a young boy. The events of these chapters are half understood, with shaded explanations for events, obliquely connected. This reticence and angled relief traces the difficult contour of the relationship between father and son; withdrawn, perplexing, distant. But the reverse narrative also suggests disorientation, displacement, and fragmentation, the condition of Babu, Dr Dam, and his family, dispossessed from their ancestral land, struggling in the new. As The Point of Return becomes a novel of memory and reclamation of the past, this backward narrative strategy mirrors Babu's gradual exploration of the events of his childhood. This is how understanding comes to us, the novel suggests, through petty revelation, splintered recollection, gradual meditation in retrospect, recognising links in moments backwards, across and forward in time. Early in the novel, we follow Dam and Babu as they visit the pension office: Dr Dam had had difficulty walking since an accident some five or six years ago, but he still took on the steep slopes of the town every day. Shuffling slowly, a short, once broad figure now thinning with age, he moved in silence through people and neighbourhoods, submerged inside his own reticent world. If the grey eyes took in anything of the places he passed through, they restricted their attention to the non-human world: a sudden flower among the weeds, the damaged branches of a tree, a clogged drain that needed to be cleared. It is suggestive of the eye of the novel as a whole, focussing on the marginal, the peripheral, the unseen and forgotten detail. The remoteness of the setting in the hills takes on significance as a metaphor for people's impression of themselves not possessing a whole being, the sense of being outside the centre, at its margins, flailing, vulnerable to a curse that partition engendered the collapse of a complete, self contained world. It also echoes the remoteness within families, the painful estrangement between generations and siblings. History has given them raw nerves, and even if it is futile to expect that it is possible for anybody to possess a sense of themselves as being truly whole, the heightened exigencies of their displaced existence and the wound they feel transmutes into a crisis of sensibility and identity. This inherited sense of loss and confusion is what Babu carries, and is the emptiness that sits at the heart of the novel, around which Deb negotiates the recursive and moving narrative. The marginal manifests itself in the politics of the hills of Assam. The state has been partitioned into tribal regions; special quotas are set for the native races of the hills. They feel colonised, and their rage against the outsiders, the Bengali settlers of 1947, is strong. A fascistic movement of harassment and intimidation is instigated against them. When Babu returns to the town he grew up in he is described, contemptuously, as a 'Bangladeshi'. To many of the hill people his family and community are viewed as interlopers, part of the great colonising chain of outsiders who settled in their land since the British. The novel describes the nature of politics and the tension in the administration of small town India, seething with ethnic hatred and contempt. Late in the novel, Babu, now a journalist, visits a minister in the area in which he grew up. He was brought to office on the back of the tribal nationalist movement that sought power through the murder of Bengali refugees and their descendants. He observes: I thought it possible that the violence that had been hurled against us had some grain of idealism in it. But the language of purity, no matter how misplaced, could only be spoken on the streets; here it was only corruption, boredom, rot, no different from the oppressive shades of power to be found elsewhere in the country. This is a microcosm of the corrupting urgencies of power and administration within the modern Indian state, a milieu and pressure also explored tellingly in Akhil Sharma's An Obedient Father. Both of these novels examine the lives of officers in the Indian civil service, administrating corpuscles in the vessels of the Indian body, and both books proffer an account of the culture and effect of this institution. This setting, the administrative nervous system of India, with its interplay of political parties, chauvinist politicians, corrupt civil servants all jostling for influence, provides an arena for the writer to explore, under the skin, the interstices of power and history in the Indian Republic. Babu recalls some government intelligence officers visiting his father after he had hosted a party of Danish scientists on a research mission to a dairy farm he oversaw. The intelligence officers suspected them of being spies: He dismissed the very notion as absurd, not understanding that paranoia was very much a part of the India he served so eagerly, and that the nation he imagined being shored up through the efforts of people like him was ultimately a fortress, that everywhere around him new battle lines were being drawn and fresh groups of people were being defined as outsiders, borders bristling with barbed-wire teeth. The composition of barriers continues, this time within the Indian body. It is the implication of nation building and consolidation, and against it The Point of Return tells the tale of the aching bones of the displaced and their descendant. Travelling to Silchar on the plains from the hills, Dr Dam stops on the highway whilst transporting cement for the home he wants to build for his retirement. They pass close to the border, beyond which lays his ancestral village: There was nothing particular about the place where they had stopped. It was like almost any other spot on the road travelled so far, the thinning, cracked tar running into the soft earth and a tattered sheet of dry grass and twigs before the ground fell away towards a thicker underbrush burrowing towards densely intertwined trees and stagnant pools of black water...'Bangladesh,' Dr Dam breathed, while the driver and his assistant stretched themselves on the grass, scratching idly. Nothing save the topography distinguished it, no flags, guns, signposts, nothing that was visible at this distance, not even the thick dash-dot-dash of the political semaphore of atlases. Dr Dam apprehends the landscape. Somewhere amidst it lies the line of partition. But it is impossible to imagine this abstract demarcation, because of the 'densely intertwined trees' and 'cracked tar running into the soft earth', the 'stagnant pools of black water' that remind us of a primordial outlook; a conjoined, knotted, unbroken scene of soil and fauna. Dr Dam's muttered 'Bangladesh' is a mournful, helpless articulation, and in the panorama he surveys; timeless, irreducible, impudent to the proprietary rights of partitioned lands, it becomes a lament, a question, a request to the air and landscape for explanation. But the air and landscape are oblivious to Dr Dam. (Notice how he is described as having 'breathed' Bangladesh. The word is collated with the basic function of life. His contemplation of it, the land of his childhood, is elemental). Late in the novel, Babu thinks of his childhood and father: As human beings, we move against the flow of the world. What was before, when we were young, is also the point farthest from us so that our childhoods must, by this paradox, be the oldest, most ancient world we know, curled and stained by time like old black-and-white photographs. I wonder if there was something that could have been recovered, whether there was no way for him to ease the burden that weighed him down constantly until the day he fell face forward in the passageway. No matter, it is all over now. Perhaps, the trauma of partition was such that it engendered in the descendants of those displaced a heightened sense of loss, even as they lived within the new borders of the states to which their families repaired. The Point of Return is a novel that lies somewhere in the whispers of the marginal people that history and nationhood churned and forgot. Babu can see the new barbed-wire fences being erected around him, even as he surrenders the unknowable and un-consoled past that recedes from his grasp. It is, after all, part of literatures gift to lament what is lost, even if it cannot offer a salve or respite, to allow the weary sigh, and repudiate the abstractions of history, politics, nation, and religion. That is an act of defiance, to allow the dignity of the individual life to mourn, even if all he can say, in perplexed wonder, is 'Bangladesh'. Harpreet Singh Soorae lives in Birmingham, England. A selection of his short-stories will be included in an anthology of new writers to be published by Tindal Street Press in August. Agree with this take? Have a different point of view? Discuss this novel and Harpreet's reading of it here