The Dhakaiyas are only recent arivals to the UK. They arive on student visas and often don’t have a right of abode here. And Sylheti families of second and third generation girld and boys like me don’t want to marry Dhakaiya freshies from back home with their third world habits of controlling women and sending money back to their poor relatives back home.

Many Dhakaiyas are arrogant and think they are better than us because they come from middleclass families back home but fail to realise that most second and third generation Sylhetis are middleclass professionals bought up and educated in Britain. Many of these ‘intellectual’ Dhakaiyas can barely speak English but think they are elites!!!

Desi Dancer wrote “I cringe to think it would hold company with some of the previous Booker recipients”. Taz “I thought the book was crap, but my mother loved it”. Saurabh “They should be protesting over that being considered for a Booker at all. That first sentence is terrible”.

I actually found the book to be pretty interesting. Granted Monica Ali’s language in her first published work does not possess the lyrical charm a la Arundhuti Roy in “God of Small Things”. Compared to Hanif Kureshi’s inimical humourous satirical style in “The Black Album” a book of the same genre in that it examines the lives of Pakistani immigrant society in England and the growing fundamentalist radical streak among its members, Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane” and the manner of her writing style in which she describes the lives of her Bangladeshi immigrant characters is pretty dark and grim.

However, her book clearly illustrates the stark existential reality of underclass immigrants in a western land. The picture she paints isn’t pretty but hey thats reality and i for one who did not particularly enjoy her writing style nonetheless liked the book and how she approached the subject matter and drew a picture of a people, while not pretty, it was definitely illuminating.

Taz i think i know why your mother loved the book. I think she was able to relate to the characters in the book and the thought processes that were at work behind what they did and why they did. It is as simple as that.

The protests over the filming of her book reminded me of the protests that swept Calcutta during the filming of “City of Joy”, or the ones that occured in Varanasi that eventually stopped the shooting of Deepa Mehta’s “Water”, and how the protestors claimed that the film would paint the cities in a bad light. Having spent all my college years in Calcutta in the mid 90s, and having visited Varanasi and seeing for myself the dire hopeless lives of those widows, i could never understand the reasoning behind those claims. It was all bloody bull as far as i was concerned, where basically a bunch of backward thugs with a seige mentality were involved in organizing the protests, and the protests against the filming of “Brick Lane” reminds me of the same.

I got a few questions though and maybe the folks here could help shed some light on them.

As far as i know, Bangladesh during the language movement till its liberation struggle and some years thereafter was a largely secular society. What happened in between say 1975 and later whereby there was a growing fundamentalist radicalization and trasformation of Bangladeshi society so much so, that now the Razakars, a section of the Bangladeshi elite along with certain groups of people who actually fought against the Bangladeshi liberation movement and openly cooperated with the Pakistani army, in the slaughter of Bangladeshi secular liberal intellectuals and freedom fighters during the liberation movement, now have asserted themselves back into helm of Bangladeshi society and are now part of the ruling class? What changed? What gives?

related, perhaps we can in the future have a discussion on tantra and religion in south asia vis a vis ideas of human nature and sin

Ponniyin Selvan you noted that the writer Katherine Mayo writing of 1920s Kalighat, Calcutta/Kolkata speaks of 150-200 kids being sacrificed everyday. I dont know the veracity of her claims since i have not read that book, but if “noro bolee” as human sacrifice is known in Bengal existed in Calcutta as late as the 1920s, then definitely me having spent all my college life in Calcutta in the mid 1990s, would have known of it.

That does not mean that “noro bolee” was not practiced in Bengal. It primarily occurred during Kali Pujo and Durga Pujo, where humans were sacrificed to the Goddesses and the practice was primarily the domain of the upper, wealthy classes and not something that was widespread among the population.

I believe that the practice started to die out with the advent and spread of British colonial rule in Bengal and by the late 18th century the practice had died out. However, I have never read anything where there was evidence that young children were sacrificed. I could very well be wrong about my assertion, maybe folks here could dig in on that subject.

No, they were from Barisal and Jashore and moved to Calcutta before partition. I have heard similar stories about abundance from them. In post-partition Calcutta, it was a common joke among the ghotis that back in East Pakistan, all bangals were jomidars (landlords) with gola-bhara-dhan and pukur-bhara-maachh (storehouse full of rice and ponds full of fishes). Sure, some of the stories were hazed by nostalgic exaggeration, but most of what they said was probably true.

I have a very old great uncle who entertains me with stories about life in Bangladesh before partition, and in paricticular about our family place, which was called Kolagachi (literally, Banana-Treed). He paints it so beautifully it is like a dream – the river near the house where they took boat rides, the pond with enormous fish (the fish get more enormous with each retelling) which they would eat fresh every day, the fact that they would sit around and sing and write poetry all day. No one else in the family has any time to listen to these stories, and everyone thinks he is ‘wringing out the towel of Kolgachi’ over and over again. I love to hear him. I sit there in my jeans and inappropriate top and nasal accent and ‘attitude’, rapt and truly deferential for once. Everyone thinks its bloody weird my dreamer-jetu and I have this connection.

Not a Bengali, but I heard this: Take a mango and scoop out the seed. A hollow is created where the seed was. A nine-yard sari of Dhaka muslin can be made to fit in that hollow.