Friendships and (be)longing are woven
through Shamim Zamanvi’s poem Faslon
ki Qurbat (Destiny’s Nearness): ‘The shadow
of my memory will be with you / Yours
with me / The pulse of our friendship will
vanquish this distance.’ He likens fate
to a magician-gambler, but trickier
still. Each move, each gamble, isn’t
one you wanted to play, but instead
were played – that dice was never
yours to throw. Zamanvi, an Urdu
poet and translator, knows what that
feels like. Born in the vortex of mid-20th
century metamorphoses of empires to
nations, one of which was the 1947 par-
tition of India, his has been a splintered
reality.
His family is from Zamania, a town
near Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh (UP),
India. The surname, Zamanvi, a trace
of that attachment like driftwood settled
on a distant beach. Zamanvi hasn’t been
to UP in a while, which is an under-
statement; fatherless very early on, he
has memories of Chittagong, where his
mother and elder brother relocated,
but he was raised by a childless uncle in
Khulna before settling in Dhaka. But ‘set-
tling’ is perhaps another understatement.
Where one is from and where one settles
and where home is are bent to shape like
bonsais of nationalist fantasies.
After the independence of Bangladesh
in 1971, the Urdu-speaking community
found itself in the untenable position
of statelessness, because many of its
members had sided with Pakistan, which
never showed any interest in granting
them a right of entry or citizenship once
the war ended. The community’s ties to
Pakistan were somewhat conceptual to
begin with, since most were from what is
now India, many from the states of Bihar
and UP. Not easily identified by race or
ethnicity, it is their linguistic identity
as Urdu speakers that marks them out
as a minority in Bangladesh. Although
no longer stateless through successivecourt verdicts granting them Bangla-
deshi citizenship, post-1971 theirs has
not been an uncomplicated journey in a
nation founded specifically on its Bengali
ethno-linguistic identity forged through
resistance to what Urdu encoded at the
time. Urdu has become tainted by asso-
ciation, an unfortunate and indefensible
aftermath, especially when Urdu literary
practice has a rich and varied tradition in
Bengal.
There are no easy ways to be a poet
anywhere. Zamanvi, a man of his times,
writes furiously and achingly but is not
diligent about archiving his output.
There are couplets on his Facebook posts
and slim volumes meagrely supported by
a handful of patrons. This is just as well,
as manuscripts have been lost both to
nature and petty lawlessness. In 1969 his
entire poetic output up to that time was
washed away in a deluge in Khulna. In
Dhaka in the 1990s, miscreants snatched
a bag with his papers as he was returning
from a late night mushaira (a gathering
where poets recite their works) in a rick-
shaw – gone was his treasury of letters.
But with feelings, there is no lessening or
nobody to whisk them away, he tells me,
sitting against the light in a white kurta
showing signs of wear. So he keeps going,the writing continues.
‘So many of my friends left for India,
for Pakistan in the 1970s, but I didn’t,’ he
says. ‘I’ve more friends here, in Bang-
ladesh, Bengali friends I couldn’t live
without. I could fill my stomach any-
where, but nowhere else would I find this
fraternity, so why should I even entertain
that thought?’ I hadn’t asked him why he
had stayed or whether he wanted to leave,
questions that would presuppose a home
elsewhere, but that hardly matters, as he
consistently encounters suggestions of the
kind. But Faslon ki Qurbat is also a lament
and a celebration of those scattered ties.
Zamanvi shares that prominent person-
alities – authors, poets, scholars, a trustee
of the Bangladesh Liberation Museum –
have supported Urdu literature in Bang-
ladesh, namely translation of Urdu works
to Bangla and vice versa. While undoubt-
edly commendable, it is also a reminder
that the practice of Urdu has to be shown
to be supported by and through the
Bengali nationalist project, thus recon-
firming its secondary status. Undaunted,
his ode to friendships, tied so curiously to
geographic limits yet somehow loosened
from them, endures. O
PARSA SANJANA SAJID IS A WRITER, EDITOR AND
ARTIST LIVING IN DHAKA, BANGLADESH.A LANGUAGE OF FRIENDSHIP
Her acquaintance with an Urdu poet reveals
to Parsa Sanjana Sajid the deep waters
of identity and prejudice.LETTER FROM DHAKASEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019 7ILLUSTRATION:^SARAH^ JOHN