A Golden Age

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The mounting Bengali nationalist movement led to the Pakistan army to carry out Operation Searchlight. This military operation targeted Bengali intellectuals, academics including university students, and Hindus. They were captured, tortured, and/or killed. [5] This led to the 1971 Bangladesh genocide that caused millions of refugees to flee to India and the deaths of 58,000 to 3,000,000 civilians. The exact number of deaths is still unknown. [5] [10] Some of the finest moments of the novel are its quietest - Rehana hearing Nina Simone for the first time, her voice "a thousand years of sorrow"; the desolation of a half-built house during the monsoons with "tadpoles swimming like lines of ink" in the pool which should have been a tiled floor; beautiful evocations of Bengal's countryside and its hill stations. The novel moves from pain to beauty, and often treads a line between the two. Sohail, the dreamer-turned-warrior, asks of the struggle for independence: "How can it be the greatest and the very worst thing we have ever done?" Now she is from Harvard, so it becomes her responsibility to write a novel to keep alive the University tradition. Like uncle Ben of Peter Parker, we also can say, With big degree comes big responsibility to write a book! Now what to do! When she has a Bengali origin, why should not she encash the year of 1971? For the writers that year was ‘Annus mirabilis!’ With the conflict taking its bloody course in the East, Rehana realises she cannot stop them from joining the Bangla effort as freedom fighters. Veering between indulgence and censure, 'there was a part of her that wanted to allow her children anything - any whimsy, any zeal, any excess', while 'another part of her wanted them to have nothing to do with it all, to keep them safe at home'. Rehana cannot keep them safe at home. Dear Sisters,' she imagines writing to her family, suddenly the enemy. 'Our countries are at war. We are on different sides now ... you see how much I belong here and not to you.' As a mother, she is circumscribed by the 'yawning, cyclic, inexhaustible need' for the son and daughter who were taken from her.

I have done quite a bit of reading this year on India and the subcontinent, both fiction and non-fiction, so the many untranslated phrases, names of foods, items of clothing, prayer times and rituals, etc, were all quite familiar to me, but for the uninitiated a glossary would have been helpful.When I first sat down to write A Golden Age, I imagined a war novel on an epic scale. I imagined battle scenes, political rallies, and the grand sweep of history. But after having interviewed more than a hundred survivors of the Bangladesh War for Independence, I realised it was the very small details that always stayed in my mind- the guerilla fighters who exchanged shirts before they went into battle, the women who sewed their best silk saris into blankets for the reugees. I realised I wanted to write a novel about how ordinary people are transformed by war, and once I discovered this, I turned to the story of my maternal grandmother, Mushela Islam, and how she became a revolutionary. The ending left the impression that this book might be a series (which it turned out to be). The denouement left me slightly annoyed, but despite that, it was a beautifully written story in prose that flowed like music on paper. Colorful, cinematic, atmospheric, mesmerizing, warm, gripping, and absolutely worth the read. In 2022, Anam gave a TEDx talk entitled "The Power of Holding Silence: Making the Workplace Work for Women". [26] That same year, Anam's debut, A Golden Age, was chosen for the Queen’s jubilee book list, a list of 70 books from across the Commonwealth marking the seven decades of her reign. [27] Personal life [ edit ] This is a fictional take on the Liberation war of 1971. I'm sure many people in the world are unaware of the magnitude of horror that took place in our small country. This book must have put it on people's radar, and maybe inspired them to get to know about our nation a little better. For that, I am grateful.

Rehana Haque, a widow with two young adult children lived in Bangladesh. She had married a man she had not expected to love; loved a man she had not expected to lose; lived a life of moderation, a life of few surprises. She had asked her father to find her a husband with little ambition. Someone whose fortunes had nowhere to go ... Who is this man? Is he from Pakistan or outer planet? Please, send him a copy of ‘The days of 1971’ by Jahanara Imam.

Search members.

Anam grew up in Bangladesh and she has drawn on the stories told her by her parents who were both freedom fighters in Bangladesh’s War of Independence. Rehana went with Faiz to bring Sabeer from jail in a car! Faiz was reading a English newspaper where Maya, from Calcutta has published an essay in support of guerrilla war. Newspaper, in English? In 1971? Without military censorship? ‘The days of 1971’ says a different story.