সম্পাদকীয়

The main theme of the current issue of the Bangla Journal was the impact of the pandemic of Covid-19. The question we wanted to raise was whether we were too concerned about the safety and wellbeings of our kins during the pandemic while failed to conceive any measures to mitigate the hardships of those who lived among us without any protection for themselves due to their meagre survival jobs. Have we simply gave up and accepted the bare naked truth of class inequality and discrimination as a natural consequance of the fate?

The world seems to be returning to its normalcy and historians are once again got into the task of interpreting and analysing the impact of current pandemic in the light of experiences of the past pandemics. We, however wanted to stich together the varied crises and problems people around us faced during last two years of pandemic. We also wanted to know the types of opinions, debates, doubts about the state of existing public health systems, profit-oriented health science and research and various measures adopted by the states to deal with the pandemic. Unfortunately, despite our utmost efforts we couldn’t get anyone in Bangldesh to contribute on the issues, especially on how the poor and heapless there were coping with the situation. This lack makes our presentaiton on the main theme inadeqauate.

Janam Mukherjee weaves a narrative of hardships and trauma the poor and hapless people have experienced during the “lockdown”. His narrative presents a stark picture of hunger and death these people had to confront in their daily struggles for survival under the “lockdown” Baby Haldar, who claimed a place for herself among the writers in India by narrating her life journey as a housemaid, highlighted the contrasting situations where lockdown brought fortune for some and loss for others. Saktinath Chakrabarty in his discussion touches upon public perception about issues of conspiracy theories, distrusts and doubts spawned by the pandemic. Sthabir Dasgupta in his detail discussion draws our attention to severe consequences we might face due to crises in public health, competing econo-social and cultural viewpoints in dealing with the pandemic. In addition to these articles on the main theme, we present Amina Khatun’s reviews of Bangla literary works the Pandemic has already triggared.

Sandeep Bandyopadhyay in his article attempts to explore the reasons why the utopia for a just and an egalitarian society during the anti-colonial struggles didn’t materialize in post-colonial states. Debjyoti Mandal’s lengthy article illustrates how poet Jibanananda practiced his poetics and his thoughts about inner workings of poems manifested in his works. Likewise Hasnara Khatun in her discussion on writer Afsar Amed shows us how the latter borrowed a traditional oral literary form called Kissa and transformed it into a literary device for his fiction to shed light on the subordinate status of women in Pashchim Banga’s Muslim society.In the current issue of the Bangla Journal we present two commemorative articles to celebrate the birth centenaries of novelist Syed Waliullah and filmmaker Mrinal Sen. Hasan Al Zayed in his discussion on Syed Waliullah’s novel Chander Amaboshya, refutes most of the previous critics’ evaluation of the protagonist Aref and presents a differenttake on this character. Bidhan Rebeiro presents an overview of filmmaker Mrinal Sen’s works.

The current issue of the Journal also includes two articles related political history of Bangladesh. The one authored by Mohit Ul Alam is an attempt to see the brutal killings of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family members in 1975 through a Shakespearean trajectory. On the other hand Shahadat H Khan’s essay analyzes the failure of Nixon-Kissinger imperial design to shape their foreign policy to favour Pakistan in 1971. In addition, the current issue presents Manohar Mouli Biswas’article on four Dalit women in 18th century Bengal, travel diary of Sumanta Bandyopadhyay’s visit to Pakistan, poems, short stories and translations of poems.