Conversations Issue 4 — June 2024
A Non-conformist in Every Possible Way — A Conversation with Nazes Afroz on Syed Mujtaba Ali
By Aninda Rahman
The Bengali writer and humorist Syed Mujtaba Ali set out for Europe from Madras almost a hundred years ago. His ship traversed the Arabian Sea, crossed the Suez Canal while he took a detour to see the pyramids of Egypt and its bustling nocturnal capital, Cairo. In Joley Dangay, which has been recently translated to English by Nazes Afroz as “Tales of a Voyager”, Mujtaba Ali crafts a tale of his voyage that is a testament to his sharp sense of humor and erudite understanding of the history and geopolitical fabric of the region.
“Tales of a Voyager” is set between the two World Wars. This was a time before television or the internet when travel writing served as a gateway to get acquainted with the world. Either one was an explorer who drew inspiration from reading travel literature and might even go on to write themselves, or the confines of the book were your limit to imagining the horizons of this planet.
Fatal wars claiming human lives in millions, along with the fall of the colonial empires, rapid and unregulated technological advancements in the last century saw a world in disarray—wars still raged the planet but the battlefields have shifted eastwards from the gentile lands of Europe. The neo-colonialists encroach and flatten the cultural spaces with globalization.
Life in the twenty-first century dances to a different tune now. A second-hand experience of Cairo’s cuisines can be easily accessed in bite-sized Instagram reels. So, why would you care to read Syed Mujtaba Ali in this metamorphosed world? And, why do we feel the urgency to introduce Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Jole Dangay to an English speaking audience? Nazes Afroz speaks with writer and artist Aninda Rahman about the relevance of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s works today.
Aninda Rahman: Shall we kick off with a ‘good night’? A sort of a homage to that funny anecdote in Jole Dangay, where Abul Asfia approaches Syed Mujtaba Ali with a good night. We find it hilarious because we’re all too familiar with the desperation of the native bourgeoisie to imitate colonial etiquettes. To what extent do you think this postcolonial sensitivity is required to fully enjoy the writings of Ali, especially Jole Dangay? Because I believe part of the humor comes from our experience with British-India.
Nazes Afroz: Well, Mujtaba Ali himself started writing after 1947, after the British had left the subcontinent. He was about 44 years old when his first book, Deshe Bideshe was published. And to his core, he was very much anti-colonial. That was the reason he left his home. He did not want to get any “education” from the education system that was set-up by the British—that is why he went to Shantiniketan, when Rabidranath Tagore founded Visva-Bharati University in 1923. Keen readers of Mujtaba Ali will always find that in his writing, this entire postcolonial narrative is very strong, in fact, in every book, every piece of writing that he has written, he is against the colonial rule of this land. In Jole Dangay, which I have named as “Tales of the Voyager”, he is writing about the British colonial projects in Africa. For any average Bengali reader, this would be completely new. We did not know about the independence movement of Yemen which he writes in detail in Jole Dangay. So every aspect of his writing is seeped into this deeply anticolonial mindset. So, we can definitely say that it was kind of a postcolonial writing which he started from 1947.
Aninda Rahman: He was a nonconformist in some dominant way of thinking, in getting education, and in subverting the conventional career ladder.
Nazes Afroz: Indeed. He left school in Sylhet where his father was a civil servant: a sub-registrar. Some boys in his school were whipped at the order of the district magistrate. There was a strike called by the students and he joined the strike. His father was called by the district magistrate who said, “You are a civil servant, so you send your son back to school.” He refused. Syed Mujtaba Ali had already written a letter to Rabindranath Tagore by then and had the opportunity to listen to Tagore when he had visited Sylhet. That is how he came to Shantiniketan. And then from Shantiniketan, just think about it, in 1927, how many people from Bengal, which is so far away from Afghanistan, would travel, would take this really arduous journey to Afghanistan to teach? He would go there, and the only reason, he writes in Deshe Bideshe in detail towards the end, he wanted to save some money. He wanted to go to Germany for his PhD. And then there is the entire story of him meeting the German Ambassador in Kabul when he was nearly starving to death. He was starving and he went and met the German Ambassador. And the German Ambassador asked him, why do you want to go to Germany for your higher education, for your PhD? And he wrote there that of course I had told the Ambassador, Germany would be the best place for me to go for the subject I had chosen. But at the same time, he wrote, there was another reason I had not told him. And the reason was he absolutely did not want to go through any British education system. So, in that way he was a nonconformist.
If we track his life, we will see that he went to Kabul, and in there he lost all his money because of the rebellion against Amanullah. Then somehow he survived that rebellion and came back. He got the Humboldt scholarship. In those days, only a handful of scholarships—two or three—were given from Germany to Indian students. He went to Humboldt and then to Boll. He finished his PhD, and came back to India. Then he went to Cairo to do his post-doctorate at Al-Azhar University. And from there, he went to Baroda. The Maharaja of Baroda visited Cairo and invited him to become the principal of the government college, which is now The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
As I have written in the introduction to “The Tales of a Voyager”, he was once applying for a passport where he got stuck when asked about his profession. And he said that he had scratched his head a lot and said, “Well, quitting my job regularly, that’s my profession.” And that he has done repeatedly.
After the creation of East Pakistan, he went to Bogura and became principal of the Government Azizul Huq College. He wrote a scathing essay opposing the imposition of Urdu as East Pakistan’s state language.
Aninda Rahman: A very important document on the Language Movement in East Pakistan …
Nazes Afroz: As a consequence, he and his family had to leave Pakistan for India overnight. For the rest of his life, he remained an Indian citizen. And he again took various jobs. He moved from one place to another. He was kind of a restless person who did not want to settle down in one place for a long time. He had married at a very late age when he was about 48. His wife was at least 25 years younger to him. His wife lived in Dhaka with their two sons while he continued living in Shantiniketan and in Kolkata till 1971.
So yeah, he was non-conformist in every possible way.
Aninda Rahman: But I think he had some strong preference for non-violence as an anticolonial strategy. I can quote from “Tales of the Voyager”. This part is quite a sermon-like retelling of the history of Mohammad Abdullah Hasan—the Mad Mullah. He was a Somali nationalist and a colonial revolutionary. This particular part, when I read it, I felt it could be taken as a manifesto on nonviolence. In your translation, it ends up as:
“We should never develop the greed to conquer other countries. We should learn from the unjust behavior of others. For two hundred years, we lived under the rule of other people. We knew the pain of subjection. We should never subjugate other people.”
Nazes Afroz: Yes, absolutely. And that came from Rabindranath. Syed Mujtaba Ali deeply believed in Rabindranth’s internationalism and humanism. This is precisely what Rabindranath wrote in his essay on nationalism. Basically he imbibed all these ideas from Rabindranath, his guru, who was almost like his polar star, dhurabatara. This influence possibly originated from his years in Shantiniketan, and being a direct student of Rabindranath.
Aninda Rahman: He took the same ideological stand on Shaw-raj or self-rule that Indians were supposed to get ready for, and here I’m quoting from the book—[Tales of the Voyager]
“In my mind I was getting annoyed with Abul Asfia. Had the man no common sense? As the leader of the group, had he no sense of responsibility? Possibly this was why India was still deprived of self-rule.”
Perhaps he was indicating or hinting towards the upper castes or ashrafs.
Nazes Afroz: Jole Dangay, normally people would read it as a very light read. It’s a very fine read. It’s a travelog. It’s a journey. But at the same time, there are things that are said between the lines. Despite being a light book of travel writing, it has a lot of embedded ideas.
Aninda Rahman: He said that it was intended for young readers.
Nazes Afroz: Yes! This is the only book he claimed he wrote for young adults.
Aninda Rahman: Yet, there are some unexpected insertions of poignant moments and passages. The author’s grief for his deceased brother whom he lost when he was only two—that part brings up tears.
And the part about Palestine, where this person is selling tickets to Jerusalem [inflicts] pain. The hawker describes Jerusalem in ordinary words, but it creates a magical vision of the confluence of three religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. “Can kill three birds with one stone”, he touts. Ali used the word Triveni to mean this confluence. It’s a very interesting transposition: the three rivers Ganga, Jamuna and Saraswati with the three major religions Islam, Judaism and Christianity. This is a very wide worldview he adopted, and I would say, preached for the next generations.
But it stirs up strange emotions to imagine a world that didn’t even know the terrible plight of the people of Palestine, or the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe. The work [the book] is free from these afflictions of historical trauma.
Nazes Afroz: I was actually trying to pin-point in which year he took this journey. I had talked to his sons, but they also did not know. It was important to figure that out. Finally, from his writing in different places, I found out that it was before 1947, actually before the second world war. Later in his life, he wrote much on the second world war perhaps because he knew Germany so well and spoke German like his mother tongue.
Aninda Rahman: There’s no mention of it in the book.
Nazes Afroz: There’s no mention of this in the book or anywhere else. But you can figure it out. So, it had to be before the establishment of Jewish state in 1948, India’s independence in 1947, and the beginning of the second world war in 1939. He started working in Baroda in 1934. So, it had to be in between 1934 and 1938 when he undertook this journey. He was still very young around that time. In Deshe Bideshe, he had described encountering an Afghan customs officer in Jalalabad. He was shocked to hear his snide comments regarding the British as they were almost like sedition. But he soon realized that he was not in British India anymore, but in independent Afghanistan. His entire worldview, particularly his stance against colonialism—have been so well spelt out in Deshe Bideshe He was of course writing small satirical pieces even before Deshe Bideshe was published. He was also trying to tell how different these places were by the 1920-30s. They were fighting colonialism. It’s there in almost all his writings.
Aninda Rahman: This was also the time he went introspective. Like Rabindranath Tagore, he too looked inside, not always at the oppressor. He was looking at the oppressed, the natives. He was critical of his own society as well as religion and communalism etc. One particular part that I find a bit perplexing, and I’m reading from your translation, it’s where he gives a definition of communalism.
“I never liked the idea of favoring any religion. This is called communalism.” He further substantiates, “When the creator of the universe has come up with so many religions, surely all of them have some good in them.” So, as we can see, it’s not always so straightforward. I mean favoring a religion and communalism shouldn’t be the same thing.
Nazes Afroz: I think he was possibly not an atheist, but a theist. He believed in something. But at the same time, he had been critical of organized religion and their oppression though not any particular religion. He had written extensively about his opposition to organized religion in many of his pieces.
The conversation took place in Bangla from this point onwards and has been translated:
Aninda Rahman: I had first read Jole Dangay years ago as a child, but I did not remember anything other than the description of the dish made with cucumber. Years later, it dawned on me that it was zucchini, and not cucumber.
Nazes Afroz: Yes, it is zucchini. People usually begin reading Syed Mujtaba Ali with Deshe Bideshe, then Jole Dangay, and later Shabnam. I did that too and read Jole Dangay for the first time when I was around seventeen. This particular detail stayed with me. I have been to Cairo quite a few times—sometimes for my profession, and other times for pleasure. So, I confided about this dish to my dearest friend there and he informed me, “You won’t find that food in any restaurant.” So he invited me to his home. It was there that I saw it was zucchini. But in Jole Dangay, he had used the Bengali word for cucumber, shosha. Perhaps there was no word for zucchini in Bengali.
Aninda Rahman: It seems that these two words, zucchini and cucumber share a common etymology.
Anyway, I think this book aims to broaden the boundary of nationalism, or the territorial ground of our identity which stems from a confluence of many cultures. It is perhaps wider than what has been narrowly regarded and traditionally dubbed as Bengali or Bangladeshi nationalism. He writes:
“My grandaunt’s stories reminded me that the Greeks had named Socotra as Dioscorides. This in turn reminded me instantly that according to many scholars, the name ‘Dioscorides’ had originated from the Sanskrit word ‘Dwip-sukhadbar’. When the Arabs landed here for the first time they had a conflict with Indian pirates. It was difficult to ascertain for how long that conflict continued, but the heads of the Indian societies had, by then, started imposing an embargo on crossing the seas. Maybe without any help from India, the pirates either slowly disappeared or got integrated with the locals like the way India’s millennia-old connections with Siam, Indochina or Indonesia snapped at some point. Most likely it happened due to the embargo imposed on sea voyages. But the Indians had left a footprint on Socotra; the cows there were of the same breed as those of the Indus valley. It was really strange that humans disappeared in the conflicts of various civilizations but the traces of its domesticated animals like horses or cows lived on for centuries, reminding the curious ones of their original masters. The Mughal-Pathan era of India ended a long time ago, but can we say for how long the roses brought by them will continue to give us fragrance?”
The traveler Syed Mujtaba Ali’s writings show us a glimpse of a cosmopolitan citizen who is not confined to the restrictiveness of nationalism.
Nazes Afroz: What he is referring to is the crisis of Hinduism in the eighth century before the rise of Buddhism. Many kings of North India had converted to Buddhism at that time. This was when the faith of the ruler was also that of the peasant. After the heyday of Buddhism, the revival of Hinduism followed. Newer restrictions and dictums like the prohibition on beef was added much later in the eighth and ninth century. Around this time, the gentrified class of the Hindu society posed a ban on traveling by the sea and threatened to evict from the castes anyone who sailed across the black waters of the sea. Bali and other Indonesian islands have a great deal of Hindu heritage in their culture and majority of their inhabitants are Hindus even today. The national and cultural icon of Indonesia is Ramayana. They retell the story of Ramayana through shadow puppets. Syed Mujtaba Ali had always shown an acumen for cultural sensitivity, which we can also find in Deshe Bideshe. His works had always taken into consideration the plethora of restrictive dictums the Indian subcontinent had to endure throughout the ages. He had written about the history of Afghanistan in Deshe Bideshe: how they were Buddhists initially, then they became Hindus, and Islam reached Afghanistan around the seventh-eighth century. He elaborated on Afghanistan’s deep connection with the rest of the subcontinent despite its separation from it: a linkage buried in earth.
Aninda Rahman: You are quite a traveler yourself too …
Nazes Afroz: In my own travels, I have seen many relics of Buddhism’s past in Afghanistan, in museums and stupas. Buddha’s bones can be found in Afghanistan among other relics. Jalalabad was a great center of Buddhist learning, an epicenter of Buddhist culture.
Before independence, during the 1920s and ‘30s, a trend of viewing history through a lens of Hindu nationalism began which has intensified in recent times. In Boro Babu, Syed Mujtaba Ali writes about the spread of Hinduism that has occurred through blurry images but our historians have shown little interest in our neighboring Afghanistan. Is it because they became Muslims? He writes about this in Deshe Bideshe. His education, perspective as a cosmopolitan citizen, and his outlook on philosophy and history has enabled him to point to our narrow-mindedness repeatedly. This has only increased with time and I wonder how he would have reacted to present day India if he was alive today.
Aninda Rahman: So, on one hand he is a cosmopolitan citizen, who has inherited an affinity for the world from Rabindranath but his writings and thoughts always tend to return to East Bengal. His arrival from a country of rivers, and I find this paragraph quite interesting:
“By then my Bangal [People of East Bengal] blood started heating up. Only a Bangal will know what that means. The Ghoti—meaning the people of West Bengal often make a mockery of us. I never take any offense to that. They love our Bhatiyali and we are mad about their Baul songs.”
Here, both senses of unison and separation are at work. He is very affirmative about his own geography.
Nazes Afroz: He is a Sylheti from his heart. His love for Sylhet, and its language Sylheti can be traced in many of his works. The rivers of East Bengal have attracted him many times though he did not live there. After the first 16 or 17 years of his life, he has hardly lived in Bangladesh for long. It is probably in Dhupchaya where he writes about his days in Vienna where he was involved in a research work. His next door neighbor was a Russian who used to play the violin really well. Mujtaba Ali had carried a recording of Abbasuddin to Vienna and one day he was playing the record. After listening to Abbasuddin, his violinist neighbor inquires about this form of music. Mujtaba Ali informs him that it is the folk song of his people. The Russian found it hard to believe that folk songs could contain such fine detail and intricacies. It seems to me that he was always proud of his roots and I believe his affinity for his own origin led him to learn so many languages, 13 of them. He was fluent like a native in many of them—French, German and Russian. He had translated one of Chekhov’s plays to English. But he had always written in his mother language, Bengali.
Littera Magazine: One can feel a different texture while reading Mujtaba Ali’s Bengali prose which is perhaps because he had liberally borrowed words from Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, or European languages. So, as a translator, what challenges did you face in translating a prose that is so enriched.
Nazes Afroz: It was a great challenge. Because when one initially reads Mujtaba Ali, his prose might come across as a bit difficult. But one really needs to immerse themselves in the prose to get a taste of it. This is particularly true for his sense of humor. My approach has been to reread him over and over again. I first read Deshe Bideshe when I was seventeen and began translating it after thirty-five years. I have read the book twice or thrice every year. So, I have read it almost a hundred times and only then could I muster the courage to translate it. It was daunting to tackle his expertise in language. While referencing a text written in archaic French, he would also render it in archaic Bengali, such was Mujtaba Ali’s prowess. I have tried my best to accommodate these nuances in my English translation of his works. Truth be told, no one has written in Bengali before the way Mujtaba Ali did.
Aninda Rahman: When you were translating Mujtaba Ali, you also had to tackle secondary materials like Sukumar Ray which he was referencing. That itself sounds like a difficult task.
Nazes Afroz: I have taken the help of a few, particularly in translating poetry. I can work my way through translating prose, but my translations of poems tend to suffer. I have been generously aided by my friends, and many who are younger than me in translating these poems. I have acknowledged their translation of these poems.
Aninda Rahman: So finally, what’s next?
Nazes Afroz: Many have asked me why I have been translating Syed Mujtaba Ali and I have tried to answer that question in my introduction. My devotion for Mujtaba Ali’s writings developed through my childhood to my adolescent years and it has inspired me in my travels later as an adult. I began traveling to those parts of the world which Mujtaba Ali and Rahul Shankritayan had written about. I first visited Afghanistan in 2002, and in Kabul I was telling my friends about the city’s history from 1928-30. Even the locals were impressed about my knowledge of that particular period, and when they inquired, I was happy to tell them that a Bengali scholar had visited their country in this period and had written about it. My friends then would ask me if there was an English translation so that they could read it. This was my inspiration for translating Deshe Bideshe.
And Jole Dangay was always a favorite of mine. So, I began translating it after Deshe Bideshe. My publisher, Speaking Tiger has been particularly helpful. The publisher, Ravi Singh who was previously the editor-in-chief of Penguin India was quite enthusiastic about Syed Mujtaba Ali. After the publication of the first book, it was his eagerness to spread Mujtaba Ali’s works to a wider audience, and his encouragement that has led to the publication of the UK edition of Deshe Bideshe.
I want to work on a book about Afghanistan that begins with my reading of Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe and concludes with my visits to the country.
Aninda Rahman: You had also worked on Kabuliwalas of Kolkata.
Nazes Afroz: The Kabuliwalas of Kolkata are actually from Afghanistan. That was a work of photography. A lot of research had gone into the project. I want to turn that project into a book someday. I have already completed the translation of Mujtaba Ali’s Shabnam. This too will be published by Speaking Tiger soon.
[The conversation has been edited and abridged at places for clarity.]
