This story first appeared in Prothomalo

Reading translated works may be tricky. If you are fortunate enough to have an adept translator, skilled in the art, it can be a rewarding experience. And when it’s fiction, you not only get to enjoy a good tale, but also you are initiated into a new culture, new people, new psyche, new customs and traditions, and a whole new world. But if you have the misfortune of reading a second-rate translation, either you are deprived of the richness of the original form and content, or you are left with a misconceived impression of the writer and his works. And second-rate translations are many out there, unfortunately.

Shawkat Hussain, bless him, undertakes translation with his eyes wide open — all senses alert — and so he neither detracts from the original, nor leaves the reader wondering what’s gone missing. And when undertaking the daunting task of translating Tagore, almost a deity to the Bengali literature lovers, there is always the risk of being told that he was ‘just not getting it right’, the stricter adherents of Rabindranath Tagore even considering any lapse to be a nothing less than sacrilegious. But he is no novice. A professor in English literature, fluent in both Bangla and English, there is a confidence in his pen as he takes Tagore to the readers in English.

‘Kabuliwala and other Stories’ arrests the reader’s attention. Of course, Tagore is Tagore and he can’t go wrong. But a translator can. Shawkat Hussain, however, doesn’t.

The translator attempts to be faithful to the original. It is refreshing. Too often translators take it upon themselves to make the original more relatable to the target audience, but in doing so, they do a disservice to both the writer and the reader. The nuances are lost in translation, so as to say, and the writer underestimates the perception of the reader.

And that is why Hussain deserves kudos for staying on track, handing the reader Tagore’s oeuvre in all its subtle shades and hues.

The first in the collection is the enchanting story of a most unlikely friendship between the diminutive little girl, Mini, and the big, brash Kabuliwala. Mini is a disarming little chatterbox whose insatiable inquisitiveness can only be compared to the curiosity of Alice in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

Then there is the Kabuliwala. Back in the day, the Kabuliwalas were traditionally known to be moneylenders coming to green land of Bengal from the faraway rugged Afghan climes. If they lacked the shrewdness of Shylock, they more than made up for that with their stoic persistence. But that’s another story.

Here he would turn up with his big bag slung over his shoulder, jovially chatting with Mini’s father. His bag was full of nuts, raisins and other dried fruit he brought from his homeland. He was a trader, not just a moneylender. It is clear that he has an innate sense of integrity, is kind and honest.

He catches a glimpse of Mini darting around and wants to meet her. After all, we later learn, he has a daughter of the same age back home whom he sorely misses. At first Mini refuses to come in front of him. She is terrified and her fertile imagination quite convinced he is a kidnapper who carries away little children in his big bag. But once Mini’s father convinces her that he is not a kidnapper, she approaches to Kabuliwala tentatively and strike a strong bond of friendship.

The narrator of the story in first person is Mini’s father, and an excerpt can throw light on the camaraderie between ‘the odd couple’:

I saw my daughter sitting on a bench outside the door and talking endlessly, while the Kabuliwala was sitting at her feet and listening to her with a smiling face, and sometimes responding to her in his own broken Bangla. In her five years of life Mini had never had such a patient listener, except for her own father.

Mini’s mother was not so easy-going and bombarded her husband with questions like, “Aren’t there questions of children being kidnapped? Don’t the people of Afghanistan practice slavery? Is it impossible for such a big Kabuliwala to abduct a child?”

If we find Mini’s mother to be a bit of a xenophobe here, we may excuse her because all mothers can be overly protective and anxious. But the racism or discrimination hits hard later on in the story when the Kabuliwala goes to collect money from a debtor. The debtor falsely claims that he owes him no money, a fight ensues and in the heat of the moment, the Kabuliwala stabs the man.

Mini comes running out, crying, ‘Kabuliwala, O Kabuliwala’, as the misjudged man is taken off to jail.

He returns many years later upon his release and wants to meet his little friend. He had got some grapes and raisins from a friend and brought them for her, perhaps forgetting that the years have rolled on and she was not longer that little Mini anymore. It is Mini’s wedding day and no one wants an inauspicious guest to enter the home. He is hurt, but leaves the fruit for Mini.

When he takes a dirty piece of paper from his pocket and shows how he has carried the little hand imprint of his own daughter close to his heart as he goes around Kolkata selling fruit, Mini’s father chokes up:

I forget that he was a Kabuli trader, and that I was a respectable, well-off Bengali… we were both fathers.

In translating this story, Hussain opens a door for the foreign reader, a door to class, culture, conventions, trade, travel and the core of the human heart. He doesn’t have to ‘dumb’ things down for the reader, everything just falls into place.

The other stories are equally evocative and he has selected the tales well.

There is ‘The Professor’. We are introduced to the know-it-all student and Hussain echoes Tagore’s tongue-in-cheek humour well:

Back in college, I was considered by my peers as something of an authority on all subjects. This was mostly down to one thing: I had an opinion about everything. I could be right or wrong, but unlike most people who struggle to express an opinion, I could say yes or no with great force. I wrote critiques, composed poetry, and was as a result an object of envy and respect among my classmates.

And then comes along the smart young professor who promptly bursts that bubble. A debate champion, the narrator proudly presents an essay on Carlyle, dazzling his friends and followers with his brilliance. The professor? Not impressed:

Bamacharan Babu stood up and calmly stated that the part I had plagirised from the well-known American critic Professor Lowell was excellent, and the part that I wrote on my own should be left out completely.

Similar disillusionment and debacles follow, and his admirers drop away one by one. But it takes much more for the narrator to shake off preconceived visions of grandeur.

Then he falls head over heels in love. He surprises himself by not falling in love with his ideal of feminine beauty, in jewellery and fancy clothes, but a girl in “ordinary dress, shoes, book in hand,” an elusive vision that leaves him completely speechless. This was Kiron.

But old habits die hard and he imagines that Kiron must be quite impressed with his intellectual interactions with her father: “in her mind when she tried to measure the immensity of my knowledge, she must have had to look very high.” He finds her household chores and domesticity to be quaint, but plans to elevate her with his intellect and knowledge, teach her, improve her.

But his balloon bursts again, when results of his exams come in and his name is found nowhere. That too he takes in his stride, egoistic enough to imagine exams, results, mundane jobs, mean nothing to the great ones of his ilk. But then it is his modest muse Kiron who has topped the list in the exams. And her beau turns out to be none other than the professor Bamacharan Babu.

There was only one thing to do:

I burned my manuscript, went back home to Kolkata, and got married.

If Tagore is brilliant in his wit and critique of human pride, Hussain is quick at conveying this to the reader, without tripping up on subtle innuendos and underlying cultural ethos.

There are a dozen stories in this collection and Hussain travels comfortably with Tagore as he takes the reader along through ‘The Last Night’, ‘Dowry’, ‘The Wife’s Letter’ and more.

This book is actually a huge contribution to the literary genre of Tagore (yes, Tagore literature is a genre in itself). Hussain himself puts it succinctly in his note at the beginning of the book:

“My real hope is that my granddaughters, Kira and Phoebe, and other young children like them, growing up outside Bangladesh, with little or no knowledge of Bangla, might chance upon this translation, and other translations like this. Hopefully this will be their gateway to Tagore.”

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This story first appeared in Prothomalo

Education has been one of the hardest hit sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP), co-hosted by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), UNICEF, and the World Bank, has prepared a comprehensive report ‘Prioritizing Learning During COVID-19’. Nobel Laureate Prof Abhijit Banerjee, the Co-Chair and one of the panel members of (GEEAP), speaks to Ayesha Kabir of Prothom Alo about the report, the losses done to education during the pandemic and the way ahead.

Q: Education has been one of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic. The GEEAP report suggests one year of lost schooling for a Grade 3 child could mean three years’ worth of learning in the long run. But in Bangladesh, schools were shut for 18 months at a stretch and then another month later. This is perhaps the longest closure of schooling globally. How would that translate into losses for the children?

I think that actually, unfortunately, it was similar in West Bengal where schools were closed from March to November and then again one month. Very similar to Bangladesh actually. And the others parts of India too, have had very long closures. So I don’t think it is that exceptional to Bangladesh.

The reason why the report says what it says, is that we have some interesting evidence from, for example, the earthquake in Pakistan. The reason why that earthquake was important was that it created a relatively temporary break in schooling. If you look at the impact of that, you will see it was much more, much bigger than it should have been. The reason why that happened is that the school system does not seem to notice that this has happened. It acts as if you are in Class 3 and have not been in school for 18 months. You should be in Class 4 now and so they treat you as if you are in the end of Class 4 rather than somebody who has basically not had any education in that time. That means you don’t adjust the pedagogy to where the child is. This idea is also in the report, about teaching at the right level.

The idea is that kids are heterogeneous even within classrooms. But teaching is targeted at the grade level rather than targeted to the child. When you do that, the children who have dropped out of school for one year or 18 months, you are pretending they have not had a major break. Then what you do is you teach them material that they have no access to.

I am not sure of the data for Bangladesh, but the data in India and Pakistan are similar. Many of them are not at the grade level. The kids in Class 3 are actually in Class 1. Nonetheless, you assume they are. These kids were already struggling. Now you teach them a Class 5 text or an end of Class 4 text. That is entirely further way from where they are. So the child feels this is nothing to do with what I can do, it is entirely irrelevant to me. I am not going to learn anything from this. They will give up, the teachers will give up because they find it impossible to communicate this material with the children. As a result, the children will fall much further behind.

The key is to focus on where the kids are and be realistic about it. Start by testing them, make sure you know where they are and start the pedagogy with the assumption that they are not where they are assumed to be. This is especially so with the disadvantaged children. The ones with educated parents, and who have access to classes online, maybe they are still okay, but not for the children from the less privileged background. Some were already in Class 1 or 2 level, maybe Class 3. Now they have fallen behind if anything. But we are pretending they are a year and a half older. They are a year and a half older, but they did not get much of an education in this period. So that means you really need to figure out, is the child in Class 1 level, 2 level, 3 level or 4 level and start teaching they are based on that. That is not a radical idea but an idea that requires systemic participation.

The syllabus needs to be adjusted, you need to somehow send the message through to the teaching community that it is their responsibility for the child to be able to participate in the class and not teach the syllabus. In our experience that has not been done.

Q: Such measures would entail a whole lot of things – policy, teachers’ training, government action and so on. Does the GEEAP report have specific pointers or guidelines in this regard? How could all this be implemented?

It has the general idea of what I have been saying. About Bangladesh, I can say from our experience of working on these kinds of things in India for 20 years now, what really matters is how it is implemented. The teachers by themselves are not going to necessarily step out of the system. The message needs to come from top down. They need to be trained.

One thing is that it is not actually that hard to test kids. The NGO Pratham in India has these tests which they use and which do a pretty reliable job of diagnosing which kids are really not in grade level. It takes 5 or 10 minutes. In 10 minutes you can tell if a child can only read haltingly or can only recognise letters. And then you don’t assume he is in Class 5. You assume he is in Class 1.

The second thing what makes me optimistic (if the government is going to put its weight behind it) is that older children learn faster. It turns out that a fifth grade student who is not at that grade level, but is given instruction and help, will catch up faster than a second grader who has a gap. The fifth grader has the maturity to learn quite fast. It is matter of focusing on that and implementing it.

We did a study in UP India where we find that 50 days of focused teaching for a half a day does more than a year of catching up. So it is not impossible to do it. It just needs the commitment to do it. Right now, suspend the syllabus. We don’t care about learning geography or about China or whatever. We need to learn how to read, we need math, we need fluency and then we pick up from there, focusing attention on a specific set of instructions which are set down not ambiguously, but unambiguously to the teachers, saying that is your job now. I think that is achievable.

Q: Online classes were an alternative, but naturally in a country like Bangladesh only a privileged percentage could avail that during the pandemic, thus accentuating the already existing inequities in education. Can we take away any lessons from this pandemic period where we can address these inequities? The rich-poor divide in education only serves to widen the divide in society as a whole. Can education, if fixed, make a tangible difference?

All the evidence is that it can make a difference. People estimated that the impact of a year of an additional education is 7 or 10 per cent. That means your lifetime earnings every year is higher by 7 per cent or 10 per cent. This is an enormous number and means an additional year of actually delivered education. The problem is that in the education system, the teachers pretend to deliver, the students pretend to learn, but it doesn’t actually happen.

We learned many lessons from the pandemic. One thing is about some version of online education supplement of what is taught in school has the potential of being egalitarian. This is quite an old idea. There was radio teaching in Nicaragua in the late 70s in math. There was an impact evaluation of that by the World Bank that showed there were major gains in learning just from exposure to the radio. It doesn’t have to be hi-tech. It can be radio, it can be text messages.

Most people in Bangladesh have phones, not smartphones, but they can get text messages. Radio is easily available, very cheap technology. Using radio, using TV, using all the other things – text messages, whatever you can. It doesn’t have to be smartphones or laptops or tablets. The evidence of tablets is more mixed that you would imagine. There are evaluations — one laptop per child, they don’t find that much. I don’t think one should make assumptions. We should be open-minded about what technology means. It doesn’t have to mean laptops. It could be radio.

During the pandemic, some of the countries, Cote d’Ivoire and many countries in West Africa produced 250 different lessons on radio. They focused on radio. There is diversity of experiments and you should try to figure out what is feasible, what can reach the largest number of people. Those are useful supplements. When they come home from school, they can still learn from a radio. Those are useful they can be learned from radio or TV. This is much more likely to reach a lot of people because a lot of families have them.

I think maybe the one lesson I would take away from the pandemic is that there is actually scope for doing many things, not using just the conventional education system with school being the centre. School is important partly for socialisation. It’s very important for kids to be with other kids, education is important and all of those things. But for children falling behind, could there be radio classes, could there be TV classes and would this actually help them catch up? Could there be text messages with little puzzles in them coming to their parents or their elder brother or someone? All of these things might work. One of the things we insist in this report is that we need to be open-minded and to experiment and evaluate the experiments and not start with the premise that it has to be this technology or that way of doing things. It is neither — let’s do everything one way or only traditional schooling. Rather we should be experimental.

Q: The extended school closure has affected the girl child in Bangladesh. School closure, economic hardships and the prevailing uncertainties have increased child marriage rates manifold. Can you share your thoughts on education for the girl child, something of which Bangladesh had been so proud given the high enrollment rates?

I guess at this point I am mostly saying that reopening schools and making them attractive are the questions to be addressed. Take the children who have already got married and try to bring them back to the school. We should not give up on them. It would be criminal to give up on them. So priority has to be given to persuading the community to act and bring them back to school. If you are now 14 and you have not been in school since you were 12, and you feel like you have lost all connection to it, it’s going to take some effort to convince you that school is going to be rewarding for you. So part of what I was saying before, is making education at the level of the child. That also addresses this issue. You can be a 14-year-old, you stopped learning at 12 and now let’s say you got married and just have no connection to the education system for two years. At this point, what would it take to make education actually accessible to you? It is not that you can just switch back to where you were. Something else has to be done, whatever that this.

Q: So can you help us see some light at the end of the tunnel in this rather bleak situation?

I think there is light. I can’t give it to you, but if there is commitment, there is light. The commitment has to come from the policy makers.

Thank you. It was my pleasure.

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This story first appeared in Prothomalo

When our leaders, whether in the government or the opposition, try to reassure members of the Hindu community, saying “you are one of us,” this is a blatant example of ‘othering’. They have drawn the ‘self/other’ divide. This in itself is a demeaning form of discrimination. No laws, no police action, no amount of compensation can remove this ‘otherness’ deep-rooted in the social-psyche. It calls for a cleansing of the mindset, a re-evaluation of values, it calls for sensitisation, for education in the true sense of the word, it calls for a human to be human.

‘Othering’ is a phenomenon in which some individuals or groups are labelled as being ‘different’ , not fitting in with the norms of the majority. Othering can be based on age, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, skin colour, political affiliation, culture, etc.

The despicable incidents that have taken place over the last week or so in Bangladesh during Durga Puja and beyond, are damnable consequences of this alienation. Yes, the arson, destruction and consequent deaths may have been the result of certain twisted machinations, may have been pre-planned ploys aimed at disrupting the country’s overall peace and stability. Yes, it could have been instigated with the elections ahead or may have nothing to do with the elections at all. Conspiracy theories abound – who hasn’t been dragged into the picture by the layman’s conjectures – India, China, Pakistan, Awami League, BNP, Jamaat, America… the usual “suspects”. Laymen aside, players or the political blame game are having a heyday.

The authorities have not unearthed the culprits behind the dastardly deeds. Will we ever know who stirred this hornet’s nest of hatred? Maybe, maybe not. Like many other incidents that take place, this too may be swept under the rug, with the next sensational news grabbing the headlines – another Porimoni or any other fiasco to feed our fickle minds. If an honest investigation is carried out, the truth behind the incidents will emerge, no doubt. But then there is that crucial ‘if’.

The bottom line, however, is that such attacks would never have happened, such a twist of incidents could never have been manipulated, if embers of communal bias and bigotry were not already simmering in the mind. Unless the propensity to ‘other’ persons of faith different from the majority was entrenched intentionally or unintentionally in the psyche, this could never have happened. Would I set fire to my brother’s house even if I was paid to do so? Would I attack my sister if someone told me she had been back biting about me? I may confront her, I may argue, I may get to the bottom of the misunderstanding, but certainly not lash out so violently in malice. We are supposed to be civilised, we claim that our civilisation was flourishing while the people in Europe still lived in caves. What has made us regress to the medieval era of burning witches at the stake?

There has been an assiduous indoctrination of the ‘us-them’ perception. A recent columnist in Prothom Alo reminded us of an astute observation by the eminent academic and activist Professor Anisuzzaman. Anisuzzaman had said that during the Pakistan rule, the state had been communal, but the society non- communal. In Bangladesh, he said, both the society and the state had become communal.

Think of the Nazis. Hitler believed in the supremacy of the Aryan race. Think of the black George Floyd who was killed by the brutality of white policeman in Minneapolis, USA. Think of the Rohingyas being beaten, raped and killed in their own land, their homes be razed to the ground in attacks and arson. There are innumerable other such examples around the world. The common factor is that these victims have all been the “others”, the “minority”.

There have recently been demands for a ministry of minority affairs to look after the interests of the minority communities in the country. That makes sense, and yet it is sad. Why should there be a “majority” and a “minority”? We are all people, human beings, men, women, Bengalis, Chakma, Muslims, Hindus, Christian, Buddhist, children, adults, black, white, tall, short, rich, poor … a virtual melting pot of differences. Or more like a pizza – all together on the same crust, but with the beauty of our individualities intact. At the end of the day, we are all humans.

So let’s say ‘NO’ to othering. Whether it is based on religion, gender, economic status, intellect, ethnicity or whatever, let our differences be complementary, not conflicting. When rain falls from above, it cools the bodies of the Hindu and the Muslim alike. When the fields yield crops in abundance, it feeds men and women alike. The rivers flow for all, the waves of the sea lap against the shores of our land, just as they hit the beaches at Brighton or Bermuda. The air we breathe is free for all. We fight in the name of our Creator, yet our Creator knows no discrimination. Nature’s bounty knows no bounds. Let us break away from the shackles of narrow indoctrination. Let us no longer be puppets in the hands of forces who will use us and discard us like soiled rags. Let us live and let live.

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This story first appeared in Prothom Alo

Indian high commissioner Riva Ganguly Das had come to Dhaka almost two decades ago on diplomatic posting. In March last year she returned, this time as the High Commissioner of India to Bangladesh. She is quite impressed by the changes that have taken place over the past 17 years.

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