Anglophone Writing and Postcolonial Diaspora: Reading Monica Ali,Zia Haider Rahman and Tahmima Anam in Bangladesh and Beyond

Introduction

Ali, Rahman and Anam, the most prominent Bangladeshi-origin diasporic Anglophone writers, are studied in Bangladesh as part of university curricula since they have made a significant contribution to world literature. Very few writers originating from Bangladesh have been able to draw wider scholarship and readership on the global stage. Many critical writings on their works have also appeared in international scholarly journals and anthologies. Their names come first when scholars, both established and emerging, at Bangladeshi universities include writers in courses such as diaspora literature, Bangladeshi writing in English or South Asian literature. However, the critical explorations of their works justify that they belong to a broader site called postcolonialism or transnationalism or world literature. These authors warrant the attention of scholars and critics teaching South Asian Diaspora literature in particular and postcolonial literature in general at various universities across the world.

Born to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1967, Ali was brought up in the UK and has written a great deal about diasporic experiences of people from South Asia. Out of a number of her books, Brick Lane (2003) is still her major work, which has earned her fame as a writer worldwide, and she is recognised as a diaspora author for this novel. Rahman, on the other hand, was born in a rural area of Sylhet, Bangladesh, in 1971, during the Liberation War of Bangladesh and moved to the UK with his family at childhood. His debut novel, In the Light of What We Know, published in 2014, has received both critical acclaim and widespread readership. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1975 and raised in Paris, New York and Bangkok, Anam lives in London at present. She is the author of A Golden Age (2007), The Good Muslim (2011), The Bones of Grace (2016), which together form a trilogy and The Startup Wife (2021). These three fiction writers, who have enriched the realm of Anglophone South Asian literature and more specifically Bangladeshi writing in English, are, to a great measure, migrants, having vast diasporic experiences. To assess their growth and experiences, the diaspora characters of their novels and their in-betweenness, Kral’s (2007) observation is highly pertinent ‘Trapped between two worlds, with one foot on each continent, migrants develop a double identity and somehow gain access, through loss and sometimes trauma, to two different systems and to two radically opposed world pictures’ (73). Ali, Rahman and Anam, as well as the characters of their fictional works, grow a sense of belonging to two different places at the same time, sometimes navigating the locations in their imaginations, which resonate with Kral’s reflections.

The three novelists explored in this article are also widely acknowledged and studied as notable voices in the lineage of Anglophone literature from Bangladesh. The Anglophone literary tradition in the country has a complicated historical trajectory as Quayum and Hasan (2022) note that Bangladeshi Anglophone literature ‘has developed through three historical phases, during which the geographical territory that now constitutes Bangladesh has gone through several political rebirths and renamings: Bengal/East Bengal (1905–11), East Pakistan (1947–71), and Bangladesh (1971–)’ (733). Although the writers touch upon the historical background of the territory, they belong to the third phase of the Bangladeshi Anglophone tradition bearing diaspora identity. Indeed, they have enriched the tradition with their remarkable literary works, drawing global attention. There had been only a handful of Anglophone writers in the first phase, but the number increased to a great extent in the East Pakistan era. A great number of established and young writers in the Anglophone tradition emerged in the Bangladesh phase since 1971, after the independence of the country.

Islam (2020) observes:

English writing in Bangladesh is not as rich as it is in other South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Among these countries, India leads in the international literary scene, since both fiction and poetry by Indian writers and poets are widely read and critically explored around the world. (68)

But Bangladeshi English writers and poets deserve to be studied and critiqued along the lines of the Anglophone tradition of writing in South Asia as well as the world. Although the tradition had setbacks in advancing to the present state, ‘Bangladeshi literature in English has made considerable progress since its inception in the colonial period. It went through a semi-muzzled period during the East Pakistan era and the early decades of the country’s political reincarnation as Bangladesh’ (Quayum and Hasan 2022, 740). One can attest that Bangladeshi English writing has a formidable position because of several renowned figures, including Ali, Rahman and Anam, but still the works from this location merit wider circulation, readership and scholarship. In line with the same note of optimism, Mohua and Mowtushi (2019) claim, ‘Bangladeshi writing in English has become more vibrant and innovative in recent years, with the advent of a younger generation of authors who have adroitly experimented with a wide variety of subject matters, employing an array of narrative techniques from historical realism to magical realism’ (541). Mohua and Mowtushi showcase literature produced in Bangladesh in Literature, Critique, and Empire Today (earlier name Journal of Commonwealth Literature) in the last issue every year, in which they also highlight the legacy and progress of Anglophone literature from the country.

Included in the syllabi of English departments at Bangladeshi universities, usually at advanced levels, Ali’s Brick Lane has been taught for several years. The students in each class, ranging from 50 to 100, depending on the university admission policies, read the novel as part of a course, or sometimes they study it for seminar papers or theses. The novel, dominated by almost all the dimensions of diaspora writing, focuses on how Bangladeshi diasporas in the UK undergo varied experiences. Brick Lane, however, is taught as a text of the course called Diaspora Literature or Bangladeshi writing in English or South Asian Diaspora Literature. Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, which Salman Rushdie calls an ‘everything novel’, as Wood (2014) refers to Rushdie in his review of the book in The New Yorker, is taught as part of the course titled Bangladeshi writing in English. The novel explores love, war, friendship, betrayal and, above all, the challenging life of a young man in several cities of the world, including London, Oxford, New York, Dhaka and Kabul.

Also taught as part of a course called Bangladeshi writing in English, A Golden Age is known as a historical novel, exploring the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, which ‘constitutes the pivot of the national narrative of Bangladesh’ (Chatterjee 2014, 134). The year 1971 comes into being as one of the most important sites of exploration in Bangladeshi writing in English, especially the works of fiction, because the writers highlight the historical event as the bedrock of their narratives. Rahman (2014) also terms the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh as ‘the holocaust of West Pakistan’s conduct in East Pakistan’ (216). The narrator’s father, who is a Pakistani diaspora in the USA, criticises, thus, West Pakistan’s military aggression and genocide perpetrated on the people of East Pakistan during 1971. The protagonist of the novel, Zafar, has a deep connection to the history of Bangladesh, as he is identified in the novel as an illegitimate child of a birangona, a woman who was tortured and raped by Pakistani Army men in the war. Mookherjee (2006), an eminent scholar working on violence against women, especially in war, observes that the birangonas ‘were equated as prostitutes because … like a prostitute a birangona’s sexual activity has been with men outside of marriage’ (440). Because of their identity as birangona, they were scorned, ill-treated, vilified and ostracised in society, although they had been simply victims during the war.

Likewise, Brick Lane elicits an interest among scholars, students and enthusiasts of Anglophone literature in exploring war, violence against women, the struggle of a woman, the idea of home and a sense of homelessness, along with a sense of belonging. Considering all these factors, this article studies major works of these three writers through the lens of postcolonial diaspora to locate their concerns on identity, in-betweenness, homing desire and above all, to identify ambivalence in their allegiance to where they truly belong. The article takes major works of the three fiction writers as primary texts, and recent, as well as important and relevant, scholarly works on the writers, and their works published in reliable journals and books are used as secondary data.

Literature Review

A great number of scholars have examined the works of Ali, Rahman and Anam, and their studies have appeared in prestigious journals and books worldwide. Their novels have been studied through different critical perspectives and lenses, including diaspora, postcolonialism, feminism and so on. Md Rezaul Haque’s article (2022) ‘Beyond national(ist) binaries: The case of Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know’, published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, intervenes in the formation of national discourse. The article focuses on how Rahman looks at the narratives of two nationalisms, Bangladeshi and Pakistani, from diasporic locations. Haque argues that it is a new trend in the study of the relationship between the two nations, encouraging empathy and subverting the notions of age-old antagonisms. Keeble and Annesley (2021) explore In the Light of What We Know and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire to locate globalism, multiculturalism and violence. Published in Parallax, the article (2021) comments on how ‘globalism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ are depicted ‘in Western, capitalist democracies in the early twenty-first century’ (Keeble and Annesley 2021, 81). Rahman’s novel portrays a pessimistic view of the Western capitalist position on globalism and multiculturalism. Instead of presenting any specific event like other South Asian novels, In the Light of What We Know focuses on ‘the slow violence of world-systems’ (82). The novel is a critique, as the article reveals, of globalisation, and it shows the fallacies of ‘meritocracy’ and capitalism.

Anam’s novels are studied from different perspectives, especially situating her works in the South Asian and diaspora reality. In her article published in South Asian Review in 2014, Antara Chatterjee reflects on diaspora, nationalism, globalism and so on as found in Anam’s works. The article focuses on Anam’s preoccupations with identity; her works represent the formation of identity in Bangladesh, which is distinct from other South Asian countries. Chatterjee argues about Anam’s deliberations on nationalism from the position of displacement and the case of agency in her writing. The novels that the researcher selects for the article are A Golden Age and The Good Muslim, both of which deal with Bangladesh and its complicated relationships with Pakistan, identity, nationhood, dislocation and so on. In another article titled ‘Writing Feminist Hermeneutics through Liminality: A Reading of Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age’, Dwivedi (2022) extends a pessimistic overview of the postcolonial societies imbued with, among others, violence, violation of human rights, discrimination and marginalisation of women, which Anglophone writers like Anam demonstrate in their works. The article critiques A Golden Age, which ‘investigates the socio-political currents that fuelled and drove the nationalist project of Bangladesh’ (Dwivedi 2022, 176). The author critically looks at the nationalist project and the juncture of the socio-political history of South Asia, which, as Dwivedi observes, ‘creates a feminist hermeneutics of nationalism’ (177). The link between the personal and the political, as well as the social, has always been conflictual and has therefore complicated the lives of South Asian people.

Ali’s works, especially Brick Lane, have drawn wider attention from both local and global scholars than other texts by Bangladeshi origin writers dealing with diaspora reality. In her article ‘To know what’s what: Forms of migrant knowing in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’, published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing in 2009, Angelia Poon examines the migrant experience of Bangladeshi people in London represented in Brick Lane. The article focuses on how claims to knowledge are connected to the experiences of the Bangladeshi community in diaspora. It is asserted that the migrants go through strange experiences in new locations, subsequently processing them in their everyday life. The concepts of home and identity are also explored in the article. In ‘Cosmopolitanism, religion and ethics: Rereading Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’, Lydia Efthymia Roupakia discusses the position of faith in relation to politics and morality. In this context, she refers to the incompatibility of Western liberal values with non-Western social norms. The article also explores cosmopolitanism in the context of religion and politics, as Roupakia (2016) observes, ‘While the meaning of cosmopolitanism remains contested, increasing recognition of the important role of religion in international politics poses new challenges for those interested in theorizing world citizenship’ (645). Reflections on how cosmopolitanism functions and how religions make an impact on world politics, posing a threat to the nations’ citizenship, are prevalent in the article. In order to examine the text in the context of cosmopolitanism, Roupakia draws on Stuart Hall’s ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, an approach to complex but pragmatic belonging to familial relationships in a cosmopolitan location. Nazneen’s ethical dilemma of belonging to London and Bangladesh resonates with Hall’s concept of cosmopolitanism, on which this article focuses.

Apart from the aforementioned scholarly interventions on the three novelists, some other critical works include Lorna Fitzsimmons’s ‘The Allegory of the Iron Fist: Transnational Ecofeminism in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’, published in English Studies in 2017; Hannah Ming Yit Ho’s ‘Resilient women: transnational homes and identities in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age’, published in South Asian Diaspora in 2023; Xin Yan Chew and Moussa Pourya Asl’s ‘The poetics of identity making: precarity and agency in Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim’, published in Journal for Cultural Research in 2024; and Chew Xin Yan and Moussa Pourya Asl’s ‘Precarious Lives and Resisting Women: A Butlerian Reading of Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age’, published in Women’s Studies in 2023. Although the scholars have studied the novelists and their selected works individually and on certain aspects, studies on the three authors together are not found, except Fayeza Hasanat’s ‘Religion, Diaspora and the Politics of a Homing Desire in the Writings of Zia Haider Rahman, Tahmima Anam and Monica Ali’, published in Asiatic in 2016. Hasanat reflects on Rahman’s preoccupations with home, Anam’s ideas about the blinded soul and Ali’s representation of radical frictions amidst diasporic consciousness (Hasanat 2017, 57). All these research articles mentioned here examine the works of these three novelists to locate and explore discrete subject matters or issues from various perspectives. Ali, Rahman and Anam are such powerful voices of Anglophone, diaspora, transnational and postcolonial literature that they can be reread from new angles or perspectives. With reference to the previous research work, this article attempts to identify the aspects and concepts in context to postcolonial diaspora common as well as distinct in all of them and analyse their works in order to situate them on the critical framework of Bangladeshi Anglophone literature and on the world stage. The article also attempts to shed new light on the areas which other scholars have addressed in some measure.

Ali, Rahman and Anam: Bangladeshi Origin Diaspora Voices

Ali, Rahman and Anam are studied as both Anglophone and diasporic writers, who represent Bangladesh and its cultural cartography throughout the world. This article highlights how their works are explored by established and emerging Bangladeshi scholars and graduate students at universities across the country, how their novels are critiqued and how the students and scholars respond to different issues and concerns ensuing from their texts. It is also argued that beyond Bangladesh, these Bangladeshi Anglophone fiction writers deserve more critical attention. And it is also argued that Bangladeshi scholars intend to study the novelists through the lenses of diaspora and Anglophone tradition, although there are other strong frameworks through which they can be evaluated. In this context, Eva Hoffman’s remarks, as quoted by Quayson (2013), resonate with their diaspora position:

All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured: no geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservations. Later, of course, we learn how to be more parsimonious: how to parse ourselves into constituent elements, how to be less indiscriminate and foolish in our enthusiasms. (qtd. in Quayson 2013, 149)

As diasporas, no one can escape from their memories of roots, the places where they are born and from where they have come to the host country. At some point, they become nostalgic for their days of growing up in their motherland and what they have achieved there, but gradually their memories diminish. Ali, Rahman and Anam’s positionality can be traced through these cutting-edge remarks about diaspora reality. The novelists, however, may also be studied from multifarious lenses as their works contain numerous issues and concerns of the world, which prominent literary figures address in their works. For example, the novels by Ali, Rahman and Anam underline the 1971 Liberation War, and as the Bangladeshi students explore them, they attempt to look back to the event seriously, sincerely and carefully. In In the Light of What We Know, Rahman (2014) presents the horrors of the war: ‘As for Bangladesh, with three million dead, hundreds of thousands of women raped, and an entire generation of its professionals, its engineers, its doctors, its thinkers and doers exterminated, that poor country was hobbling on its infant feet’ (219). The atrocities committed by the Pakistani Army and their local collaborators are unprecedented in history. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, cities were burnt, houses were torched, and women were raped. In Bangladesh, there are, however, a great deal of narratives on the war, because this is connected to the independence of the nation. Well-known poets and writers such as Shamsur Rahman (1929–2006), Syed Shamsul Haq (1935–2016), Hasan Azizul Huq (1939–2021), Akhteruzzaman Elias (1943–1997), Nirmalendu Goon (1945), Selina Hossain (b. 1947) and Rudra Muhammad Shahidullah (1956–1991) have contributed a wide range of poetry and fiction on the Liberation War. The scholars and the students look into the past with a careful and critical eye as the works dig into the most important national event.

Teachers of literature departments at Bangladeshi universities often bring the issue of diaspora nationalism to the classroom for an elaborate discussion, and the students sometimes analyse the characters of the novels through such critical lenses. As already introduced, precisely though, Ali, Rahman and Anam live in the West, and they are well familiar with the quotidian experiences of the people belonging to diaspora communities, especially the ones from Bangladesh living in European countries and the Americas. As a result, they delineate the characters representing the people from the Indian subcontinent and, more specifically, from Bangladesh. Mishra’s (2007) observation about diasporic reality subscribes to how these writers reminisce about their rootedness: ‘Diasporic writing often recalls a moment of trauma in the homeland’ (12). Ali, Rahman and Anam have chosen and adapted to diasporic life under certain circumstances, but they go back to their past memories about the homeland, which sometimes appear as traumatic.

The writers living in diasporic locations and breathing in the air of the West depicted the real struggles, challenges and sufferings of the diaspora people. Their understanding of diaspora life is not similar to the way people in the countries of origin hold a view about the countries of migration. Before migration, the people from native countries form an illusion about the host countries, but after migration, their dreams are devastated in many cases, because they miss the love and care of their motherland. With a Bangladeshi origin at the backdrop, the three writers have navigated countries and continents, so they have been able to realise the nuances of socio-cultural-political life in both native and host countries. Migration takes place for multifarious reasons, but the migrants at some point in their lives fall into a crisis of identity and representation. Ali, Rahman and Anam have faced this reality in their personal life and therefore portrayed the pictures of the people in diaspora in their leading literary pieces.

Theoretical Underpinning

In his London Review of Books lecture at the British Museum, James Wood offers a new definition of postcolonial literature ‘that moves between and powerfully treats, questions of homelessness, displacement, emigration, voluntary or economic migration’ (qtd. in Preston 2014). A profound sense of homelessness makes the people of diaspora communities anywhere in the world feel inferior, as they think that they belong neither here nor there—neither in their country of birth nor in the land in which they are currently living. Hence arises a concept of postcolonial diasporas, a combination of diaspora and postcolonial studies. Keown et al. (2009) point out:

Diaspora has become an increasingly ‘diasporic’ concept within postcolonial studies during the past decade. The term once referred specifically to the dispersal of the Jews, but within contemporary cultural analysis the term is now more likely to evoke a plethora of global movements and migrations. (1)

The concept, diaspora, has taken various shades of meaning over time and across disciplines; it is now deeply associated with postcolonial studies. The people who have migrated from different countries to a new land form a community in which they receive new identities as diaspora, and their situations and experiences are critically examined through the lens of postcolonial diaspora. ‘Postcolonial diasporas’, as Keown et al. (2009) define, ‘draw together the parallel and equally contested fields of postcolonial studies and diaspora studies’ (1). This article, to a great degree, relies on postcolonial diasporas to examine the defining novels of the leading Bangladeshi Anglophone and diasporic writers.

Exile, immigration, displacement and diaspora have been theorised in a great many different ways. As a result, the degree of sadness in the sense of homelessness differs from person to person, but there is no denying that almost all diaspora people feel homeless, exiled and displaced—at least at certain moments in their life. Said (2012), thus, reflects on exile and homelessness, ‘Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’ (155). There is a marked distinction between forced homelessness and voluntary homelessness, the latter being milder as far as the degree of sadness is concerned. But no one can deny the fact that the people in diasporic spaces intensely feel the pangs of leaving their home and then also returning to their roots from the host land.

It is worth noting that ‘The desire to return, after so long away, is gladly irrational, and is perhaps premised on the loss of the original home’ (Wood 2014). At some point, the return to the landscape of their childhood becomes difficult, even impossible, for the diaspora people, since they have, by this time, grown a strong sense of loss about their home as well as some gain about the diasporic location. Brah (1996) argues:

Where is home? On the one hand, ‘home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of ‘origin’. On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of a locality. (188–189)

Here, some crucial observations about home are offered—home is, in essence, more a place of imagination than it is a geographical location; it is, however, also ‘a place of no return’. Furthermore, home may be looked at as the experience of a person living in a certain place for a long time. What is more engrossing about this observation is that it is difficult for an immigrant to launch a journey back to what they ascribe as home.

At the end of the novel Brick Lane, Nazneen, the central character, expresses her desire to stay in London, holding a similar stance as reflected in Wood’s statement. Similarly, Razia, another character, is also excited about England, as she expresses her position about the diaspora life, ‘This is England … You can do whatever you like’ (Ali 2003, 413). When everything is settled about the return of the whole family from England to Bangladesh, even aeroplane tickets are also purchased, Nazneen wonders if it is impossible for her to go back to where she has come from, as Ali (2003) writes, ‘Nazneen examined the sloping red letters of the Biman Airlines logo on the thick wallet. She ran her fingers over each ticket and was surprised how flimsy they were, how lacking in importance’ (353). To Chanu, tickets bear confirmation of their return, but to Nazneen, they are just some small pieces of paper, signifying nothing. Moreover, other circumstances, including deep connections of their later generations to the language and culture of the host countries and people, also impel them to decide to live there forever and not to think about returning to their original lands.

Many diaspora people experience a sense of ‘secular homelessness … in which the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened, perhaps happily, perhaps unhappily, perhaps permanently, perhaps only temporarily’ (Wood 2014). In this kind of homelessness, which is markedly different from ‘tragic homelessness’, people do not undergo exile or undertake forced migration. The people experiencing ‘secular homelessness’ that Wood also calls ‘transcendental homelessness’ do not have strong ties to any particular country, because the migrants happily or unhappily move back and forth between different countries. The diaspora people do not go through similar experiences as far as their mental state and adaptability are concerned. Mishra (2007) argues, ‘All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way’ (1). The statement justifies the dismal condition of diaspora communities in the foreign land, but their sorrows and sufferings are varied. Mishra asserts that happiness among the diasporas is a rare case. A diaspora, Mishra (2007) further claims, is ‘uprooted’ and an ‘aimless wanderer in search of home’ (13). When someone feels displaced, they think that they have no place of their own where they can feel at home, secure and comfortable.

Attachment to homelands or diaspora varies and depends on how rich or poor the country of origin or the host country is. Here, the variety of diaspora, which has already been discussed, is a factor for identifying the range or level of attachment. Gal et al. (2010) observe:

The nature and the intensity of the attachment to the homeland, too, are manifold. We find poor or weak orientations, but on the other hand there are also rich, deep connections between diasporas and homelands … the greater the contrast between the modernity of the host country and relative backwardness and conservatism of the country of origin, the weaker the attachment. By the same token, when the homeland is relatively developed and dynamic, and somehow attuned to the emigrants’ destination, the diaspora tends to consistently sustain the homeland and cherish its call. (xv)

If the country of origin is less developed and goes through numerous crises and challenges, including poverty, conflicts, clashes, violence, conservatism and militancy, the diaspora people’s attachment to the host country becomes stronger and deeper. If the host country, on the other hand, has fewer facilities than what the emigrants expect and anticipate, their attachment to their homeland grows stronger and more intense. Hence arises a new phenomenon that Gal et al. (2010) call ‘diaspora nationalism’ (xv), which marks differences among emigrants in showing allegiances to the homeland or the host country.

Anthony D. Smith’s definition of diaspora nationalism is important in examining the South Asian diasporas in the UK and the USA, and Ali, Rahman and Anam’s novels portray several characters who may be assessed through Smith’s concept. Thus, Smith (2010) defines diaspora nationalism:

Accordingly, we can define diaspora nationalism as an ideological movement to secure for a self-defined ethnocultural population collective autonomy, unity and identity by restoring its members to their historic homeland. As such, it is a form of ethnic nationalism, and like all other forms, it is relatively modern. (4)

The diaspora communities in their host countries sometimes face a dilemma to expose their attachment to the country in which they are currently living or the country from which they have come. Various factors are responsible for their dilemma, since many of them do not want to return to their homeland, but, at the same time, the host country does not treat them as they anticipate and desire. It is also found that a certain segment of diasporas decides on their nationalism after comparing numerous issues between the two countries. Nazneen, Chanu and some other characters in Brick Lane have different attitudes to the homeland and the host country—their sense of nationalism varies; Nazneen decides to stay in England, whereas Chanu returns to Bangladesh. Chanu believes that home can provide him with everything that he wants, ‘But when we’re back home, we won’t need to think about these things. Back home we’ll really know what’s what’ (Ali 2003, 388). Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know and Anam’s A Golden Age also offer the same reality in which the sense of nationalism of the characters varies.

Nationalism is one of the pivotal concerns of postcolonial literature, and the South Asian writers, including the diaspora ones, have offered their own views about it in their works. In this respect, nationalism can be understood in alignment with Anglophone writing from this part of the world, postcolonial diaspora and transnational literature. Ali, Rahman and Anam have also shown concerns about nationalism in their novels. In understanding their works from the perspective of nationalism, it is relevant to look into how Dipesh Chakrabarty extends his thoughts about it. In line with Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of ‘pedagogic moment of nationalism’, Chakrabarty locates two forms of nationalism: pedagogic and performative. His reflections on these two forms of nationalism resonate with how the people of postcolonial locations, especially the South Asians or the postcolonial diasporas, develop their sense of nationalism. Chakrabarty (2000) observes:

The history and nature of political modernity in an excolonial country such as India thus generates a tension between the two aspects of the subaltern or peasant as citizen. One is the peasant who has to be educated into the citizen and who therefore belongs to the time of historicism; the other is the peasant who, despite his or her lack of formal education, is already a citizen. This tension is akin to the tension between the two aspects of nationalism that Homi Bhabha has usefully identified as the ‘pedagogic and the performative’. Nationalist historiography in the pedagogic mode portrays the peasant’s world, with its emphasis on kinship, gods, and the so-called supernatural, as anachronistic. But the ‘nation’ and the political are also performed in the carnivalesque aspects of democracy: in rebellions, protest marches, sporting events, and in universal adult franchise. (10)

The pedagogic nationalism, which is a construct and the essence of which is taught, is a given history that the postcolonial people are instructed to follow. Performative nationalism, on the other hand, is a spontaneous lived experience of everyday life. The nationalism that is taught by the parameters of Western ideologies contrasts with how the ‘peasants’ of the subcontinent, the subalterns, form their sense of nationalism. To them, a deep sense of nationalism grows from the deep attachment to their land, culture, participation in the nation’s events and adherence to the state’s historical trajectory. From this binary, the elites and the peasants exhibit their nationalist spirit in a distinctive manner. For the elites, ‘nationalism was inseparable from their aesthetic experience of the phenomenon. But the aesthetic moment, which resists the realism of history, creates a certain irreducible heterogeneity in the constitution of the political’ (2000, 177–178). Ali, Rahman and Anam’s nationalism is intrinsically connected to their aesthetic experience and progress. Their characters in the novels, however, hold both pedagogic and performative nationalism.

Although there is ‘bilateral and multilateral Southasianism’ (Shakya 2022, 163), among the nations in South Asia, people’s sensibilities on national belonging are both common and varied. Although historically deeply related, the South Asian countries have their own historical progress as well, and their nationalist sensibilities have grown in distinctive ways. One of the common characteristics is that there is performativity of ‘coercive nationalism’ in South Asian countries. Shakya (2022) claims that:

…coercive nationalism imbibes in itself the hegemonic power to establish a few elites as ‘representatives’, ‘leaders’ and ‘visionaries’ of the nation-state whose achievements or perceived contributions will be celebrated at the expense of all others. The majority are often mere bystanders in this milieu of performative beings, and their rise or fall will not matter significantly to their nations. (164)

The coercive nationalism resonates with Bhabha’s pedagogic nationalism, which Chakrabarty has elaborated in Provincializing Europe. The atmosphere that the people in power and the elites create in a country impels the common people to believe in whatever they prescribe about the nation, leadership, representation and so on. Sometimes, the general citizens attempt to put up resistance against the hegemonic behaviours of the elites, but there always seems to be the dominance of punctilious design towards leadership and governance. Since the Independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the people of the country have witnessed this kind of volatile behaviour of the politicians in their efforts to govern the country. Rahman and Anam have implicated the notions in their works, and Ali’s Brick Lane also portrays some realities of the country through diasporic characters. The novels explored in this article exhibit how the characters maintain pedagogic or coercive nationalism, no matter where it happens from diasporic locations.

Conclusion

The three novels Brick Lane, In the Light of What We Know and A Golden Age, and their authors Ali, Rahman and Anam are worth studying through the sites called diaspora, postcolonialism and the stream called Bangladeshi writing in English. The central characters of the novels—Nazneen in Brick Lane, Zafar in In the Light of What We Know and Rehana in A Golden Age—have a ‘homing desire’ (Brah 1996, 177), and they are not in a position to return to the land of their birth. Brah (1996) illustrates the concept thus:

The homing desire, however, is not the same as the desire for a ‘homeland’. Contrary to general belief, not all diasporas sustain an ideology of return. Moreover, the multi-placedness of home in the diasporic imaginary does not mean that diasporian subjectivity is ‘rootless’. I argue for a distinction between ‘feeling at home’ and declaring a place as home. (194)

This is indeed an apt observation about home, homing desire, feeling at home, and a sense of rootlessness. The characters in the aforementioned novels are certainly concerned about the idea of home, but in the diasporic imaginary, they gradually turn away from the concept of single-placedness of home. However, their country of birth, which they can never forget, comes to their mind as home over and over again. In the end, the return to the origin becomes, in almost all cases, impossible, but the desire is eternal and unending.

Ali, Rahman and Anam are iconic figures of Bangladeshi writing in English who depict the reality of the diasporic world and the postcolonial reality. And their seminal works Brick Lane, In the Light of What We Know and A Golden Age must be a valuable addition to world literature, and there is much in them to study, teach and critique through the lenses of diaspora, postcolonialism and Anglophone literature. The scholars become interested in discovering the distinguishing characteristics of the novels while critiquing them as works of the diaspora category. In such a state, the students respond to the questions with interest, attempting to find how the writers became diasporas, and as diaspora writers, what differences they have brought to their work, or if any of the characters of their novels represent them. The students also discuss the novels critically, relating them to some other great works of diaspora or postcolonialism as well as to critical essays on the texts. The scholars and students also attempt to examine Ali, Rahman and Anam’s novels from different perspectives of diaspora studies or postcolonial diasporas—such as a sense of homelessness, the concept of home, a sense of belonging, the desire for homeland, ambivalence, nationalism and so on.