CAMBRIDGE - Fiction writers focused on Indian culture and characters have a huge audience these days, including Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manil Suri, Anita Desai and her daughter Kiran, and many others. But Bangladeshi voices have been notably absent. Now there's "A Golden Age," a novel of the 1971 war of independence, in which East Pakistan became Bangladesh, by Massachusetts-educated Tahmima Anam. First published last year in Britain, the book was a finalist for the prestigious Guardian First Fiction Award.
Anam, 32, was in town earlier this month on a book tour, and over lunch in Harvard Square she talked about her life and her novel. The story concerns Rehana, an apolitical mother of two idealistic teenagers active in the Bangladesh resistance. Gradually Rehana is drawn into the national struggle out of loyalty toward her children. At the end, she is faced with a decision nearly as awful as that in William Styron's "Sophie's Choice."
Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to socially and politically active parents (her father was a UN official), Anam moved to Paris when she was 2, to New York at 7, to Thailand at 10, back to Bangladesh at 16. She came to Massachusetts to attend Mount Holyoke College, then earned a doctorate in anthropology at Harvard. She moved to London in 2004.
With almost a dozen years in all spent in the United States, Anam speaks English as though she might be from Connecticut or Ohio. She has Bangladeshi citizenship, her parents live in Dhaka (her mother is a human rights activist, her father founder and editor of the largest English-language daily newspaper), and she spends several weeks there every year.
Q. How did you choose this subject?
A. Both of my parents, and many other members of my family, were in the war, and I grew up hearing these amazing stories. At Harvard, I decided to write my dissertation about the war, and spent two years traveling all over Bangladesh, meeting people who had survived the war. I was so obsessed with this war, it felt like the only thing I could write about.
Q. Why a novel, rather than a nonfiction book?
A. I felt that this was a human story that needed character and plot. I wanted it to touch people's hearts, as the stories I had heard had touched my heart. I wanted people to have a visceral sense of what it was like to be there at that time, and I didn't think that nonfiction, for all its beauties and virtues, could do that.
How did you keep the human story from being overwhelmed by the history?
I had big ambitions to write an epic story, with battle scenes and political rallies. But then I decided, "I want to write about how ordinary people become heroic in extraordinary times." The lens focused on Rehana; you only get information about the war when she gets it, and you see the world through her eyes. It is a domestic world. She is worried about her children. That made it a lot easier to determine how much history I would give the reader. In the end, you get very little.
Q. How did you imagine that you would use your training in anthropology?
A. I wanted to do something to help me reconnect with Bangladesh. My parents drummed it into my head: You need to give something back to the country, you have been so privileged. They were very worried that I would lose my ties to the country. Wherever we lived, they would say, "This is temporary, don't get settled here. We are Bangladeshi." I had to take Bengali singing, music, and dancing lessons. I thought perhaps I would work for a nonprofit.
Q. Has living in so many different places created confusion or a sense of richness?
A. I think a bit of both. Wherever I am in the world, I am never completely with all the people I love. In London, I miss my parents and Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, I miss my life in London and my friends and freedoms I enjoy there. It is a perpetual feeling of longing. I have a friend who grew up in rural New Hampshire, and we went to his family home, and he said, "This is where I grew up, this is the room where I was born." I said, "My God, I can't say that." It has helped me become a writer, so I don't resent it. I do feel quite settled in England now.
Q. How has your book been received in Bangladesh?
A. Writing the book has helped me establish my own identity in Bangladesh. Because my grandfather was a famous political satirist, my father runs a big newspaper, and my mother is an activist, people say, "Oh, you're so-and-so's daughter." You're known by your relations, and I always hoped I could do something that would make people see me as an individual.
Q. Do you think you will give something else back to Bangladesh, as your parents wanted you to?
A. Yes. I am hoping to start a creative writing workshop in Bangladesh, to teach once a year for two months, because I want to encourage people to publish. I convinced my British publisher to let me self-publish a small cheap edition of my book in Bangladesh. They were sending over the export edition, and it was too expensive. This would cost $2. We printed 6,000 copies, and they all sold out. There is a great Bengali literary tradition - we have Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate. It would be wonderful if people started to write and consume fiction, to make it easier for writers to be noticed and maybe write for a Western audience.
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.
