This paper explores textual or historical erasure as a process. In general, what sorts of changes are considered bowdlerization, excision, addition and transcreation, or commentarial reinterpretation? What is left unchanged, and why? What are the various reasons for such “laundering” of a text or its history? Who does the purifying or editing? What are the effects of such changes? And what are possible ways of approaching or judging the phenomenon?
I take as a case the national poet of Bangladesh, a man named Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), whose 12-volume oeuvre of poetry, songs, short stories, plays, lectures, and letters – all of which shows him to have been a Muslim with extraordinary sympathy for the Hindu tradition – has elicited both great admiration and even adoration, as well as great discomfort and critique. I first noticed the bowdlerizing of his compositions when I began working on the poet, discovering that some of the most beautiful English translations of his poetry and songs were not faithful to the original Bengali. My first SCRIPT paper in 2011 was, in fact, on this theme. Now, fourteen years later, after comparing myriad Bengali to English translations, doing my own (I am about to complete an anthology of Nazrul Islam’s work), researching the context of the poet’s life, and studying the translations of his poetry into other languages, such as Urdu, with which Bengali as a language has had a tempestuous relationship, I have a much more nuanced understanding of the stakes involved in raising a maverick visionary poet to the status of national poet.
Politics, inter-religious antagonism, nationalism and national pride, literary rivalry – all of these have had a part in the controversies over Nazrul Islam’s literary output. As a national poet, he is supposed to represent the nation. A select few of his compositions are popular enough almost to have achieved the status of revered religious texts. The higher the esteem in which a text is held, one might say, the more dangerous it can be deemed to be.
Oddly, at the end of this long engagement with the work, literary history, and reception of Kazi Nazrul Islam, I find myself more and more sympathetic to the impetus for erasure.
This paper explores textual or historical erasure as a process. In general, what sorts of changes are considered bowdlerization, excision, addition and transcreation, or commentarial reinterpretation? What is left unchanged, and why? What are the various reasons for such “laundering” of a text or its history? Who does the purifying or editing? What are the effects of such changes? And what are possible ways of approaching or judging the phenomenon?
I take as a case the national poet of Bangladesh, a man named Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), whose 12-volume oeuvre of poetry, songs, short stories, plays, lectures, and letters – all of which shows him to have been a Muslim with extraordinary sympathy for the Hindu tradition – has elicited both great admiration and even adoration, as well as great discomfort and critique.