When Babu Bangladesh! was published in 2019, it was already too late to celebrate the brilliance of Numair Atif Chaudhury. His untimely de...
When Babu Bangladesh! was published in 2019, it was already too late to celebrate the brilliance of Numair Atif Chaudhury. His untimely death in 2018 robbed the world of what could have been one of the most luminous literary voices from Bangladesh, and maybe even all of South Asia.
In an expansive narrative, Babu Bangladesh! opened up a portal that not only allowed the reader to revisit the tumultuous past of Bangladesh but also get a glimpse of its future while holding up the challenges of the present. The novel is quite unlike any that have emerged from Bangladesh – it is massive, polyphonic, and humane.
Choudhury is liberal in mixing genres and timelines in the novel, whose story stretches out in every direction to emulate the vastness of Bangladesh’s bloody but proud history in a span of a few hundred pages. This is a work of an indomitable writer – his intelligence and farsightedness burst through on every page, and you are aware of being in the company of a literary work of fantastic magnitude.
I had reluctantly accepted that there wouldn’t be another book by Choudhury, but a pleasant surprise lay in a posthumous collection of eleven of Choudhury’s short stories in Taxi Wallah and Other...Read more
