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This volume puts together literary writings in Urdu and Bangla on the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. The crop is by no means as plentiful as the writings on Partition, but nevertheless quite appreciable, particularly in Bangla. The great advantage of the volume is that it tries to gather the harvest from both the Eastern and the Western wing of Pakistan, in an effort to provide a holistic perspective. Sadly, the writings in Urdu on 1971, except for a few honourable exceptions, are abstract, inane and escapist.

The written word is a silent medium—we can only see the words on the pages of a book, cannot hear their sounds. We create those sounds in our minds while reading the book. As we slowly move from one word to another, one sentence to another, one paragraph to another, we gradually grow accustomed to listening to the words in our mind. Loud, shrill, gruffy, with different accents—we assign voices to characters, and sounds that we have created while reading assume texture.

In the Urdu world and in the world of Indian culture in general Sanjiv Saraf needs no introduction. He is the man behind Rekhta, the organization that has become synonymous with all things Urdu. Apart from its annual festival, the Rekhta website has become the go to site for all lovers of Urdu and now it is also attracting students and scholars. Through their digitization programme they are preserving books in private and rare collections all over the world. They spent weeks in my father’s library filming all the important books and manuscripts he possessed.

The self that remains rooted at the place of origin is a different one from the identity that the world creates. Home becomes a place one constantly returns to and the division of the self that occurs when one remains away from home magnifies on encountering one’s old self. Concepts regarding the definition of the self and one’s identity change with time but more importantly are dependent on the location and the surroundings. Kamila Shamsie through her writings has tried to discover Pakistan.

The opening lines of many books have acquired iconic status. From Dickens to Daphne du Maurier, the first lines have entranced the reader, and brought him back to the book time and again. Of all these, few can match the effectiveness of the first line in its simplest form ‘Can I tell you a story?’ or ‘Once upon a time….’ In an instant, the imagination is captured; we want to know ‘What comes next?’

Every now and then there is a spurt of interest in Amarushatakam, a compilation of a hundred love poems, dated around the 11th century AD. If viewed as part of the Indian literary tradition, such poems singing the praise of love, personal and yet universal, to which even an ordinary person can relate, have a hoary tradition.  Amarushatakam and its precursor Sringara Shatakam by Bhartrahari, follow motifs and approaches similar to Hala’s Gathasaptasati in Prakrit (dating to the 1st century AD).