Books

In Conversation with Rahul Soni on Babu Bangladesh!

Numair Atif Choudhury’s debut novel, Babu Bangladesh!, a decade and a half in the making, was published in June 2019. The author’s untimely demise in 2018 has left us with this remarkable work of literature as his final memory. Rahul Soni, Senior Commissioning Editor at HarperCollins India, worked on this project, and he was kind enough to take the time to tell us a little more about the book as well as the author.

Q1: It’s unfortunate that Numair isn’t with us today. As his editor, you must have had a chance to interact with and meet him. Can you tell me a little about how he was in person?

Rahul: I only got to meet Numair once, unfortunately. This was a while before we had signed on to publish Babu Bangladesh! I had only read the Prologue to the novel at that point, courtesy his literary agent, and even then I knew that this was a book we absolutely had to publish, that this was an extraordinary talent.

So when Numair happened to be visiting Delhi we set up a meeting. What I was immediately struck by was his enthusiasm and passion for the book, for the story – for Bangladesh. What I was also struck by was that – unlike most people who write – he was in absolutely no hurry to get published. He told me he’d written the first draft of this story when he was still in the US, still very young. That was almost 15 years ago. But that he soon realized that he would have to come back to Bangladesh and learn more about the country, about its people, its history and culture – about everything. And so he spent many years working – researching, learning, scrapping and rewriting, until it became a different book altogether, a far more capacious, generous and ambitious book than it started out as.

He was still working on the final draft when he passed away, refusing to submit it to his agent until he’d got everything just right. It’s one of my great regrets that I didn’t get a chance to interact with him more, and to work with him more deeply on Babu Bangladesh! But that one meeting and, of course, his work has left a deep impact on me.

Numair Atif Choudhury

Q2: Fifteen years is a lot! I’m sure the book grew and evolved with him over that period of time. In what sense is the final version different from its earliest draft?

RS: I haven’t seen the earliest draft, so I don’t really know if I can answer this question. But a hint at the answer lies in what I’d mentioned earlier. That Numair, soon after finishing the first draft, became dissatisfied with it – that he soon realized that he would have to come back to Bangladesh and learn more. I imagine there was a limited sort of viewpoint that the first draft may have had – a viewpoint that comes from distance, privilege, lack of knowledge or any combination of these factors, and something that we all too often find in first-time writers and/or “diaspora” writers. It’s to his immense credit that he could see and recognize that shortcoming in vision (again, note that I’m speculating here) for what it was and had the dedication to his craft and the story that he spent all these years working on himself / working on it. It’s a truly rare thing, and something I have the highest respect for…

Q3: The character, Babu Bangladesh, from my understanding, is a figure who became known for his involvement in humanitarian causes. Why, then, is there so much controversy surrounding him?

RS: You mean he’s a figure of controversy in the world of the novel – not that the novel itself is controversial, I should clarify. Without giving too much away (this is a crucial plot point), let us just say that his methods of supporting humanitarian and “good” causes were, umm, unorthodox. We should leave it to readers to find out how exactly this happens in the final act of the book, but clues are scattered throughout and those who are attentive will be able to pick up the Babu-trail…

Q4: Without giving away too much, does this narrative serve to inspire or is it more of an exposé regarding the true nature of things (given Babu’s unorthodox practices), or both? Or is simply to be read as a work of fiction?

RS: It should be read as a work of fiction, of course. With as much or as little to do with “real life” and the “true nature of things” as any good work of fiction does – which is to say, it serves to illuminate reality in new / different ways.

Q5: Lastly, do you feel the book encapsulates the true essence of modern-day Bangladesh? If so, what aspects of it?

RS: I wouldn’t be qualified to speak about the true essence of Bangladesh, modern-day or otherwise, really. But I would say that Babu Bangladesh! is more than just a novel about Bangladesh – which it also, gloriously, comprehensively, is. In the same way as One Hundred Years of Solitude is not just about Macondo … Babu Bangladesh! is also a novel about the way nations form and work, about political idealism and corruption, about capitalism and its perils, about not losing sight of one’s roots and culture and history, about art and about architecture, about our planet and what humankind is reducing / has reduced it to … I could go on and on. In what it aspires to be, this is a novel about everything. And if it doesn’t quite get all the way there (for what can?) it is still a brilliantly ambitious work, a work of great boldness and imagination, and quite stupendous for how far it actually manages to go.

Babu Bangladesh! by Numair Atif Choudhury now available online and in stores

 

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