15 18 arts & letters

Editor’s Note

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n about less than a week, the Pahela Baishakh celebrations will be over and the summer heat will replace the calming Falgun wind. Arts & Letters wishes its readers a very happy Baishakh in advance and hopes the celebrations this year will he held in high spirits all over the country without any untoward incidents like last year.

Ahead of the official beginning of the sultry summer heat, this issue takes a look at the theme of love, which is so ubiquitous in the arts of this region, through a translated poem and a literary reflection written by a budding author. The poem, written in the 1970s, describes the emotions of a man waiting for his girlfriend.

It’s highly romantic yet modern.

The nonfiction, on the other hand, strikes more with its cer-

INSIDE

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Abul Hasan Spoons like your eyes rest on the placid table and my watch – the star of a blue dial is glowing dimly in my wrist!

I look like a tourist now or like an over-zealous journalist.

At this moment, I have flicked the pains of waiting from the ashes of my cigarette into a black ashtray – those slushy pains, soft like dew!

Won’t you come to the restaurant today, Swati?

ebral touch than its emotions, verging often on the absurd.

There are also a feature on an art exhibition, and a book review.

But most importantly, this issue gives adequate space to a critical piece on the Indiana Jones movie series that offers a different reading of the role the iconic hero plays. In Anvar Alikhan’s reading, the protagonist looks more like a plunderer than an archaeologist. l

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Elegy for the waiting man

Arts & Letters wishes its readers a very happy Baishakh in advance

Art Review

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The cakes, soft and green as your words, are kept neatly on a saucer.

And some spoons rest like your eyes!

The Chinese curtains are fluttering like your laughter while an impatient butterfly, flying off the decorative patterns of a curtain has made its way right into my head!

Aren’t you coming to the restaurant today, Swati?

Won’t you come to the restaurant today, Swati?

Translated by Rifat Munim

Why archaeologists hate (and love) Indiana Jones

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Reflection on lovers

Send your submissions to: anl@dhakatribune.com

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EXHIBITION

The dichotomy of life

Why archaeolo

Arts & Letters wishes to carry critically writt to our readers. As a sample of the kind of w Jones series and brings out the elements th

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n Anvar Alikhan

Celebration and Frustration

n Nadira Sultana Ava

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t was indeed a rewarding experience to visit the Alliance Francaise de Dhaka that is hosting Rashed Alam’s first solo exhibition “Three Shadows of Art”.

Rashed loves to experiment.

A good number of his paintings verge on the contrarieties of life, the contradictions that constitute a basic theme of art and literature from time immemorial. In this group of paintings that he calls dualist paintings, he captures the dichotomy between pleasure and pain, happiness and melancholy, transience and permanence etc. Life is not only about happy and ecstatic moments, joy and rebirth, but it’s also about pain and frustration, decay and death.

Then there are those miniature sculptures some of which are of great political figures such as Che Guevara. There are also quite a good number of wonderful portraits that would attract anyone with some interest in politics and culture.

His works -- Mystery of Life, Beauty and Dust, Celebration and Frustration -- arrest the viewers’ eyes with a unique shape of the canvas. On the wavy surface, Alam paints in a way that exposes two different perspectives of the subject when seen from opposite angles. In Mystery of Life, Madona, when seen from the left, is a very young looking girl but seen from the right she has grown old.

The artist imbues his paintings with life and feelings with

A miniature sculpture of Che his magical strokes of lines and colours. In another series, named Celebration and Frustration, the joyfully dancing ladies, seen from the left, end in struggle, tension and frustration in the transition of time. One can hardly miss the underlying meaning that humans must enjoy the pleasures of life to their fullest intensity because this pleasure can be over any moment; so one must prepare himself well in advance for the gloomy period of his life as well.

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dreds of his book titles drawn in geometric forms.

Another interesting feature is his experimental miniature portraits of SM Sultan, Zainul Abedin, Da Vinci, Matisse and Picasso, among others, on the wooden handles of small paint brushes.

This is how, through tireless endeavour and dedication, Alam pays his tribute to the time-transcending artworks of those artists.

Alam was born in 1988 in Laxmipur, Bangladesh. He com-

He captures the dichotomy between pleasure and pain, happiness and melancholy, transience and permanence etc. Life is not only about happy and ecstatic moments, joy and rebirth, but it’s also about pain and frustration, decay and death

Illustrious personalities like Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Humayun Ahmed have been embodied in his works. In the portrait of Bangabandhu, one can also spot hundreds of freedom fighters and mass people in the background to imply their contributions to the Liberation War of Bangladesh. Titled The Author, the portrait of Humayan Ahmed is adorned with hun-

pleted his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Dhaka Art College, National University.

The exhibition will run till 15 April and remain open, except on Sundays, from 3:00pm to 9:00pm. However, on Fridays and Saturdays it will remain from 9:00am to 12:00pm and 5:00pm to 8:00pm. l The writer is an art enthusiast and freelance writer.

fter years of rumours, it’s now official! The Disney studio recently announced that the next Indiana Jones film is in the making, and will be released in 2019.

The entire saga began on a beach in Hawaii in 1977 with a conversation between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Lucas apparently asked Spielberg what he planned to do next. Spielberg replied that what he really wanted to do was to direct a James Bond movie, but that the producers had turned him down, twice.

That conversation eventually ended up with the creation of the bull whip-wielding, leather-jacketed archaeologist Indiana Jones and the film franchise that owes more than a little to James Bond.

In fact, Indiana Jones was listed by the American Film Institute as the second-greatest hero in cinema history (after Atticus Finch, the lawyer hero of To Kill a Mockingbird but, ironically, ahead of Bond himself at #3).

Indiana Jones is a character with whom archaeologists have a love-hate relationship. On the one hand Indy, with his tough-guy persona, exotic adventures and cynical wisecracks, has probably done more to popularise archaeology as a career than any other single factor. In fact, John RhysDavies, one of the regular Indiana Jones crew, claims that he must have met over a hundred young archaeologists who confessed to him that one key reason for their career choice was the fact that they had watched an Indiana Jones movie in their childhood.

On the other hand, archaeologists are embarrassed by Indy’s knuckle-dusting heroics, his lack of scholarship and – most of all – the fact that today he would be described as a “tomb robber” rather than an archaeologist. As an archaeologist once observed about the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark: There is Indiana Jones, surrounded by all the engineering marvels of an ancient civilisation, and all he can think of is how he

can get his hands on that golden idol. For a proper archaeologist, it would be the least interesting thing around; but for a tomb-robber like him, of course, it was the most important.

So who was the real Indiana Jones? And was he based on any real-life archeologist?

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg say no. According to them, the inspiration for Indy came from a variety of explorers in the action movies of their childhood. But members of their scriptwriting teams have admitted that they researched some real-life personalities and blended their elements into the final Indiana Jones mix – some of the names mentioned being Otto Wilhelm Rahn and paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews.

In fact, these are just two of the dozen-odd historical models who are believed to have been the real-life Indiana Jones.

Otto Wilhelm Rahn was a German medieval scholar of the 1930s who searched for the Holy Grail – the mythical cup that was used to hold Jesus’s blood when he died – based on cues he had discovered in medieval texts. When Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader, read about his quest, he funded Rahn’s expeditions to bring back the Holy Grail, with its occult powers for himself (shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade).

But Rahn’s quest didn’t lead him anywhere. Persecuted by the vengeful Himmler, he committed suicide.

Roy Chapman Andrews was not an archaeologist, but a paleontologist (or, loosely, a “dinosaur hunter”). He was, like Indiana Jones, not just a college professor, but a rugged, two-fisted adventurer. In the 1930s, he went on expeditions to remote corners of the planet, including Mongolia and the Gobi Desert, where he discovered the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs.

Andrews, like Indiana Jones, habitually carried a gun, which he used to hunt for food as well as to protect his party from bandits.

And, interestingly, like Indy, he also habitually wore a broadbrimmed fedora hat.

While both the men might have

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TA L K I N G F I L M S

ogists hate (and love) Indiana Jones

ten crisp pieces on Bangla, Hindi, English and other foreign-language films that would be of interest write-ups we are expecting, we publish an article that deals briefly with the history of the Indiana hat make the iconic hero a plunderer rather than an archaeologist contributed to the colourful amalgam that is Indiana Jones, a more likely historical model is believed to be the swashbuckling archaeologist Hiram Bingham III. Leading a Yale University expedition to Peru in 1911, Bingham discovered the lost Inca city of Machu Pichu and became an overnight celebrity, returning home with a hoard of 40,000 priceless Inca relics, and writing a best-selling book about his adventures. (And he too, like Indy, habitually wore a broadbrimmed fedora hat.)

The more convincing piece of evidence connecting Bingham with Indiana Jones, however, is the 1954 film Lost City of the Incas, based on Bingham’s adventures and featuring Charlton Heston in the lead role. It’s interesting to note that, when preparing for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg’s team studied Lost City of the Incas very carefully, and “borrowed” various important elements, including Indy’s costume (down to that hat). But, more than that, they lifted from the Jerry Hopper movie the entire iconic scene of the scale model of the lost city, where Indy uses an ancient reflector to catch the beam of sunlight and thereby reveal the location of the Biblical treasure (the only difference between the two films being that in the 1954 original, the scene is set in South America instead of Egypt).

In recent times, Hiram Bingham III’s reputation has been tarnished: he has been accused by the Peruvian government of looting its treasures, which Peru is trying to recover from the US. And so that is perhaps another similarity between him and Indy: they were both, at the end of the day, just “tomb-robbers”.

So does all this mean that today the romance has gone out of archaeology and that today’s archaeologists are just a bunch of dry-as-dust academics? Not really.

One contemporary archaeologist whose adventures have been in the Indiana Jones tradition (well, almost) is Ivan Sprajc, who has made a career of finding ancient Mayan cities lost in the jungles of Mexico, doing Indy kind of things

(Clockwise) A still from the movie; Otto Wilhelm Rahn; Roy Chap,am Andrews; Hiram Bingham III

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There is Indiana Jones, surrounded by all the engineering marvels of an ancient civilisation, and all he can think of is how he can get his hands on that golden idol

like hacking his way through the dense foliage with a machete and dealing with poisonous snakes, jaguars and local bandits. According to his photographs, he even dresses like Indy, in khaki safari gear, leather boots and, yes, that good old broad-brimmed fedora hat.

Yet, as somebody once succinctly put it, the Indiana Jones theme music gives the game away:

instead of the existing adrenaline-pumping brass-and-percussion march, a slow, introspective cello piece would have been much more appropriate to the world of archaeology. The rule of thumb for an archaeologist, after all, being that for every hour of on-site excavation, you spend four hours in the lab analysing and documenting your finds.

All this brings us back to

the new Indiana Jones movie, tentatively referred to as Indy 5.

All we know for sure about it so far is that Harrison Ford will star, Steven Spielberg will direct, David Koepp will write the script, Janusz Kaminski will be the cinematographer, and the film will be released in July 2019.

But there’s obviously a great deal of speculation. First of all, this will clearly be Ford’s last Indiana

Jones movie (he’ll be 77 when it’s released). So how will the series be kept alive after his departure?

Who knows? Perhaps the film will begin with Ford, and then go into a flashback of a fresh new star who will play a younger version of Indiana Jones for now, and the future.

And if there is to be a new star, who will it be?

The names that are being mentioned are Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper and Robert Pattinson. River Phoenix, Sean Patrick Flanery and Corey Carrier have also played younger versions of Indy in the past.

Well, just as long as it’s not Shia LeBoeuf, who played Indy’s son in the supremely awful Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it should be okay. l

This piece was first published in Scroll.in

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REFLECTION

BOOK REVIEW

Spider and Other Stories n Sumaiya Tasnim

On lovers n SN Rasul

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magine this: you’re staring into the eyes of a girl. In the liquid reflection of her eyes, because you’re so close, you can see yourself in all your pathetic glory. Your face betrays a sense of desperation, your eyes echo the infinite number of reflections of two mirrors standing opposite each other, your mouth stays in a half-open, half-closed state of notknowing-what-to-say.

You recall the multiple times you kissed her and how, each time, you saw the entire movie of your lives reel across the floor of your connected timelines. You remember how her neck nestled itself into the groove in your neck, or how the “ground beneath her feet” shook and her voice “could melt mountains.”

But mostly, you remember her eyes, with a hunger so strong that “an astronaut could’ve seen it from space.”

That’s how you think, as you live in art. As you turn a love story into a tragedy through the words of movies, music and literature.

Through hedonistic displays of

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affection and an urge so strong you feel you will explode.

But, of course, you won’t.

But that comes later. The not-exploding comes after the sleepless nights pleasing yourself to the muted displays on your computer, desperately trying to divert your attention. It comes after you’ve analysed and overanalysed, and convinced yourself how this person was the very worst thing, the one thing that you thought this person wouldn’t be: normal.

You look into their eyes and this is what you see: a monster.

And how do you normalise them? You make a list of how each lover is the same.

Step 1 : They meet the love of their lives (not you).

Step 2 : They get screwed over (not by you).

Step 3 : Find someone who thinks they are the love of their lives (you).

Step 4 : Screw this person over (you).

Step 5 : Go back and forth in confusion (you and not you).

Step 6 : Eventually settle for this person (you), or: Step 6 : Settle for a nobody they’ve never met (not you).

Step 7 : Get married, have a baby, and make that their life because they’ve lost everything because they had given too much importance to a person they met when they were too young to know better.

Or so you think. These are the patterns you see amongst your lovers. And with your heart still reeling from the blow, you clutch on to the tiniest bit of attention you get. You need to matter. You need to be not-so-small. You need to be significant.

You take someone’s heart in your hands. You feel it beating to the same rhythm as your heart once did. This is a heart that needs love like you did once. This is where you were. For the shortest time, you perhaps fool yourself into thinking this is what you wanted. This is perhaps what you needed, but you can’t decide.

Confusion infiltrates your mind.

How welcome you are as you take her hand in yours, cradling it inside your palm; brushing the sides of her cheeks with the back of your palm, your fingers intertwined in the curls of her hair.

And, imagine this: You’re

You recall the multiple times you kissed her and how, each time, you saw the entire movie of your lives reel across the floor of your connected timelines

staring into the eyes of a girl. In the liquid reflection of her eyes, because you’re so close, you can see yourself in all your pathetic glory. Your face betrays a sense of desperation, desperate to feel what she feels. Your mouth, halfopen, half-closed, says things it wishes to mean, means things it doesn’t wish to say.

And this is what you feel: nothing.

She can’t help but ask: “Is there something wrong with the way I love?”

What do you say to that?

What can you? No, darling, this is exactly how I loved once, but not anymore, not now.

How far you’ve come, what stories you told yourself! How you lived in art, and wished to turn a tragedy into a world of happy endings, of striking the perfect balance, of being the one thing you knew you never would be.

You normalise yourself. And how? You make a list of how you are the same.

Step 1 : You meet someone you think is the love of your life (not her).

Step 2 : You get screwed over (not by her).

Step 3 : Find someone who thinks you’re the love of their lives (her).

Step 4 : Screw them over (her).

Step 5 : Go back and forth, waver (her and pre-her).

Step 6 : Leave (her).

Step 7 : Repeat (not her and not preher).

How far you’ve come, to only end up here, in front of a girl staring at you, ready to traverse the world in your name. How far you’ve fallen to raise yourself up from the depths of an insignificant pseudo-lover who saw you as you see this girl now, with unforced indifference.

And you wonder if you’ve, finally, after all these years, learnt your lesson. You wonder if, as you crush someone inside the palm of your hands, you’ve realised that, at the end of all love stories, there is a disappearance. You wonder if you understand that lovers are either butterflies or caterpillars. Some are beautiful to begin with, and take it for granted. And some, with enough time, become the butterfly it was destined to become. It is perhaps not the end of the world, for the world, as you walk through it, remains so unjust, so all-thesame.

And you wonder, as you look into the reflection in their eyes and you see yourself, if you’ve become what you most feared: a monster. l The writer is a writer and journalist.

Saleha Chowdhury has authored more than 65 books in Bangla in different genres from fiction to nonfiction to translation.

For her illustrious contribution to literature, she has won the prestigious Bangla Academy Probasi Sahitya Purushkar (2012), Ashraf Siddiqui Gold Medal (2008) and the Anannya Sahitya Purushkar (2009).

Spiders and Other Stories is a collection of her translated short stories, which introduces English readers to the sheer range and main tenets of her short stories. The book’s neatness in terms of selection and rendering owes much to Professor Niaz Zaman’s deft editorship.

Author: Saleha Chowdhury, Edited by Niaz Zaman, Publisher: Writers.ink, 2016, Page: Tk 400 The book has fourteen different short stories and all of them deal with different psychological aspects of men and women. It shows how we, as humans, wear masks and become entirely different than what we, in essence, are. Sometimes she uses black humour, the combination of wit and reality, to capture the contradictions present in society and men. “One Kilogram of Holy Meat” and “Mr Brown’s Feeling Of Loneliness” – both of these stories use black humour.

Her narration always compels readers to empathize with the characters in the stories, some of which have melancholic, humorous or sarcastic streaks in them. The most important part of the book, however, is formed by a group of stories that questions the freedom of women and issues of middle class people.

The stories have been translated in English by Niaz Zaman, Sabreena Ahmed, Jackie Kabir, Masrufa Ayesha Nusrat and Shahruk Rahman, among others.

The author herself translated some stories. l *Sumaiya Tasnim is an undergraduate student of the department of English at BRAC University.