Abstract: Agunpakhi is the debut novel of Hasan Azizul Huq, a professor of philosophy and a leading short story writer of Bangladesh. In this novel Hasan employs a strong female voice to narrate the epic-scale tragic story of a single family and the bloody partition of the Indian sub-continent from the protagonist's first person point of view. In this work-in-progress paper it will be tried to show how this masterpiece of Hasan has captured and portrayed the lives of three successive generations with masterly stroke and how the partition of India split and destroyed the psyche, emotion, feelings and values of an individual and how the mindset of a people got fanatic and lunatic to have vengeance against the opponent community over the cause of religion where religious harmony and coexistence had prevailed from the very dawn of civilization. Agunpakhi shows us how millions of people-Hindus and Muslims - lost their home and were bound to leave their home losing their identity for good only for the cause of religion and how trust and sympathy were replaced by distrust and religious hollowness between the warring communities. The protagonist of the novel unlike her family did not leave her home whereas all the members of her family left her behind for East Pakistan and by not leaving with them with a false dream she has become an unparalleled symbol of tolerance and friendship and has become a strong female character in the total partition literature composed in English, Urdu, Panjabi and in Bangla by the sub-continent writers and novelists till today.
"I can only write about it [the past] by bringing it in some relation to my present-day thoughts and activities, and then this writing of history, as Goethe once said, brings some relief from the weight and burden of the past," (The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru).
The aforementioned quote will satiate your thirst why we are concerned about history and why Huq has found history as the background of his finest creation, Agunpakhi.
