War and Famine.
Agunpakhi is the debut novel of Hasan Azizul Huq. We find a concrete picture of World War II and its effect on the Indian sub-continent and of famine, one of the direct outcomes of that war and of the tumultuous partition which took away many lives through a first person narrative of a female character who gets maturation as the novel progresses towards the end, the penultimate partition and isolation.
The novel starts with a young girl of rural Rarh, now in West Bengal. The story begins a score years before the Partition of India. She makes a powerful observation of herself and the people around her. Through her eyes we see the way of life of the then Rarh region.
In the early part of the novel, she mostly speaks of life within the family: births, deaths, marriages, love to each other and the family bondage gets predominant in the early description of the novel. With the passage of time she gets married and enters into life of marriage. She is married to an educated man though the lady lacks ABC of education. But with the willingness of her husband the young lady gets a little education and her husband becomes her home tutor. That was a large family and that kind of family structure was a common sight at that time. After her marriage she finds herself in a large joint family which is full of bounty.
It has been already noted that the husband of the lady being an educated man is involved in the local politics. And for the first time we find a political smell in the novel as the husband says: "this is a dependent country," (45). Everything was going on well and peacefully. But Second World War brings a catastrophic consequence to this sub-continent. The War breaks out among the nations of the world. The little educated narrator tries to understand war. But she cannot. Suddenly she thinks that millions of people will join the war, will kill each other without knowing their enemies as told in Dover Beach: "Where ignorant armies clash by night," (37).
