Another Bangladeshi English Novel

Journey to the East

MaryAnn and BiJon Sarma

Trafford, Canada(on-demand)

Published in 2001

ISBN 1-55212-755-9

Subcontinental writers are producing scores of worthwhile fiction in the recent decades. Most of those fiction writers are immigrated to different American or European countries. A huge number of these writers are of Indian base, some are of Pakistani base and rarely we get someone from Srilanka or Nepal. The case of Bangladesh in this regards is almost insignificant. English fiction from Bangladeshi writers is really a rarity. The name of BiJon Sarma (b. 1949), whose prolific exposition is only a question of time, will be cited as an encouraging example in the arena of English novels of this region very shortly.

Most of the subcontinental fiction may be categorized in the group of deliberating domestic stories. R.K. Narayan’s omnibus, most of the novels of Raja Rao, Bharati Mukherjee are the well known examples of this category. Domestic realism has been the main theme of those ones excepting some of Salman Rushdie etc. Some novelists have also emerged there with feministic views. The last decade experienced a new trend - Partition Fiction. Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (or Ice-Candy-Man), Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers, Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass, or Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters are the recent successors of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan or Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day. Pangs of migrated subcontinental people in American states have also been a poignant seed of many subcontinental novels. But BiJon Sarma’s focus hovers over something else - the decadence of western civilization and comparison of it with the eastern one.

BiJon Sarma’s first novel is Mollika Aamar Chandramollika (2000) published in Bangla. The two English novels of him that have been published in online from Canada are Journey to the East (2001) and Drumline Migration (2002). His other three English novels that are in the pipeline of different world famous websites are : Maruhito Power Plant; WTA (Pvt.) Co. Ltd and The Virgin Mother.

In his Bangla novel Mollika we got an interaction about the cultural question of the west. The same question has been the main and only theme of Journey to the East. In the novel the story is set in a society some eight hundred and fifty years ahead of the twenty first century. The society where the story of the novel takes place is a western one - full of riches and luxuries and development. The novelist sees the society from a very logical viewpoint. The present socio-familial milieu of the west compels the writer to design their future society in such a one where there is nothing like family - no one is a father or mother or a child of any other one as Gloria the protagonist says �I do not have a father, mother or any family’ (14). All the women folk of that country are of three categories having cards A for �Available on Payment’, or M for �Motherhood’ or F for �Free-lance Woman’ as our Gloria also is.

�Womb-hiring’ is a profession in this country which Gloria accepts repeatedly, though in this hazardous task the final payment from the men’s part comes after the DNA test is done. The narrator of Journey to the East Ms. Gloria Sullivan’s baby also fails to pass the DNA test which is a common activity of �the would be fathers to be certain about the genetic inheritance’ (5) and with this antipathetic incident the novel opens. �I am a natural born child, I belong to no one and no one belongs to me’ (34) is Gloria’s principal hollowness for which she can easily say � I did not have any love or affection for the children’ (23) or �In my case, the only attraction to become a mother was money’ (23) because �of all the jobs a woman can do in our society