A Golden Age

Christine Pyle

English 3080

Essay 1

February 26, 2010

Symbolism in A Golden Age: Rehana as Bangladesh

In her novel chronicling the dramatic events of Bangladeshi independence, Tahmima

Anam focuses on the microcosm of a single family: a widowed mother, Rehana, and her two

children, Sohail and Maya. A Golden Age tells the story of Rehana’s struggle to keep her family

and her nation together during wartime chaos. Despite repeated desertion by other male

protectors, Rehana preserves her family through the wartime love of a faithful man. The story of

this brave woman, in particular how she relates to the men in her life, parallels the tumultuous

story of the Bengali people from before Partition to the formation of a distinct nation.

Rehana’s Indian childhood and hasty marriage mirror the Bengali experience during

Partition. Growing up in pre-partition India, Rehana was the neglected last daughter in her

family. She felt alienated from her wealthy father, a “handsome, polished” gentleman with

British tastes, such as Thackeray, piano music, and fashionable parties (138, 144).

By the time

Rehana reached marriageable age, her father had died, and family fortunes had turned upside

down, so she escaped into an arranged marriage (137).

Similarly, the Bengali had grown up

among other “sisters”—the future Pakistanis, the Hindus, etc.—under the paternal hand of Great

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Britain, a distant, foreign father. When the British government left India, the Bengali regions

were united with distant West Pakistan, without much forethought.

Rehana’s life with her husband, Iqbal, was a peaceful, prosperous period, during which

she was surprised by love for the stranger she had married. Iqbal treated her with attentive love

and respect, lavished her with expensive saris, and watchfully guarded the safety of their family.

This happy interlude in Rehana’s precarious life does not correspond directly with the rocky

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transformation of Bengal into East Pakistan. Anam prioritizes Rehana’s development as a

character above the neatness of the allegory. Rehana is primarily a believable woman; her

symbolism is lagniappe. Rehana’s union with Iqbal is significant for the allegory, though,

because it produced the children who would dominate her affections—the children who are the

hope of Bangladesh. Furthermore, Iqbal died suddenly, leaving Rehana a widow, a state that

suitably represents post-Partition Bengal. Like an unprotected single mother, the Bengali nation

faced a frightening, vulnerable future.

Her husband’s death left Rehana vulnerable to other men, and the absence of a

sympathetic government exposed the Bengali to merciless outsiders. As a poor, single woman,

Rehana became prey to the greedy desires of men around her. First, her brother-in-law Faiz and

his wife Parveen took advantage of her weakened emotions to gain legal possession of her

children, Sohail and Maya. Then, when she asked for loans to get her children back, the money

lender tried to rape her (148).

The Bengali, in their new formation as E. Pakistan, were weak and

exposed. Consequently, unscrupulous leaders of West Pakistan took advantage of East Pakistan,

subjugating the Bengali in order to enrich their own state.

At this point in the novel, Rehana became more closely identified with the fate of

Bangladesh through her struggle for her children. The children of Rehana are, simultaneously,

the children of Bangladesh. They represent the future and promise of the Bengali nation, as well

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as of Rehana’s personal world. For their sake, she begins an undercover resistance against

manipulative men, by refusing to remarry (23) and then by stealing from T. Ali. Interestingly,

when Rehana committed the theft, she broke a mirror belonging to T. Ali’s dead wife, Rose.

With her English name, white complexion, and European dress, Rose evoked Britain’s colonial

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presence. By shattering the mirror, Rehana could be symbolically breaking the Bengali link to

the nation’s unnatural parent, Britain (152).

When Rehana’s Pakistani brother-in-law, Faiz, took the children, he stole the future of

Bangladesh. If Sohail and Maya had stayed with Faiz and Parveen, the children would have

been transformed into Pakistanis, and Bangladesh would have been metaphorically childless. In

contrast to Rehana’s fruitful Bangladeshi family, Faiz and Parveen are childless, and Parveen has

an insatiable mother-hunger (178).

Just as the Pakistani couple attempted to usurp Rehana’s

children, so bitter, barren Pakistan tried to possess Bengali children through linguistic and

cultural domination. This effort eventually fails, so Pakistan must kill the rebellious children of

Bangladesh—with Faiz and Parveen as murderous instruments, to complete the allegory. The

Bengali, in turn, must launch an undercover resistance.

When the events of 1971 commenced, the story of Rehana and her children became

inseparable from that of their nation. The men who had deserted them—Rehana’s father and

husband—were replaced by a fierce nationalism. The three had a father-void, which was filled

when they saw Mujib at the rally: “They belonged to him now; they were his charge, his

children. They called him father. They loved him the way orphans dream of their lost parents:

without promise, only hope” (49).

The Bengali saw this political leader as their surrogate father

and the whole country as their siblings. On the night of Operation Searchlight, “Maya fell asleep

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in the flag,” cradled in this symbol of her nation like an infant in a father’s arms (61).

Due in

part to desertion by their own fathers, Maya and Sharmeen disavowed relations with men, took

on masculine characteristics, and devoted all their energies to Bangladesh. In a sense, through

these actions, the girls “married” their country. Therefore, the revolutionary government of

Bangladesh became a father and husband figure, a replacement for absent men.

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During the ensuing period, Rehana’s actions reveal her growing identification with the

Bengali revolution at the level of a husband figure. At first, Rehana tried to remain her own

source of strength and protection (65).

She lived with her eye on the past, focused on her dead

husband. However, when she devoted herself to the revolution, Rehana forgot to visit the

cemetery (131).

She donated her best saris, which were gifts of romantic love from her husband

(91).

She disassembled the saris, converted them into blankets, and sent them to cover

revolutionary soldiers. With this gift to the liberation army, Rehana demonstrated a significant

transfer of love and authority. Moving out from the shadow of Iqbal’s death, the widow was

initiating a courtship with her nation. As she discovered her love for Bangladesh and sealed it

with the sari gift, Rehana found a parallel love in the Major.

The Major is the first man in the novel with a real physical and emotional presence. He

is identified by manly attributes like his “firm grip” and “the span of his shoulders” (111).

The

Major was also the first man to suffer wounds for Bangladesh; in previous pages, Anam

represented only women’s emotional and physical sufferings. The Major evoked in Rehana an

awareness of her desire to serve her country, not just her children (111).

Not only did he expand

her world, but he invited her trust: “He reached over and laid a finger on her arm. ‘I understand,’

he said” (146).

Drawn to the Major’s protective, compassionate strength, Rehana finally shared

the secret of what she had done—what she would do—to win back her children, the burden

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which “she knew, should only be hers” (37).

When she surrendered the burden of her aloneness,

Rehana was able to rest in the protection of a real man and allow him to save her children.

By the end of the novel, Rehana was the mother not only of Sohail and Maya, but of all

the young revolutionaries who would form the new Bangladesh. Before a dangerous mission,

Sohail asked Rehana to give her blessing to all the young men: “They’ll be happy to get your

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blessings. Some of them haven’t seen their own mothers in a long time” (109).

Rehana became

aware of her new identity as mother of a country, when she refused to give Mrs. Haque news of

her sons: “But now she was something else—a mother, yes, but not just of children. Mother of a

different sort” (140).

This new Rehana united herself with the Bangladeshi Revolution, and she

was involved in the birth pains of a nation. Earlier, she had mused about familial happiness:

“She felt an old swell of longing for the unit, the family: man, woman, child. This was the

formula for happiness, the proper order of things” (165).

In a satisfying allegorical symmetry,

Rehana found her perfect unit: Bangladesh (Rehana), the wife; the Bangladeshi liberation

movement (the Major), the husband or lover; and young Bangladeshis, their children.

Because the Major represents the Bangladeshi freedom fighters and their selfless love for

the emerging country, Rehana’s relationship with the Major confirms her as a symbol of

Bangladesh. As Rehana’s lover, the Major sacrificed for Rehana’s children; as the symbol of the

Bangladeshi Revolution, he sacrificed for the future of Bangladesh. Bengal had endured a

history of rejection and suppression: ignored and discarded by paternal distant Britain, used

economically by Urdu-speaking West Pakistan, and, finally, violated through wartime violence.

In 1971, two “fathers” stood in the gap for Bangladesh. Mujib rose up to be founder-father of a

free Bangladesh. The liberation army, led by faithful commanders—and majors—and composed

of devoted sons and daughters, was the sacrificial father. The army’s outpouring of passion,

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youth, blood and life was necessary to give life to the new nation.

The Major’s love was not, like that of Faiz, a false love that violated Rehana, nor, like

Iqbal’s, a love that unexpectedly left her. His departure was a determined choice to give a free

life to her and her children, a sacrifice that Rehana believed to be necessary: “your life for mine”

(265).

She saw their relationship as a deeply-felt but doomed love—a love fated to a set period

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of time. She writes to Iqbal, “For the smallest fraction of those ninety-six days, I loved

him….Only the briefest moment” (274).

Her relationship with the Major was a passionate

wartime love that preserved her family. When the war ended, she decided to think of the Major

as a bittersweet episode, from which she could move on to watch her children and her nation

build a new future. “I will clutch my flag, hold my breath and wait for our son,” she tells her

deceased husband (274).

Though she released the Major, Rehana’s love for him will live on in

her love for her “beautiful and bruised country” (276), the new nation born from a bloodied

union of love and sacrifice.

Works Cited

Anam, Tahmima. The Golden Age. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.