Bangladesh : An Intercultural Panorama

Bangladesh: An Intercultural Panora ma is an unusual book by an exceptional writer. Professor Anwar Dil is an uncompromising scholar and a writer of eminence; he has acquired international repute for his publications, especially in the field of his specialization, which is sociolinguistics and human development. Since 1961 he has been editing an Intercultural Studies Series; he has translated Punjabi poems into English and has collaborated with his scholarly and equally well-known wife Professor Afia Dil, a Bengali, in writing a book of cultural history called Bengali Language Movement to Bangladesh. And now he is writing autobiographically not about his own self but some of the notable Bengali cultural figures whom he had known, liked and understood. … Professor Dil has an unfailing, almost astonishing, memory and he recollects his happy experiences of knowing those he has written about not only in detail but with accuracy. One could have called him a living archive, as he makes use of his archival collections with a liveliness and art that makes the personalities he is dealing with come alive on every page of his book. Of course, he writes autobiographically, but his manner is more like that of an inquisitive traveler rather than that of a person remembering and recalling the past. This traveler has not only seen personalities with curiosity but sought to understand them; he has read, done research, reproduced photographs, book covers, and even memorial postage stamps. Persons have been more interesting to him than landscape, although his interest in nature has been abiding and he himself is an abstract-calligraphic painter of international fame. Those who would read Professor Anwar Dil’s books on Bangladesh would come afresh to the realization that viable integration can be achieved only from within and that it has to be cultural even more than political. -Serajul Islam Choudhury Professor Emeritus, University of Dhaka