BLiterature-Apratim

50
As a fictionist, Elias was a good technician that can be called both his merit
and limitation. His language too is sometimes unnecessarily crude or vulgar.
However, his works reflect his extraordinary worth as a portrayer of the country and
its people. He opened a new horizon of fiction with his outstanding narrative
technique.
Muhammad Zafar Iqbal (b. 1952)
Postmodernism, the latest artistic concept, relies on irrationality. But literature
is justifiably intended for enlightenment and thus it apparently seems unfit for this
concept. The works of pictorial art, which I recognize as one of the most typical
postmodern genres, cannot be included in the realm of literature. As literature must
convey something higher than thoughts of surface level, it cannot be similar to other
postmodern genres. Only science-fiction owns at the same time, postmodernist
illogical expression and a highly standard outlook of the world fit for literature.
In this respect, Muhammad Zafar Iqbal is not only Bengal’s greatest sciencefiction
writer, but he is also the pioneer of Postmodernism in our literature.
His sci-fi stories outwardly concern with scientific inquisitions, atomic wars,
space travels, attacks of aliens, time-machine disasters etc. Using such themes, he
has given birth to a new diction of prose.
But his works are not just the vehicle of scientific and technological ideas; he
assimilates philosophies (sometimes his own) with those ideas for implying a higher
meaning of life. Sometimes his notion turns to utopian (and sometimes even
dystopian) thoughts. He envisions an ideal society having scientific application, a
society run by its quintessential scientific consciousness. And sometimes he depicts
the picture of the future world as a deceased waste land.
Some of his fictions show the contradictoriness between robots and men; he
depicts the dark sides of human nature while depicting those distinctions. He at the
same time draws the superiority of men over machines – not just ethically but also
intellectually, and also in the measure of scientific knowledge and innovative ability.
His machines, although at first seem mightier than men, later surrender to men’s will
and strength.
His fictions have a world-wide background (which is an essential postmodern
feature), not strictly oriental as is drawn in most other Bengali sci-fi writers’ works.
His cosmopolitanism can be compared to Tagore’s.
Human feelings and emotions are not absent in his science-fictions, rather
human values and refined essences now and then appear in his writings. He
sometimes uses natural landscape in order to express human feelings, for example
– in Nihshongo Grahachari (The Lonely Dweller of a Planet), he expresses his
lovers’ passion through the metaphor of volcanic eruption.
Sometimes keeping scientific imagination aside, he seeks shelter in
metaphysical ideas like god, fate and rebirth.