Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age: A Family Saga of Love, Duty and Identity against the Backdrop of War

Abstract

The paper explores love and duty as the dominant themes in Tahmima Anam’s debut novel A Golden Age (2007). At various points of the story, it seems that both love and duty come at the forefront in turn overshadowing the significance of the other. However, it is not hard to notice that the yearning of love and the call of duty almost equally pervade the story. While analyzing these compelling themes, the paper critically examines how Anam aesthetically mediates the conflict between the immediacy of love and the urgency of duty at a time of armed national struggle. It also emphasizes the status of women in pre-independence Pakistan era male dominated Bengali society and their struggle against various misogynistic norms portrayed through the defiant activities of the female protagonist in the novel. Apart from defending her feminine identity against the odds of contemporary androcentric society, the paper also focuses on the issue of the protagonist’s non-native past and tends to establish her Bangladeshi national identity even though she comes from a different ethnic, lingual and cultural background.