Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age: A Gendered Re-Telling of Partition

Abstract

Literary representations of historical events have, in the past few years, witnessed a radically new orientation, particularly with the strengthening of the feminist perspective that sought to address a longstanding gap in history writing in India- the silencing of marginal voices including those of women, children and various minority communities of society. In short, the muffling of the human dimension of history. Tehmima Anam’s A Golden Age, published in 2007, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize in 2008, is in this context a rare achievement in that her fictional narrative is set against the backdrop of the war that culminated in the birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation but more significantly, it is told from a diasporic Bangladeshi woman’s perspective. By offering a personal and subjective perspective on history through a woman narrator, the author breaks free from the traditional narratives of history that centre around the political and communal aspects and extreme experiences and sensitizes the reader to alternative forms of viewing history as it intrudes into the private world of a woman.