I have just finished writing a play, Song for Bengal, which is currently
being translated into Bengali. This the result, not only of many years spent
coming and going to both Dhaka in Bangladesh and
Kolkata in West Bengal, but also in research at the British Library into the
conditions under which the weavers worked for the East India Company
in the last decades of the eighteenth and first decade of the 19th century.
The story is of a village girl, Bilkis, who leaves her impoverished family
to come to Dhaka for work in the garments industry, which now provides
Bangl;adesh with three quarters of its foreign exchange. She shares a room
in a hut with three other young women. Women make up about 80 per cent of
the labour force in the industry.
As she works, Bilkis becomes possessed by the spirit of dead weavers and
spinners from the time of the East India Company. They speak through her of
the time of hunger and starvation, the great famine of 1770, the control
over the labour of the weavers by the Company through its middlemen and
agents.
Believing her to be possessed by evil spirits, a traditional healer is
called upon to exorcise the demons. He fails, and Bilkis continues to wander
through the neighbourhood, lamenting the fate of the long-dead weavers and
their families, remembering how, when Dhaka was emptied of people by hunger
and weavers fleeing the tyrannical regime of the Company. As she does so, it
is clear that the memories of the past converge with the exploitation of the
present day; and the factory-owners and government of Bangladesh come more
and more to resemble the representatives of the imperial Company. Her
prophetic utterances come to the attention of the authorities. She is also
visited by the spirits of the weavers of Lancashire, who came into the
industrial cities of the North to tend the machines which had taken work
away from the weavers of Bengal.
Her subversive remarks are seen to apply to contemporary Bangladesh.
Government becomes alarmed. She is eventually taken into custody as a
madwoman; and in the final scene, the leaders of contemporary Bangladesh
finally morph into representatives of the East India Company.
Some of the play is in blank verse. There are monologues and scenes of
semi-realism. It is a kind of ghost-story which is also a meditation on
arbitrary nature of identity, the shifting fortunes of countries, the roles
that are made and unmade for different generations to fulfil in the
unfolding drama of globalism.
We are planning a production in London some time in 2012, and I am hopeful
that it will also be performed in Kolkata next year.
Jeremy Seabrook
October 2011