আবুল বাশারের ‘সাঈদা বাঈ’ : প্রান্তের রাজনীতি ও ক্ষমতার ডিসকোর্স / Abul Bashar’s ‘Saida Bai’: The Politics of the Margins and the Discourse of Power

Abstract

Abul Bashar’s story ‘Saida Bai’ uses a municipal election in the small nawabi town of Motibagh to examine power at the margins. The essay argues that the ‘margin’ has three layers: the village of Kashdiyara on the town’s edge; its people, who live on nawabi memory without nawabi power; and Saida, a childless former courtesan who now rolls bidis for a living.

          Kashdiyara’s residents fit no standard category. They are neither peasants, factory workers nor labourers, and “not quite nawabs” either, so party organisation never reaches them. Gramsci’s view that subaltern history is ‘fragmented and episodic’ mirrors the story’s structure, in which a few election days carry centuries of buried history. The villagers approach voting with a “nawabi mentality”, bargaining for money. Moneylenders finance their tangas, and a rival candidate is dismissed in advance because his party favours Hindutva. Foucault’s claim that power “comes from everywhere” explains how debt, identity and fear shape the vote before it is cast.

          Saida’s husband Feru beats her, seizes her earnings and wants to turn her body into income because she is barren. The story’s account of nawabi polygamy and mut’a marriage places her in a long history of women whose bodies are leased, not owned. She speaks an Urdu-inflected idiom and cannot read Bengali, while party politics runs on written Bengali. She is not silent, but her speech finds no channel that counts as political, echoing Spivak’s ‘violent shuttling’.

          Pinku, an idealistic student activist, ‘discovers’ Saida and calls her ‘didi’, offering comradeship as an alternative to Feru’s ‘wife’. Yet neither offer asks what she herself wants, and her reply that a courtesan can never be a mother exposes the limits of the party’s vocabulary. The rival Bhatubabu is cruder, but he too treats her as a means.

          A fire on election eve kills Saida, and only then is the title spoken, in her husband’s cry. Relief money arrives, and the leader reports, ‘we got one vote in Kashdiyara’, turning Saida into one of countless Saidas. The essay concludes that Bashar sympathises with Pinku but shows how even sincere idealism, once inside the language of power, risks speaking for the marginal rather than hearing them.