Title: Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay)
Author: Syed Mujtaba Ali, translated from Bengali by Nazes Afroz
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Translator’s Introduction
What will you call someone who puts down his profession as ‘quitting job regularly’ while applying for his passport? The short answer is Syed Mujtaba Ali. Even though written in jest, this succinct phrase describes him perfectly—his wicked sense of humour, his peripatetic life, his ability of making fun of himself, his propensity of not settling down in one place or a job—everything can be packed into that phrase. And when these traits are gifted with a razor-sharp brain that masters a dozen languages and absorbs tomes on philosophy, history and knowledge from the four corners of the world, you get a Syed Mujtaba Ali. Only a few such unique persons are born in a century.
It was not a coincidence that a born rebel and non-conformist young Ali would be attracted to the greatest writer and philosopher of his time, Rabindranath Tagore. Refusing to go to a university run by the British rulers, he chose Visva-Bharati in Shantiniketan, founded by Tagore. Under Tagore’s tutelage, the cocoon flourished into a dazzling butterfly. The teachings of Shantiniketan set the life course for Ali as Tagore remained his pole star.
Imbibing his guru’s deep-seated ideals of freethinking humanism and internationalism, Ali as a twenty-three-year-old fresh graduate, would set out to explore the world. Starting as a teacher in Kabul in 1927, he went on to completing his PhD in comparative religion as a Humboldt scholar from Bonn, Germany, in 1932. After returning home briefly, Ali went to do his postdoctoral studies at one of the oldest universities in the world, Al-Azhar in Cairo in 1934. The ruler of Baroda state, Maharaja Sayaji Rao was hugely impressed by this young scholar when he met Ali during his visit to Cairo in 1935. The Maharaja invited him to head the government college in Baroda. Accepting the post, Ali moved to Baroda in 1936 and remained there till 1944.
Following the death of Sayaji Rao, Ali left Baroda and returned to Kolkata. He did not take up any jobs for a few years, concentrating on finishing his first book, Deshe Bideshe,* his memoir of his time in Kabul between 1927 and 1929. Serialized in 1948 in Desh, the most-read literary magazine in Kolkata, it was published as a book in 1949. The book attained an instant cult status and Bengali readers were swept off their feet by Ali’s prose, wit, gripping storytelling, ability to create a cast of most fascinating characters, and his multilingual and multicultural erudition.
Ali went through another life-altering event around this time. In the wake of the partition of Bengal, Ali moved to East Pakistan, which was his birthplace and joined the government college in Bogura in 1949 as the principal. But his stay in Pakistan was rather a short one. This was the time when Pakistani rulers were trying to impose Urdu as the national language over the majority Bengali population in East Pakistan. It was impossible for a freethinker like Ali who took a huge pride in his Bengali heritage and identity to subscribe to such a policy. He penned a short yet scathing critique of the government’s attempt to colonize the Bengalis with another language. Pakistani authorities promptly issued an arrest warrant against him after the essay came out in a journal in Kolkata. Ali’s elder brother, who happened to be a district administrator at the time, warned him about his impending arrest and overnight he left Pakistan forever. He returned to Kolkata and lived in India as an Indian citizen for the rest of his life.
Shortly after returning to India, the first Education Minister of India, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, invited Ali to head the newly founded Indian Council for Cultural Relations or the ICCR* as its first Secretary and the editor of its Arabic journal, Thaqafat-ul-Hind. He took up the assignment in 1950 before joining the All India Radio in Delhi in 1952. He went on to be the Station Director of All India Radio in Cuttack and Patna. Finally, he joined his alma mater, Visva-Bharati in Shantiniketan in 1958 first as a professor of the German language and then of Islamic Culture. After his retirement in 1964, as a full-time writer he lived between Shantiniketan and Kolkata.
As a man who led such an unorthodox life, his family life could not be otherwise. He married, late in his life (1951, at the age of forty-six), Rabeya Khatun, who worked for the education department in East Pakistan. They had two sons, born in 1952 and 1953. While he continued living in India as an Indian, his wife and sons lived in East Pakistan. After the freedom struggle and the war of independence of 1971 when East Pakistan became an independent country as Bangladesh, Ali started spending more time with his family in Bangladesh. He died in Dhaka in 1974 during one of such visits and was interred there.
(Extracted from Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay) by Syed Mujtaba Ali, translated by Nazes Afroz. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2023.)
About the Book
Some time between the two World Wars, Syed Mujtaba Ali set out on ship from India to travel to Europe. Leaving Sri Lanka behind, sailing in the Arabian Sea and then along the coast of Africa, he crossed the Horn of Africa, until the ship reached Suez Port. Along the way, Ali collected a bunch of stories—about his new young friends Paul and Percy, who became his loyal acolytes; and the eccentric Abul Asfia Noor Uddin Muhammad Abdul Karim Siddiqi, who carried toffees, a gold cigarette case, and other sundry items in his capacious overcoat pocket and who had the answer to all problems though he barely spoke a word ever.
As the ship makes its way, Mujtaba Ali tells stories of the island of Socrota with its pirates in search of treasure. He dives into history and recounts how the giraffe went to China via India from Africa. And when the friends get off at Suez, in order to see the pyramids of Giza, he provides a deeply entertaining and perceptive description of Egypt—from its taxi drivers and café owners, to pharaohs and tomb hunters.
Erudite but light-hearted, brimming with laughter and with many moments of tenderness, Tales of a Voyager is a gem of a travelogue from the author who wrote the immensely popular travel account of Afghanistan, In a Land Far from Home (Deshe Bideshe).
‘Syed Mujtaba Ali knows how to perform magic through his writing! One moment his humour and wit will make you break out in roaring laughter and the next you find yourself buried in deep thought being touched by the poignance in his satire.’—Dhaka Tribune
About the Author
Born in 1904, Syed Mujtaba Ali was a prominent literary figure in Bengali literature. A polyglot, a scholar of Islamic studies and a traveller, Mujtaba Ali taught in Baroda and at Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan. By the time he died in 1974, he had more than two dozen books—fiction and non-fiction—to his credit.
About the Translator
A journalist for over three decades, Nazes Afroz has worked in both print and broadcasting in Kolkata and London. He joined the BBC in London in 1998 and spent close to fifteen years with the organization. He has visited Afghanistan, Central Asia and West Asia regularly for over a decade. He currently writes in English and Bengali for various newspapers and magazines.
Click here to read the review/interview with the translator, Nazes Afroz.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Borderless 