In Elias’s Story, Purging Threatens a Family’s Home

In Akhteruzzaman Elias’s short story “Khoari,” liberation fighters set their sights on a Hindu family’s house in old Dhaka after Bihari occupants flee it following the Pakistan army’s defeat. The fighters say they’ll oversee the area in the “right way.” Farukh, a close associate of their principal leader, Manik, gives the slogan beneath that promise: “purging is needed, purging!”

The house changes hands under successive claims of power. The family first loses it to looting and occupation during the 1971 war; later, the liberation fighters seek to make the family leave again. Samarjit, the story’s central character, is left with hangovers from liquor and from watching his friends and associates pressure his father to abandon the house. The people who speak of order aren’t the ones paying its price.

The next “other” in line

Priyam Pritim Paul writes that the story’s punchline is the persistence of “others” marked for purging. The targets shift. In “Khoari,” Hindus and Biharis appear as minorities in post-independence Bangladesh, as Shibu Kumer Shill observes. Paul places the story within a longer history in which Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Bengali, Bihari and indigenous peoples have been purged in different situations in the name of religious or ethno-cultural nationalism.

Paul also writes that majoritarianism played a significant role in the subcontinent’s two partitions. Elias said in 1987 that his times were shaped by the 1971 Liberation War, which brought a second independence symbolised by a new flag but didn’t bring substantive liberation. The flag changed; the story asks what happened to the people still exposed to pressure over their homes.

“Khoari” was published as a short story in 1975. It first appeared in book form in Rajshahi in 1982, alongside three other stories. The story’s focus is not an abstract contest over national identity: it is Samarjit watching his father face pressure to leave a house that has already been taken from the family once.

A writer watching power up close

Elias, who lived from 1943 to 1997, is regarded as a classic writer of Bangla literature. Paul describes his work as attentive to society, the state and people, mapping characters through their tastes, class and social positions. Elias tried to remain faithful to history even when that challenged readers, and his stories and novels don’t follow an easily accessible common underpinning.

His friend Abdul Mannan Syed described a shift in Elias’s writing: the younger writer was partly a romantic experimentalist and sentimentalist, while the later Elias was more committed to an ideology. Syed said the phases overlapped and the distinction wasn’t absolute. Elias’s perceptive realism has drawn praise, but Syed Shamsul Haq said Elias was deeply dissatisfied with Chilekothar Sepai and acknowledged that he hadn’t correctly captured the actual reality of the 1969 uprising.

Elias planned a novel about the 1971 war of independence, his wife, Suraiya Elias, said, but his sudden death prevented him from carrying it out. Ahmed Sofa said Elias had also expressed a desire to write about the hardships of Biharis. Paul writes that both planned novels would have been outstanding contributions alongside Elias’s two great novels.

Shibu Kumer Shill made the documentary Eliaser Khoari in 2014 and later edited a book bringing together memories and assessments from friends, relatives and literary figures, occasional thoughts by Elias, the story and material about its background. Paul praises the volume’s production, size and presentation, and says its relevant, rare images add value. The book returns readers to a story in which the promise of a new order doesn’t end the search for someone else to remove.