Hassan Ajizul Haque's Agunpakhi

In her dreams, when she met her old friends and played in her parents’ home, everyone still called her Pooro. At another times she was Hamida. It was a double life: Hamida by day, Pooro by night. In reality, she was neither one nor the other, she was just a skeleton, without a shape or a name (25; ch. 5).

At the end of the novel, Hamida stands before an acid test. Her head is still held high in peerless personality and haloed in a divine dignity. She is now no Pooro, no Hamida but an illuminated human being with all the normal sensibilities. When Hamida’s brother grabs her hand and says, “This is your only chance” (125; ch. 27) Hamida can easily understand what he intends to say. Like Lazo, she too is now free to join the group of the Hindus

It’s a tale of a woman who struggles within and ultimately is purified. She becomes bold and decisive to denounce the so called geographical concepts of boundaries which break the human hearts and yield unimaginable destitution and suffering. Agunpakhi is no simple woman, but a part of a greater human civilization where each individual is given importance according to his or her own choice. There is very little reference of physical violence in the text. The violence is shown within in the form of a great mental

Written in the background of partition, Agunpakhi is actually a search for all these three democratic and humanistic ideals- freedom of the individual, right to self determination and full realization of each person’s talents. Agunpakhi has never enjoyed the liberty of taking any decision about her own life. She is never asked about her love of education, about her own decision before her marriage. In her marital life too, she is never asked about her valuable thinking. The narrator sometimes considers herself like a slave without any liberty in her in-law family. She cannot even express her opinion regarding her children’s treatment and education. She lives on like a silent spectator and only obeys her husband and grown up children. But when the whole family decides to move to East Bengal, she exercises her individual freedom to express her decision of not leaving her house and country. She is determined to take her decision alone and realizes, for the first time, the importance of her talents. She boldly says, “I will stay in this house” (246; ch.28). She becomes alone in her fight against the partition of her family. Her two sons and one daughter become settled in East Bengal and her husband too decides to stay with them selling all his land property excluding the house. It is like a bolt from the blue for the narrator. She can