Noorjehan Murshid

I am Noorjehan Murshid and I come from Murshidabad. I was educated at the Victoria Institution in Calcutta and the Universities of Calcutta and Boston. My first job after my graduation from Calcutta was that of Headmistress of a Girls’ High School in Barisal. Before my M.A. results came out, I was appointed Superintendent of a Post Graduate Women Students’ Hostel in Calcutta. At the same time, I joined All India Radio as a broadcaster.

With partition I opted for Pakistan, which meant for me Dhaka and my destiny. I joined politics in 1954 and got elected to the East Pakistan Legislative Assembly on a United Front ticket. Since 1954, I have been actively involved in politics both in and out of power. But with the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the murder of my colleagues Tajuddin Ahmed, Nazrul Islam, Monsur Ali and Qamruzzaman, I lost heart and sort of withdrew from politics.

My journal was born in these circumstances and in response to my own need for a worthwhile occupation as well as to the situation in the county. You bring out a journal at a particular time when you believe you have something special to say and that there are people in society who want it said. Most of our people are poor and without rights. The idea of social justice was accepted and current but it did not seem to include the notion of equal rights for men and women.

The journal wanted to draw attention to this long-standing default and work for the equality of woman and man. The concept of the journal and its range of interests were expressed through its different sections which were: “The World,” “Country,” “Society,” “Interviews,” “Literature,” “Miscellaneous Reflections,” “Debate,” T.V., the Theatre and “Letter from Abroad.”

I recall that the first issue contained articles on the original of the dowry system in Bangladesh, women workers in industry, women’s representation in parliament, a long extract from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in Bengali translation, and a discussion on the subject of women and development. We wanted Edesh-Ekal to say something to all citizens and at the same time to maintain a strong focus on women and their problems. The editor got dozens of congratulatory letters. The actual readership of the journal was limited to a small section of the middle class.

I started the venture without any institutional support. Most of the support came from my family. I created a fund with contributions from my husband and children and my own savings.

The first issue came out in August 1986. When I decided to bring out the journal I was optimistic that there would be a large readership.

We approached friends and sympathetic people for contributions and were pleased with the response. I wanted to lay a strong emphasis on women and women’s issues and contacted almost all female writers in the country. I received some articles, stories and poems from them, but most of my contributors were men and I feel sorry to say that some of our women writers, who of course rightly call themselves writers and not women writers, were rather cool towards the magazine. They promised and never delivered.

I brought out my journal from the Bangla Academy Press. One morning Nirmalendu Goon, the poet, came to the place and appointed himself my assistant. He helped with proof reading and also contributed a personal column.

I contacted the Hawkers Association and gave it 1000 copies to sell, only to find out that most of these were destroyed by white ants and rats. When I protested, they said no one wanted to buy this type of intellectual magazine. They showed me some cheap and glamorous magazines of cinema and sex and asked me to bring out something like these; otherwise, it would not sell.

Nirmalendu Goon could only assist me for two hours a day in proof reading. So I appointed a very bright girl called Sabera and a boy named Tareq to help with the distribution of the journal, collection of articles and ads, answering and mailing letters, etc.

Soon I felt the need for an office assistant, who would maintain files, answer telephone calls and keep an account of the expenses. Soon I found that my overhead expenses were becoming too much for me to bear. I was bad at collecting ads. I noticed how confidently Dr. Mustafa Nurul Islam, the editor of the quarterly journal Sundaram, went to business organisations and came back with very lucrative and regular ads. Obviously, I did not have his flair for business, but I know I was being discriminated against. I was a woman and an ex-minister of a former government whose members were not in great favour in the commercial district of Motijheel in Dhaka.

The first step I took was to reduce my expenses. Printing charges at the Bangla Academy Press were high. So I thought of changing the press. I tried some wayside printers, but the atmosphere in these places was rather uncongenial unlike at the Bangla Academy Press, where one could have a place to work for hours, have tea, and meet well known literary people. I bought a small composing unit and hired two compositors.

The more I tried to reduce my expenditure, the more it increased. But in spite of all these troubles, I never thought of giving the journal up. The journal used to come out regularly but understandably with very few ads. My daughter Sharmeen came forward to help me in collecting ads. She and Sabera both worked for the journal with dedication. They never thought any work for it beneath their dignity.

And what is the moral of the story? I must play down the hilarious denouement to the affair. The switch-over to computer technology need not have been the undoing of the journal. The truth is I was weary of the effort to keep the journal afloat as a deficit proposition and of dependence on ads. I acknowledged earlier that the intellectual support I received was not unsatisfactory. The readers too responded well to the journal, enabling us to maintain the circulation at a reasonable level for some time. The real reason for the failure of the journal to stay alive longer than it did is to be ascribed to certain social and economic factors.

When times are hard, the lower and middle classes are not very keen on spending their scarce cash on things like Edesh-Ekal. The slump in the sale of the journal, which began with the great flood of 1988, coincided with the growing strength of religious fundamentalists, a group seeking power and control over society, especially educational institutes.

I, however, think, in retrospect, that despite all this, some of the problems I spoke of would not have existed for a person with greater business acumen than I possessed. I also think that the values for which the journal stood are not only valid but basic to our conception of the society we want to build. These values and forces inimical to them are at present engaged in a deadly conflict. What is needed is not surrender but a reincarnation of the spirit of Edesh-Ekal as a form of intelligent and assertive group action rather than lonely individual effort.

Noorjehan Murshid was a journalist and politician.

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