Why Zia Haider Rahman’s In The Light of What We Know is the best English novel from Bangladesh

It has been ten years since Bangladeshi writer Zia Haider Rahman’s debut novel, In the Light of What We Know (Picador), a doorstopper both sweeping in scope and epic in its ambition, came into the world. If you possess even a passing love for fiction, you’d know that there comes a novel every once in a while that sweeps you off your feet, seizes your attention, gets a hold on you. Rahman’s novel does all this and more. 

It pulls you into its multi-layered world, surprises you with its complexity, delights you with its elegance, and overwhelms you with the sheer weight of all that you do not know, filling you with a poignant awareness of the expanses of various disciplines — besides literature itself — that can be tapped to tell a story: mathematics and philosophy, for instance. To me, it’s the best novel in English to come out of Bangladesh, perhaps rivalled only by Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh (HarperCollins India) that was published (posthumously) five years later, and one of the most important works of South Asian literature in recent years.

In the Light of What We Know, with its intellectual rigour and stimulating exploration of identity, displacement, and global systems of power, demonstrates the immense potential of the novel as a form. It also expands the boundaries of fiction to explore the most complex questions of life, and to forge connections between disparate ideas and experiences. It’s a novel as much preoccupied with the personal as it’s with the political. A novel that demands to be read not with the casual detachment of an observer, but with the deep engagement of one who is willing to be transformed by the act of reading. For within its pages lies a world so vividly realised, so profoundly moving, that to immerse oneself in it is to embark on a journey in which you emerge on the other side changed, enriched, amazed, and in awe of its architecture, its craft, its world-building.

The wider context of post-9/11 literature

With multiple epigraphs threaded through its fabric and at 576 pages, the novel is dense and demanding. But it’s ultimately rewarding in a way that makes you catch hold of the next person you meet, and enjoin, “Read it.” Its thematic focus fits within a broader literary context in which authors from South Asia, particularly Pakistan’s Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie and Nadeem Aslam, have been grappling with the aftermath of 9/11 and its lingering effects on the immigrant experience of Muslims in the West. We all know that after 9/11, there was a shift in global politics, which coincided with the rise of Islamophobia, the war on terror, and increased scrutiny of Muslims in most Western countries. On the upside though this period also provided a fertile ground to writers from South Asia and the broader Muslim world, who keep revisiting this to explore the trials and tribulations of living in a world that suddenly views them through a lens of distrust and fear.

Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is a dramatic monologue delivered by Changez, a Pakistani man who finds himself increasingly alienated from the United States after 9/11. It deftly explores the duality of identity, the seduction of the American Dream, and the subsequent disillusionment when that dream turns into a nightmare. A decade later, he followed it up with another searing novel on the subject, Exit West, which distinguishes itself by merging a deeply personal love story with an allegorical treatment of migration. Through its protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, Hamid tells a story of love and survival in an unnamed city on the brink of war. Significantly, he doesn’t anchor the novel solely in the trauma of terrorism or the binary of East versus West. What he does instead is defy the stereotypical images of migrants as either victims or threats and humanise their experience, subverting the Western media’s dehumanising narratives about them. 

At least two of Shamsie’s richly imagined novels — Burnt Shadows (2009) and Home Fire (2017) — engage with these themes. While the former spans multiple generations and continents and explores how the echoes of historical trauma — ranging from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki to the Partition of India and the post-9/11 war on terror — shape identities and destinies, the latter, a modern retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone, dives into the lives of British Muslims grappling with loyalty, love, and the irresistible pull of radicalisation.

Aslam’s exquisitely written, lyrical and poignant novel, The Wasted Vigil, set in Afghanistan — a country caught in the crossfire of history — tells the story of Marcus, an Englishman who has lived in Afghanistan for many years, and the people who cross his path: Lara, a Russian woman searching for her brother; Casa, a young Taliban recruit; and David, an American who is haunted by his past. Each of these characters is driven by an acute sense of loss — whether it is the loss of a loved one, a homeland, or a way of life. Yet, amid this overwhelming grief, Aslam also weaves in moments of love and hope, suggesting that even in the darkest of times, there is the possibility of redemption and renewal.

A novel of big ideas 

Coming back to In The Light of What We Know, there are few novels that limn the dissonance between what we think we know and the truth that continues to elude us, challenging our perceptions and forcing us to confront the limitations of our own understanding, so effortlessly. Its epigraph, a line from W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, reads: “Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” In nods to a constellation of works in the beginning of every chapter, Rahman lays out a terrain of ideas that resonate with the story he tells, the story of post-colonial identity, the dislocation of the immigrant experience, and the moral ambiguities that arise in the face of global conflict.

Rahman’s background as an international human rights lawyer and a scholar also influences the depth and breadth of the novel. He incorporates rich details and references to diverse fields. Following a digressive style, he moves between different places and times. Knowledge — its acquisition, its limitations, and its consequences — forms the philosophical backbone of the novel, giving it a weight and depth that is rare in contemporary literature. Rahman questions the reliability of memory, the construction of identity, and the epistemological challenges of knowing the world and oneself. Harkening back to a time when novels were expected to grapple with big ideas, it never loses sight of the larger forces at play — the geopolitics, the history, the intellectual currents — shape these individual lives.

The novel is centered on the lives of two friends, both South Asian men who meet at Oxford and whose lives diverge sharply in the years that follow. Narrated by one of these men, a nameless narrator who comes from a privileged background, while his friend, Zafar, a bright and erratic financial wizard in his heydays, hails from a much more humble family. Zafar’s journey, both literal and metaphorical, takes him from the streets of Dhaka to the elite circles of London and New York, and eventually to the war-torn landscapes of Afghanistan.

The narrator, early in the novel, clarifies that he is merely “reporting” his conversations with Zafar, “collating and presenting all the material he provided, including volumes of rich and extensive notebooks, and of following up with my own research where necessary, it is the matter of representing details that has most occupied me, the details, to be precise, of his story, which is — to risk putting it in such dramatic terms as Zafar would deprecate — the story of the breaking of nations, war in the twenty-first century, marriage into the English aristocracy, and the mathematics of love.”

Ultimately, Rahman’s novel is a bold and necessary reminder of what literature can achieve when it dares to think big, to reach for the universal, and to illuminate the light of what we know.