Comment on the social picture drawn in Syed Waliullah’s Tree Without Roots.
The celebrated novel Tree Without Roots by Syed Waliullah depicts the sorrow and happiness, thoughts and dreams, struggle and urge for life of the people in a society hopelessly and helplessly fallen prey to religious fraud. The novel is set in a village called Mahabbatpur in the northern part of the present Bangladesh. This village represents the rural life of the ignorant millions made to accept the feudalistic systems imposed upon them by the chieftains or religious leaders.
This novel is set in a time just around the Second World War when the genre ‘novel’ has become essentially urban; Syed Waliullah has directed his readers to a hitherto unknown village of northern Bengal and made them encounter an existentialist character Majeed hailing from a barren but populous area of Bengal. This man like an uprooted tree enters Mahabbatpur along the road of Motiganj and finds the weapons of his struggle for food and livelihood in an old and broken grave of some yet unknown person, which he identifies as the tomb of some saint and covers It with a piece of red cloth. The villagers become simultaneously alarmed and ashamed that they did not pay proper homage to the tomb of a great person of spiritual power. To compensate for this shameful ignorance, the villagers rush to the tomb with their heartfelt pleas and pledges. The tomb covered with a red cotton cloth, looks like the back of a dead fish and begins to flicker the light of candles and to spread the fragrant smoke from incense sticks. People from the villages around begin to follow with their tales of hope and dismay, success and failure, and gratitude to the tomb and with the shines and tinkers of coins.
Tree Without Roots depicts the decadent state of the superstitious Muslim Bengal. Majeed struggles existentially, but he uses fraud as a tool for his fight against poverty. By the time he gains victory over poverty, he destroys the serenity in the village's social life and injects dread into it. Majeed’s exploitation of the villagers, his marrying twice, evoking a sense of religious passion in villagers’ minds himself being not that committed—all these events are delineated by Waliullah with an unfailing realistic touch.