Art and Life in Bangladesh

Art is the most human of things. Based in the genetic, in the creative intelligence and the nimble body, art is a potential in every individual.

Nurtured in social experience, taught, learned, and bent against circumstance, art is a reality in every culture.

Always unifying what analysis divides, art is personal and collective, intellectual and sensual, inventive and conventional, material and spiritual, useful and beautiful, a compromise between will and conditions.

Art is, given the storms and pains and limited resources, the best that can be done.

Through art, the human complexity comes into the world for consideration.

It is here to see. To study art, we need not sneak about like spies or thieves or detectives, wheedling for information or bullying our companions into uncomfortable confessions.

We stand with them, letting their work set the agenda for inquiry.

We look together at what they have done, using it to discover what they think and intend.

Learning to be fascinated by what fascinates them, overcoming our separation in a oneness of interest, we find in art a courteous entry to the life of the creator and the culture of creation. - from the Introduction. This book does for Bangladesh what Henry Glassie has already brilliantly achieved for Ireland and Turkey. "I write", he says, "to introduce you to the people of Bangladesh through their art, and to use their art to exemplify the study of creativity in its own context as part of a general inquiry into human being". "Art and Life in Bangladesh" is at once an introduction to the country and its history and a meditation on the importance of art and life and the relationship between art, meaning, and understanding. And far from incidentally, it recognizes the work of a variety of gifted artists - potters, metal workers, painters, weavers, poets.

Glassie introduces us to dozens of artists working in different mediums and shares with us both the thrill of meeting new people and discovering new ways of art as well as his ruminations on their work.

Anyone interested in Bangladesh, art, and the ways of the folklorist will be thrilled with this magisterial volume.