Bangladesh: An Intercultural Panorama
About the book
Bangladesh: An Intercultural Panora ma is an unusual book by an exceptional writer. Professor Anwar Dil is an uncompromising scholar and a writer of eminence; he has acquired international repute for his publications, especially in the field of his specialization, which is sociolinguistics and human development. Since 1961 he has been editing an Intercultural Studies Series; he has translated Punjabi poems into English and has collaborated with his scholarly and equally well-known wife Professor Afia Dil, a Bengali, in writing a book of cultural history called Bengali Language Movement to Bangladesh. And now he is writing autobiographically not about his own self but some of the notable Bengali cultural figures whom he had known, liked and understood. …
Professor Dil has an unfailing, almost astonishing, memory and he recollects his happy experiences of knowing those he has written about not only in detail but with accuracy. One could have called him a living archive, as he makes use of his archival collections with a liveliness and art that makes the personalities he is dealing with come alive on every page of his book. Of course, he writes autobiographically, but his manner is more like that of an inquisitive traveler rather than that of a person remembering and recalling the past. This traveler has not only seen personalities with curiosity but sought to understand them; he has read, done research, reproduced photographs, book covers, and even memorial postage stamps. Persons have been more interesting to him than landscape, although his interest in nature has been abiding and he himself is an abstract-calligraphic painter of international fame.
Those who would read Professor Anwar Dil’s books on Bangladesh would come afresh to the realization that viable integration can be achieved only from within and that it has to be cultural even more than political.
-Serajul Islam Choudhury
Professor Emeritus,
University of Dhaka
About the Author
Anwar Dil was born in Jullundur, Punjab, and raised in Abbottabad in the North-West Frontier Province. Educated at Government College, Lahore; Islamia College, Peshawar; University of Michigan; and Indiana University. He has been Professor of Language Science and Communication at United States International University (renamed Alliant International University in 2000) in San Diego, California (1973-2003) and Professor Emeritus (2003–). In Pakistan, he served for sixteen years as Lecturer in English Literature at Government College, Dera Ghazi Khan, Sahiwal, and Lahore, and as Professor and Language Specialist at the West Pakistan Education Extension Centre, Lahore. He is the author and editor of forty books including nineteen volumes in the distinguished Language Science and National Development Series published by Stanford University Press. His internationally acclaimed books, among others, include: Humans in Universe (with Buckminster Fuller, 1983), On This Earth Together (1994), Norman Borlaug on World Hunger (1997), Science, Education, and Development (2002), Toward Eradicating Hunger and Poverty (2003), Intercultural Education (2004), Toward a Hunger-Free World (2004), Strategy, Diplomacy, and Humanity (2005), Intercultural Learning (2007), Science for Peace and Progress (2008), Bangladesh: An Intercultural Mosaic (2010), Bangladesh: An Intercultural Memoir (2011), Bangladesh: An Intercultural Panorama (2011), and, Bengali Language Movement an Creation of Bangladesh (with Afia Dil, Bangladesh edition, 2011). His abstract-calligraphic paintings are in the collections of connoisseurs around the world.
