Akhtaruzzaman Elias's look back in anguish: time traveler in search of left utopia.

This essay looks at Akhtaruzzaman Elias' modernist novel Khwabnama as the apex of a narrative arc of left utopia within the ruins of the present, distributed over multiple short stories and one earlier novel. The ennui that suffused this body of work emanated from the author's itinerant affiliation with organized socialist politics, and the sense of disappointment that surrounded the evisceration of that politics within the Pakistan (1947–1970) and Bangladesh (1971–) period of this geography. I explore how Elias developed a distinct literary strategy of resuscitating hope by traveling back to anticolonial uprisings to narrate a time of Hindu-Muslim unity along class solidarity alignments. I look at Elias' peers, who also wrote from within a landscape of postcolonial disappointment. I then spend time with four of Elias' short stories that present a post-independence Bangladesh in which, bereft of external enemies, fratricidal tendencies turn populations against each other. From these short stories, Elias moved to his first novel, Chilekothar Sepai, where he looked at the 1969 Pakistan uprising as a class revolution derailed by bourgeois nationalism. Finally, I look at Khwabnama and think through how Elias wanted to travel far away from the traditional focus of the Bangladeshi historical novel—the 1971 liberation war—to find an earlier anticolonial period where a politics of class solidarity across religious lines could find hopeful purchase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]