Continuing the legacies of those martyred and targeted
By: Ani Naser (Austin, USA)
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My parents were born around the time of liberation, and as a result they’ve passed down stories to me. My family is one of teachers; my mother was a substitute teacher for many years, while my dad helped teach in his parents’ classrooms; my sister and I both got our professional starts in education. That said, my grandparents were scholars in the truest sense of the word. My Dada, Abdul Halim, was a mathematician with his hands in many other pies, and my Dadi, Nurun Nahar Begum, was a historian. Between the two, they had many published works, the most well known one being Manusher Itihash, a documented history of the world.
If there’s one thing that immigrant children know to be true, it’s that their parents love keeping secrets and dropping bombshells at wildly unexpected moments. My Dada and Dadi both died when I was young, and I never got the chance to hear their life stories from them. Over the years, I’d hear these stories in more detail from my father. To be clear, these weren’t heartfelt moments of remembrance on family trips or family dinners, but rather spiraling family arguments that were getting all too personal, interrupted by completely irrelevant revelations which, to be fair, did do well to shut me up.
My Dada and Dadi joined the Communist Party, though refrained from contact with the Soviet government due to their more Marxist interpretations. However, this academic and political profile made them noteworthy to the Pakistani Army during the period of liberation, as the Army under General Yahya Khan sought to murder Bangladesh’s intelligentsia. My grandparents were both specifically named on that list of targets. As a result, they took refuge in India with their young son (my father), along with 10 million other Bengalis. In 1971, when the genocide was launched in Dhaka, my grandfather learned that his name was on that list from an associate who had insider information. He had little time to prepare his family. After the war, when they returned to Bangladesh, my grandparents went right back to being scholars and educators in the newly formed country. As professors, they continued a long family tradition of teaching, and every generation since has at one point held a job as a teacher.
As immigrant children, we often joke about the expectation of us to become doctors, engineers, and lawyers. As somebody going into college for political science and filmmaking, I’ve created considerable tension for not being a computer science major as expected of me. A recent conversation with my sister put some things into perspective for me. She asked if I ever felt pressure to enter these fields, not because of the parental expectation or the lure of private sector money, but because people like our grandparents had died for it. After all, these were the Bangalis on the forefront of progress, innovation, and development. Each and every martyred intellectual, and those who survived, were a part of something bigger than themselves. I often think of the estimated 991 teachers killed by the Pakistani army, and of the legacies that ended in 1971. I think I have a responsibility to carry my grandparents’ legacies of teaching, of fostering intellectuals to create a better world. And as much as my grandparents resented my father for immigrating to America, the very nation complicit in the massacre of their peers, I hope to use whatever tools at my disposal to continue their legacy here.
Glossary:
Dada — paternal grandfather
Dadi — paternal grandmother
