Ami Bangla
Click here to read this on Rasa Journal where it was first published on March 11, 2022.
When Dr. Nira Rahman’s teen daughter came home from school one day, she told her how she had spoken about Feluda for a class discussion about detectives. “She said she liked Feluda more than Sherlock Holmes,” says the Bangladeshi-Australian academic who teaches at University of Melbourne. “I read Sherlock Holmes in English and Feluda in Bangla in my teenage years [and] when she said that, it made me very happy and I felt I had done something definitely right,” Dr. Rahman adds.
One of the subcontinent’s most beloved fictional characters, Feluda was created by the Indian Bengali film director and writer, Satyajit Ray, in 1965. Since then, his stories have been read and adapted to screens in West Bengal and Bangladesh over and over again. Dr. Rahman, 45, was born and brought in Bangladesh, studied in Kolkata and has been living in Australia for two decades now.
Trained in Hindustani classical music, sarees and food are two of the major ways in which she embraces her roots. “I’m a very proud Bengali,” she says, “it’s important to appreciate your own culture because if you cannot do that, you cannot appreciate other cultures”. A socio-linguistics researcher, she counts Bengali icons like Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Jibanananda Das, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay amongst her inspirations. “Culture trumps language but language ties the culture,” she says, pointing out how the language ties up Bengalis from either side of the border.
Swaroopa Lahiri, 30, who is an Indian Bengali and currently a PhD scholar in Global Studies at University of California Santa-Barbara, would agree. “It is almost worshipped in Bangladesh and theirs is a more pure version of it compared to ours which has words from English,” she says of conversational Bangla, referring to a Westernised version of the language on the lines of Hinglish (Hindi-English). She adds that she often connects with Bangladeshis abroad, sharing an example from her time as a graduate student in New York City. “There was a Bangladeshi fruit seller that I used to buy from and I was happy to talk to him in Bangla even on days when I didn’t buy anything from him,” she says.
Speaking of national identities, Dr. Rahman makes an important and often overlooked distinction. “For us, the struggle didn’t stop in 1947, we had to wait another 24 years for our nation,” she says, referring to both the India and Pakistan partition as well as Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971. Her uncles, she shares, fought in the War as well.
Formerly East Pakistan, the Bengali nation saw immense sectarian violence in decades prior to 1971 and the Bengali refugee experience throughout these years remains mostly unexplored even to date. Lahiri shares how her paternal grandfather’s family belonged to Pabna in Bangladesh and when the war struck, the family’s relatives would often write to him seeking assistance in terms of clothing and food. “They wrote him letters and they would tell him how they had to hide in rice fields from rioteers,” she says.
A recently released book, Birth of Bangladesh, by five IIM Calcutta alums shines a light on the violence of the War. The authors share their experiences from 1971 when they were studying at the management institute and crossed over to the other side of the border to observe how things were in a newly liberated Bangladesh in real time. Written by Kanakasabapathy Pandyan, it has insights and thoughts from Shyamal Chakravarty, Jayanta Sengupta, Devasis Gupta, and T. R Sankaranarayanan. S Clement and P. K Ganesh Aiyyar, both alums as well, were a part of the trip but passed away in 2016 and 2021 respectively. The five have worked across sectors such as technology, business, advertising, mentoring and consultancy, and academics broadly throughout their careers.
Joining over from different parts of India over a Zoom call on a Sunday evening, they collectively claim that the book is strictly an eyewitness account and their opinions here completely their own. “[The journey] was never taken as an intellectual task by us, it was pure enthusiasm and we wanted to see for ourselves what was happening,” says Chakravarty, who was the only Bengali member of the group of four that travelled together. The other three, Pandyan, Aiyyar, and Clement, had grown up in Tamil Nadu. Gupta, who also travelled to the newly independent nation, was part of an Oxfam project group, whereas Sankaranarayanan visited a refugee camp with Caritas India.
Chakravarty points out that one of the major differences between the partition of Punjab and Bengal during 1947, where one half of both regions became a part of India and the other of Pakistan, is that Bengali leaders called for a separate nation unlike the Punjabis. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who is infamously known as the Butcher of Bengal for his role in 1946 religious violence, was the one to float the idea for the first time at the time. It was not accepted at the time and led to people migrating to either sides. Refugee camps were set up on the Indian side and Bangladeshi filmmaker Tanvir Mokammel’s documentary on the topic, Seemantorekha, brings forth the trauma of that experience on celluloid. Chakravarty’s family too migrated to India from their home in Rajshahi district of East Pakistan.
Suhrawardy’s idea eventually became the seed of the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, which again not only resulted in violence but saw an even greater refugee crisis. It is estimated that over 10 million Bengali Hindus crossed over to India from the newly independent nation that was Bengali but also Muslim. It was an overwhelmingly traumatic and chaotic period in the history of the country as well as its neighbor, India. So, when the IIM Calcutta students set out on their week-long trip in December 1971, they had to take each moment as it came.
They travelled by train to Bangladesh and when on road, they soon encountered an Indian infantry soldier, Major Chandrakant. The man chastised them for their venture but also shared the happenings of the War with them as he drove them to their chosen destination in his jeep, remarking at one point that the violence inflicted on civilians in Bangladesh was comparable to worst such events in human history. Later on, the group met with more Indian soldiers, a Bangladeshi boatman who cooked food for them, a Bangladeshi engineer guarding a Sabre jet, members of Mukti Bahini (the Bangladeshi resistance force), and locals.
The book commemorates fifty years of Bangladesh as an independent and sovereign nation. It is primarily a document of the memories of the authors who witnessed a historical event as young adults. However, as the world currently witnesses another war unfolding in Ukraine, it is helpful to remember the Bangladesh experience which was more than a struggle for land.
Gupta says that there was far more intellectual, cultural and economic integration between the two Bengali regions than the Punjabi ones in the pre-Partition era. As early as 1905, when the region was separated for administrative purposes by the British, Rabindranath Tagore wrote Amar Sonar Bangla which was later adapted into the national anthem of Bangladesh in part. Bengalis on either side swear by both Rabindra and Nazrul sangeet, irrespective of their religion. “The concept of two Bengals was never there, it was one land like Maharashtra,” adds Sengupta.
Chakravarty and Pandyan say that while West Pakistan had multiple ethnicities such as Afghans, Balochis, Sindhis, and Punjabis, East Pakistan only had Bengalis. So even though worked for West Pakistan to summarily adopt Urdu along with Punjabi as common languages, it did not work in East Pakistan because not only was Bangla more popular but Urdu wasn’t relevant for the Bengali Hindu community. Bangla, then, became the more dominant identity of those in the region.
But while this cultural bonhomie suffered a violent stab in mid 20th century, were there other spheres of life that were influenced too? “Calcutta was always the bureaucratic part of Bengal but the business community mostly hailed from Dhaka,” says Chakravarty, “and the Bengali Hindu business community got wiped out in the war”. The acumen was retained by the Muslims in the country and that is why, he says, that Bangladesh is far more business oriented than the Indian side of Bengal. Worse still, it became difficult for those in West Bengal to influence policy decisions owing to their geographical distance to New Delhi, especially when compared to other trading communities in India, say, in Punjab and Rajasthan. West Bengal’s turn to communism did not help either.
Moving forward, then, Sankaranarayanan notes that India would do well to build economic partnerships with Bangladesh as both countries have a lot of similar problems such as poverty, unemployment, and so on. Considering the fact that India is surrounded by the ocean on three sides and has difficult relations with neighbors like Pakistan and China and has relatively smaller neighbors in Nepal and Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka should be natural allies and vice versa. “Our strengths and weaknesses can be complementary,” he adds.
“There’s a lot of interaction between Dhaka and Mumbai in areas of filmmaking and animation,” says Pandyan, “and not just that, they are coming to all parts of India so it’s definitely more open than India and Sri Lanka or Pakistan.”
Adila Noor, a Bangladeshi-Australian musician in her mid-40s, has recorded several Bangla songs with the Indian music label, Saregama. Born and brought up in Bangladesh, she migrated to Australia in 2003. A trained musician, she has learnt not just Nazrul sangeet but also Indian ragas. “I get invited to events of both the Bengali communities as a singer, so I get to celebrate with both,” she says, sharing that the events take place in a variety of suburbs in Melbourne where she lives. Women from both sides tend to wear the same colours, especially red and white, for festive occasions such as Pohela Boishakh (the Bengali New Year), she explains, highlighting how the gatherings feel rather similar.
“I encourage my son to speak Bangla but nowadays in Bangladesh, young people are forgetting the Bangla culture and adopting Western culture,” she says. Noor shares that she is concerned about the increasing religious nationalism in Bangladesh and feels that people should speak out against it. “We’re losing our culture,” she worries.
