To and From Ekushey: A Long and Tortuous Journey
Farida Majid
Mixed emotions of remembrance of the traumatic days of February, 1952, when three of my uncles were hauled to Dhaka Central Jail for involvement in the agitation, have become more mixed up in recent years. In 1952, the real 'culprit' among the police-imprisoned three was the youngest, Mustafa Monowar a boy of 15 or 16 then. The police hunted him down for having drawn a cartoon poster which he had posted by the paan-shop on the main street in Narayanganj.
The cartoon depicted a supine man, clearly recognizable as the figure of Khawja Nazimuddin, flat on his back with his ample belly up in the air. Over and around his belly were ant-like crowds of people marching in a procession carrying placards in their hands that read "rashtro bhasha bangla chai."
The police arrested the boy-artist and his local guardian, his dula-bhai (brother-in-law), that was my khalu, Lutfar Rahman, and they took along khalu's younger brother, Moshi. The three were beaten up with police baton, harshly enough to cause swollen arms and eyes visible a few days later when my mother and I visited them at Dhaka Central Jail. They remained imprisoned for a whole month before my nana negotiated a release. We used to live in Narinda, close by the Central Jail. My mother would take a tiffin-carrier of food and argue heatedly with the jailer for her right to visit her minor brother incarcerated for no bigger offence than drawing a black-and-white picture. On the way back from the jail visits I used to sob and vow never to learn Urdu.
I now regret not having a reading proficiency in this, quintessentially an Indian language. One would have thought that I had the good chance of acquiring it in the Pakistani era of 1950's. But Pakistan dared not impose Urdu on East Pakistan as was dreaded. Among my contemporaries I know no one who can read and write Urdu because he or she was forced to learn it at school. Even being in the first batch of students in Viquarunnisa Noon Girls' School where there were plenty of Urdu-speaking girls and teachers, there was no compulsory class for learning the Urdu language. I had nothing to rebel against. So, on Feb. 21, 1956, at the end of the school day, I went around to several empty classrooms and in big bold letters wrote on the blackboards: "rashtro bhasha bangla chai." There was a big uproar the next day. I was severely reprimanded and as punishment had to stand in the sun during the break period foregoing my tiffin.
I get flashes of insights as I revisit old issues. What was beneath the surface of the passion, the demand for Bangla as a State language of Pakistan? Bangla was even then a big and expressive modern Indian language with a Nobel Laureate poet to its credit among a dazzling array of world class litterateurs. Bengali artists, musicians and technicians figured prominently in the burgeoning moving picture and gramophone record industries. Outside the class politics, in the cultural milieu of mid-twentieth century India, Bangla and Urdu were not pitched in any apparent battle.
So the trouble began with the choice of a State language. Where did this idea of a State language come from? Urdu was not all that alien a language in Bengal. As a matter of fact, one of the native languages of this great 400-year-old city of Dhaka is Urdu. But the British sahibs had been classifying and labeling not only peoples of India but even languages of India strictly according to religion. Urdu was given the label 'Muslim'. 'Bengali' received the ticketing of 'Hindu' at Fort William College that was turned into a veritable factory for manufacturing communalized Indian history and culture.
Hence "Urdu, and Urdu only" will be the State Language of Muslim Pakistan, declared Jinnah on March 21, 1948, which we Muslim Bengali people must accept because we had made the choice of becoming Pakistani. That mistaken choice roiled us in 1948; and the protest in 1952 was actually a foil for a massive regret. The word 'mass' needs to be used here in a literal sense; I see it as a people's movement expressing bitterness of a betrayed idealism, an idealism that yearned for a democratic secular state that was betrayed by a non-Bengali elite group deciding our fate. It was tough to admit, after the bloody communal riots, loss of lives and property, and untold human misery, that the grand Partition along the religious fault-line was a grave mistake. A large but late realization dawned on the conscience of Bengali Muslims: Our identity – our collective 'porichoy' is through our language and culture. Our various religions are enriching parts of our common culture, not separate entities outside it.
The whole idea of a 'State language' was and still is a mid-20th century hoax -- an imported idea from Europe thrown in the midst of turbulent India as a golden apple of Strife -- yet another imperialist trick to keep the former colonies forever in-fighting amongst themselves. The British had no intention of leaving India intact. Neither was it in the geopolitical interest of the USA, an emerging world power. One State One Language seemed a good enough formula whose application to India's newly formed nations would emulate the native European model. The model for one language one nation with many states was provided by the U. S. A. All in all, a thoroughly modern idea for a backward India!
Instituting a state language was considered pre-requisite for a modern state as opposed to the perceived "chaos" of multiple languages, dialects, local cultural differences within a large language group and varieties of sects, sub-sects, within any one religion co-habiting in an integrated civilization. Not content with classifying Indian languages according to their own whimsical notions of 'Hindu' languages and 'Muslim' languages, the departing Imperialists warned the newly independent nations against any state of multilingualism which they euphemistically labeled "language problems" and that the problems needed to be attended to for economic and political reasons. Thus, the very sociological aspects that had contributed to India's pre-colonial status as the wealthiest nation on earth became characterized as "problems" to be tackled by suppression.
Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah were all aglow in European Enlightenment. A paternalistic top-down morality replaced an older, traditional sense of justice that was shared equally by all. British–educated political leaders, mostly from landed upper class, thought oppressed Muslims of India ought to have a homeland carved out of India. Jinnah even toyed with the idea of Dalitstan, a homeland for the lower caste Hindus. Instead of looking for the root causes of oppression most of which were started by the British imperial rule, and determinedly discarding communalism and casteism (the form of inflexible 'scheduled' caste that was a British invention) as the legacies of evil machination of the British administrators, these political leaders sought means of solutions that caused death and displacement of more than two million people, and perpetuated the strife well into the next generation in the form of neo-colonialism.
It is worthy of note here, especially as a hindsight, that the only set of intellectuals with any sense of obligation towards the magnificent mosaic of Indian civilization was the learned Muslims of Jamiat-ul Ulema i-Hind. They thought it was a ridiculous idea to carve the Indian peninsula and ghettoize the Muslims in a separate state. Muslims and Hindus had lived side by side for centuries. "We should be joining our Hindu brothers in the struggle to oust the British from India," said Moulana Shibli Noumani, renowned for his authoritative tome on the Prophet's life. He rebuked the Muslim League for indulging in a 'tamasha'. Many leading Deobandi scholars from Darul Uloom, the most influential seat of Islamic learning in India, vociferously opposed British imperialism and the 'two-nation' theory of the Muslim League that posited the demand for a separate country.
Those venerable religious men were not politically naïve. It never ceases to amaze me how perfectly sensible, humanitarian, pragmatic and far-sighted ideas of these Islamic scholars were shunted aside by the religious-identity champions of Muslim Leaguers. The Ulema were not 'angreji'-educated! The two-nation theory-wallahs were. They were also 'rai's' and 'ashraf' and they all spoke Urdu. I call these men Macaulay's Imperialist Dream Puppets. The Mill-Macaulay-Grant education policies of 19th century were given a boost by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan who was doggedly opposed to social equality in matters of 'ajraf' or lower class Muslims receiving English education. Pursuant to his commitment to creating vigorous 'ashraf' hegemony among Indian Muslims who would be loyal to Queen Victoria, Sir Syed expressed his disgust openly for Bengali Muslims since an overwhelming majority of them were from a lower social order. Bengali was the language of these despised people.
Bengali Muslims had been subjected to a double-dosage despise from their countrymen throughout the colonial period. The emergent urban educated middle class Hindu Bengalis were oblivious of Muslim presence amongst them. Or so it would seem if one were to look in the entire corpus of Rabindra-literature. As little girls my younger sister and I used to be complimented for our prettiness by Hindu neighbors with the words: "They don't look like Muslims, do they?" There was a reasonable mingling of Hindus and Muslims in the realm of music, but Muslim Bengali writers and poets thrived in a Jim Crow-like literary world of their own away from the limelight. It is no wonder that this Muslim intelligentsia of Bengal would opt for East Pakistan for fear of more Hindu domination after the British departure. Ekushey's was a complex revolt of Bengali Muslims against not only the double dosage of despise but also against its aftermath.
Such stark realities of human experiences do not often find expressions in the current narratives or the formal ritualisation of Ekushey in a coherent way. Yet they sure formed the load of discontent behind the back of the visible eruption of protests in East Pakistan over the State language policies in 1952. The political ramifications of the unrest grew, as we know, with the passing years through oppression, discrimination and military dictatorships. Stories from Ekushey to the 1971 War of Liberation and the birth of Bangladesh have been well-told. But the journey begun on Ekushey, 1952, is not done yet, unfortunately.
Ekusey was the realization that decolonization of 1947 was not 'freedom' from imperial domination but a continuation of it by local collaborators of imperialism. As we commemorate what had been achieved in 1952 we must also reflect upon all that has been underachieved thus far. For this reflection to be meaningful we need to revisit the psychological spot where a 15-yr old boy was pasting a protest poster on the side of a pan-shop in Narayangunj. How did his sense of a citizen's rights get mixed with his passion for his mother language? We need to trace the emotions and walk the trail back down a complicated, yet formative part of our history.
©2011 Farida Majid, a poet, scholar and literary translator. Taught English at CUNY and Bangla at Columbia University in the City of New York.
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