Bangla the core of our national identity

The following presentation was made by the late Enayetullah Khan, at an assembly of the Asian Study Group in 2004

I have no first-hand account to relate of the electrifying events of February 21, 1952 that had lighted the spark of a new national consciousness among the Bangla-speaking constituents of the then Pakistan. The day’s events centring on Dhaka University were tragic and landmark at once in that the students had shed blood, braved death, and successfully forced the hands of the Pakistan ruling coterie to yield to their demand of giving Bangla language the status of one of the two state languages of what is now an unlamented Pakistan as far as the people of this land are concerned.

I was still in the school in the district town of Jessore in the south-west, happily and obediently inured to a strict routine of class-hours, after-school games, homework and tutorials, and the unexceptionable parental rule of early-to-rise and early-to-bed regimen, relaxed only on festival holidays. Dhaka, the capital, was a schoolboy’s dream for taking wings to college, and was distanced, unlike in the present times, by one or two weekly flights of propelled aircraft, and the long haul of railway trains coming and going in a distinct jingle of rhythms of their clanging wheels.

News travelling from Dhaka, one or two days too late, in cold print on the newspaper’s pages were the curiosity staple for a schoolboy, mostly about cricket and other sports. The world, including that of mine, seemed so calm and self-contained, despite the rubble of the Second World War ending in 1945, and the great divide of the subcontinent in 1947, scarred by the two-way mass transfers across the Radcliffe lines amid communal mayhem on both sides of India and the then Pakistan.

But those were not for me to ponder like most of the Midnight’s Children, to borrow a title from a Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece crafted on the events of the partition of the subcontinent. We would rather set sail on the dreamboat and take the voyage as far as imagination could cruise limitlessly. Everything was intimately and almost guardedly personal and familial, though my mother was no more, in what was a migratory sheltered life from one place to another as was warranted by my father’s transferable judicial career.

My two older brothers were in Dhaka in the first and the second years of their university honours courses. The eldest of the brothers, Sadeq Khan, had already turned a communist at 17 in his pre-university college days, and the second brother, the late Abu Zafar Obaidullah, was about to follow in his footsteps. Those were the early heady days of romanticism painted Red that had swept the imagination and the intellect of the bold and the young as later happened on both sides of the border in the late sixties and the early seventies. For the Pakistan establishment, it was an ideological heresy that had to be strongly put down. I was somewhat concerned lest I was denied the freedom of the dormitory world in Dhaka’s pre-university college years only few months hence, and tied down to the leash of home-discipline as a hedge against the contagion of the heresy.

Jessore was a sleepy and pleasant district town with old colonial structures as in other towns housing the officials of the Raj. The ambience had changed little despite the indigenisation of what was known as the steel-frame of the civil service under the Raj.

The events of the 21st of February, hence, would only ring a distant bell had it not been for the brief news item in then Pakistan Observer’s front page arriving, as usual, two days late. The tumultuous proceedings of the day in Dhaka’s University vicinage were yet to sink in. What, however, changed everything was the flush in the rubicund face of my father holding the newspaper and poring over it. When I could steal a look at the newspaper, I learnt that Sadeq Khan was in a list of 7 leading activists of the language movement wanted by the police. He had gone underground two years before to carry on clandestine agitprop for the Party that was banned, up until 1954.

A strange stirring came over me, and I further learnt that the late Obaidullah too, younger by a year and some months to Sadeq, the eldest, was carted off to prison along with hundreds of defiant young men and women of Dhaka University who dared to break the prohibition of street assembly beyond four in number under Section 144. All of this that I have put to pen is by way of prologue.

Epilogue
The spiralling history of Bangladesh, coming into its own, is a fascinating mix of pristine political emotions, smothered at times by the heavy hand of a feudal-military-bureaucratic combine in the western wing, lording over the tribune of power, and healed and renewed at other times through victories in democratic struggles. If those were short-lived beginning with 1952, the bits of victories of the people or the hesitancies and the capitulations of the political class, as in 1971, were overtaken by the great mass upsurge of 1969 singularly uniting the whole people without arms against an armed enemy carrying out one of history’s worst genocides on this soil in 1971. The enemy of ‘internal colonialism’, to use a new-left terminology, finally met with defeat and surrendered to the allied forces of the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladesh Defence Forces and the Indian Army. That is yet another story subsequently developing many distortions and some landmark assertions of sovereignty and territorial integrity, still carrying meanings in those days, in the 33-year span since December 16, 1971, the Victory Day.

That may rest for now as we are talking about Ekushey, the symbol of pride and embryonic nationalism built around the language — a unique case in the annals of political science. One may ask why, the other Bengal across in India that also speaks the same language and has the same literary and cultural heritage even amid religious diversity, did not undergo a similar upheaval. Bangladesh, which was known in the days of yore as Banga, had always asserted a geo-political identity of its own, different from its western counterpart in India through different historical periods, including the Mughal and the Pathan imperial rule and the subsequent times of the independent Hindu kingdoms and the Muslim sultanates in this part. It was only during the two hundreds years of the British colonial rule that Bangladesh or East Bengal or Banga finally came under Delhi’s suzerain authority. Even the partition of Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, that had to be annulled due to powerful opposition from the metropolitan elite in Calcutta in 1911, had invested a distinct badge of identity to the eastern floodplains of the then Bengal.

The buildings that you see, namely the old High Court, the Curzon Hall opposite to it, the red-brick bungalows on the Minto and the Hare Roads, were built for the new capital during the 1905 partition, and were subsequently handed over to the Dhaka University in 1920-21 at the time of its founding. Even the Dhaka Club, whose facade has been kept as it was when founded by Sir Lancelot, the Lieutenant Governor General of East Bengal, also prided in a massive stretch of Gymkhana course till 1971 which is now known as the Ramna Park.

In this random exercise, I am just taking you on a tour of the time and the watersheds, for you to comprehend, if not for you to have a feel, of this land of six seasons and the embroidered quilt of the plains and the greenery, which when you are sky-borne and look down below, remain mostly under water for the better part of the year; and the croplands seem like patches of squares as in a chessboard, and the village homesteads look as if they are marooned in, and bound on all sides, by stretches and stretches of water. This is the land we are speaking about, ‘the land,’ as the poet says, ‘the like of which you will not find anywhere, the land of my birth that is the queen of all lands’.

Ekushey of 1952 also produced its literature, a crop of poetry, which in their pluralities of expression are still on everyone’s lips. My second older brother, Abu Zafar Obaidullah, then 18, wrote one of the most moving poems in the form of rhymes addressed to a mother.

Forgive me for this very personal account written in a hurry in one go, and to my responses to Ekushey as a schoolboy, particularly in the context of my brothers, who otherwise universalise the great daring of hundreds of other university boys and girls, the real heroes of the Ekushey.

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