Apnar Bari Kothai?

I regularly visit the coastal regions of Bangladesh for work. Whenever I meet a family, like in every other place in Bangladesh, the first personal question I am asked is: apnar bari kothai (where is your home)?

My standard, first response to the question is Dhaka. This is usually met by a curious look, because very few people are really from Dhaka. Dhaka is a city of migrants, many of whom have lived here for generations, but have never owned it. For most, it is a city to be at, not a place to be from.

So I have to explicate with: I live in Dhaka now, but our family is really from Habiganj, Sylhet.

This answer is met with: Oh! So do you visit Sylhet? How is your village?.

I don’t know. We lost everything to the river.

This earns me instant empathy. They take me in as one of them — a migrant soul detached from her roots, a survivor of our changing homeland. Then they want to tell me more about themselves because they feel a kind of kinship.

But I am not sure how similar our migrant experiences really are. Our home in Habiganj was washed away by the river even before I was born. I was born uprooted. Most of the people I meet at the coast are uprooted in the near past, some are being uprooted in the very present.

Apnar bari kothai?

That’s one of the first questions Bangladeshis tend to ask each other at the first meeting. You could be in the middle of a business meeting in Dhaka, a courtyard meeting at some remote village in the coast, a posh drawing room in Delhi, London or Washington, or just on cyberspace. But you can bet on this being among the first questions.

When they ask this, they don’t mean to ask where you live now. Like most overcrowded, growing-at-a-pace-faster-than-we-can-keep-up-with population, Bangladeshis are shifting — transitioning between our imagined homelands and our migrant realities. So when they ask about ‘home’, they mean the root. We want to know where it all began.

I’ve often wondered why. Why do we care where our roots lie, when we are branched so far from it? Why do we care where it all began when we know that we can never go back to it?

Salman Rushdie compares migrant people with translated work. When we marvel at the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, do we appreciate the Persian genius, or his translators into English or Bangla? Similarly, Rushdie asks us migrant people to celebrate our transplanted, chutneyfied self.

People I meet often ask me if I speak the Sylheti dialect. I don’t. This is not commonly spoken in Dhaka, and I speak the chutneyfied dialect of the city. Maybe I should follow what Rushdie suggests.

But any celebration can only be done by those for whom the uprooting was a matter of choice. The children born to families losing lives and livelihoods to floods, cyclones, river erosions and all the other ancillaries that is climate change, what choices will they have? These children will not remember what home looked like.
When I meet children at the coast, children who have been forced to leave their homes, which has its own socio-cultural milieu, I think that someday, they'll end up like me, where Khulna - faissha fish - pot gaan will only exist for them in the stories their parents will tell them about the good old days.

This December, the mighty and powerful, and their hangers on, will meet in Copenhagen to discuss the future of the planet. There will be a lot negotiation, based on complicated modeling, on who will pay whom how much for cutting what amount of emissions for over how long. Somber sounding communiqués will be issued. Pundits will parse every single word of that document.

Will anyone think about the children who will not know how to answer apnar bari kothai?

Being a Bangladeshi

Any one, who has been following, even sometimes unwittingly, the developments in the socio-political pandemonium of Bangladesh, must be familiar with the recurring dilemma of the politicians, civil society members and other members of the intellectual elite in deciding whether religious identity is analogous to national identity and political ideology, and vice versa. Is it imperative that being Bangladeshi, must either entail being a practicing Muslim and a supporter of the conservative wing, or being a Hindu or Christian or Buddhist and siding with the more politically liberal? Or worse still, does being neither make one a hyacinth, that belongs to neither the liberal (Sobhan ) nor the conservative (Mazhar)? What happens to me if I am Chakma and I chose to speak my national language over Bengali and also uphold my own ‘ethnic’ culture (Kabir)? At which political camp should I then seek refuge? Scholar Lamia Karim has grouped the alignments of this triangle quite aptly, she writes.
‘For cultural nationalists in Bangladesh, language/culture is the more important determinant of identity, and they seek a pan-ethnic Bengali identity with Bengalis living in West Bengal (India). For religious nationalists, Bangladeshi Muslims must reject residual aspects of syncretic Islam and strictly follow the Saudi Arabian interpretation of Islam and its codes. In the third place are nationalists who advocate a national identity, which is rooted in the indigenous folk culture of Bangladesh, one that rejects the ultra-nationalism of both the Islamic and cultural nationalists.’ (Abstracts)
What is most incredible about these philosophical and insightful concerns are their rather cosmetic relevance to the cross-section of the population. The common farmer, fisherman, or small trader is not plagued by such soul-searching quandaries. Such time-consuming, brain-draining, awe-inspiring profound queries usually only occupy the minds, columns, seminars and drawing rooms of the country’s elites. Both the conservative, namely the right-winged Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) with its political ally the Islamic-minded, Shariah-guided, Jamaat-E-Islami and the liberal Awami League , with their respective designated and closet allies, are busy cultivating cultural identity, through various overt and covert means, that they hope to establish as intrinsically Bangladeshi (Kabir). However, historically, the identity of the people of Bengal, or Banga as it used to be known as, was always determined by the land of their birth, not by their religion or merely on their language (Khan). Till today, the common man of Bangladesh has only one national identity – Bangladeshi, by virtue of their birth in the land of Banga, Bangladesh.
While we cannot obliterate the fact that a staggering 90% of the population is Muslim(Wikipedia). So, the argument that national identity be determined by the majority religion of the land has some strong footing. However, historically we have seen that a religiously homogenous nationalism gives rise to sectarian violence and minority repression, as in the cases of Iraq, Serbia, and even India. Moreover, specifically in the case of Bangladesh, we have seen that religion fails to be a barrier when it comes to the matter of national sovereignty. In 1952, during the Language Movement, the activists transcended all religious boundaries to fight for the right of Bangla to be the state language, and this ignited the fire for the ’71 Liberation War (Ahmed Ullah). So, again, the stronger argument remains that though statistics and common logic may dictate that religion be a deciding factor in determining national identity, Bangladeshis have this illogical tendency to feel thwarted and enraged when their language or their land fall under threat. Nonetheless, the debate over religion remains unresolved as the global phenomenon of Islamic Fundamentalism entrenches its roots in Bangladesh (Kabir). The moment you try to establish cultural or linguistic identity over religious identity, riots tend to erupt. Sadly for Bangladesh, this fact goes unaddressed by the liberal elite who see language and culture as the most integral determinant of identity. Eminent development activist Farhad Mazhar writes, “One cannot practically imagine a democratic and futuristic polity without creative engagement with people identifying themselves with Islam. The secularists are profusely funded by western donors but mainly those who have hardly any connection with the grassroots or any idea of the popular discourses and identity concerns of the majority population.” In his New Age article, Mazhar deliberates on how since Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country, the role and influence of religion can never be abdicated from the political arena, regardless of which camp, the liberal or the conservative or the neutral, holds and controls the power.
The fact that the liberal fronts tend to shove in the faces of adversaries in the former’s defense of a Bengali, language-based, national identity, is that 98% of the population belongs to the Bengali linguistic group (Wikipedia). As mentioned earlier, what culminated into the War of Liberation in 1971 was sparked in 1952 by the Language Movement. So, this camp considers it their duty to champion the cause for Bengali secular identity as the national identity of Bangladesh, ignoring the majority faith and widening the gap between the elite and the mainstream. Professor S. Nazrul Islam’s eulogy on the death of cultural activist Waheedul Huq, exemplifies the sentiments of this camp. He writes about the deceased, ‘He was deeply committed to the Bangalee identity that transcends the religious divide. He wanted that secular Banglalee identity to take hold, flourish, and spread its influence to other spheres of life, including politics. That is why Waheedul Haq was so hurt by the regress that Bangladesh witnessed with regard to secularism over the last decades, by the lost promise of the 1971 victory, by the revival and semi-dominance of communal politics.’ This goes to show that they put the cultural and linguistic roots of the nation over all others. Furthermore, he writes, ‘He was pained by the loss of national identity in post-independent Bangladesh, as manifested by the bifurcation of the education system into "Madrassahs" on the one hand, and English medium schools, on the other. He wanted to raise the flag representing the Bangalee identity, and established Nalanda, an innovative school for children.’ It is apparent from the ‘pain’ and ‘disappointments’ suffered by the departed that his actions and beliefs did not concur with those of the majority post independence. Nonetheless, there are still many like the departed and the writer of his eulogy, who belief that religious beliefs are of no consequence when it comes to cultural identity. Needless to say, the common man differs.
Thankfully, in this bi-polar world divided along the lines of culture and religion, there remains a group that is aggrieved by both ultra-secularism, that shuns religion, and religious fanaticism, that rejects the value of all, but religion. This group argues that the history of the land, it’s more intrinsic practices and the sense of belonging to it, is what ultimately determines national identity. The common man knows to keep his patriotism and religion in separate compartments of his heart. In most cases, for him being a Bangladeshi is one thing, and being Muslim or Buddhist is another, not to mention that the notion that Bangladeshi and Bangali could be different identities would never cross his mind. Intellectually, this group of people does not fall under the criterion for the elite. Their voice is not represented in these thought-provoking debates about national identity. But, interestingly, these people are the majority of the population and more than that they do not suffer from dichotomy symptomatic to the elite.
The late Enayetullah Khan, like a story-teller, regales and retells the proud history of the geo-political sovereignty of East Bengal from the olden days. He writes,
“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.”
This is the proud history of Bangladesh. When you read this, you realize that a person’s relationship with the State is not guided by institutionalized religion or culture. We have a history of sound unity and resistance to adversity that transcends all racial, religious and linguistic borders. The need to claim and identify with a place, a homeland, is almost primal. Bangladeshis have proven time and time again that their sense of belonging to their land does not stem from an external motivation like religion or language, but from the more intrinsic ownership of the land. Hence, the socio-cultural and cultural elite may be unsure about what defines them as a national of Bangladesh, but the majority of the nation realizes that they do not need a definition to call their land their own.

July 16th, 2007

(This was written last year, as a part of an assignment)