Within class and beyond

Serajul Islam Choudhury

The state language movement began as a middle class protest. Students and teachers of Dhaka University were at the forefront. And it was only after students gave their life on that fateful day of 21 February 1952 that the movement took on the character of a mass uprising.

That the middle class should have been the first to speak out against the imposition of Urdu as the only state language of the newly established state of Pakistan was only too natural. This class has always been both sensitive and responsive, and it saw in the threat of Urdu being the state language a very real danger to its hope of advancement, perhaps to its very existence.

Through much pain and labour the Bengali Muslim middle class had acquired some skill in English, and would not, perhaps, have reacted violently if English were to continue as the language of the state for some time to come. But with Urdu attempting to come as a usurper the middle class was alarmed by ominous signs of the imposition of Urdu in different fields of governmental activities. On currency notes and coins as also on postal forms and envelopes Urdu had made its appearance. Non-Bengali immigrants from all over the subcontinent were busy occupying posts in government offices and manufacturing companies. They were setting up trading and business firms and making themselves owners of houses and property left vacant by migrating Hindus.

Even the Bengali language was being intruded into by words and expressions of Urdu and Persian origin. That independence should turn into a new kind of subjugation and the Bengalees would be reduced to second class citizens only because they did not speak Urdu was totally unacceptable to the middle class. It came out on the streets to make its protests heard.

But the middle class movement could not have been what it became later, namely, almost a revolutionary uprising against the state, without the participation of the people at large. That participation happened because there was a rising tide of frustration and resentment in East Bengal. Pakistan was made possible mainly because the Bengalees had voted for it and they constituted no less than 56 per cent of the population of the new state. They had supported the Pakistan demand not to see one set of foreign occupiers to be replaced by another but in the hope of achieving material advancement. But to their great disappointment, the public found out that the conditions of their life and livelihood were worsening instead of improving. Their resentment vented itself through the language movement.

Language, of course, is dear to everyone's heart. So it was to the Bengalees. Their hope was that independence would not only bring them opportunities for material prosperity, but also create a way for cultural and educational enrichment through a promotion of their mother tongue. In the usurpation of Urdu they found a denial of all opportunities and promises. Quite reasonably, they felt betrayed.

To the man in the street the educated were role models. They took pride in the students. And when the students were being fired upon and killed, the resultant indignation was as deep as it was widespread. The students had been at the forefront of the Pakistan movement and the public looked upon them as natural leaders. Seeing the students at the leadership of the new movement the common man took heart and lent his support as much as he could. Not to speak of the students only, there were leaders like Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani. Abul Hashim and the young Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whom people had seen fighting for a common cause and whom they now found thrown into prison because they were demanding that Bengali be made one of the state languages. People were dissatisfied and angry.

Then there was the question of nationalism waiting to be resolved. The class conflict was, of course, very real and important. But for the middle class, and through them for the general public as well, the question of national identity was more immediate and visible. The state language movement proved beyond doubt that the Pakistanis were not a nation in any visible sense, and that language is a more effective and abiding force of unity than religion. The two-nation theory on which Pakistan was based had already been abandoned by, of all persons, Mohammad Ali Jinnah himself in his inaugural address to the Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947, three days before the new state came into existence. Pakistan, he famously declared, would be a secular state where, to quote his own words, 'Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.' He admitted that religion does not unite and noted that 'even as regards Muslims you have Pathans and Punjabis.' He could, and indeed should, have mentioned the Bengalees because they constituted the majority of the citizens of Pakistan and the majority of them were Muslims. However, he did not remember the Bengalees. In that same sentence, albeit a bit later, he said, 'Among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vaisnavas, Khatris, as also Bengalees, Madrasis and so on.' Does that 'as also' signify that to his mind the Bengalees and Madrasis were all Hindus? There is no way of getting a clarification. Nor do we need quarrel with his placement of Bengalees and Madrasis so close together, although Madras, to be sure, was not in Pakistan. But the words of the 'father of the nation' are now all part of history and cannot be altered. One can only note that Jinnah's attitude to the Bengalees was not untypical of the rulers against whom the language movement was the first mass outburst.

But what could have brought the Punjabis and the Bengalees together within a single nationalism? Not surely geographical contiguity because East Bengal was separated from West Pakistan by more than a thousand miles of 'enemy' territory. Now that the founder of the state had dismissed religion, what remained to act as the unifying force? In hindsight, it seems that Jinnah was depending on language and perhaps that is the reason why he had come out with the fantastic and wholly undemocratic proposition that Urdu and Urdu alone should be the state language of his new nation. Maybe he had, mistakenly, been encouraged by the thought that it was Hindi which was likely to keep India, which he called Hindoostan, together as a nation.

These are things of the past. Yet the fact remains that language cuts across class and religious divisions. Our language movement went beyond the middle class to become a people's revolt against the state, contained within it the spirit of nationalism based on language, gained in strength and ultimately led to the establishment of the sovereign state of Bangladesh. In a way, this has resolved the national question. But the class contradiction remains and has already proved more difficult to resolve than the problem of nationalism.

That this is so is borne out by, among other things, the state of the Bengali language itself in the state of Bangladesh. To be sure, the state has a single state language; but Bengali is yet to become the language of the state. Its use has been denied in the highest courts of justice as also in the fields of higher education. The higher bureaucracy uses English more comfortably than it does Bengali. Even socially, the use of Bengali is less prestigious than that of English.

This downgrading of Bengali is due largely to the attitude and role of the middle class, that very class which once spearheaded the language movement and carried it to its successful and legitimate conclusion. The middle class, however, is not what it was during the Pakistan days. After 1971 it has split itself into two, with one part rising higher and the other pushed downward. The prosperous upper middle class controls both the state and society and prefers, for local as well as global reasons, to cling to English in personal, social and educational spheres. The lower middle class remains under its superior's cultural and material sway.

The persistent, indeed increasing, class division is responsible for much of our backwardness inasmuch as it helps the exploiters against the exploited and makes exploitation itself the ruling ideology. The use of Bengali can, in its own way, bring the classes together and make us aware of the urgent necessity of the resolution of the problem of class separation.

That the right to the use of the mother tongue is natural and inalienable does not need to be demonstrated. It is the birthright of every individual and its denial signifies both unnaturalness and the hegemony of the powerful over the powerless. Therefore, the meaning of the movement we began in our country goes beyond territorial boundaries. It upholds the fact that in the last resort mother tongue is the space on which a people can stand in togetherness, locate itself, draw sustenance from inside as well as the world outside and, also, stand up against aggression from within and without. Patriotism and progress are promoted and brought together in a harmony by the use of the language one is born into.

The world has been globalised. Globalisation is not only contrary to but also works directly against internationalism. Globalisation would be happy to see the erasure of cultural diversity. Internationalism, on the other hand, is based on recognition of the rights of nations to exist through retaining their identity.

It is thus that the state language of Bangladesh has become part of both national and international heritage.

Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury is an academic and writer and edits the quarterly journal Notun Diganta.