Ekushey musings

Fakrul Alam

Growing up in Dhaka in the 1950s and the early 1960s I was exposed to at least four languages. Bangla I naturally heard all day long, almost everywhere, but English was never far away from me wherever I was. Urdu, on the other hand, seemed to invade my consciousness every now and then. Occasionally, Hindi, too, intruded into it through the airwaves for my eldest sister was fond of the Binaca Geetmala on Radio Ceylon. It is obvious to me now that such a mixture of languages is healthy for the growth of the mind, but the politics of identity then would make our reception to Urdu and Hindi quite problematic for a long time.

At home, of course, we always spoke Bangla. My mother spoke to us in the “shuddho” form, and always insisted that we did so too. My father mixed up English and Bangla when he spoke to us unselfconsciously. But with my friends I enjoyed spicing the correct form of Bangla with pungent Dhakaia idioms, or moved seamlessly between English and Dhaka's social dialect, relishing the mixture immensely. In school we would sprinkle the occasional Urdu word in our conversation, for we had some West Pakistanis as our classmates. Our house was full of visitors from my parents' desh and so we heard a lot of the Noakhali dialect too, amused at the unique inflections and the occasional unintelligible word that our relatives used when speaking to Amma and Baba.

The radio--the chief form of home entertainment--was mostly tuned to Radio Pakistan, Dhaka, and Akashvani, Calcutta. We always heard the news on Radio Pakistan being presented in Bangla, but while waiting for it to be aired, would have to occasionally listen to the news in Urdu reluctantly. Was the Urdu newscaster speaking perennially in a gruff voice or were we impatient for him to end and therefore too irritated to like the sound of Urdu? Now I think it must be the latter, because the Urdu I hear from time to time while channel-hopping nowadays or on occasional visits to the parts of India where the language is spoken appears to me to be quite pleasing in its sounds. But then we would look forward eagerly not only to the end of the Urdu news but-- depending on the time of the day to the Bengali songs--mostly folk and modern or the ones composed by Nazrul Islam. In the somnolent afternoons, we would relax after coming home from school or on holidays by listening to modern Bengali songs on Akashvani. In addition, whenever my father was around, we would listen to Rabindra Sangeet on Calcutta radio or to classical music being broadcast from Delhi, introduced in Hindustani by its announcers, which seemed like a softer version of the Urdu we heard on Radio Pakistan.

But by the middle of the sixties things began to change quite abruptly. We were all suddenly conscious that we were Bangalis and pitted against a force trying to impede our right to speak in our mother tongue. Even in 1961 I was old enough to resent the insidiousness with which the official Pakistani media was trying to discredit Rabindranath. In our house, where his songs were an integral part of our day, this was cause for considerable dismay among my parents and their friends and acquaintances. We heard a lot of Nazrul songs, but somehow the singers seemed to be stirring our consciousness into protest through his songs and not making us Pakistani zealots as the Pakistani media bosses no doubt intended us to be. We also began to listen to Gono Sangeet and I was soon admiring the bold and defiant tunes sung by the likes of Sheikh Lutfur Rahman and Abdul Latif to arouse the masses against oppression.

Our neighborhood hummed with cultural activities centered on Bangla. My sisters, learning to sing at home or the Bulbul Academy of Fine Arts, were performing Bangla patriotic songs in neighborhoods shows. Songs like “Amar Sonar Bangla”, “O Amar Desher Mati” , “Badh Bhenge Dao”, “Dhonne Dhanne Pushpe Bhora' and “Runner” were being sung everywhere. I was an “O' level student of St. Joseph's School, and Bangla was taught only in the most rudimentary way in our institution, but I had become an avid reader of popular Bengali novels by the time I was in my teens. One of my sisters had set up a “home” library and through it I now began to devour Bangla--fictions thrillers, romances, and comic stories. Although my Bangali friends and I were now speaking English fluently and resorting to it more and more in school, we never saw our love for English books and music in any way undermining our love for Bangla and our culture. Indeed, the Bangla programs on the increasingly popular television station were absorbing us evening after evening. We would still keep strewing Urdu words in our conversation with our West Pakistani class friends for a few more years, but by the mid-sixties, we were becoming determined to stick to Bangla and English in our exchanges with them. No doubt after 1965, when the Indo-Pakistan war made every Bangali in Dhaka feel vulnerable and marginalized in the Pakistani scheme of things, we had become suspicious of the blather about brotherhood being aired by Pakistani s.

But the song that possessed us completely in the later years of the nineteen sixties was “Amar Bhaiyer Rokte Rangano Ekushey February.” Elegiac, haunting and immensely moving, it was played endlessly throughout the day on the twenty-first of the month. But the paradox was that the more we heard it the more beautiful it sounded. For sure, it took over our consciousness like no other song did. I was now studying in Dhaka University and allowed by my parents to spend Ekushey evening and night outside the house. I would join the midnight procession with a few friends and listen to the musical events organized all over the city for the next twenty-four hours or so, or for as long as I could avoid sleep! Ekushey day and Chayanot's Pohela Boishakh functions were also occasions for Bangla's incomparable stock of songs to take over our sensibility and awe us with the beauties of the language we had been born into.

The other thing that took over our consciousness as the decade came to a close was Sheikh Saheb's speeches. One unforgettable day in December, when he was on the campaign trail for the national elections, I heard him speak in three successive meetings in and around Manikganj. I was enthralled by his oratory, but also spellbound by the inspirational tone with which he delivered his speech and the fluent and passionate way in which he spoke in Bangla. In his folksy and insistent manner he poured scorn on the Pakistanis and made us dream about taking over our country for the first time in recent history.

Our love for Sheikh Saheb and the golden Bengal he made us envisage peaked after his 7 March, 1971 speech. It made us feel then and subsequently as nothing else did the eloquence and the power of the language and the rootedness of our hopes in our bhasha. His speech seemed to have made Bangla into a wing that could soar us to an immense height from where we could see the infinite possibilities of breathing the pure air of freedom. By now he had become Bangobandhu and had made us all realize that we had to have a space of our own where we could make the language ring with freedom and make it the vehicle of our aspirations.

But soon Bangobandhu was in prison and we had to listen to his speech being played endlessly on Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendro confined to our homes for most of that cataclysmic year. Amazingly though, the more we heard the speech, the more inspirational it seemed to be, and the more potent an antidote to the veiled threats and insidious messages being broadcast over Radio Pakistan. Indeed, the Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendro appeared to be the perfect alternative to the claptrap being served on the official Radio. The saucy, striking voice of M. R. Akhter Mukul and his effortless use of Bangla dialects as he read his “Chorom Potro”, the rousing patriotic songs by Nazrul and contemporary composers as well as the sweet and soothing music of Tagore being aired on this station proved to be the right mix to sustain our hopes in besieged Dhaka in 1971.

For me though 1971 was also memorable as the year when I discovered Jibanananda Das, “Bonolata Sen” and Ruposhi Bangla, Tagore's poems and the wonders of modern Bangla verse. Forced to stay home by the intimidating and repressive tactics being used by the Pakistani army, I now savored the wonders of modern Bangla poetry as never before. I had come relatively late to its treasures, and would lose sight of them for years as I first pursued English Studies obsessively abroad and then tried to establish myself professionally. But the Bangla language and the splendors of its literature and music, of “Amar Baier Rokto Rangano” and Bangabondhu's speech had seeped into my consciousness over the years and would never be lost. They would reside in my sensibility and would come back to me whenever I was ready to cultivate them. Bangla after all was my primal language, my most significant inheritance, and my deepest link with my mothermy mother tongue.

What does Bangla mean to me now? I attempt an answer and also a bid to salute it as well as Bangladesh with my translation of Amar Shonar Bangla, Tagore's immortal paean to our motherland:

My Bengal of Gold
I love you, my Bengal of gold,
Your skies and winds make my soul as musical as a flute.
O mother, in spring your mango blossoms' heady scent drives me wild
How fulfilling it is too o mother dear
To see your fields smile delightfully in late autumn!

Such beauty and such shades, such warmth and such tenderness,
Such a lush carpet spread under bata tree canopies and riverbanks;
O mother, your sounds ring in my ear and comfort me
How fulfilling such sights and sounds are o mother dear!
But when you look sad how my tears can flow!

In your nursery I've spent my childhood
I consider life blessed when I daub my body with your dust and clay,
And when day ends and evening descends how lovely is your light,
How pleasing it is then o mother dear
To abandon play knowing you will take me up in your lap adoringly!

In fields where cattle graze and in riverside ghats where boats dock;
All day long in shaded village paths reverberating with bird songs;
And in your crop-filled fields where we spend our lives;
How fulfilling you make our lives o mother dear!
Your herd boys and farmhands all become my own then!

O mother, when I lay myself down at your feet;
Bless me with the dust that they tread, for they will bejewel me.
O mother dear, what little I have I will lay at your feet,
How fulfilling to stop adorning myself with foreign purchases,
To know that even the rope you provide for a noose can be my decoration piece!

Dr. Fakrul Alam, a noted intellectual, teaches English and American literature at Dhaka University.

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