The state, culture and society

Serajul Islam Chowdhury
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Anisur Rahman

The state, culture and society are supposed to go together; sometimes they do, but there always remains a basic contradiction between the state on one side and culture and society on the other. Visibly, the state is more powerful than both culture and society; it has its coercive machinery of law and the law-enforcing agencies as also instruments of propaganda of many different kinds.

But it is in society that we work and live, and the state represents and protects the interests, particularly the vested ones, of those who are powerful in society. To that extent there is no antagonism between the state and society, but the vast majority of the people do not find that situation satisfactory and revolt against the state occurs. The rulers of the state and those who wield power in society get united in one particular area of activity, namely, the forestalling of a social revolution, which, they fear, would destroy the very class they belong to.

In the ultimate analysis, culture is more abiding than the state and society; states rise and fall, but culture continues, and it even survives the destruction of civilisation which society as a whole creates.

Culture in Bangladesh has its qualities as well as weaknesses. As a people we have been called religiously oriented, but at the same time we are secular in our outlook. We believed, and still do, in separation between religion and the state; we have not been communal either.

In general, we are hard-working and worldly-wise. Songs and music have always been of interest to us. We love our language and consider it to be the most important component of our culture. There has always been in us a closeness to nature.

But our culture along with society has suffered because of state intervention. For a long period of history the state power belonged to foreigners. To be sure, they have brought to our service new knowledge and values, contributing to the enrichment of our culture; but destructive and negative aspects of their interference have off-set the positive additions.

The British rule has been the latest and the harm it has caused to our culture and society still remains. The British created a new middle class in Bengal, which served the interests of the state, remained isolated from the common man, and became the guardian of our culture and the role model for society at large. And by manipulating the political leadership supplied by this class, the British rulers introduced communication in our society.

The Indian subcontinent was a land of many nationalities, each having its own language. The British had imposed on them an administrative unity, and in fighting them the disgruntled part of the middle class forged a unity, which the rulers found alarming. They engaged themselves in destroying that unity and encouraged the middle class to think on the line of communal interest. They were successful, and the result was that not only did secularism suffer, the anti-British struggle itself degenerated into communal riots. So much so, that in 1945-46 when the sub-continent was very much near a social revolution, communal strife took on the form of civil war, allowing the British to partition India into two dominions.

In hindsight, this partition has been the greatest disaster in modern Indian history. For Bengal and the Punjab it has caused irreparable loss and injury -- economically, socially and culturally. The Indian National Congress, dominated by the Hindus and the exclusively Muslim organisation, the Muslim League, had joined hands with the British rulers in their material interests and also, although they did not admit it openly, in their shared anxiety to extinguish the flames of a social revolution that seemed to be ablaze all over British India.

Sk. Enamul Haq

Needless to say that both society and culture had suffered miserably during the British rule. We were impoverished to the extent that we had to put up with two great famines, which took a toll of several millions of lives. The famines were veritable genocides. Industrialisation was not encouraged. With unemployment rising, people became inward-looking, surrendering to a fate which remained continually hostile. Resources were plundered and sent abroad. What was once a buoyant exporting economy and had lured the English traders to invade it, became a real colony with all that such a transformation meant. Having lost the use of the sea to foreign traders and rulers, we forgot that we should not depend on our rivers only, but also explore the sea for resources and become a sea-faring nation. We Bengalis were landlocked and marginalised; we developed an insularity, which was not far away from defeatism.

The middle class which was supposed to lead the nation tended to be spineless because of its surrender to the colonial state. As happens in such cases, feuds, quarrels and conspiracies became rampant. Litigation was a favourite pastime with some. Mutual trust and respect declined.

Education became almost the only gateway to professional and social success. But the education we received turned us into alienated self-promoters rather than encouraging us to be enlightened social beings. The educated built walls around themselves and looked for stairs to go up. Flattery proved to be more fruitful than cooperation and gratitude. Our land was fertile; we idealised fertility even within the family, and bred, as the poor usually do, without the needful sense of responsibility and were in that particular respect, heedless of consequences. With poverty inducing breeding and breeding increasing poverty, the vicious circle was complete by itself.

The British Indian state was capitalistic in character and bureaucratic in system. But its capitalism was of trade and plunder rather than productivity. Capitalism has its virtues, but the capitalist system that was foisted on us was full of vices and without the virtues. It promoted the ideology of profiteering, self-aggrandisement and exploitation.

Under it the relationship between individuals became bureaucratic, and dependence on the overwhelming power of the bureaucrats permeated through the society. At the same time, the feudal values of hero-worship and the consequential loss of faith in the individual remained as operative as before. Darkness and backwardness prevailed in culture. We have learnt to make compromises, and to look for unilinear melody rather than variegated harmony. The state language being English, we have tired, increasingly, to be bi-lingual.

In the rebellion that came from the Indian society Bengal and the Punjab had taken the leading role. That must have been one of the reasons why the British rulers were particularly interested in partitioning these two major provinces -- almost revengefully. Significantly in the partition meetings of the viceroy with the leaders of the Congress and the League no representative from Bengal and the Punjab was consulted and yet it was the fate of the millions living in two provinces that was being particularly decided. Unfortunately, the leaders who could have kept Bengalis and the Punjabis united at the provincial level, were either dead or inactive in those fateful days of 1947.

A section of the Bengali leadership drawn from both Congress and League made a last minute, and almost desperate, attempt to keep Bengal independent and united, but it was doomed to fail almost as soon as it began, because of the interference of the All-India leaders from both sides who were united in their intention of keeping Bengal under their centralised leadership, and were, at the same time, apprehensive of a social revolution subversive of their material interests.

That state fell in 1947. But the society did not change. It remained the same. Because the Pakistani state that took over power was not different from the British Indian state inasmuch as it was of the same capitalist and bureaucratic dispensation. What was worse, it was even more brutal in relation to the Bengalis. The design of the new rulers was to reduce East Bengal to a colony. It would be helpful for us to recall that the British Indian leadership that wanted to have independence was anti-British all right; but it was not anti-capitalist; therefore, capitalism was under no direct threat either in the Indian union or Pakistan.

In Pakistan it flourished without any hindrance, ruled as it was by a military and civil bureaucratic conglomerate. Even a semblance of democracy was not allowed to be practised. And when they found that East Bengal was about to break away from its fold, with indications of setting up a socialist-leaning state, they decided to perpetrate, one of the worst genocides known in human history.

Right from the beginning the Pakistani rulers were interfering with the cultural life in East Bengal. Ignoring the fact that 56 percent of the Pakistani population spoke Bengali they desired to impose Urdu as the only state language. They attempted to introduce unnecessary Arabic and Persian words into the Bengali language, tried to Pakistanise Kazi Nazrul Islam, thought of excluding Rabindranath's songs from Radio and TV programmes and had even harboured the idea of changing the script of the Bengali language. Their proposes were two, firstly, to break the cultural backbone of the Bengalis, something that even the British rulers had not thought of doing. To the Pakistani way of thinking, cultural hegemony would secure for them the subservience of the Bengalis. Secondly, they sought to destroy the secular content of Bengali culture with a view to forestalling the coming of a social revolution.

That state is no more. Even than the society has not improved. Economic developments have helped the rich to get richers, uprooting the poor. The class cleavage has deepened, and the three systems of education is dividing the people on class lines instead of forging the much-needed unity. The promise of a social revolution held out in the original constitution has disappeared. Even secularism is being threatened by the rise of the Islamic fundamentalists who have been patronised by the occupiers of state power -- the past as well the present.

Madrashas have spread themselves as never before. Simultaneously, English medium schools and universities have flourished to the detriment of the mainstream of education. And today we are more bi-lingual than ever before. Sadly, Bengali is being neglected in all spheres of life. The electronic media is corrupting Bengali. The catalogue of these disappointments would be long. The basic fact remains that both culture and society are under severer pressures, and even attacks, than they were before. Today we seem to be less patriotic than we were in the days of Pakistani rule. That is because the Pakistani state was an identified and knowable enemy; the harm that our own state is causing to our culture and society is not always visible and is coming from those whom we have known to be our own people, and not as enemies. That makes state antagonism to culture and society even more insidious.

Why has this happened? The answer is that the state has changed, its size has become smaller, but its intrinsic character has remained unchanged. It was capitalistic and bureaucratic in the past; it has remained so even now. Like the freedom fighters in British India, the nationalist leaders who fought for the liberation of Bangladesh were certainly anti-Pakistani, but they were not anti-capitalist.

We in Bangladesh have been dreamers; what we need now are not dreams but visions with achievable goals. Neither golden Bengal nor digital Bangladesh would do, we would like to have a livable and reasonably joyful Bangladesh. We must humanise the society and socialise the state. The state as it stands today will not help us to realise that vision.

On the contrary, it would oppose it in all conceivable ways, using culture to hinder our progress and, in the process, would cause culture to suffer as it has been doing for ages.

No significant change is to be expected unless the patriotic and democratic elements in the country come together and make sustained efforts to carry forward our liberation movement -- which neither began nor ended in 1971 -- to the goal of a revolutionary social transformation. In this work the right kind of cultural activities would be of immeasurable help with culture itself changing as we move ahead.

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The writer is a Professor Emeritus at Dhaka University.

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