Evasion of identity and the psychological solution

Mustafa Zaman
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"I'm proud to be an Indian," is a demonstrative volley that we often receive from the citizens of our closest neighbour. The phrase too often seems pretentious to an outsider. The ardour, or should one say over-enthusiasm of our neighbours used to make me feel a bit queasy in the stomach. I mean what's the point in being full of hubris over something we have no control over. I am sure it is even beyond genetic science to take charge of one's genealogy. Picking the country of one's birth or gene pool of one's liking is even scientifically impossible, we haven't even seen it in Hollywood productions. Not yet that is.

The geography as well as race are part of our inheritance and are accepted as plain fate. In this respect perhaps the Indians have developed an exemplary attitude. While many Bangladeshis often struggle to free themselves from their inheritance, Indians take pride in being what they are. I have reached this conclusion after having put vis-à
-vis the practice of dodging national identity. It certainly was not a mere jolt when I first heard that some young Bangladeshis living and studying abroad often try and avoid being recognised as Bangladeshi. The word Bangladeshi somehow makes some of us feel degraded. This fact is yet to be registered in our collective psyche.

It is insulting for any Bangladeshi to find our youth in foreign terrain pretending not to be what they really are. The vicious habit of our own brethren to take pride in being easily passed for Indians tell a lot about the state of our national psyche. Perhaps it gives them extra power, as a slogan says in an advertisement of an Indian product. A friend who went to China to study art back in the mid-eighties testified that some of the students from Shonar Bangla simply thrived in this kind of self-denial.

The crisis (with identity) starts from the national frontier. As a nation, we are constantly in denial. While for other nation-states it is a matter of expediency in certain circumstances, it almost becomes a synonym for the Bangladshi Bangalis in the home-ground as well as abroad.

Any crisis too has a genealogy. Our identity crisis goes back a long way. Revert time and we will see that the British ruled eastern Bengal, where Muslims were a majority, the crisis was manifested in our denial of the language and race. Now it has taken the form of a debate between Bangladeshi nationalism and Bangali identity. There is no skirting around this scuffle.

Before, during the time when the Jamindars and Olemas ruled, this fault-line never ran deep into the society. At least the masses were not bothered about how the elite thought of fashioning the culture or national identity to fit their own garbled perception. At present, it has reached the furthest corners of the nation-state that first became recognised as a part of Pakistan and than later asserted its own independent identity on the basis of language.

Before taking a long and hard look into the mirror, we must come to terms with this crisis of split personality that we have inherited. Or else, every reflection we would see would be bound to retain the tint that is part and parcel of this crisis.

Whether to bask in the glory of Bangladeshi nationhood or to be filled with pride to be Bangali, is not the cardinal issue. Though these days it remains unresolved, as it never occurs to us that nations can be defined along many lines, be that religion or race. While religion can be partially renounced, race is eternally defined by a definite gene pool it belongs to, and so irrevocable. However, we can avoid such ungainly national attributes that make us feel low. The habits we inherit never vanish even when we pretend to be someone else. It is lowly to think that it would. In contrast with our genetic designs, our mental designs can always be improved upon. It is only a matter of will. For an individual and for the nation as a whole the answer, perhaps, lies in this act of forming a 'will'.

The problem remains, how do we go about building this 'will' in the national consciousness? Surely, there is no easy answer. With the government unwilling to lend a hand and the public lost in the whirlpool of day to day living, who will take charge of the matter? Perhaps historicity may advance our cause. Let us imagine a day when the fashionable drooling over anything folksy is transformed and we are equipped with the drive to do some excavation in the terrain of heritage. The questions, how back in the rural frontier we had folk philosophers like Chiotonyo, Lalon or a string of Sufi saints and how today they are no more, might help us to be a little self-critical. And how after adopting a modern mode of living we could not produce a cerebrally-inclined public figure of their stature may help us sort out whatever bias we have for or against Euro-American modernism.

Meanwhile, when most Bangladeshis give their assent to a certain social or political belief or a certain mode of living, they do so without even knowing which strand of knowledge it stemmed from. As of today our lifestyle remains an amalgam of many things of disparate origins. Purity never was our forte. But yes to the cyncretic culture of rural Bengal, where people had no qualms in seeing Islam, Buddhism and Visnavism in fusion.

Past can never be revived, but it can always serve as a source of inspiration, and a cultural yardstick. Finding a true lineage of our culture may serve to clear our head over matters of socio-political import. Only then, perhaps, we would be able to look at ourselves without the tainted consciousness, crooked biases and most of all embarassment about our identity.
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The author is staff writer of Star Weekend Magazine