Selim Al-Deen: Telling our tales, our way

Selim Al-Deen interviewed by Mahfuz Sadique

‘The tales of my farmers,’ he says as he takes a long drag from the tightly-held cigarette between his fingers, ‘is no less heroic than the Herculean feats of Achilles or Prometheus.’ Dying rays of a winter afternoon get caught up in the ensuing smoke, and as Greek tragedies fade away behind the veil, from behind his desk at his second-floor office in the dramatics department of Jahangirnagar University in Savar, Selim Al-Deen tells me a quintessentially Bengali tale. It is the tale of fighting against nature’s wrath, of fighting with tigers, of clearing dense forests for cultivation, and it is the tale of one man’s search to bring the soil and soul of a race to the pages of literature and the stage of drama.
Firoza Khatun was worried about his eldest son. Her third child, Selim, just couldn’t stop reading. This son of hers — born on August 18, 1949 — had taken to reading as if there were no tomorrow. As Firoza’s husband, Mofizuddin Ahmed, a deputy superintendent of customs, moved from one town to the next due to his job postings, she had to shuffle along with her seven children. Ever since Selim learned to read while they were at Anwara, Chittagong, he had read everything he got his hands onto. Comilla, their home district Feni, Moulvibazar, Kurigram, Rangpur, Lalmonirhat — the list of places Selim has attended schools at reads like a route crisscrossing Bangladesh. Perhaps as he stayed at one place for such short a span, books became his best friend. And by the time it was time for Selim to head out to university in 1966, he had made his choice: he would be a writer.
Selim recalls: ‘I read everything. By the time I entered university I had read most major works. My mother was so worried with my frenzied reading that she beat me once for reading all day.’
The classrooms of Dhaka University’s Bangla department were to be the breeding ground of minds which were to shape the coming decades. ‘It was my teacher Munier Chowdhury who spurred me to put my attention to drama. If I had to point out a catalyst for my first inclinations into a particular stream of literature, it would be Munier sir,’ recalls Selim.
And as Selim forayed into the realm of theatrics and looked deeper into original literature written for the stage, he started to have a grave realisation: ‘I almost felt insulted that starting from Roman literature to Shakespeare, all major languages of literature had great tragedies. Whereas Bangla utterly lacked any.’
It was with this realisation that drama as an established form within the scope of Bangla literature lagged behind most other languages that urged Selim to take up writing drama. But Selim admits that it would not be another decade till he would finally be able to create a unique Bengali ‘narrative’ stream in his acclaimed play Kittonkhola.
Selim Al-Deen’s fundamental contribution to the field of drama, and the literary form of Bangla drama, are many. But his crowning achievement has to be his success in giving Bangla drama a unique voice. ‘Techniques cannot be art. It is the realisation that it brings out. But to bring out that realisation depends a lot on the technique used.’
While Selim started out with his first play Libriam as early as in 1968, while still a university student, his early works were, in his words, ‘more centred on European themes at the time’. ‘Sartre or Camus came into my early work. But I realised that Western dilemmas could not be the basis of Bangla drama,’ says Selim.
Till 1977, Selim’s works such as Sharpa Bishawak Galpo, Jwandis o Bibidho Baloon, Explosive o Mul Shomoshya, Karim Bawali’r Shatru o Mul Mukh Dekha, Charkakrar Documentary were mostly based on the European school of thought.
‘Between 1978 and 1979, I spent considerable amount of time observing our folk forms of theatre, such as jatras. It was at this juncture that I sat down to write my first fundamental work on the new format,’ recalls Selim.
The result was Kittankhola, considered as the first major play based on the new format. Selim never looked back. Through plays such as Bashon, Atotai, Saifulmulk Badiuzzaman, Keramat Mangal, Hat Hodai, Chaka (later made into a film), Selim kept up his experimentation with formats such as ‘epic realism’, which he brought into Bangla plays single-handedly.
The early nineties saw Selim focusing on a new style derived from the folk traditions. In Jaiboti Konya’r Mon, the ‘kathya-natya’ style was used. ‘This was another tradition that had been ignored for long. This format was again used in Hargaaz.’
Selim Al-Deen has played a pivotal role in the theatre movement of Bangladesh with his involvement with one of the leading theatre groups in the country — Dhaka Theatre. One of its founding members, almost all of Selim’s plays have been staged by Dhaka Theatre. Selim has also been one of the key organisers of Bangladesh’s village theatre movement. He took the monumental task of creating the only dictionary on dramatics available in Bangla.
Having been awarded with almost all national recognitions possible in the field of theatre, Selim Al-Deen’s work is studied at many universities across the world. Several of his plays have been translated into other languages, and staged too. In fact, he is one of few Bangladeshi writers to have his plays staged by West Bengal troupes.
‘But my life actually comprises of another component that I take pride in. In front of my eyes, I have seen the dramatics department of Jahangirnagar University grow. If I were to sum up my life’s work, then 30 per cent of it would be related to the university,’ Selim points out.
Pressed to mention his greatest achievement in his own mind, he finishes, ‘I guess, I would consider my life’s work most relevant when considering Bangla drama’s search for its roots and a place in the firmament of world literature.’

Published: Heroes/ The New Age/January, 2006

Farhad Mazhar: ‘And the seed shall set you free’

Farhad Mazhar interviewed by Mahfuz Sadique

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‘Seeds,’ says Farhad Mazhar, when i ask him about the focus of his agricultural movement. The man behind the Nayakrishi Andolon (literally, the new agricultural movement) leans back and ties his long grey hair in a pony-tail, fixes the beads round his left wrist. We meet at the first-floor conference room of UBINIG (a Bengali acronym for Research on Alternatives to Development), the organisation spearheading the movement. The room itself stands out as a time-capsule of the 58-year-old’s life, which has been as eventful, as it has been controversial.
On the opposing walls are two worn-out Che Guevara posters. A wooden bookshelf on the floor is stuffed with daily newspapers, files of clippings, and old copies of Chinta — the Bengali magazine Farhad had founded, and also bears legacy to a crucial event in his life. It was Chinta that had carried Farhad’s essay (‘The Ansar Rebellion’) on the 1994 uprising of the paramilitary force. He was arrested under the Special Powers Act, to be eventually released through a court ruling, but only after a national and global outcry had ensued appealing against his detention, including an appeal in the The New York Times, signed, among others, by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
And as if to overpower all other objects in the room, and to point to his present preoccupation, a large framed map of the world with dots showcasing global biodiversity concentrations rests atop the bookshelf. The area indicating Bangladesh is almost clogged with red dots. Farhad Mazhar and the 50,000 farmers of the Nayakrishi Andolon want that map to stay as it is.
‘It was a book, Symbolic Logic, that first got me thinking,’ recalls Farhad. Born in Noakhali on August 9, 1947, Farhad’s ‘turning point’ in life, as he puts it, was that book by Bertrand Russell and AN Whitehead, which spurred in him the need to question conventional wisdom. ‘After getting into university (Dhaka University), I got involved with left-student politics. For me, I guess, it was a philosophical quest,’ Farhad reminisces.
But it was the dogged cynic in him, borne from the firm footings of logical deduction, which pushed Farhad to question the ‘idealist’ nature of left-student politics of the time. While the mid-sixties saw him involved with the politics of the Maoist-block of Chhatra Union, by the late sixties, having graduated with a Pharmacy-degree in 1967, a more decisive means to attaining the result of that elusive ‘class emancipation’ was crystallising within Farhad’s mind. Like many of his contemporaries, he also started contemplating ‘armed struggle’ as the final necessary thrust.
In the early seventies, as the left sought to place itself within the new political context, Farhad’s philosophical quest took a turn. ‘At that juncture, I got involved with the Purbo Banglar Sramik Dal,’ Farhad recalls. Popularly known as the Sarbahara Party (Sharbahara meaning proletariat), led by the firebrand Siraj Sikdar, their dream was of Bangladesh’s own Naxalite movement, a local parallel of the armed Maoist struggle in West Bengal.
This polarisation of Farhad from the mainstream holds a key to the gradient of his thought in later years. The intellectual dictates of the centre — be it political, social, cultural or economic, had started to find the sceptic in Farhad. Though his primary inclination to class emancipation remains intact till today, he had already started questioning the approach prescribed.
During this time Farhad Mazhar was also heavily involved with various cultural movements. He was a key member of the theatre troupe called Bahobachan.
But at the height of the frenzied struggle for change, Farhad left the country. After returning from a prolonged stay in America, where he had attended the New School for Social Research in New York, Farhad came back to the country in 1981 and joined the pharmaceutical operation of Ganasasthya Kendra. The involvement was to be short lived.
And it was in this period in his life that Farhad started engaging in, as he puts it, ‘the search for an effective way forward.’ Though, upon his return, he again started taking an active role in left politics through his involvement with the Oikya Prokriya, a political grouping attempting to unify the splintered Maoist factions in the country, the sceptic in him was lurking in the background. Alongside this, he gave crucial support to the Chhatra Oikya Forum in their fight against the dictatorship of President Ershad.
At the time, Farhad was a regular participant at several study circles of left political parties, which were also engaged at finding a new solution to the class problem. In fact, he still maintains and attends many such study circles, though not all of them are left-leaning. But it was at UBINIG, founded in 1982, primarily as a study circle addressing women’s issues through alternative approaches to the main issues of development, that Farhad found the key to his answer. ‘Between 1983 and 1987, the ideas generated from this study circle gave birth to what are UBINIG and Nayakrishi today. Countering the two basic principles of the development model prescribed by international entities: income-generating and export-based industrialisation approach, we felt that a community-based ‘sectoral’ approach was required,’ explains Farhad.
‘If you develop a specific sector, including all the support networks that it requires, an entire community, and its craft, will flourish. And it is sustainable,’ points out Farhad. Farida Akther, Farhad’s partner-in-life, was one of the key founding members of this circle.
While Farhad kept up with UBINIG’s soul searching for a way forward, the small study circle had gained organisational form through awareness programmes addressing health issues, mainly concentrating on infant mortality and population control. ‘This was a critical phase. We started to look into the possibility of getting involved with specific communities, or rather sectors, and try to provide them with support in the form of alternative ideas,’ explains Farhad. ‘It was clear from our studies that indigenous techniques of production had to be preserved. The only requirement was a more concentrated community-based approach.’
The first implementation of this idea was with the weavers of Tangail. ‘Rather than providing them with credit, we provided them with designs and an assurance that we would buy their products,’ Farhad elaborates. As an outlet for these products, UBINIG eventually created Prabartana in 1989, a sister concern that envisioned promoting artisans and weavers by bringing them to the niche, high-end market.
But it was to be an unlikely event that would give Farhad and UBINIG, the opportunity to implement their ideas at a far larger scale. The floods of September, 1988, which devastated the country’s crop, became an unlikely thrust for Farhad to get involved in implementing the ideas of community-approach to production. While generic ideas of production were at hand, the specific problems of farmers were another issue.
‘In Tangail, where UBINIG had already concentrated their work with weavers, farmers asked for help. They brought up the issue of seeds. The seeds for their winter crops were lost,’ recounts Farhad. Imbued with the intellectual rigour of the left, Farhad leapt into the problem. After many discussions with farmers, and through a study conducted by UBINIG in 1989-90 on the perception of farmers towards ‘modern agriculture’, i.e. chemical-based agriculture, it became clear that what was being dubbed as ‘modern’ was also ‘degenerative’.
And this is where Farhad Mazhar comes full circle: ‘just as Marxism is not intellectually suited for our culture, any attempt at implanting farming techniques and ingredients from outside — dubbed as modern — is fundamentally flawed.’
The problems pointed out by farmers were multifarious. Ranging from the declining fertility of the soil, progressive need for fertiliser usage to maintain yield levels to worsening health conditions, such as intestinal, skin and respiratory diseases, most of which farmers attributed to the increased usage of chemical fertiliser.
‘Nor UBINIG or I gave them anything new. Rather we just suggested them to go back to their traditional farming techniques. And that is how Nayakrishi came about. Since the techniques used are essentially indigenous, Nayakrishi at its core is a community-based farmer’s movement,’ Farhad points out.
‘To start with, we suggested that farmers make compost as a replacement to chemicals. They succeeded in the 45-day trial,’ Farhad recalls. But Farhad is cautious in pointing out that ‘such indigenous techniques have been passed on, and developed, from generation to generation through trial and error in different ecologies and landscapes.’
Somewhat contradicting the theme of ‘practicing indigenous techniques’ though, like their very own Ten Commandments, Farhad suggests that farmers who come under the Nayakrishi Andolon follow ten ground rules, which should dictate all farming practices. They are: ‘Water is life and also wealth’; ‘Seed is the totality of life activities, the metaphor and the organising principal of farming in material forms.’ And some wordings, along with traditional farm knowledge, carry subtle references to Farhad’s history with the left: ‘Agriculture is not merely milk and meat production and it is never a factory.’
Under the vision of Farhad, the Nayakrishi Andolon, while essentially remaining a peasants’ movement, has propelled itself to become one of the components — regionally and globally — in the fight to preserve biodiversity. The issue has gained gradual attention at global platforms since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, and now ranks as a key battle between translational-driven, capitalism-based economic discourse vs. the anti-globalisation camp. Farhad Mazhar is flexing his intellectual fibres to provide the farmers with the appropriate course of action.
Farhad’s mind, probably relishing in the process, points out: ‘Transnational companies are trying to make indigenous materials and techniques obsolete. If they succeed, our farmers will become prisoners to these corporations.’
‘And this is where seeds come in. To counter any attempt by large corporations to patent our traditional seeds, farming families of the Nayakrishi Andolon have set up seed banks of traditional varieties,’ explains Farhad. These are called ‘community seed wealth centres’, with elaborate networks of akhra (seed huts). Farming families also engage in seed swapping, in the process completely bypassing commercial seed. To give all these activities a strategic focus, the families have formed a nationwide network: Nayakrishi Seed Networks (NSN), mostly operated by the women of the household.
‘This practice not only helps farmers remain self-reliant, but, in turn, has become the primary protection for biodiversity,’ Farhad explains. In fact, in terms of protecting biodiversity NSN has become a formidable force: over one thousand rice and vegetable seed varieties. And further exhibiting Farhad’s first answer, a poster in the staircase of UBINIG’s office reads: ‘Keep the seed in your hand, sister.’
While an ever-growing peasants’ movement that came out of a study circle of disillusioned leftists remains as Farhad Mazhar’s key focus, his ‘philosophical quest’ that started decades ago has not stopped yet.
Some call it disillusioned, some see it as ‘radical’. Though, Farhad remains an independent, yet marginalised, intellectual voice in the country, his comments often stir up mixed, and often heated, responses. His attempt at bringing the Bauls, the wandering spiritual singers of Bangladesh, to the forefront of national culture, has earned widespread acceptance.
On the other hand, over the years, as more and more of Farhad’s lectures, writings and comments on philosophy, politics and culture have increasingly slanted towards giving an alternative intellectual expression to Islamic Socialism, and also an indigenous political language based on spirituality, he has drifted further away from the mainstream intelligentsia of the country.
Farhad remains dogged though. ‘My quest continues. My actions and my ideology have to be in unison. UBINIG, Nayakrishi Andolon are manifestations of my ideas. Economic and political struggle cannot be separate. With time, the politics behind it will also become more consolidated than now’, Farhad believes.
Does a man leave behind a singular legacy? Or is it fragmented, and should each string stand on its own? Time will tell, as it will also show whether Nayakrishi Andolon, Bangladesh’s indigenous peasants’ movement can stand the tide, and not be ‘overwhelmed in the modern world, co-opted or submerged beneath the staggering flow of business as usual.’
In Farhad, though, the eccentric cynic might just have found that elusive exception. Maybe he has, at last, found the ‘magical seeds’ of hope in the grand quest for ananda, which refers to ‘harmony with all entities of life’ in Nayakrishi farming.
Proof: ‘Nayakrishi will become a global movement in ten years!’
Interview: Mahfuz Sadique

Critical thinking and higher education

With a gradual decay in the education system of the country as a whole, and a flailing state of liberal arts and sciences education, leading academic Dr Belal E Baaquie, once the ‘toast of the town’ in Dhaka’s theoretical physics fraternity, and now with the National University of Singapore, talks to Mahfuz Sadique about the multifarious issues facing the practice, image and breadth of ‘the process of learning’ and the general perception of knowledge both in the country, and globally

Mahfuz Sadique (MS): As an academic involved in curriculum formulation, what is your take on the global trends in liberal arts/ sciences education at the higher education level?

Dr Belal E Baaquie (BEB): It is widely accepted worldwide that intellectual broadening for students in majoring in all subjects is necessary to keep up with the rapid changes in global knowledge and in the job market. All students should take at least 20-30 per cent of their courses outside their field of specialisation. Almost all universities in the US have adopted this approach, and European countries are also moving in the same direction. Countries in East Asia are also adopting this approach. A pillar of higher education, in addition to intellectual broadening, is to impart critical thinking to all students. This is a bit more difficult and most elite institutions of higher learning worldwide have undertaken specific steps to inculcate critical thinking in their students.

MS: With specialisation as the driving mantra of academia today, what are the advantages of an elaborate liberal arts/ science education?

BEB: All specialisations are based on the application of the fundamental knowledge of the Arts and Sciences. For example, MBA and business specialisations in general are all offshoots of the study of economics, sociology, political science and so on. All of engineering and medical sciences are applications of the fundamental physical and life sciences. Without a sound foundation in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, a society can never master the specialised and applied forms of knowledge.

<>MS: Does the incorporation of a holistic approach to education need attention at a more rudimentary level i.e. primary and secondary?

BEB: Imparting breadth of knowledge should start at the primary and secondary schools. Reading, writing and numerical skills should be developed from the earliest age. Given the large amount of knowledge that has been generated and accumulated, specially in the 20th century, more and more educational material is being pushed down to the primary and secondary levels. A curriculum that integrates elementary schooling with higher education is becoming more and more important for successfully educating the new generation.

<><>MS: What are the basic changes required to have a globally competitive, and locally practical, education system?

<><>BEB: To be globally competitive Bangladesh first needs to emphasise on English as the medium of education for all university and higher degrees. The courses need to be designed keeping the best global practices in mind. Courses based on memorisation and book knowledge are useless as these can be replaced by having access to a good library or to the internet. Education must emphasise critical thinking and intellectual breadth.
For having education to serve local practical needs students need to have problem solving skills since local problems need unique and specific solutions. Copying solutions from other countries will not work. Solving problems creatively and with originality needs independent thinking and education should focus on imparting these intellectual skills.

<><>MS: Aptitude for the sciences and mathematics is at an all time low in Bangladesh. In fact, science education is seeing an alarming depreciation across the globe. What do you attribute this to? Is there a larger socio-economic factor contributing to this in Bangladesh?

<><>BEB: Science and mathematics are the lynchpin, the key link, in the contemporary explosion of both theoretical and applied knowledge. All of the sciences are undergoing a process of deepening quantification and mathematisation, with the current focus being on arriving at a quantitative and mathematical understanding of biology.
In this circumstance, any society that ignores science and mathematics will certainly end up by falling behind others. The global depreciation in science and mathematics is an illusion. There is enormous effort being put into the three leading and cutting edge technologies, namely information science, nanoscience and life science; all these three technologies are based on an advancing foundation of science and mathematics.
In Bangladesh the subjects that students choose to study is largely determined by the job market, which at present does not require a high level of science and mathematics. In this circumstance the leaders of the country should ensure that a sufficient number of students study science to keep up with the rapid development of world science and to train science teachers for the schools and colleges. Universities have to keep upgrading their level of science and mathematics or else face the prospect of becoming irrelevant.

<><>MS: What steps do you feel are needed to turn the tide, to induce a resurgence in a purer, knowledge-based education system?

<><><>BEB: Education moves through cycles. A few decades back engineering was quite the rage, which was replaced by computer and information sciences and with the current rage being the life sciences. There has also been a rush for students going for degrees in BBA and MBA.
A knowledge-based education needs an economy driven by research and that depends on innovations, inventions and patents for developing new technologies. It is only a matter of time that all the simple avenues for advancing the economy will be exhausted forcing society to draw upon the fundamentals of science to make further progress.
Knowledge is also an important component of the social consciousness of a society; once a society goes beyond merely bread and butter issues science becomes a major component of the culture of a society, of how the society views the universe.

<><><>MS: How big a role do you feel market dynamics plays on the education system, subject choices, curriculum formulation in today’s skill-driven corporate and professional world? Is the trend positive? What long-term implications would this trend have on the intellectual health of the nation? Or, for the world as a whole, for that matter?

<><><>BEB: The corporate world needs not only trained manpower for mid- and higher- management. There is a pressing need in the corporate world for experts having technical knowledge as well. The educational system can benefit by responding to the needs of the market. For example, given the growing importance of textiles there should be a concerted effort to develop textile technology and the sciences that contribute to this. Another great growth area for education is information science and software in general.
As long as the educational system produces graduates with real skills and knowledge, education will thrive; however if the graduates only have paper certificates with no real knowledge everyone will suffer.
The greatest danger for the world is a growing divide between those who have, and those who do not have knowledge. The exponential growth of knowledge means that all those who want to possess knowledge have to integrate an enormous amount of ‘vertical’ knowledge before they can even reach the frontiers of knowledge. This enormous integration of knowledge can be carried out successfully only if students are properly trained from early childhood uptil adult hood. If a society does not take this task seriously their members will be permanently trapped in ignorance and the concomitant social and economic backwardness.

<><><>MS: In a previous interview, you had talked about ‘intellectual corruption’ in our intelligentsia? Would you care to elaborate.

<><><><>BEB: The intelligentsia of Bangladesh has a glorious history with the University of Dhaka having been the home of many outstanding academics and alumni. A drastic decline occurred after the [War of] Liberation when both students and academics were admitted to the public Universities based on their political allegiance rather than on their merit; quality education took a serious beating. Matters have come to such a state that at present one can be a full professor in the University of Dhaka without even having a PhD degree. Something quite unheard of in any university of good standing the world over.
The reputation of academics is determined by quality of their intellectual products, be they original research or other scholarly texts. Once this criterion is given up academics, who should form the backbone of the intelligentsia, are in a state of free fall. Intellectual corruption is a term that refers to ‘intellectuals’ who hold forth on all matters without themselves having any creative and original intellecual output in their own field of specialisation. These ‘intellectuals’ should rather spend their time more fruitfully developing their own expertise.
Only those intellectuals who have studied a subject deeply should offer their views to the public; the last thing we need is so called intellectuals passing judgements on matters based on guesswork and hearsay, or worse, based on their political leanings.

<><><><><>MS: Research is almost non-existent at our higher learning platforms. Some argue that with such a dilapidated state of the education system, and also the flailing socio-economic condition of the country, research funding is ‘unwanted’ and only a novelty. What is your take on this? What areas of the sciences would you recommend to get for research funding, if at all?

<><><><><><>BEB: Research is the lifeline of higher learning. Without research higher learning will soon be out of step with the rest of the world and Bangladesh would be permanently relegated to the backwaters of the world. Research depends crucially on the leadership of the Universities and of other centres of higher learning. For example in India even the most obscure University, with funding and infrastructure much worse than say the University of Dhaka, has a few dedicated souls writing papers in international journals. A culture of research has to be fostered that recognizes and rewards research. It is up to the Universities how they organize this.
As I mentioned the three areas of science and technology that have been identified as being at the leading edge of science are nanoscience, information science and bioscience. Research funding for these three sectors, or even one of these sectors, should be organized on a national scale.

<><><><><><><>MS: The private higher education setup has expanded over the years. There has been repeated criticism of these institutions for their lack of academic diversity, stopgap ‘patchwork’ knowledge dispensing and an excessive market-driven mindset. What is your analysis of this? Are private institutions going to be the mainstay of future higher education?

<><><><><><><><>BEB: The public universities have been politicised since 1972 and are beset with unending chaos, disruption and ‘session jam’. Serious scholarship and education have taken a back seat in the public universities. This situation may be reversed in the future but at present there seems no sign of any improvement. In this circumstance, private universities represent a historic breakthrough for higher education in Bangladesh and the pioneers who made this breakthrough have done a great service to the country. There are now at least a few centres of higher learning where classes are taught seriously and regularly, and with degrees being conferred on time. Another positive factor is that all private universities use English as the medium of instruction, thus providing a lifeline to the vast body of worldwide knowledge.
Since the private universities are entirely funded from student fees, there is little option for them but be market driven, since as I mentioned earlier most students choose a subject to gain appropriate employment. To demand the private universities be comprehensive and well rounded is quite premature and unrealistic, as they simply do not have the resources or the students for such a broad curriculum. As the private universities mature, they will themselves broaden their curriculum as they will realise that a sound education requires teaching a broad range of subjects and not just job-market related subjects.
To avoid the exploitation of students by unscrupulous people setting up private universities a first step could be to allow only non-profit organisations to set up private universities. Furthermore to ensure that the courses being taught are of acceptable standard there should be some sort of quality control of both curriculum and classroom teaching, preferably involving international academics to avoid the trap of being under the sole ‘supervision’ of local corrupt officials.
Given the high cost of private universities and the huge population of Bangladesh, private universities can never be the mainstay of future higher education. Public universities need to be urgently developed since they are the mainstay of higher education and need to provide the required higher education to the youth of Bangladesh. Private universities will however continue to play a crucial role in the higher educational system. Private universities will hopefully continue to provide high-end university education that is responsive to the market and hence directly serves the economic and technological needs of the country.
I hope that in the long run the private universities will evolve into universities providing the highest quality of education, something similar to the Ivy League and other private elite universities in the US, and will complement the public universities.

<><><><><><><><><>MS: It seems there is a lack of general appreciation for knowledge. It’s almost looked down upon. Why do you think this is happening?

<><><><><><><><><><>BEB: Of the many reasons why Bangladesh has lost its respect for knowledge, other than the obvious ones such as growing materialistic tendencies, or lack of opportunities for knowledge-based endeavours, it is the chronic corruption of our intelligentsia. It is a simple matter of professionalism. Just as doctors are supposed to cure, and politicians are supposed to serve, with due professionalism, the process of gaining, gathering and practising knowledge is no trivial matter. It needs professionalism.
Well, for one, our intellectual class is doing everything else other than their primary concern: exercising intellect! Skimming off the surface, and just surviving on the stopgap materialistic solutions of consultancies, is destroying our academic community and bringing down with it the sliver of respect for knowledge and the credibility of the academics.
Here is the danger: while the masses do not need to be knowledgeable — that is not possible — it is dangerous slippery slope, when they lose respect for the finer learning, or knowledge in general. Our intelligentsia should be wary of the trend that they are losing the respect once given to them. A society that finds no purpose in knowledge is not healthy.

<><><><><><><><><><><>MS: How is knowledge and its practice perceived globally now? Is there any depreciating trend?

<><><><><><><><><><><><>BEB: While the American idea of knowledge is segregated within the elite class, the European idea is quite different. The American mass is not in touch with such matters, though their intellectual class enjoys respect, as do the general academics; in Europe, and especially in my personal experiences from staying in Paris for six months, the knowledge earns the highest pedestal of respect. They feel honoured, and appreciate the company of a knowledgeable person. In fact, in general, the Oriental philosophy also holds great respect for it, still now. In Japan, no one is more respected than a scholar.
However, I gather that this has a lot do with socio-cultural evolution. Most of the societies that respect and cherish knowledge are also economically and socially at equilibrium state, countries; whereas, developing and least-developed countries are yet to find a balance between the pursuit of materialistic gains and the scope of knowledge in that. Probably, this will need time and a strong sense of purpose.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>MS: Appreciation and inculcation of knowledge is a primary role of higher education platforms. Where is this going wrong?

<><><><><><><><><><><><> BEB: Higher education is the platform to inculcate both practical and intellectual leadership. Yet, sadly, over the decades our universities have lost touch with any of the discourses expected of a podium of ‘higher learning’. While donor-prescribed policy had just spearheaded primary and secondary education, to mixed results, a complete indifference towards the bastions of intellectual rigour — our universities — has resulted, with even further catastrophic consequences, of new leadership, be it political, economic, or social, which is devoid of intellectual rigour. Or, for that matter, even respect for it.

Published: The New Age/ September, 2006

Living with the sea

Mahfuz Sadique reveals how the inhabitants of the cyclone-ravaged coastal islands of Sandwip and Kutubdia could be changing the way people across the world deal with natural disasters

<> Nilufar’s father, Abdul Baten, 36, stands by the dirt road that runs beside their mud hut right on the embankment, his gaze on the horizon. ‘The nadi is swelling again. It is hungry. Soon, it will start eating,’ his voice has a tense undertone, but he is calm. What he, and the other inhabitants of this forgotten little Chuatoli village on Bangladesh’s coastal island of Sandwip call ‘river,’ is nothing less than the restless Indian Ocean. A gaze out to the horizon, and Baten’s words ring true: the mighty Bay is truly swelling up. ‘The west side of the island has already started eroding. Chunks of earth as large as houses are being devoured by the water,’ Baten points towards his right. There is no landmass there; just the endless sea.
Like their ancestors, Baten and the other inhabitants of Chautoli have lived by the sea for as long as they can remember. They have remained settlers of sorts, for theirs is a existence, the permanence of which depends on the whims of the sea. Sometimes they arrived as new landless settlers from the mainland to these islands along the Bengal coast that had risen out of the salty waters over the centuries, and sometimes, as slaves: both Ibn Battuta and the Chinese traveller Ma-Huen had accounted of ‘Bangali slaves in the Arakan Empire bought from the thriving slave-markets in Sandwip (Chittagong) run by the legendary Portuguese pirate Sebastian Gonzales’.
While lives lived by the sea sway with the rise and fall of the foaming waters, millions have adapted with the threat of cyclones, the saline, infertile soil and the shifting landmass. Two very different areas present a contrasting idea of the coastal life in Bangladesh. Sandwip under Chittagong district is one of the largest islands in Bangladesh with highly fertile soil, while Kutubdia under Cox’s Bazar district is relatively smaller and its soil is almost barren and fruitless. Between them, they represent the wide spectrum of life that is Bangladesh’s coastal belt. Living with cyclones, with minds of explorers, men from islands such as these were among the first from the Ganges Delta region to have set sail for uncharted waters of the high seas and settle as far off as Europe and the US, say historians. Some call them shrewd, but that is just their survival instinct. They are pioneers of sorts: be it the use of solar power as an alternative energy source in Sandwip, or the much lauded low-tech, high-impact Cyclone Preparedness Program (CPP) in place all along the coast.

As the MV Baro Awlia takes the final turn into the channel, and starts its slow progress along the south side of Sandwip to the right and the horizon to the left, the passenger trawler’s inmates are an eclectic blend; a capsule of the cross-section of life that the island has come to represent. The first-class cabins, and the front deck are mostly occupied by returnee non-resident Bangladeshis from as varied places as New York and Muscat. There are the well-off, educated urbanites coming to the island of their origin to settle land disputes, or to see family. Then there are the multitudes of small traders carrying goods varying from fruits from the mainland to Indian cloth. A pale young girl lies on the deck with her head on the mother’s lap returning from an aborted attempt to diagnose her illness at the Chittagong Medical College Hospital. Suddenly there is a commotion, and the yells from the deck eventually clear the matter: the ghat is in sight. With everyone starting for the two exits, there is a mad rush. As I step out through one of the exits, the sight takes me by surprise. What dock? My feet search for something solid, and eventually find the floor of a boat tied alongside the steamer. We are being offloaded in mid-sea. Yes, land is in sight from the boat, but the sheer thought of shifting from a steamer to a boat in mid-sea is no less horrifying.

There is no scope for discussion regarding the fare at the ghat. ‘These things are all fixed down here, bhaiya,’ the scooter driver tells me. The black-smoke-fuming three-wheeler that do not ply on the streets of Dhaka anymore have found their way here. Through bumpy, beaten down semi-pucca roads, the scooter takes us to Shiber Haat, several kilometres into the island and on the other side of the island.
‘The sea was at least a kilometre out, just a year back,’ says Mohammad Shamsuddin, a field officer at the Shiber Haat of Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha, one of the first NGOs to have started operations in the island as far back as 1986, and also my hosts at Sandwip. As Shamsuddin performs an intricate dance of sorts with his bike, ploughing through the muddy dirt path on the embankment that is supposed to stretch all along the southern and western side of the island, he points to the brown, turbulent salty waters licking at the cliff-shores barely a few yards from the us.
Standing beside the road, there was Abdul Baten with his eldest daughter, thirteen-year old Nilufar. ‘My parents used say that my great-grandfather came here from somewhere up north in the mainland. We had our own house near the Sadar. When the “big storm” took away our house, we built it again. But a few years back, the sea started eating again. And now look what’s happened. I don’t have any land of my own,’ says Baten.
‘The land where you see my small mud hut is actually a part of the embankment,’ he says. The ‘big storm’ referred to by Baten is the devastating cyclone of ’91. As I had started to understand, life in these islands and all along the coastal belt had changed, in some fundamental way, since that cyclone.
The small courtyard of the Baten family was abuzz with Nilufar’s younger siblings — Irin, 10, Russel, 6, and Saiful, 2. They all hide behind the mother, Moriom, at the sight of a stranger. A mother of four, Moriom, has a tender glow on her face as she is expecting another child. She and her mother-in-law are spreading out peanuts on a mat to dry, which they will eventually sell in the local market. ‘How can I describe our life? Unsure; yes, uncertainty is the mainstay of our life,’ explains Moriom. ‘Look at my family. We are worse than beggars. This island is our only place. We cannot leave it. But where will we live when the sea eventually gobbles up this embankment too?’ she asks me. As I would find later, further west, along the road that brought me to their house, slowly but surely, her worst fears were coming true.
‘Sandwip was such a prosperous land when we were children. After all this land was blessed by the Baro Awlia,’ reminisces Mariom’s octogenarian mother-in-law. She was referring to the popular history that many centuries ago a Muslim pilgrimage while sailing past the then small landmass made a stopover for Asr prayers. Having been enthralled with the beauty of the island, an elderly pious man — referred to as ‘Baro Awlia’ — blessed the land. And that is when the small landmass became the vast island that Sandwip once was. According to some estimates, Sandwip was at one point as large as 600 square-miles.
Whether anyone remembers those days is not sure, but today’s Sandwip is shrinking fast. In fact, it’s nothing unnatural. Just as Sandwip had risen from the sea once, it will sink. For just a few kilometres across into the sea, a new land is rising. Though it sinks with the high and low of the tide, the islanders expect the landmass to become a full-fledged island within a few years. ‘With the length of the land that we can see from here, it might be as large as Sandwip itself,’ says Baten hopefully as he tries to show me a faint outline somewhere in the Bay.
Further down the embankment, I come face to face with the true nature of the wrath of the sea. Suddenly, midway, the dirt road and the embankment disappear. Mohammad Jasim and his family live, to put it literally, on the edge. In fact, as I take a few steps to the edge of the eroding landmass, Jasim pulls me back. ‘You never know what will haven. Large chunks of soil are sometimes washed away,’ Jasim explains. As he goes on to explain, he and his family collect fish fries from the coast and sell them at the local market. In fact, that is what most landless families do in Sandwip. These fries are eventually sold to hatcheries in Khulna, Bagerhaat and other southern districts.
‘Well, considering that we have no property to live off, it is the only source of earning that the sea gives us,’ explains Jasim. ‘But I have to move in day or two. The land where my house stands will be taken by the sea within a few days. I have found a place on the southern side of the embankment where it’s safer. In fact, come next week, the place you are standing will not be here. This sea has so many faces, it is beautiful to you but it is my undoing.’ He seems unperturbed at his imminent predicament. As Moriom had put it earlier, uncertainty is the only certainty in the lives of these islanders.
This uncertainty, paired with the seafaring traditions of the people by the sea, are main reasons why these islanders, and those from areas along the coastal belt, such as Noakhali, or even Chittagong, went in search of better land long ago. And some families in Sandwip even carry this tradition in their lineage. In Sandwip, family titles such as Sherang, Sukani, Tendol, Mondol, Laskar all have their roots with titles of workers and sailors of seafaring vessels. ‘A very famous family is that of Kala Miah Sukani. He is said to one of the first of their community to have settled in the US. Today, few members of that family live at Sandwip, and their entire extended family has moved there,’ explains Mazharul Islam, manager of BNPS.
As I went further inland, the next day, it became clearer that every family had at least one or two family members living abroad. This trend increased even further after the cyclone of ’91. With the lack of work, and a sustainable livelihood, many men migrated to find work in the Middle-East. Here, prosperity seems to come from external influences. ‘I came back last year after working in Jeddah for twelve years,’ Mohammad Monir Hossain of Noapara tells me. ‘My younger brother lives in Italy. And I hope go their soon,’ he explains.
As it came out, most families tend to feel that sending out the men to foreign land is the best way of ensuring prosperity. And if they could they would settle abroad. ‘What can we expect here? For generations, we have lived with the sea. But I guess this generation is tired of that. We want a stable life,’ Mohammad Billal of Choukatoli comments.
The change is visible. And even more so as I move further inland. Kazi Muhibullah, a retired school teacher, is a content man. Two of his sons are working abroad — one in Saudi Arabia and the other in Oman. The money that they have been sending has possible for his two-story concrete building right beside the main market of Chuokatoli. And it has brought another change that stands out as a jewel for an energy-starved country like Bangladesh. On the porch of Muhibullah’s freshly painted house, atop a pole is the newly bought 85-watt solar panel from Grameen Shakti. For a handsome Tk 35,000, Muhibullah’s house has electricity for light and television. Due to many years of government negligence, and dillydallying from part the Rural Electrification Board, Sandwip was long deprived from electricity. Then in 2001 came Grameen Shakti, and soon other organisations followed suit. ‘Presently we sell no less than 100 units of solar panels annually from my centre of Grameen Shakti,’ proudly proclaims Mohammad Zahirul Islam, a manager at the Shiber Haat branch of the company.
Throughout Sandwip’s relatively better off localities a quite revolution of sorts has been taking place. Keeping true to their instincts as explorers, and pioneers, Sandwip has taken on the solar adventure. ‘It is cheap, and at least I feel good that it is helping the environment,’ says a gleeful Muhibullah, who is one of the more educated, and conscious, members of his community. His proactive approach has earned him an added designation. He is also the head of the local team of the Red Crescent Society’s Cyclone Preparedness Program. He has been its head since the cyclone of ’70. Like many others who are voluntarily involved with the CPP, Muhibullah is one of the mainstays in the cycle preparedness efforts that become urgent year upon year.
The stories in Kutubdia, however, paint a more violent image of the sea, but the resilience of its people are a match for its ferocity.
‘I was holding her so tight to my bosom. Only Allah knows what happened,’ she says, eyes neither tearful, nor her voice emotional. ‘My fingers felt numb, and when I looked down, she was not there anymore. My little baby girl was gone – washed away by the sea,’ Shahela Khatun, 38, recounts the events of that fateful April night of 1991 when ‘the land became a sea, and the sea became a wave’, as another resident had one described it to a photographer. While clinging to a babul tree, she had lost her 3-month-old Yasmin, along with a son, Jasimuddin, and two more daughters, Sultana and Jannat.
Sitting on the uthan (porch) of her mud hut, you wouldn’t know death was once here. With three toddlers, Shahela feeds her 3-year-old Nahar. Though her life, and that of all her neighbours’ at Kutubdia’s Azom Colony, seems to have changed little over the decade, this community has been through a whirlpool of upheavals.
‘They came to my house to warn me of the coming storm, but this happened every year. I didn’t pay much heed to their words then,’ says Marium’s neighbour, Maimuna Akhtar, 42, who had lost a son and a daughter in ’91. ‘Now I do what they tell me.’
Across the Kutubdia Channel, by the shores of the mainland, as S. M. Zaker Hossain, 46, almost yells into his megaphone, and his partner Mohammed Iskander, 37, winds his handheld siren, the sleepy village of Mognama, still not fully awake from its early morning slumber, springs into a magical momentum. Grandfathers, clutching the hand of 6-year-olds tighter than usual pace towards Hossain; young men look up from the adjoining salt fields; and some housewives loosely holding their toddlers, wrapping their saris over their heads as a veil, hurriedly come to the bamboo picket fences, suddenly the entire village is on alert.
‘What is the signal,’ an old man asks Hossain, inquiring of the numerical standard of danger signals denoting storm intensity; 10 being the dreaded highest number. ‘It’s a drill,’ tells Hossain. As those who had gathered around him start to leave, not a bit agitated with the false alarm, the Unit-2 team leader of Mognama’s Cyclone Preparedness Program (CPP) takes off his Red Crescent vest, gets down from his bicycle, and with pride beaming from his sunburned face, comments, ‘How things have changed!’
‘Things have truly changed,’ says 58-year old Abdul Malek, another veteran Red Crescent volunteer under the CPP, ‘since I started out way back in 1972. After the cyclone of ’70, the Red Crescent came to our village. When they called for volunteers for the three-day training, I and my neighbor, Abdur Rashid here, joined up. Whereas, back then, people paid little attention when we told them about warnings, after the cyclone of ’91, they started listening.’
The people of Mognama, along the Bay of Bengal, are no strangers to tropical cyclones and storm surges. Villagers like them, and those in Kutubdia, and 5 million others, inhabitants of mainland locales, and islands dotting the coastline, fall within the High Risk Area (HRA), which spans a staggering 8,900 square kilometres in 13 districts of Bangladesh. The HRA is classified as the zone most vulnerable to cyclones.
The Bangladesh coastline has experienced a total of 66 major cyclonic storms from 1797 to 2001, and numerous smaller, yet equally fatal ones. Coastal configurations, and bathymetry of the Bay of Bengal, along with the fact that the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which is situated near the equator, and where winds from the two hemispheres meet, shifts with the apparent movement of the sun across the Bay, makes it a breeding ground of cataclysmic cyclones.
These cyclones can typically whip up inland wind speeds well above 200 kmph, as was the case in 29th April, 1991, when gusts of 225 kmph and tidal surges topping 7.5 meters lashed the villagers of Mognama and other such coastal communities, killing nearly 140,000 people. With little to protect them, the last bastion between life and death for these villagers remains any early warning system. This in turn enables them to take refuge in the nearly 2,000 cyclone shelters, mostly constructed after the ’91 disaster, all across the HRA. And this lifeline of early warning comes from none other than Bangladesh’s homegrown, low-tech and simple, yet effective system known as the CPP.
‘The CPP, initiated in the late sixties with substantial help from the Swedish Red Cross Society, geared into full operation after the cyclone of ’70, and is now managed jointly by the Government of Bangladesh and Bangladesh Red Crescent Society. It is one of the most successful cyclone preparedness programs in the world’, claims Mohammad Nasir Ullah, Director of CPP. And now he has formidable international footing to say so. At the Second World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan in 2005, the program was flaunted by world experts as a classic example of an effective warning and dissemination tool. Eva Von Oelreich, head of the disaster preparedness and response department of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies dubbed it ‘as a global model for an early warning system.’
The CPP operates Asia’s largest radio network: 35 High Frequency (HF) transceiver radios with a main base station located at the Dhaka headquarter; a field station system of 97 Very High Frequency (VHF) transceivers to receive and transmit messages; and finally transistor radios used at village level to receive meteorological information and cyclone warning signal bulletins transmitted by Radio Bangladesh in special weather bulletins on regular basis during the time of cyclones or depressions.
But the true foot soldiers of this extensive network are the 33,324 volunteers of CPP, divided into 2,777 units of ten men and two women, across the coastal belt. These well-trained volunteers are equipped with appropriate warning equipments, such as megaphones, sirens, public address equipment, signal lights and signal flags. The volunteers are also provided with appropriate gear such as rain coat, gum boots, hard hats, life jackets and torch lights. ‘We can warn nearly 8 million people, and fully assist 4 million to the cyclone shelters,’ says the director of CPP.
‘The entire program has a significant training and public awareness component,’ Nasir Ullah points out. ‘On recruitment our volunteers are given preliminary training by the CPP officers. A three-day basic training is then given to the volunteers, batch by batch, on different aspects such as dissemination, evacuation, sheltering, rescue, first aid and relief operation,’ he explains. The training of volunteers is complemented by an extensive public awareness program that includes cyclone drills and demonstration, staging of dramas/ folk songs, distribution of posters, leaflets and booklets, film/ video shows and radio and TV programs.
As Shahela of Kutubdia stirs the rice in the pot on the earthen stove, she knows what to do when the next storm comes. ‘I am alert whenever I hear the sirens and the megaphones. I will not lose any more of my sons and daughters to the sea,’ she says, as she looks up at the sea. ‘Never again.’

Published: SLATE, The New Age/ August, 2006

‘Living to tell the tale’

Mahfuz Sadique chronicles stories of those who stayed, those who left, those who fought and those that were captured

Dr Samir Kanti Saha
Fled with his family from their village home in Noakhali and was registered with a refugee camp in Agartala
We lived in Dadpur village under Sudharampur thana of Noakhali district. My father was a commissioned agent, and we led a well-off life. I was studying in class ten at the time of the war. We left our village a few weeks after the war had started. We went to our maternal uncle’s place in Choumuhuni and stayed there for 15 days. But as that was getting increasingly insecure, we left for India in mid-May.
We hadn’t even gone 4/5 kilometres from the ghat when we were stopped by a boat which had Shantibahini members in it. They searched the entire boat and when they couldn’t find anything, they did something that I still find unbelievable. They just dropped a few bullets and a gun on my father’s lap and yelled out: ‘Here we have found weapons.’ We were brought back to Choumuhuni.
After persuasion from an uncle and a family friend, they eventually did let us go. We left on that boat and eventually on foot, we finally reached Agartala. I still remember we had to walk for hours on the Akhaura road. The people who were travelling with us on the road became our companions. They helped us carrying sacks and in a way they were a solace amidst all this mayhem.
We started living in this one-room slum quarter, very close to the refugee camp. We were registered with the camp, and had to go there to collect ration. Of all the memories I have of the camp, the most aching is the one of my mother crying. She cried regularly, especially whenever she started cooking, as she remembered how we used to live compared to what she was feeding us now. But my father never cried. He was always strong.
My father and I were returning from the camp with ration one day. My father had the heavy rice sack on his head, and I had the lighter sack of lentils on my head. As we were walking home, it started raining. It was fun for me. But as I looked up, my father’s body was shaking, he was crying. As a teenager that was something that really shook me. I watched my father, Chandra Kanta Shaha, employer of hundreds, a strong man, crying. He cried all night after coming back home. I guess, now that I look back, probably it was the feeling of hopelessness for his children and the life that he had painstakingly created getting lost in front of his eyes that pushed him over the edge.
All through those months, we were known as ‘Joy Bangla’. We rarely had any names. As physician, I find it amusing to recollect that in the camps and the vicinity there was a spread of conjunctivitis. And it also came to be known as ‘Joy Bangla’. They would say, ‘S/he has caught Joy Bangla.’
Sometimes, we would get a jackfruit for 20/25 paisas and that would be our supper. We slept on one single bed. We did not have any pillows, and my parents used a piece of brick with a cloth on top.
The camps were all so cramped too. With their blue plastic roof, in a single compartment lived several families. We sometimes played games. But every day there were times when the entire camp centred around the transistors where the Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendro would be playing. At home, my mother was mostly gloomy; but when the Kendro was playing some item, maybe the Charampatra or even the news read by Deb Dulal Bandyapadhay, her face would light up with hope.
At the camps, religion was never a factor. As I said earlier, we were all Joy Bangla. That was our religion and our identity.
Finally, in December, we left for Murshidabad. We started feeling that the war was going to end soon. One of my uncles lived in Murshidadbad. For me, the day of liberation came when I took my little sister, Kabita, on the handle of my cycle and slowly pedalled into a liberated country. We went to the bordering village of Ajani in Rajshahi, where my father had business and we had lived earlier. We saw collaborators being rounded up.
As I look back, those were such troubling days. The sense of humiliation I saw in my father’s eyes would haunt me fore a long time. That was the most painful experience of living in exile without hope.
Dr Samir Kanti Saha is a professor of microbiology at the Bangladesh Institute of Child Health, Dhaka Shishu HospitalShaheen Anam
Was in Dhaka throughout the war, and assisted guerrilla activities from her home, which was one of the major safe houses in the capital
It was early April, probably the first week. My brother, Wasif, and several others — Bodi, Towheed, Badal, Samad, Atik — came to our house in Dhanmondi with about five or six rifles. They were .303 rifles. They dug up a hole in the ground and concealed the weapons there. The fight was going to start. We were all young. I was in university, so were the others. Now I look back, and think, how were they even thinking of fighting a city full of army with those things?
Though there was fear, our age permitted us the liberty of adventure, or even excitement. We were doing something. And I felt bad as I stayed home and my brothers and the others were out there without food, or shelter, for days.
As the months passed by, our house started to resemble a warehouse. We stored blankets, medicine and anything that was required. Our almiras, floors were overflowing with these items.
On some occasions there were as many as 10 to 12 young freedom fighters at our place. They would be either planning or hiding for the time being. On one such occasion, a captain in the Pakistan Army, Rizwanul Islam, came to our home, without notice. I knew him by acquaintance from my school days at the Cantonment Model School. As he walked into the drawing room, there were at least ten men sitting there, all guerrilla fighters. It was a tense situation. He had a brief conversation with us and left. He probably guessed their identity, but did not inform the authorities.
Several months into the war, we heard that the army was conducting house-to-house searches in Dhanmondi. We got scared. Our house had so many belongings of freedom fighters. We just locked the doors and left. Fortunately, our house was not searched.
But on the morning of August 29, I woke up at gunpoint. A soldier was pointing a gun at me as I woke up. I told him to stand outside the room as I had not even got out of bed. As I came out, I found the whole house was ransacked. The whole house was swarming with at least 200 army personnel. They had searched every corner. Then they took us to the back of our house, where the dugout was located. The fighters had taken the weapons sometime in May, but inadvertently left the place bare.
The army men told us that they knew that weapons were kept there. When asked where my brother was, my mother told them that he had gone to Pakistan to visit relatives. We had some relatives in Pakistan. Actually, he was Agartala at that time. When they could not get any information, one of them suddenly pulled one of my younger brothers by the arm. They threatened us by saying that they would get all the information they needed if my brother was ‘properly’ interrogated. Both my mother and I grasped my younger brother and started yelling that we would not let them to take him away. At this point, a senior official came and broke off the standoff. He warned my mother and told us to refrain from helping any fighters. He also said that they knew that my brother was a freedom fighter, and he should stay away from such activity. Later, we learned from our neighbours that earlier in the morning they had surrounded the house and brought a limping man to the house. It was Bodi Bhai. They tortured him.
There were several such safe houses all over the capital. There was Atik Bhai’s house. Then there were Shirin Haque’s, where my brother took refuge when he came back from Agartala, Alam Bhai’s, Chullu Bhai’s office. The army had captured Bodi Bhai from Chullu Bhai’s place.
After the August incident, we were very disheartened. I am ashamed to think now, but many of us who were desperate to get news of the captured and to get them released, went to a peer. Poor Jhinu apa! She went and cried at Pagla peer’s feet so many times, thinking that he might be able to get her loved one released. Those were really hard times. Several of those who used to come to our house were captured and the worst was feared.
Then finally, December 16 came. On the seventeenth, Shahadat Bhai came to our house with Chullu Bhai. There were so many others. They were firing blanks. We were so happy! We went to Jahanara Imam’s house. We feared the worst for Rumi, her son. But she was so resolute.
For us, the generation that liberated the nation, a common frame of reference binds us. Those were glorious days. When I look back, I feel proud that our generation had liberated the nation.
Shaheen Anam is executive director, Manusher Jonno, a non-governmental organisation working on Human Rights and good governance.

Kazi M Iqbal
Captured in early June, 1971, while on a guerrilla mission, held and tortured in a prisoner of war camp in Dhaka Cantonment, and later at the Dhaka Central Jail, till December
I was studying at Dhaka University. On March 28, I left the city. First I went to Jhenidah, and then onto Magura. I crossed the border near Meherpur. I trained at the camp under Tauqfique Elahi, Bir Pratik. At the end of May, or maybe early June, we went into Pakistan territory to blow up a train near Jibonnagar, Darshana under Kushtia district.
We were staying at a safe house. Two others and I were caught with explosives, guns. The 18th Punjab regiment’s Bravo company captured us. I find it amazing that even after catching me with explosives and weapons, they did not shoot me. I was first sent to a camp in Darshana. Then from there onto Chuadanga, then Faridpur, Jaidevpur and eventually the dreaded Prisoner of War Cage No 1 at the Dhaka Cantonment. Just think about it — it was called a cage. As if we were animals!
Life at the camp was just horrifying. There were all kinds of people being held there. A half-moon warehouse had been turned into a camp. There were at least 1,000 inmates at any point of time. PIA loaders, college teachers, government officials, day labourers — they were all there. The infamous Field Interrogation Unit of Major Faroque brought in many inmates.
I was interrogated and tortured. My entire body had marks of beatings after I was released. Starting from beatings with belts and hunters, to standing on your knees for hours and burned by torches, there were many forms of torture. The main attempt by the interrogators was to degrade and humiliate the inmates as much as possible.
‘Thala, bati, kombol, ei tin shombol’ was the saying at the camp. We were given a mess-tin. That was the only container we got. We carried water in it, used it for washing and carried food in it. The food we were given was barely food. A blob of rice, and a slap of cooked dundul, those vegetables, which are eventually dried for scrubbing. For some weird reason, they did not give any salt in the food. In the morning, we just got a mug of tea, sometimes cold and if we were lucky slightly warm. By the time I left the camp, I had come down to 80/90 pounds. I was young, but others were worse off. The sight at the camp was no less horrifying than the images seen in World War II movies, and those of Nazi concentration camps. Many went mad after several months. Many more were completely mentally unstable.
My interrogation went on as usual. They asked me what I would do to if they let me go. I said that I would go back to India. So they beat me even more. Eventually, they let me write a confession. I took full liberty and started writing my life’s history, which eventually led to nothing. During those days, we saw many freedom fighters, and some Indian soldiers being brought in. Samsher Mobin Chowdhury, Bir Bikram, was brought in one day. He was limping from his wound.
Finally, in October, I was transferred to Dhaka Central Jail. Compared to the PW Cage, that was like heaven. Though I was held up at a small cell with several others, the situation was quite different. For one, we could eat to our hearts’ content. We could take as much rice as we wanted. And the cooking was edible, with salt.
Sometime after I had been sent to the Central Jail, I was told that I would be tried under Marshal Law. There was also an underhand deal going on, as I later learned. My father was summoned to the cantonment, and told that if he gave the investigating officer a bottle of whisky, they would punish me, but would not beat me. My father gave it without a question.
My trial was a mockery. When I declined to call any defence, they appointed a lawyer on my behalf. His opening words were: ‘He is guilty, but kindly reduce the punishment.’ Anyway, by this time December had come. And when on December 4 India gave its consent, we knew the end was near. As the jail was an open compound, we could see the early attacks of MiG-21 fighters coming in from the other side of the city.
On December 17 we got out. Shahadat Chowdhury came and took us out. I went to my aunt’s house near Science Laboratory.
The days at the prisoner camps were like a nightmare. They were days when we lived on the borderline between rationality and insanity. Other than the memory of eating arum for the first time while in Dhaka Central Jail, I didn’t bring back any good memories.
I look back and wonder how we survived that cage.
Kazi M Iqbal is a director at the Consolidated Tea & Lands Co. (Bangladesh) Limited, a subsidiary of Finlay

Ishtiaque Aziz Ulfat and Major (retd) Manzoor Ahmed, Bir Pratik
Left Dhaka for training camps in the early days of the war, and fought for the entire duration
We were friends since childhood. One lived at Abhay Das Lane and the other at Ram Krishna Mission road. In early March, even before the war had started, we being the youthful rebels we were, had planned to hijack a Pakistan International Airlines plane. But we abandoned that plan.
About that time, we also made many Bangladeshi flags and sold them. We had collected a lot of money from the sales and were hoping that they would come in handy if there was a resistance. It did. Then came March 25. All night there were trucks plying on the roads. On the night of the twenty-sixth, they burned down the Ittefaq office, (Ulfat’s house was right next to the paper) and we could feel the heat coming out of the hot iron.
When the curfew was lifted on March 27, we went to see what had happened. Near the Ittefaq office, a teenager was lying dead stuck in between the gap of the gate of a house. Everywhere we went, there was death. Shankharibazar, Shadarghat, everywhere! We had only one thing on our mind at that point — revenge.
All our brothers were friends with each other. When news came that Khaled Mosharraf had started a resistance, Manzoor’s brother Akther was also among those in the 4 East Bengal Regiment in Kishoreganj, we felt we had to do something.
After an initial visit to Pirojpur, we got instructions from Major Jalil, who was in Barisal, to go back, and collect more young men from Dhaka and come back. After returning we gathered several others, and eventually three of us — Ulfat, Manzoor and Shelly — left Dhaka.
We reached Madaripur. There we stayed at the residence of the Bhuiyan’s, who were very helpful. Then we went on to Bagerhat, where the manager of the Australasian Bank gave us refuge and helped us. We finally reached Shelly’s paternal home in Satkhira. After staying there for a day, Shelly’s family wouldn’t let him come with us. So, he stayed back, and later joined us in war. We took his watch and all the money we could.
Eventually on April 20 we crossed into India. We reached Manzoor’s maternal home in Hoogli. We stayed there for nearly ten days. Then started the long journey to Agartala, and Matinagar camp, which was the first camp for training. Kolkata to Bihar, on to Shiliguri, Lauding, Dharmanagar and finally Agartala. We ate at the Ashoka Restaurant and went to look for the Shonamuri camp.
Those were golden days. We felt like David in the novel Exodus, or like some character out of Kiriti Ray’s book. The journey we took, looking for the war, was probably the most enduring, as those were the days when we were starting to know the world too. We had just finished college. In a way, we grew up with the war.
Ishtiaque Aziz Ulfat is president, Freedom Fighters Peoples Council
Major (retd) Manzoor Ahmed, Bir Pratik, is a director at Agro-based Industries & Technology Development Project

Major (retd) ATM Hamidul Hossain, Bir Bikram
Fought in the war, got caught by the Pakistan Army, and was subsequently let off, rejoining the war
In March, I was at home in Syedpur under Rangpur district. My father was the sub-divisional police officer there. I had come back home after finishing my studies at Gordon College in Rawalpindi. I left for training right when the war started. I went to Panikata in Darjeeling. After initial training, I came back and, set up a camp at Anginabad in Balurghat. It was made up of 121 fighters, most of them civilians.
Several months into the war, we were planning to blow up a bridge near Syedpur town. So, I decided to go and ‘recce’ (reconnaissance) the target myself, as it was near my hometown. The 48 Field Regiment (Artillery) and the 26th FF Regiment of the Pakistan Army were stationed in the area. Early that morning I started off by bus. The bridge was heavily guarded, and the bus was stopped at a regular patrol post on the bridge. While they were searching the passengers, I closely observed the positioning of the patrol post and other parameters. It was about 9:30am. Everything went fine.
After entering the city, I went straight to a friend’s place to get news of my family. The authorities were holding my father at that point. I was on my way back, on the same bridge, and the same checking. But this time before I realised anything, they strapped my hands and blindfolded me. They took me straight to Syedpur Cantonment. After a while, still blindfolded, I heard salutes and boots clicking. Then I heard the duty officer saying that the adjutant officer was going to interrogate me.
By order of the adjutant, they opened my fold. As I looked up, the man standing in front of me looked very familiar, but I could not place him. Then, he looked straight at me and said, ‘If I am not wrong, you are Tareque from Pindi.’ In a flash, I remembered who the army officer was. Captain Khaled Latif Chowdhury was the cricket captain of the small community team we had back in Chaklala in Rawalpindi. He was a few years senior to me at Gordon College.
He asked me to follow him to his office. There he offered me tea. After that he took me to his mess, which was then at the Syedpur Technical School. It was about 3:30pm. After giving me lunch, he locked me from outside and went off. While in there, I tried all forms of ways to escape. As the sun was setting, I desperately tried to escape, in vain.
Finally, he came after dark and asked me to follow. ‘There is a divisional meeting at Bogra. Come with me’ All this time, he had not asked me even once whether I was a freedom fighter.
So with a Wanton Dodge Truck at the rear, I got up beside him on the M38 jeep, while he told his runner and driver to sit at the back. As we approached Taraganj haat, he abruptly stopped the car. He told me to get off the car. I didn’t oblige, as I knew many such incidents when they shot prisoners from the back. So the captain got off, came over to my side, pulled me down and dragged me to a Banyan tree nearby.
‘I know you are Mukti. And I know you will go back to India the moment I let you go. But yaar, we are friends right. Go. I won’t shoot you. Do you have money?’
And then he gave me some money, and warned me not to take specific routes as their patrols were on them. He got on his jeep and drove off. Not until the red tail lights of the jeep had faded did I gain my composure. I couldn’t believe what had happened. I was let go even after being captured, and that too after they had clear knowledge that I was a freedom fighter.
Many years later, when I was the first PSC graduate on a scholarship to Pakistan at the Quetta Staff College, I met Khaled Latif Chowdhury again. ‘You are back again,’ he boomed. As I look back, I realise that wars are so complex. There is pain and death, but also a human bond that cannot be broken.
Major (retd) ATM Hamidul Hossain, Bir Bikram, PSC is a manager at Padma Oil Company Limited

Mirana Zaman
Fled Dhaka during the war and lived in a village in Tangail
39, New Elephant Road. Yes, I will always remember that house. On the ground floor, we had a pharmacy called ‘Sheba’. We lived on the first floor. We lived there until March 27, 1971. I gave voice for the radio and my husband, QA Zaman, was a manager at the Daily Ittefaq. As the month of March entered its third week, things had started to get tense. We were confused about what was going on. We could feel that something was going to happen. Like many homes in the capital, we had put up the new flag, the one with the map of Bangladesh on it. My three daughters made it.
Then on the night of March 25, around 9:30pm, my husband, Atik Bhai, and others in the neighbourhood went to the turning at Science Laboratory. Now that I think of it, they were so naïve — they were setting up some sort of barricade on the road, as news had spread that tanks were waiting at the Dhaka Cantonment on their way into the city. Then sometime after 10:30pm, we started hearing large bangs and saw smoke rising from the Dhaka University and other adjoining areas. At that time, Dhaka did not have so many high-rises, so from our house we could see smoke bellowing from many buildings. I clearly remember the time because the radio was on, and we were listening to a regular program. A man with a very distinctive voice used to conduct a program on Akashbani that made subtle fun of Pakistan. It started at 10:30pm.
We got scared at that point. We switched off the lights and pulled down all the curtains. Now that I think of it, amidst all this tension, we had forgotten to take the flag down. As the night progressed, we could hear heavy vehicles plying on the road in front of our house.
No one slept that night. In the middle of the night, a military convoy stopped at the house on the opposite side of the road. It was the house of Moazzem Bhai. He was one of the accused in the Agartala Case. Through the slit of our curtains, we saw military personnel threatening the family. As they were about to take them away, Moazzem came into the room. Later we learned that he had been hiding in the attic room. The moment he entered the room, they shot him several times. They took his body to the truck. It was a gruesome sight. They carried his body like that of an animal. In the morning, a man going to the neighbourhood mosque was shot on the street.
After that there was total paranoia. We were just waiting to get out of there. On the morning of March 27, they had lifted the curfew for just two hours. We took nothing. We just locked the door and left. I remember that the recorded March 7 speech of Sheikh Mujib, transmitted just a few days ago and given to me for safe custody, was locked in my almira.
On the morning of March 27, my family, the family of my two brothers-in-law and my brother left for my village. As my husband’s family had come from West Bengal after partition, they had nowhere else to go.
There were about seven to eight cars and jeeps filled with people. My brother’s car was on the lead. He was tall and fair, and could pass off as a Pakistani. We were so tense all along the way. Near Mirpur, there were Biharis out on the streets killing innocent Bangladeshis. One such group stopped us. I do not know what my brother said but eventually they let us go. No one came out of the cars during this time. We were stopped, again, in front of the Savar cantonment; but they let us go too. All along the way, we kept whispering any prayers we knew. One of my brothers-in-law, Colonel Qazi Nuruzzaman, whom we called Phul Bhai, was in grave danger as he was in the army.
We finally reached our village in Karatia in Tangail. Though it was a village, it was quite developed. It had electricity even at that time. Ours was the Syed Bari. It was a big house. However, there were so many of us. There was cooking all day and it was a makeshift kind of living.
While we felt relieved for a few days, it worsened on April 3. Phul Bhai had left by this time. He left the moment we arrived at Karatia, looking for the war. He was so restless. He felt that something needed to be done. The army came on April 3. They came firing, left and right. Many of us fled the house. All the cars were damaged.
The days in the village were always full of uncertainty. Around mid-April, it was no longer safe for Phul Bhai’s family to stay at our place. So they were sent to an even more remote village called Gandhina. The army raided our house several times during the months leading to December. A kabuliwala in the main town always came to our house to warn us of any army raids. On one of these days, they ransacked the house.
Every time the army came, every man, woman and children had a small sack with them as they fled. They had a spare piece of cloth, a gamcha, and in some cases some sort of dry food.
After several weeks, the families of my brothers-in-law went back to Dhaka. Later they fled to India. But as my mother was ill, I stayed back. I had requested my husband to leave with my daughters, who were young then, but he would not leave me back there alone.
I had to come to the capital sometimes. All along the way, I would see dead bodies lying by the roadside. As a one of the big houses in the area, and known to be supporters of the Muktibahini, freedom fighters regularly came to the house. But the saddest day was on Eid day. There was a small canal behind our house.
On the morning of Eid, I had gone to the back of the house. I saw several young boys lying on the bank. They were barely teenagers, and so skinny. They were doing reconnaissance for freedom fighters. I asked them to come in and eat some shemai. But they were scared, and did not come in. It was the saddest of sights.
All through the war, I kept feeling that why had I not died at the very beginning. Then this omnipresence of death would not haunt me every moment. The radio was a relief. The Shadheen Bangla Betar Kendro kept spirits up even amidst dark days. As the months progressed, news of Kader Siddiqui’s fighters fighting the Pakistani army came and we started to regain hope. Gradually, during daylight hours, the Pakistani army ruled, and by night, it was the reign of the Muktibahini.
Then one morning in December we saw hundreds of umbrella-like things dropping from the sky. The fields were bare as the harvesting season was over. Then we realised that they were paratroopers. Before we knew it, December 9 came. Our region was liberated. We eventually came back on December 17. On our way back to Dhaka, I remember seeing many bodies of young Pakistani soldiers lying by the roadside. I felt sad. They were young boys, son of some mother. They had little understanding of what was going on.
As I look back to those days, I realise that a shadow of death hung over us throughout those months. But those were also days which bore our history. They hold tales that will never end.
Mirana Zaman, an actress, has performed in Bangladesh Betar and Bangladesh Television for many years.

Published: The New Age/ December, 2005

Addicted to happiness

‘How are you doing?’

I am asked that so many times a day that I have recently given up on coming up with answers that give a correct projection of my state of being. So, once and for all, here goes: I am addicted. Yes, I am addicted to the state of happiness that I have learned to be on the lookout for as long as I can remember. And, like any self-respecting addict, I will tell you too: I don’t get enough! What is worse is that whatever little I get ‘I don’t get no satisfaction’. Still I just can’t stop myself looking for it in all the wrong places. This airy taste of not having enough ‘joy’ in life, this quest for constant well-being is almost an acquired taste! While I am at it, why just me, happiness it seems is a global obsession now. No, not an obsession; it is an addiction. What is worse, it’s been perfected into a science!
For starters, what is this with Bangladesh being ranked as the 41st happiest nation in the world? As if that was a troubling fact to digest, the Brits are 108th, while them damn Yankees came out way back at 150 among the 178 nations surveyed by the New Economics Foundation. I just do not buy into all of this. I’ll come to that later. But first things first, how can we be so happy? With such talk of eternal love, absolute honesty, or pure knowledge, how can anyone climb the high mantles of perfectionist ideals, and say, ‘Yes, I am happy!’
If you ask me, here is what I think: we are taught happiness, and that is the problem. For an average bloke, it’s already been prescribed: a respectable degree, a well-paying job, a good-looking wife, an apartment, a car, the kid’s college fund (no longer an American expression, mind you), etcetera, etcetera. You have all of these, and bam: you are happy! And yet the countless and clueless graduates, the high-paid clerical jobs of business executives devoid of personal imagination, the three-bedroom 64-apartment blocks in the concrete jungle of this mad city, the reconditioned paradise on four wheels guzzling millions of barrels of subsidised petrol are things I don’t get. Excuse me, but that is not happiness in my books.
So maybe it’s not happiness per se, rather the aura of a happy live is what we are taught to strive for. I am tired of this attempt of giving an impression of a happy life. Maybe, we are not meant to be happy if things are not so. At least not all the time. Utilitarianism doesn’t work. Period. Quantitative maximisation of happiness has its limits. So, is it going to be spiritual? Will it be the utilisation of the 72,000 nadis (energy cycles) that the Indian spiritual chakra-system stipulates? Or, maybe we are bound by the shackles of complex reasoning that the Zhuangzi philosophy of the Chinese blames for our eternal dilemma as the ‘thinking’ animal. For all that I know: I need to find a way out of this happy-holic syndrome. I want to be free of this addiction to the quest for happiness.
So, now back to the question of why Bangladeshis are so happy. Yes, friends have come up with various reasoning other than the ones the New Economic Foundation came up with: life satisfaction, life expectancy and ecological footprint. The more frivolous ones came up with the ‘Bangladeshis don’t know what happiness really is’ observation, and the ones waxing philosophical went as far as to comment on the ‘closer to the soil, and simple living’ argument.
Here is my take, and thank our lucky stars if I am right: we are yet to learn the ‘prescribed’ definition of happiness. Probably our lives are yet to be on track, so to speak. We Bangladeshis are still happy with whatever comes along. The ‘promised’ highway to happiness is still not in sight for us. And that is all the more reason why we are not yet restless when we don’t find things that were never supposed to be there. A Danish photographer on assignment in Dhaka went berserk on his first day out. But the next day, he had a big smile as he met me. ‘It works!’ were his first words. The inches between two rickshaws in Thataribazar, or the even the lack of it, and the following arguments had made sense to him, eventually. ‘Rather than concealing, or blocking, all of the grudges and complaints, you just let it out into the open’, came his reasoning. So, isn’t that good. It works!
In fact, that is what I am doing from now on. Next time I am dumped (well, provided that I am ‘picked’ in the first place), it’ll show. And when the CNG driver tries to pull my leg tomorrow, be sure he will get a piece of my mind. Above all, I defiantly renounce all those paths to happiness that ‘they’ tell me to take. While I am renouncing things, I also declare the survey that says Bangladeshis are 41st as bogus, and give my full support to the World Happiness Survey done by the Americans, which has been ranking Bangladesh as the happiest nation in the world, every year.

So, go ahead and ask me how I am?

To rise from the ashes of the Pheonix

Yes, it is time. The fables of great battles that imagined themselves in the minds of men are not creeping up anymore. They are here. It is time to speak out. The ‘forgotten furies’ of millions – starved, dead, forgotten – have finally deepened into a gathering storm. A pregnant pause. And then the battle shall begin, my friend.

Speak out loud against those who want their dreams to prevail and not anything else.

SCREAM!

May the dream of a ‘poetic’ world rise from the ashes of the Pheonix!

To Dhaka, with love

The clouds are almost still. Cracking loudspeakers atop the spires of thousands of mosques carry the muezzin’s azan. Countless crows move with tense steps around the garbage trucks. The city cleaners are still sweeping the avenues, streets, by lanes. Slow paced old men and women, wearing their jovial smiles and booming with stories of the way of the world, old and new, crisscross the streets. A city — my city — is waking up. Dhaka is rising, again.

Along Elephant Road, Mirpur Road, Kawran Bazaar, and the many major lanes, that now also house glass-wrapped shopping malls and other gargantuan edifices, tired day labourers have already woken to another day under the same sky. The strained muscles, levers and engines that build and move this sprawling capital have started their never-ending motion of change. Not that it ever goes to sleep, for abode to millions, this city — Dhaka — beats like the heart of a country. Always!

Today, like every other day, thousands will arrive at Phulbaria, Gabtoli, Sayedabad, Sadarghat, Kamlapur to her promise of a ‘better life’, and the other thousands will stand still by the roadside, the black pitch staring back at their momentary hopelessness in this metamorphosing capital of a young nation.

Dhaka is also a city of memories, of dreams made, of hopes shattered. She is our city. Save a few grumpy faced historians, debating over the ‘exact’ date (yes, even the year is disputed!) of Dhaka’s emergence as a formal city, last week was widely proclaimed as the tilottoma city’s birthday. Four hundred years of history as the centre for a people, Dhaka has seen them all come and go. Emperors, colonials, ‘fake’ federalists, and the eventual emergence as the capital of a nation of its own. That is the story of Dhaka that the pages of history will tell. However, people make the place. Probably, therefore, Dhaka’s story is essentially of its people too. From the eccentric Dhakaiyyas of Old Dhaka to the nouveau rich scattered across the new city, and to the recent suburban Dhakaites of Uttara, the millions of lives that make up this city are as fascinating as they are diverse.

While it remains as the city of fleeting lives, the past few decades have seen the rise of a collective consciousness for an entire generation of urbanites who have been born, have grown up, and dreamt, within the confines of this concrete jungle that is Dhaka. I am one of them.

Like millions of the post-liberation era, I was also born in Dhaka. No midwife, but a doctor delivered me; no azan proclaimed my birth, but a certificate; no grandparent’s mango orchard to spend the year-end vacation (well, sometimes for Eid maybe), but an alley crisscrossed by an amusing game of light and shadow that came through the openings between those ever-increasing multi-storied ‘homes’ of other such city boys. Still, today, take me out of this city for more than a week, and I suffocate. Yes, I have learned to discreetly smug at the smog, and profusely fume at the traffic, but it has come to be a part of my life.

Rather than being a continuous stream of memories, Dhaka has filled lives with moments. Events — collective and personal — have created a connexion of shared experiences. While these have made us all part of the larger texture of this metropolis, like the many others around the world, they have severed us from each other.

Growing up in Dhaka has been somewhat of a solitary experience. While the neighbourhood-feel of paras is still there in smaller towns around the country, the new urbanites of Dhaka were never truly a part of the place. With millions living in rented housing, and the other millions living in shifting slums of the periphery, Dhaka never owns anyone. To me, the memories of personal and collective experiences make up Dhaka. And, how sparing this city has been when it came to experiences!

That non-descript last house at the dead-end narrow alley in Shantinagar, where one misty winter morning a seventeen-year old boy had paused for a while to look at the sheuli flowers spread out like ‘happy flowers from the mountains’, is tucked neatly somewhere in memory. So is the exhilaration of being a part of the jubilant crowd of thousands on the streets of the capital when Bangladesh won its test status, is etched in recollections. The Igloo van on lazy afternoons or the fading voice of the chanachurrrrr-man all make up my Dhaka. And yes, this city holds memories of many firsts. Yes, the girl who looked at the sky for far too long, after one of many coaching classes, was naturally my first crush. Of falling in love, of heartbreaks, of hidden kisses on rickshaws beaten down with the rain of cumulous city clouds, is my Dhaka.

Sometimes I hate her for making my life miserable, I curse her for not growing up, and for not becoming mature like those other cities of the world, and right then she holds me tight, like a long lost love. In a while, when the rickshaw puller will pedal me through those familiar streets, my city will whisper their names to me: Manik Miah Avenue, Dhanmondi 32, Shatmosjid Road, Central Road, Bhuter Goli, Aga Moshi Lane, Free School Street…

(De)imagining Identity: The ‘real’ Pahela Baishakh in villages

‘Pahela Baishakh has long ceased to be our festival; it’s now a gimmick for you city folks,’ Abdul Kader Mridha had a grin on his face, as the octogenarian of village Joyshara under Atrai upazila in Naogaon sat on the makeshift bamboo bench facing the only convenience store in the vicinity. Calling out to the young men, who had timidly trickled from the surrounding paddy fields to gather around the spot, Kader Mridha pounded the dusty ground devoid of rain for nearly four months with his thick wooden walking stick, and yelled out, ‘So, what do you men say — is Pahela Baishakh our big festival?’
Blank stares at first, and then one of the teenage faces with watermark traces of a juvenile moustache, blurts out: ‘There is a mela near the haat. It goes on for a week. We go there.’ Several sceptical glances from the relatively more wrinkled faces turned towards the boy. ‘What?’ ‘To see those filthy cinemas, and drink “bad liquid”?’ ‘Is that what you call mela?’ The accusations and questions crashed onto the already shrinking young faces in, in what was a small crowd, as the morning sun climbed further up the sky to a blazing mid-afternoon glare.
Joyshara is a typical village. It’s what the Roads and Highways Department lexicon would term ‘remote’. The motorbike taking me had to stop twice, as the resurrected feeder road to the village was having new soil and crushed brick spread over it. The diggers — both men and women with bare rippling muscles — were mostly from in and around the village. The dust rising from the constant thumping of shovels wafted the warm, dry air with a grainy taste, lingering on at the roof of my mouth. Despite all the work on the road which snaked through several villages, and the dust, Joyshara and everything for miles and miles on both sides of the rail track, on which the local train from Shantahar had brought me to Atrai Sadar station in the morning, was stroked with a gentle green. The paddy fields were gestating for their final gradient shift in colour: from green to gold. A sense of trepid excitement was sparkling on the pupils of the rugged faces standing with me at the crowded entrance of one of the train’s eight compartments.
At Raninagar, the station before where I got off, some of the commuters and I had to lend our hands to a man who was trying to pull up a heavy, iron machine with crude blue colour onto the train. ‘What is that?’ Several curious, forgiving glances shifted between those around me. ‘Bought a new thrashing machine for this year’s harvest,’ the man with the machine answered.
As I casually brought up the subject of Pahela Baishkah, the initial blank faces and then meek smiles of recognising an alien idea was a potent nudge to the understanding that Pahela Baishakh was no longer a part of ‘their’ way of life. Someone, somewhere in the cities have been telling them through television, newspapers and the dominant urban popular culture that this — Pahela Baishakh — was a festival they should be calling their own.
***
While Baishakhi offers for cheap mobile lines and opening of glass-rapped shopping malls and swanky cafés crowd airwaves and newspaper pages, and as millions migrate to be part of the great dream of prosperity that has come to represent the ‘elusive’ urban middle-class, through our looking glasses the lives of the other millions in Bangladesh’s villages have somewhat become a ‘fabricated reality’. Monga, flood, micro-credit, fertiliser crisis, diesel prices have become fables many of us read in newspapers and say, ‘Ishh!’
Ananda (Joy), the quintessential Bengali word for happiness, was always there under the waves of sunshine and over the green paddy fields of rural Bengal. Its condensed expressions had been through the many festivals dotting the seasons. But before romanticising over the ‘spontaneity’ of these festivities, it is essential to understand their roots. For many of these celebrations, though expressed through a festive mood, were borne out of feudal, agrarian systems. And Pahela Baishakh is the best example of such festivities.
Like many borrowed traditions, and transposed ideas, during the early rule of the Mughals, the Hijri calendar started being used. But as the Hijri calendar was based on lunar readings, it was in gross mismatch with our native agricultural cycles. This also created a problem for the ruling class: taxes. And in order to streamline agricultural tax collection, a new calendar — a mix between the Hijri and the then existing Bengali Solar calendars — was formulated by a renowned scholar and astronomer of the time, Fatehullah Shirazi, and instituted by the Mughal Emperor Akbar. This new Fasli San (agricultural year) started off on 10/11 March, 1584, and was known as Bangabda or Bengali year (Source: Banglapedia).
It was during Emperor Akbar’s period that saw the first celebrations of Pahela Baishakh. And throughout the British colonial times, though the festivities changed in variation and form, the zamindari system of landlords collecting taxes at the end of the year sustained these celebrations. While the tax was collected on the last day of the Bengali calendar, that is the last day of Chaitra, the celebrations organised by the zaminders — quite logically — started off the next day.
Different localities had their own way of celebrating. But while local forms of celebrations were customised with the climate and topography of the region, the actual formal celebrations were mainly focused around the fairs and other festivities, in the form of entertainment and food, organised by the zamindars.
While today’s popular history mostly projects a time of merriment during the time, this period also culminated in a crude reality: it was the time when farmers had to give away much of their earnings. Of the three crop cycles of the Bengal delta — ayush, aman and boro — the harvest of the last one, which in fact was a leaner season during those periods compared to the other two, coincided with Pahela Baishakh. As a result, after the tax collection and the initial merriment of festivities were over, the farmers of the Bengal delta were hit by poverty in the following months as the remaining meagre crop and other savings started getting eroded. Though this phenomenon has changed in nature, with the abolishment of the permanent landlord, or zamindari, system, today’s monga is just the acute and more complex manifestation of that crack in the system. One of the reasons for this can be attributed to the ever decreasing crop holdings per household.
Another aspect of the festivities of Pahela Baishakh was the opening of a new halkhata at trading establishments. The point to note here is that in Bengal trading and capital-intensive businesses, as in every society, was limited to a certain segment of society, namely those closest to the ruling class. And as the majority of the populace were purely producers, i.e. farmers, Pahela Baishakh manifested itself in a two-prong erosion of savings as they had to part with another large chunk of their seasonal earnings. Therefore, if put together, it is natural that the rentier class, i.e. landlords (zaminders), traders, were the most enthusiastic in organising formal celebrations as their coffers started filling up.
Yet, Pahela Baishakh celebrations in more localised forms have long been around, before the British, or even the Mughals, came. And these celebrations had little connection to the ushering of a new year as a calendar, or cycle. That, unfortunately, is simply the post-modern expression of a colonial tradition. The celebration of Pahela Baishakh as an event ushering the Bengali New Year is, therefore, fundamentally a transposed idea: an urban ‘re-imagining of popular memory’ of sorts. What started in Dhaka in the mid-sixties as a nationalist, cultural movement rooted in urban/semi-urban middle-class values, and centred on the native reinvention of the classical Rabindric mould of the Calcutta intelligentsia, has now manifested itself through ‘a selective post-modern screening of indigenous motifs’ befitting that transformation — or rather metamorphosis — through present day Pahela Baishakh celebrations.
Today’s Pahela Baishakh, dotted with the enveloping grasp of the localised capitalist establishment, is Bangladesh’s latest addition to the never-ending parade of confidence in selling our own culture, but it is albeit not a holistic representation of our present-day rural, agrarian countryside. The urban intelligentsia should be careful in claiming so, as is often the case. For if that claim of origin is made, much larger dilemmas will suddenly surface; probably they already are out. Questions of identity, of coping with the painful transition from a feudal, agrarian system to a winner-take-it-all, predatory capitalist system are looming at the backdrop as we are slowly awakening to the realities of our new-found confidence of ‘re-invention.’
***
The men of Joyshara village have ‘bigger fish to fry’ than Pahela Baishakh, as they laid it out bluntly. For now their vigils, often nightlong, are for the dreaded pangapal, or locust, also known as ‘brown grasshoppers’ among many local insecticide agents of Cyngenta, BAYER. The agents relish like opera conductors at this pregnant pause before imminent catastrophe for they know that the hybrid crop verities are highly prone to those and other insects, and eventually most of these farmers will have to rush to them for the solution.
Apart from the irrigation done through hired shallow tube wells burning over-priced diesel as the Rural Electrification Board’s lines are lacking any of the promised sparks, till the beginning of the IRRI harvesting (which is the main hybrid crop variety of the boro cycle), they are petrified over the idea of current poka, another name for the locusts. This harvesting incidentally is not before or even during Pahela Baishakh — as the logical deduction of a festival supposedly rooted in agricultural harvesting, and tax collecting thereafter, would indicate — but at least two to three weeks beyond that time, at the end of April.
‘And even after I bring the crop home, I immediately have to start selling many maunds of it at painfully low prices. Everyone sells. They have to. For the dozens of creditors — diesel dealers, insecticide agents, the landlord from whom I have taken borga (agricultural land rental system), all start pounding me for their dues,’ Mohammad Saiful was now irritated at any insistence on bringing up the joys of Pahela Baishakh.
‘So, young man, now you understand what is Pahela Baishakh to us!’ a sheepish smile of greater wisdom glowed over the wide-bearded face of Kader Mridha, as he raised his face to the sun with his eyes closed, giving off the impression that he is sunbathing. His hands strongly holding onto the darkened wooden walking stick he was pounding the cracked dirt road of the new road with.
As thousands clad in red, white saris and punjabis throng to Dhaka’s Ramna Batamul to listen to the quintessentially Bengali songs of Rabindranath, on both sides of the newly finished feeder road snaking through Joyshara village under Atrai upazila of Naogaon — incidentally, the district is the source of nearly one-third of the rice brought in for consumption in the capital — men with bare torsos and tucked up lungis will be spraying the highly effective, but toxic, Fedi insecticide over their crops to fend off locusts. It is not a time for celebration in Joyshara; it’s a question of survival.
‘I heard you eat panta and hilsha for hundreds of takas to celebrate Pahela Baishakh. That is sad. We celebrate in more grand ways. We just eat panta with maybe just a green chilli to finish off our leftover rice. But I guess that’s way things are nowadays.’
The wise, old Abdul Kader Mridha had a way of telling things.

Published: Pahela Baishakh Special/ The New Age/ April, 2006

Ekushey under siege?

Mahfuz Sadique on identity, nostalgia and the price of liberty…

It’s a new world out there. Closer to home, it’s a new Bangladesh back here. Remember that Orwellian nightmare in 1984? The one where you live a life that is no longer of your own making; you stand in front of the mirror, looking at that face staring back with suspicion. Well, two decades too late, in 2005, I had that eerie, recurrent feeling that I was being watched. As I leaned on the barbed-wired, metal barrier, and looked at the Shaheed Minar — our Shaheed Minar — brightly lit as a day, the red-white-green alpana adoring the steps, I was sad. Sad knowing that those hundreds of dark lords of ‘ultimate’ vigilance, i.e. RAB, were here for my security. Sad knowing that thousands of torque-uniformed policemen are tensely guarding every single yard of this lovely university campus, where I had once heard Shimul Mustafa roar into the afternoon air, ‘Shabash Bangali, E Prithibi Abak Takiye Ray.’

A bare-foot, seven-year-old boy tightly gripping the index finger of his father, and timidly climbing the steps holding a single rose stem is my most fond memory of Ekushey. How many Phalguns have passed by as that melancholy tune of Altaf Mahmud floated into the starry night! Not anymore. This year the ether around Shaheed Minar carried — for the first time, ever — religious recitations. The authorities later clarified that it was for the purpose of testing the public address system. Why not test with a song of Ekushey? In fact, Mursalin Alam, a student of Dhaka University, instead of answering questions, ended up asking me, ‘Are the songs of Ekushey not good enough, or have religious scriptures lost their sanctity that they can be tested for microphone testing?’

As I have told you already, there was a new eighth of Phalgun this year. The usual spiralling line of hundreds of banners proclaiming ‘the respect and never-ending glory of Amar Ekushey’ starting from the Shaheed Minar all the way to Palashi, crisscrossing the roads in front of Jagannath Hall, and then the SM Hall, was a bit thinner, a bit more formal. Something was amiss. The eternal song of Ekushey wasn’t there as the backdrop. Amar bhaiyer rakte rangano, Ekushey February…where was our favourite tune?

About half-an-hour after midnight on the 21st — the state formalities over with — the main wave hit the minar shores, as usual. East-West-North-South, and forgive me if I have missed the other dozens of diagonal combination of thana and city units of every known and closet political, cultural, spiritual (there was a group of Sadhus), university organisation, making way one by one in their hundreds towards the metal and concrete structure. So what brings them there every year? ‘It’s different than all the other national days,’ replied Mohammad Aftab Rahman, a grey-white bearded, white kurta-clad man, as he led his group of cultural enthusiasts from Demra. ‘You know, we are an unfortunate nation. Floods, cyclones, hartals, and the image of poverty is what we are known by. This is one of those few things we can proudly claim as our own. Pretension is what we do with other things. This is pure,’ says Rahman, as he pats me on the back.

As I saw for the umpteenth time this annual ritual, the words of Rahman came as a personal realisation. So this is how it goes: wars, movements for multi-faceted reasons have all had their monuments of glory. But Bengalis have something unique. The cultural conscience of something more than just a nation-state is symbolised by the Shaheed Minar. Religions, gender, regionalism — forget about all of that; it’s about being Bengali.

It shows. Through the rigid stares of security, the glow in the eyes of over-enthusiastic youth, the fidgety, yet firm steps of burdened experience coming to the Shaheed Minar had still not lost its timelessness. And as I had watched on TV in other years, and live this year halfway through the night, it truly seemed like the longest night. So many people, toiling into the wee hours of the morning to do just a simple act — congregate! As I went for the morning rounds, I finally found not recurrent nightmares, but sweet memories of bygone days. Little boys in kurtas, and girls in black-white saris, waiting their turn to put a rose or a marigold on the shrine — that is what my mind had been looking for since midnight. ‘Katto manush! (So many people!),’ says five-year-old Anushka from Mohammadpur. ‘I love to dress in sari, and the alpana is very beautiful,’ smartly replies Anushka from atop her father’s shoulders.

The campus was abuzz as usual. The Boi Mela remained the focal attraction. The cultural group Prachyanat had a cultural programme at the Institute of Fine Art. But the gathering surrounding it had very little to do with the programme itself. Bangaliyana was in the air, and they were celebrating it. Film screenings at the Public Library Auditorium had their stray crowd. Poetry recitations at TSC, discussion sessions at every possible venue in and around the Dhaka University campus had all the makings of a regular Ekushey. The Raju Vhaskarjo in front of TSC was ‘occupied’, as is the cyclic ritual, by the reigning political party’s cultural wing.

Ekushey has a vibe of its own. There is more to it than just the usual national celebration. Spring in the air, Boi Mela round the corner, TSC in the middle — the concoction couldn’t have been better. As evening draws in on the 21st, the nightmare of a thousand pairs of eyes scrutinising you is still there, but just as a backdrop.

No sadness in the air now. Just the forgotten flower of some seven-year-old by the footpath, the remains of a torn Ekushey black-badge, and the wait for another Phalgun is in the air. But then as the gloom of the everyday descends, you ask yourself: Will Bangla always be remembered like this? Is the nightmare here to stay?

Listen carefully! You will hear the answer floating in the air:
‘…Jale pure mare chharkhar, tabu matha nowabar nay.
…Shabash Bangali! E prithibi abak takiye ray!’

Published: The New Age/ February-March, 2005