Othering of Bangla in independent Bangladesh

— Wikimedia

ABOUT five years ago, as a student contributor to the Youth, a weekly supplement of the daily New Age, I wrote a piece exploring the strained relation that today’s youth have with Bangla (New Age Youth, February 19, 2017). Why for many students is it ‘cool’ to consider Bangla as ‘kothin’ (harder) than English? While writing the story, I spoke with students from different backgrounds and the responses were so revealing that I continued my research on the relationship between the two languages. Their responses instantly made me realise that nationalist celebration of Bangla and Bangla literature did not really influence the status of Bangla in our everyday life.

For the purposes of this article, I would like to recall the responses from 2017. To my question, why they considered Bangla as kothin, a student of Daffodil University responded, ‘Bangla grammar is very difficult.’

Then I asked an SSC examinee of English version curriculum of Kakoli School and College whether he thought Bangla is difficult because of its grammar and he said:

‘We are not rewarded for doing well in Bangla. So, from very early on we put in more effort in English, mathematics or science. At the end of the year, if you get a prize in science, your parents will be very happy. Instead, if you get it for a Bangla essay writing competition, they will be happy, but not as happy. Since Bangla is our mother tongue, we are more casual about it. That might be the reason that it eventually gets difficult for us.’

I asked the same question to a student of an upscale madrassah at Mohammadpur, Dhaka and the response was:

‘Effectively we are forced to learn Arabic, English and Bangla. Unlike English medium schools, here Arabic is prioritised over other subjects. A good student would try to emphasise English after Arabic, because you need to know English in order to remain competitive in this education system, to get into good universities. Inevitably, as a formal topic of learning, Bangla gets very little attention from students. Therefore, it is not a surprise that it appears as difficult.’

For ethnic minority students in Bangladesh, their relationship with Bangla, for obvious reasons, is different. A student of Khagrachari College related her struggle with Bangla and English:

‘Bangla is not our mother tongue. During our childhood, we don’t have much everyday communication in Bangla. It would be mistaken to say we don’t know the language before we start school. How can you not know Bangla being Bangladeshi, but it is as difficult as English for us.’

What this set of answers made evident is that language is not a thing to celebrate or mourn. It is lived. It survives and evolves through classed, gendered, religious and ethnic experiences. In the experience of an ethnic minority student from Chattogram Hill Tracts, Bangla and English bear certain similarities. They are the languages of the immediate and distant oppressors. Due to the institutional bias towards Arabic in madrassah and demand for English in the job market, a madrassah student deprioritised learning Bangla. These responses led me to think, whether social and institutional environment is ensured in post-independent Bangladesh for Bangla to thrive in everyday life or Bangla has been reduced to an object of nationalist gratification?

Without examining the structural condition in which a language can freely evolve, I find it rather odd to complain that the young generation are distancing themselves from the language — an issue that many have termed as our ‘lost love for Bangla.’ I term this phenomenon of ‘lost love for Bangla’ as the othering of Bangla in independent Bangladesh, because I think it is important for us to ask, why the language we fought for in 1952 has faced a slow social and institutional alienation in the subsequent decades.

Let me first clarify what I am referring to when I say the ‘lost love for Bangla’ phenomenon. As a researcher, I have been closely following the newspaper supplements on International Mother Language Day or any public conversation on the status of Bangla in Bangladesh. Even a cursory glance at the title of essays published in the Amar Ekushey newspaper supplements demonstrates the collective anxiety over the status of Bangla: ‘Our responsibility towards Bangla’ (Ashraf Ahmed, Prothom Alo, February 21 2021); ‘Bengali’s lost love for Bangla’ (Eresh Omar Jamal, The Daily Star, February 21, 2017); ‘The extinction of Bangla’ (Naira Khan, The Daily Star, February 21, 2016).

There is another set of reactions presented in the media that also contributes to the making of this phenomenon. It is about the sanctity of Bangla. In these news reports, eminent citizens are found expressing concern about how the radio jockeys are desacralising the ‘ideal’ form of Bangla. How contemporary advertisements are abusing the language for cheap popularity of their commodity? They are concerned about the influence that Bollywood culture has on Bangla and the way people, particularly young generation are speaking in a form of Bangla that is more Banglish than Bangla (Rahima Akhter, Banglish chorchay jokhon porabhuta Ekusher chetona [When the practice of Banglish has defeated the spirit of Ekushey], Prothom Alo, March 7, 2017). It is true that a form of Banglish has evolved in recent years. It is also true that the state has a role to play in the evolution and survival of a language. However, I don’t think in a globalised world we can shut our windows to keep Bangla from interacting with other languages.

There is also a group who are sincerely distressed that in government offices English still dominates. On February 17, 2014, the High Court issued a rule to take steps for implementing and ensuring the use of Bangla language everywhere, including signboards, banners, electronic media advertisements, nameplates, and vehicle number plates. There is a lot of discussion around the non-implementation of the Bangla Language Implementation Act, 1987. The government is negligent, non-committal in ensuring the universal use of Bangla. I am however not sure whether the universal use of Bangla would automatically resolve the emotional crisis manifested in the ‘lost love for Bangla’ phenomenon. More important question, at least for me, is why progressively Bangla, the glory of our nationalist imagination, has such an uncertain status in contemporary Bangladesh?

To explore this question, I proposed the idea of the otherness of Bangla in Bangladesh. In postcolonial studies, the terms other, otherness and othering are developed and in use for decades to analyse different unequal, exploitative colonial situations. The term was coined by Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak and is used to discuss the discursive and other processes used by the colonisers to create and sustain the negative and inferior views and assumptions about the colonised natives. A Kenyan writer and academic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o used another idea, colonial alienation to describe similar processes when discussing the cultural domination of English on the languages of Africa.

In his work, Decolonising the Mind (1986), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o termed English as the language of imposition and described the process of colonial alienation,

‘The language of an African child’s formal education was foreign [imposed language]. The language of the books he read was foreign. The language of his conceptualisation was foreign. Thought, in him, took the visible form of a foreign language. So, the written language of a child’s upbringing in the school (even his spoken language with the school compound) became divorced from his spoken language within the school compound) became divorced between the child’s written world, which was also the language of his schooling, and the world of his immediate environment in the family and the community. For a colonised child, the harmony existing between the three aspects of language as communication was irrevocably broken. This resulted in the dissociation of the sensibility of those children from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation. The alienation became reinforced in the teaching of history, geography, music, where bourgeois Europe was always the centre of the universe. This dissociation, divorce, or alienation from the immediate environment becomes clearer when you look at colonial language as a carrier of culture.’

In this rather long excerpt, the dominating relationship between English and Thiong’o’s mother tongue Gikuyu and the processes of alienation becomes explicit. There are other scholars who have worked on unequal relationships between languages, but mostly in the context of colonialism. In independent Bangladesh, the ‘lost love for Bangla’ phenomenon presents a unique problem for post-colonial scholars. Bangla is the official and national language of Bangladesh, with 98 per cent of Bangladeshis using it as their first language. Yet, Bangla still appears harder to students than English. How, when and through what processes of alienation Bangla became the ‘gram theke asha durshomporker atmiyo (distant relative from the village)’ while English maintained its status as the ‘Amerca-ferot khalato bhai (the maternal cousin who returned from America)’? These two phrases, distant relative from the village and the maternal cousin from America also indicate the very classed dimension of the ‘lost love for Bangla’ phenomenon.

This is a perplexing question that I do not have a fully formed answer to. I agree with all who are concerned that as a speech community we have failed to care for the language that has such historical significance in the formation of independent Bangladesh. I don’t deny that the state has a role to play in ensuring an enabling environment for Bangla. The divisive education system — English medium, Bangla version, English version, madrassah curriculum — does not help, it presents a hierarchy of language — English, Bangla, Arabic and then all the languages of ethnic minority communities.

The de-intellectualisation of Bangla Academy that has once played an important role in creating space for literary scholars, translating world classics in Bangla and conducting research on Bangla also did not help. I have recently spoken with a fourth-year undergraduate student of Bangla literature about the academy, what does he know about it? For him, the academy is a government office that makes policy decisions about Bangla grammar and spelling. In other words, the academy is now more interested in managing the bureaucratic affairs of language.

The continued use of English in the legal proceedings and the coloniality of our legal system is, for some, a matter of concern. When the entire legal system is inherited from the colonial masters, it is not surprising that English dominates legal practice. The courtroom etiquette, the god-like status of the judges and the laws — all are based on and rooted in the British colonial, political and cultural ideals. The political aspiration that led us to fight for an independent state did not include decolonising our legal system. There are legal experts and political activists who have spoken about decolonising the system. However, the proponents of the ‘lost love for Bangla’ phenomenon rarely linked the question of language with its colonial history.

The hierarchy of languages maintained by our education system, the de-intellectualisation of the Bangla Academy and the loyalty to the legal system inherited from the colonisers among other things contributed to the institutional alienation and othering of Bangla in Bangladesh. What is missing from this list is the role of English in the making of the Bengali middle class. Although, there are many historical and sociological works describing the rise of ‘bhadralok sreni’ in the colonial Bengal, they mostly deal with the Hindu Bengalis of the colonial capital, not so much about the formation of Bengali Muslim middleclass, particularly in the East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh. However, the discussion on the generic Bengali babu helps us genealogically trace back the prevailing middle class obsession with all things English in Bangladesh. Instead of drawing from scholarly work, I would like to quote from a poem by Mokshadayini Mukhopadhyay titled, Bangalir Babu (The Bengali Babu):

Who’s that rushing through his breakfast and bath

The Bengali Babu! He’s terribly pressed:

The Sahib will scold him, should he be late

So he’s got to get ready, and bustles about.

There he comes, decked in trousers and jacket!

On his head a pith helmet, tied round with scarf,

The carriage costs fives annas, but it hurts him to walk

Alas, there goes our Bengali babu!

Alas, there goes our Bengali babu!

He slaves away from ten till four,

Carrying his servitude like a pedlar’s wares.

A lawyer or magistrate, or perhaps a school master

A subjudge, clerk, or oversee:

The bigger the job, the greater his pride;

The babu thinks he’s walking on air.

The babu’s learned English, he swells with conceit

And goes off in haste to deliver a speech.

He flounders while speaking, and stumbles and stutters,

But he’s speaking in English, you must come and hear.

Alas there goes the Bengali Babu!

Mokshadayini Mukhopadhyay wrote the poem in the 1870s, but the loyalty to the language of the coloniser sarcastically presented oddly helps us understand the uncertain status of Bangla (in relation to English) in independent Bangladesh. Bangla as a language and an ideology is hegemonic, yet constantly marginalised, othered.

Shovon Das is a PhD researcher based in Canada.