History and its left-outs: The missing links of Ekushey history

Afsan Chowdhury
Published : 21 Feb 2016, 04:10 PM
Updated : 21 Feb 2016, 04:10 PM

The idea that history belongs to all can be interpreted in two ways.

One, that everyone is a part of history, and two, that everyone has a right to be recognised for their role in history, whatever their contribution.

This has not happened in our case and that is why our history and memorialising is one of exclusion rather than inclusion.

In that sense, historical narratives have been captured by a group, which means all history serves to support that group which controls the narrative.

As a result, we have a self-limiting process of remembering, and ultimately a socio-political filter through which we construct our nation-building narratives.

Sadly, Ekushey history is no different.

When we write history, we need to link it with a past as a necessary part of continuity.

However, due to many reasons including that of political safety of that era, we tend to isolate Ekushey as an event that was a result of the cultural aspirations and rights of the people of East Pakistan.

However, the political roots of resistance are always symbolised by ethnic, linguistic, and religious rallying points.

In the case of Ekushey, this was no different. It is linked to a past of peasant resistance in East Bengal where cultural expression was different but objectives the same.

In the last few centuries, there were several streams moving towards a common goal. This was the movement for rights of Bengal, and East Bengal in particular.

There were several identity markers at work ranging from religious, ethnic, and linguistic conflicts.

This process was accelerated by the British takeover after 1757.

The scenario changed dramatically as the British caused the famine of 1770 which led to 10 million deaths, one third the total population of Bengal, followed by the Permanent Settlement of 1793, which established the Zamindary system.

East Bengal was essentially a peasant-populated land, and the educated middle class were largely from one community – Bengali Hindus.

The Muslim upper class that came from aristocratic sources soon became minor players, but the small educated urban Muslims supported British rule.

The peasants – primary victims of British rule – resisted.

The first resistance came from the religious mendicants who collected tax from the peasants which the British forbade, leading to a conflict known as the Fakir-Sannyasin movement in the 1760s- 1780s.

It also showed that peasant Hindus and Muslims were not one community, but two communities living together.

Bengali peasants embarked on a series of resistances which saw the Pabna resistance of 1783, the Bakerganj revolt, the Wahabi resistance that began under Haji Sharitullah in 1812 through Titu Mir (1830s), Faraizi movement, the Revolt of 1857, the Indigo rebellion and so on until Partition of Bengal in 1905.

This saw the middle class of East Bengal, largely rooted in Muslim peasantry, enter the political space.

By that time inter-communal relationship had become inevitably very toxic – most zamindars were Hindus and most peasants were Muslims – and riots broke out in different parts of rural Bengal from 1907 onwards.

The partition of Bengal boosted Bengali Muslim middle class identity, but also helped launch the Muslim League – led by people who were all-Indian Muslim identity driven, Urdu speaking elitist, and not peasant friendly at all.

Thus the nature of the movement began to change.

Muslims of Bengal suffered as the North Indian Muslim identity dominated everything. The contest of the North Indian Hindu identity and the issues which had led to the peasant risings in Bengal were lost.

The peasant inspired party Krishak Praja Party led by Fazlul Huq – coming from a rich peasant background – was born in 1936.

It was rooted in East Bengal, but the upper class leadership of all Muslim Bengal – Suhrawardy and Abul Hashem – won the day, and the voices of the marginalised were lost.

In 1946, Bengali Muslims voted as a part of all-Indian Muslims, not as Bengali Muslims, which saw Pakistan delivered, but Bengal neglected.

Communal relationships further deteriorated over time and thus the doomed attempt to form a Bengali nation-state – United Bengal – was lost.

After 1947

But the nation state aspiration was not lost and it was born almost immediately through the language movement which began in early 1948 as a continuation of the identity aspiration movement of East Bengal.

Freed from its contest with upper and middle class Bengali Hindus of all Indian identity, people could construct a new identity. This was one of a dominant linguistic Bengali identity with the Muslim or Hindu identity as a sub-tag.

In some ways, the nationalist movement was linked to the framework of the Fakir-Sannyasi movement which was not based on artificial notions of a single identity construct, but of two identities confronted by the same threat and struggling together.

It was in this search for this One meta-identity narrative that served the subsequent nationalist movement most, by which the other players of such histories were left out of the narrative.

Ekushey is imagined largely within the perimeter of Dhaka university thus limiting its appeal, but also showing how the Bengali nationalist movement imagined itself – Dhaka based, elitist, culturally urbanised et cetera.

The result is the loss of memory and birth of forgetting the history that began long before a couple of centuries ago.

Even the martyrs of 1952 are transformed in narratives into "students" though they came from across the social classes.

We rarely remember the role of women or people from elsewhere making Ekushey an exclusive middle class male narrative, preparing and justifying it for the later history of 1971.

In constructing that narrative, we too do the same. It has become a history of incomplete narratives, a history of flawed continuity.

History to be made right must begin with writing the right history. That has yet to happen.