The Spirit of 71

Syncretic Bangladesh challenges Political Islam again

Syncretic Bangladesh challenges Political Islam again

When the uprising was coalescing at Shahbag Square in Dhaka in early February, demanding stern sentences for war criminals of Bangladesh’s nine-month-long war of independence, I was getting daily reports from a close friend and her daughter. My friend has been a leading light of the country’s feminist movement for almost three decades, and the daughter is finishing college while also working for an NGO. The mother’s reporting, as I expected, was highly political, even as the daughter, who had not participated in any direct political activity in her life, was telling me how her friends’ mothers who’d never get close to any protests were joining the gathering at Shahbag. I heard the same from another journalist friend. Her younger brother, his wife and their friends—all in their late twenties or early thirties—who had no penchant for any kind of political activity during their years of growing up, were present at Shahbag on a daily basis.

Another artist-cum-photographer friend was regularly posting photos of the gathering on his Facebook page. What caught my attention was the diversity of the crowd: there were old and young people, even children; thousands of women—activists and housewives; the Dhaka elite and madrassa students; small shopkeepers distributing water to protestors; leading feminist figures and women in headscarves; the country’s top artists putting up huge paintings to depict the spirit of the gathering; caricatures of Jamaat leaders on the walls around Shahbag; and famous singers turning up to sing for the crowd.

The most striking picture was a top shot of a candlelight vigil by a sea of humanity converging on Shahbag Square. Even though I was not present there, it was not difficult to gauge the emotions of the gathering.

While outsiders—namely, Western critics, including some human rights groups—were debating the question of the ‘death penalty’ and the ‘unfair’ process of the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) looking into the horrors of 1971, the gathering was swelling and demanding that the Jamaat-e-Islami and all kinds of religious extremist groups be banned from politics in Bangladesh.

THESE CONVERSATIONS WITH friends and my scanning of social media and news reports on the emotions of Shahbag reminded me of experiences narrated to me by another close friend, filmmaker Tareque Masud, who died in a tragic road accident in 2011. In the mid-1990s, Tareque and his wife Catherine had just finished their first documentary film on the 1971 war, Muktir Gaan (‘Songs of Freedom’), but its release ran into trouble with the then BNP-led government. The distributor simply reneged on his promise to screen the film. Undaunted by these obstacles, Tareque organised screenings of the film by gathering groups of young students who took the film to small towns and villages. They screened the film through portable projectors by renting local town halls and school auditoria and putting up open- air screens in remote villages.

The audience response was overwhelming. People would pay a token entry fee to watch the documentary film. Tareque and Catherine recovered most of their film-making cost within weeks through these gate collections. Not only this, Tareque found himself swarmed by ordinary people—peasants, daily wage labourers, elderly men and women— who told him how they had participated and fought in the war of liberation and how their dream of a nation they fought for remained unfulfilled. Realising that he had stumbled on gold dust, Tareque decided to capture parts of this undocumented oral history in a sequel called Muktir Katha (‘Tales of Freedom’).

I accompanied Tareque to one such open-air screening and filming of a sequence. Thousands of villagers turned up to watch the film in the middle of winter. They sat through the screening and filming patiently and poured out their emotions and talked about the spirit of 71.

While watching the Shahbag uprising from a distance, I realised this spirit of 71 that I had encountered on my travels across Bangladesh was still in play. It is almost impossible for an outsider to understand how deep this runs. Outsiders who are critical of the ICT process are either unaware or selectively suppressive of the atrocities of 1971 committed by Jamaat- led death squads such as the Razakars and al-Badr. Wanton killings and torture, including the rapes of thousands of women by these groups, have been documented by several independent researchers in the past four decades. Tens of thousands of witnesses are still alive and ready to recount their experiences. By raising procedural flaws of the ICT, these detractors are trying to silence these testimonies.

There is little wonder that the Jamaat, which forms part of the opposition political coalition, will want to turn this war crimes trial into a narrative of ‘throttling of the opposition’ by the Awami League led government. People who buy this narrative either fail to look at or ignore the documented evidence of war crimes by Jamaat leaders Ghulam Azam, Delwar Hossain Sayedee and others.

THIS BRINGS US to the crux of the upheaval that is taking shape in Bangladesh. What do the Jamaat and its leaders who are on trial at the ICT represent? Is it only a ploy by the Awami League led coalition government to outflank the opposition?

To get to the answers, one needs to look at what happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan soon after the partition of Bengal. The Muslim League, which spearheaded the demand for a separate Muslim nation called Pakistan and got one slice in the east of the Subcontinent, drew a blank in the first election held in East Pakistan in 1954. It was routed by a coalition of centrist Bengali nationalist and leftist parties. The Marxist thinker Badruddin Umar explained this religious party’s demise in his seminal book on the 1952 ‘Language Movement.’ He argued that the linguistic-cultural identity of Pakistan’s Bengalis, as well as a transformation of land relations, came to prevail over religious politics in the eastern wing of this country that came into being on an argument of religious identity. It was the 1952 language movement by Bengalis against the imposition of Urdu as Pakistan’s national language that laid the foundation of Bangladesh, which came into being less than 20 years later. The country’s emergence can thus only be understood in this cultural context: as a sign of the region’s secular impulses and syncretic values.

Political Islam did try to make a comeback through the Jamaat with direct sponsorship by the West Pakistani army in 1971 during the East’s liberation war. The Jamaat and its subsidiary groups, representing the most violent form of political Islam, carried out crimes against humanity unseen since World War II. The Jamaat is not just another opposition party in Bangladesh. It is more of an ideology in conflict with the syncretic underpinnings of Bengali culture. Its leaders fled the country after the war but were rehabilitated by military dictators in the late 1970s and 80s. Extremists of its ideological extraction have led brutal attacks on the celebrated poet Shamsur Rahman and thinker Humayun Azad. Both of them survived. But many rural women were stoned to death in the early 1990s following edicts issued by mullahs who were proponents of the Jamaat ideology. An award winning film Grahan Kaal (‘The Eclipse’) documented these crimes.

One of Tareque’s unfinished films was on the popular singer Momtaz. The biggest star of subaltern Bangladesh, she holds tens of thousands of villagers spellbound with nightlong rural concerts, often singing songs of separation and evoking the legend of Radha and Krishna. If Momtaz and her bichhed songs are at the heart of Syncretic Bangladesh, then the Jamaat and its ideology stand in stark opposition.

The Shahbag uprising and the Jamaat’s violent reaction have suddenly exposed this tension at the core of the country.

“What will our future be if these Azams or Sayedees get space in our politics?” asks my friend’s daughter.

The liberal-secular mantle has changed hands from the Bangla language protestors of 1952 to the present generation of my friend’s daughter.

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