Trekking through a village, and especially if it is a village where one has one’s roots, is healthy for the soul. Or broaden the idea, to take in every village in Bangladesh. We realize of course that villages have not been in a state of good health for years together owing principally to the exodus of their inhabitants to the urban regions of the country. The lure of town and city is too powerful an element to be resisted and so what we have in Bangladesh’s rural landscape is a condition where those who feel they ought to utilise their experience in promoting themselves in life, which is a combination of education and rationality, find it more interesting to move away from the villages.
One does not, indeed cannot, complain. Life in its highest form of meaning is an illustration of dynamism, of the opportunity for the individual to interact with other individuals at those points where light seems to be shining ever brighter. And light gleams in the cities, where the future beckons, where the individual readily, perhaps a little naively, is willing to turn his back on the past. That is our predicament in these times, in this beautiful country to the political liberation of which we were witness to more than five decades ago. We are, let us be brutally frank about it, carefully but insistently abandoning our villages or observing our villages move away from us.
And yet that calamity -- and it is a calamity -- should not be coming to pass. It is such thoughts that arise in you when you take a walk through a village, by a settlement of families inhabiting space beside rivers or deep in the shade of plants and trees away from the chaos and din of towns. There is yet the call of the bird in the morning; there are yet the measures taken to protect the chickens from the marauding foxes lurking on the edges of the village. Once the sun sets beyond the huts and the fields, it is the seductive smell of fresh food, redolent of what our parents and grandparents cooked in our childhood in the open courtyard, which wafts across to us. Time stands still.
The village shop, many of which may be rundown images of struggling business, continues to bring neighbours and strangers alike together for good, vibrant and sometimes agitated conversations over tea and, yes, coffee these days. Little children who have never been to towns walk over to this shop for delicacies, toffees and biscuits, they have set their sights on. As you sit among those humble people who have spent a hard day toiling, as their ancestors toiled long ago, in their fields and converse with them, you note the vibrancy, the absence of fatigue in them. The evening is a moment of delight for them. It revives their spirits.
Yes, the village is there. Even so, we know only too well that urbanization, in the form of factories and car showrooms, has rapidly been swallowing up other villages. Vast fields where once rice and jute and vegetables used to be cultivated have simply passed into memory. It is on this account that we need to draw the attention of society and government to the requirement of preventing any further encroachment of the city into the village. This country, like all those scores of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, rests on an essential foundational principle, which is the village. Take away the village or bulldoze it into modern housing complexes and shopping malls, and what you have remaining is an ugly manifestation of life. Beauty goes dead.
Life, my friends, needs to resuscitated in the villages of Bangladesh. The village needs rejuvenation. That job should begin with a repair of every rundown road and mud path which links the village to the highway. It becomes a responsibility of local elected leaders as also the Member of Parliament for the constituency of which the village is part to speedily undertake a programme of road development. Communication being a vital element of national progress, giving villagers the feeling that they can travel down the road in ease is an imperative. Politics is best when people do not complain. But people do complain when they are in discomfort caused by the callousness of the powerful and the influential, those who are elected to authority by these very people.
Our villages must be centres of enlightenment, an image which can turn into purposeful reality through a building of libraries or centres of intellectual activity. Raising the level of social perceptions among the young ought to be a goal of not only local councillors but also of those whose roots in the village enjoin upon them this responsibility of building libraries. Nothing deepens knowledge in the young as powerfully as a comprehension of the world through reading. The young in Bangladesh’s villages are the descendants of individuals who in an earlier era sought knowledge through education; and many of these individuals went on to serve as teachers in schools for long stretches of time.
It is those ancestors, in the figurative sense of the meaning, that the young men and women in the village should be going back to. The vehicle for that journey to progressive thinking is certainly the library, a hub which must be open to all, meaning to adults as well. We do not expect our young to abandon the country someday and resettle in foreign land. When the young travel out of the country, in order to come by higher education and then decide not to come back home, we are certainly not happy. Leaving one’s country because another country offers promise of a more satisfying or lucrative future is no reason for pride, for any of us.
Which brings us back to the issue of rural libraries. And, yes, do remember that a vast number of the world’s great men have sprung from pastoral clime. In Bangladesh’s history, its great politicians, academics and its notable civil servants went to school in the village before branching out into serving their country. It is that sense of service, of dedication to the land, which should be the point about the rural libraries we speak of. Those libraries will enrich the mind and shape the worldview of the young.
Let IT centres come up in the village. Let our neighbours in the village reflect on AI, on space science, on what we need to do to combat climate change. It is back to basics which is called for. We who have walked down the village paths, through the clearings in the woods and across the fields under the blazing sun and in monsoon downpour, know the art of fishing, of growing fruit, of climbing coconut trees to pluck the fruit. We should not have to learn from seminars in the cities how to go about life.
The village in Bangladesh will have a renaissance when the jatra is revived. When the puthi culture makes a comeback, when children are heard loudly preparing the next day’s lessons in the traditional warmth of homes where once their grandparents prepared for school in similar fashion.
The village is home. It is the song we have sung for ages. And will sing on for ages to come.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune.