I would like to start by paying my respects to all the heroes who were involved in the Bengali Language Movement of 1952. Many of those heroes sacrificed their lives in an attempt to establish Bangla, their mother tongue, as the state language of then East Pakistan, which to this day remains the only incident in the world where people sacrificed themselves for their mother language.
However, it would be a huge mistake to limit their contributions to only that, because, in many ways, their movement was a colossal factor in paving the way for a sovereign and independent Bangladesh. May their spirits live on forever.
I personally feel that we are not doing enough to commemorate this occasion. Yes, obviously, we celebrate February 21 every year with astounding grandeur, but that is totally beside the point.
An event this huge, and especially one that deals with something as sensitive as our mother tongue, deserves to reside in our hearts and minds eternally rather than in empty actions only once a year.
I say this not because I am frustrated, but because of all the things I feel that we do, which totally go against the spirit of Ekushey.
First of all, I would like to discuss the way we treat the monument which was built to memorialise the Language Movement, the Shaheed Minar. All year round, it is neglected and unkempt. Phuchka stalls and cotton candy vendors surround the monument. There are chips wrappers, street food leftovers, and dirt of all kind around it.
It seems as though there is nobody to take care of it. Be that as it may, we, the public, who so meticulously and pay their respects in that very vicinity on February 21, decide to loiter around Shaheed Minar, sometimes sitting or standing on the stairs, or the podium, with their shoes still on.
It’s disrespectful to say the least. But come February 21, all the dirt is cleaned and the monument is made to be impeccably clean. And on February 22? Back to the way it was.
I stumbled upon two videos on Facebook. The first video shows a journalist from a TV channel asking several people about what exactly happened on February 21. Answers ranged from “there was a war” to “I don’t know” or “sorry.”
No one got it right. It may seem like only the negative answers were displayed. I don’t think that was the case, but even if it were, it still means that those people really don’t know what happened. They could be blamed for their ignorance, but so could the authorities of the education and media sectors.
Why hasn’t there been enough content about 1952 in academic books? Why, in all these years, have we not had a movie on the Language Movement? Or a TV series? Why do we only have telefilms on the subject matter of February 21? And even those telefilms focus on the effect of the Language Movement on the present day rather than the accurate history.
I would like to applaud the music sector on this end, because there are quite a few new songs written about the topic, and they’re quite good. But obviously, music can’t portray history as perfectly as theatre or films or any visual representation can.
The second video shows an American woman, apparently in her 50s, speaking fluent Bengali, simply expressing her disgust towards the fact that we Bangladeshis incorporate words from other languages in our day to day speech. And in her dialogue, she did not use a single English word.
Obviously, she wasn’t talking about the words that have been adapted into Bengali over the decades or even centuries, like “sampan” or “rickshaw,” but she was talking about the words that clearly have a Bengali translation.
The fact that we do this isn’t a big surprise, considering that we are being culturally encroached upon by a few different cultures at once, mostly an Indian one. It is infiltrating through dubbed cartoons and Hindi soaps.
But during our speech, we tend to include more English words than Hindi, because from an early age, we’re taught that being able to speak English is a great achievement, and this “mixed” language is often considered to be smart.
We are not taught as children to be proud of our own mother tongue, and to take credit in speaking it in all its glory.
In addition to that, in the last few years, a disturbing trend of writing Bengali using the English alphabet has become increasingly common. But it was well dealt with by the tech savvy young Bangladeshis, who came up with an easy way of typing Bengali, and the annoying trend is on the decrease.
The last subject I want to touch upon, that I feel is almost insulting towards the spirit of Ekushey, is probably not as common as my last few points. The question I want to ask is that, after 64 years, why are we letting the mother tongues of other minority ethnicities living in Bangladesh die out slowly?
Is it not similar to what the Pakistanis were doing to us? Obviously, Pakistan was oppressing us in many other ways, and the comparison is a poor one in that sense, but are we not imposing our mother language on them?
According to UNESCO, there are three languages (namely Koda, Kurux, Pnar) in Bangladesh that are “severely endangered,” which is the last stage before extinction. Additionally, there are multiple languages which are vulnerable and definitely endangered.
The government must ensure that kids receive some courses or lessons on or in their mother tongue, at least, at the primary level before it is too late.
At the end of the day, all we can hope is that the new generation of Bangladeshis will be aware of their own culture despite all these drawbacks we currently have, and in turn, teach their children about Bengali heritage through creating means that they themselves did not have while growing up, or improving on the means that they did have.
Hopefully then, we will start doing the things that we should have been doing all along, like implementing the true spirit of Ekushey in our daily lives rather than just once a year.