Klanti amar khoma koro Probhu
Pothe jodi pichchie pori kobhu
Ei je hia thoro thoro kape aji emontoro
Ei bedona khoma koro, khoma koro Probhu.
Beautiful as the poem is, its entreaty and supplication is intensified and correctly appreciable only in Bangla. In what other language is there a word for cleanliness that sounds like a sparkly spell, other than porishkar porichchchhonno? No other language can embody the volatility and impatience of hulustul, and osthir. Bangla sounds like the tinkle of bells, Bangla brings back memories of home.
Bangla reminds me of shimmering mighty rivers. It reminds me of precarious fertile silt that sifts the land and its people. It is the language I hear in my memories from Kamlapur railway station to Mymensingh. It is the language I see etched in the pained facial contours of Zainul Abedin’s famine-struck farmers.
It is the language of some of the best friends I ever made. It speaks of relentless loyalty and togetherness. It takes me on journeys of marriages, death, drag races, and carefully orchestrated near-deaths on getting the “ditch.” It patronises me into over paying for roses I don’t need at traffic lights.
It leaves me slightly debilitated when I don’t find it in my operative vernacular. It puts Ayub Bacchu’s “Tumi Keno Bojho Na” right up there on the list with Lionel Richie’s “Hello.” It is the language of my home.
Bangla takes me to a time before the rise of the geopolitical cognisanti. In a time before documented history, I see the landscape unfolding to sustain the language. The geography and topography taking form in preparedness for syllable-ridden words yet to be born. For in my mind, Bangla beholds and gives shape to the meandering Matamohori, and the lotapatas of the krishnochuras.
No other phonetic could arbour and entail such names, were it not for the tendril-like shapes of the shoreos and shoreas. Bangla tells the stories of more than 160 million lives joined in a land. It tells the stories of many who have given their lives for it. It beholds the future of many more whose lives are entwined with it.
Hardly has a language in history made an impact so deep on its politics and nationalism than Bangla. Of Eastern Indo-Aryan decent, it evolved from ancient Sanskrit around 1000 -1200 AD. It won’t be an exaggeration to say Bangladesh is probably the only nation in the world whose liberty was initiated by subjugatory threats to its language.
The Bhasha Andolon, or the Language Movement, started in the late 1940s, to gain recognition for Bangla as an official language. Today, more than 200 million people in the world speak it.
Born some years after the Liberation War, raised outside the country and educated primarily if not solely in English, there is different andolon taking place for a generation of Bengalis like myself. We struggle to instil the significance and nuances of my language and culture in a new world context of fractionated identities.
In Bangladesh, the andolon is of moving into the new times, while the majority of our population remains without basic humanitarian rights. As a nation, we struggle to move while our political unrests cripple us; we fight to stay afloat in repetitious geopolitical water issues; we fight to survive when our rivers leave us high and dry; we put up with blatant displays of shadism and classism against our own; we remain silent when witnessing accepted degradation reserved for our 90% - the domestic worker, the returning construction labourer, the exploited garments employee. Tumi keno bujho na?
Adapted from an article previously published in a Toronto-based newspaper.