I read Ziauddin Choudhury’s Understanding the Modern Bangladeshi with the quiet gratitude one feels on hearing a stranger describe the inside of one’s own chest.
He traces, with a civil servant’s clarity, the long road by which a people learned to stop choosing: The rival answers to colonial India’s question -- the line that ran from Sir Syed to the Muslim League, minority and safeguards, against Bengal’s own instinct, which found identity in a language and a soil as much as in a faith.
He walks us through 1952, when “we are Muslims in Pakistan” quietly became “we are Bengalis whose tongue is our nationhood” and through 1971, which turned sentiment into a state.
He reads Article 12 of the 1972 Constitution as it was meant to be read -- not as an assault on religion, but as an assault on the use of religion as the ticket to power and citizenship. He ends, rightly, on Tagore and Nazrul. I would not change a word of it. I want only to sit beside him and add what a man sees from inside the thing he describes.
I am old enough to remember a Bangladesh that no constitution could legislate. In the first years after independence, in the lanes where I grew up, a friend had no religion. I do not mean we were tolerant of one another’s faiths; I mean the question did not arise.
I could not have told you, of half the boys I played with, whether their mothers turned toward Mecca or lit a lamp before an image -- it was not a thing one knew, because it was not a thing that mattered.
That society was real. I did not dream it. And the slow tearing of that fabric, thread by thread, in the decades since, is a wound those of us who remember carry still. I write, in part, to describe the wholeness before it is forgotten by those too young to have stood in it.
For I was born beside a Bengali river, into a family that would be called Hindu, though I have never once been able to feel the border that word is meant to draw around me. I am not a theologian. I am, if anything, a civilizational Sanatani -- heir to an old subcontinental inheritance the way a Florentine is heir to the Renaissance, not by doctrine but by blood and weather and song.
My DNA is the DNA of the subcontinent, which is to say it is Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist and a dozen older things at once, and it has never asked me to choose. So when Ziauddin Choudhury writes that being Bengali and being Muslim need not negate each other, I do not read it as a Muslim’s reassurance. I read it as the description of my own body.
And let me grant, plainly, what a man with my name is not always expected to grant. Some time ago I sat reading the old constitutional quarrel of the 1930s -- Jinnah insisting that the Muslims of India needed a voice of their own, one the Hindu majority could not simply overrule; Nehru, the secular, unable to see how faith could enter a question of constituencies at all. It was an all-India argument, about Hindus and Muslims in the abstract; neither man had Bengal in his thoughts, and the word Bengali appears nowhere in it. But as I read, my mind slipped homeward, to my own soil, and a sentence rose in me -- not a proverb, nothing I had been taught, only my own voice murmuring what I suddenly understood: Musolmanra to jole bheshe aseni -- the Muslims did not come floating down the river.
The Bengali Muslim is no stranger washed in from elsewhere. Some came to Islam by conversion and many did not; but all of them rose from this very soil, the same villages, and the same rivers that gave me my grandfathers.
The Bengali Muslim and the Bengali Hindu are not two peoples who learned to share a country. They are one people wearing two of its names. This is not a poet’s flourish: Their belonging is not a courtesy I extend, but a fact older than any objection could be.
Let me give the synthesis a face, from the side Choudhury was too modest to claim. In the house where I grew up, the morning did not begin with a clock. It began with the Azan from the mosque down the lane, and it was by that call -- a Muslim call, in a Hindu household -- that my mother knew the hour to wake her son for his studies.
No one found this strange. The Azan was not another faith intruding; it was the sound of morning itself, the texture of a shared Bengali dawn. We were not tolerated guests at the edge of the nation. We were the nation, in one of its oldest forms.
Let me confess something that may surprise anyone who reads only the name at the top of this essay. I do not pray to Durga. And yet few sights give me more joy than a Bengali home at Diwali -- the rows of small lamps along the windowsills and the rooftops, the whole simple, childlike happiness of a festival of light that now glows from Dhaka to Kolkata to New York.
The only thing that moves me as much is the sight of children in their new clothes on Eid morning, shining with a pride they can barely hold in. I love both the same, and for the same reason.
To me, neither is theology; both are culture -- the way a people’s faith flowers into everyday life -- and such culture is among the most beautiful things human beings have ever made. A man who can be stirred by the Azan, light a lamp at Diwali, and smile at an Eid procession has not lost his religion. He has understood what religion was for.
This is why the minority is not a footnote to the story of modern Bangladesh. It is the proof of the story. A secularism that forbids religion from deciding citizenship is only as true as its weakest-placed citizen.
Choudhury notes, almost in passing, the great Hindu departure from East Bengal, and maps the longing for undivided Bengal onto the Hindus of the western shore -- those who left. But the leaving and the staying were often one family, not two.
My own parents and grandparents did not go. Yet most of my kin did -- nearly all of my mother’s people, nearly all of the family I married into -- packing in a single season what it had taken generations to root.
So I do not write as one who stayed, gazing across at those who left. I write from the torn seam itself, where half a household remained and half became a memory on the far side of a line.
For those of us on the staying side, East Bengal is not the recollection of a lost ancestral home across a border. It is home -- and we are what remains of the synthesis here, keeping it because someone must.
In the summer of 2024 and the months that followed, temples were burned and homes were marked; and last month -- in an image I cannot forget -- a mural of Rabindranath Tagore in Dhaka was defaced, blackened, as if the Bishwakobi himself, the first of all Asia to win the Nobel, could be painted out of the place that raised him.
When a mob blackens Tagore, it is not a Hindu who is attacked. It is the synthesis. It is the very thing Choudhury spent his essay defending. For Tagore belongs to no sect; he belongs to the morning, like the Azan.
And here the oldest lesson returns to warn us. A people cannot bury their language in the grave of their faith; when they are forced to, the nation tears. East Pakistan was Muslim -- as Muslim as the West -- and it tore anyway -- first in spirit, in 1952, when its students died for their mother tongue, and then in body, in 1971 -- because identity is never one thread, and you cannot pull out the thread of language in the name of the thread of religion without the whole cloth coming apart in your hands.
That is not a Hindu’s grievance nor a Muslim’s. It is simply what our history taught us. We learned it once, against an imposed tongue. We must not now unlearn it against one another.
Consider Nazrul, whom Choudhury rightly names in the same breath as Tagore. Our rebel poet wrote hamds and naats to the Prophet with one hand and shyama sangeet to the goddess Kali with the other; he married across the very line that was meant to be uncrossable, and raised children who carried both inheritances in their names.
Nazrul was not a Muslim poet who dabbled, nor a secular poet who hedged. He was the non-divide itself, walking around in a single body, singing. If we wish to know what the modern Bangladeshi could be, we need no constitutional theory. We need only read him.
I am not writing as a Hindu, pleading a Hindu’s case. I am writing for everyone this ancient and exhausting divide has ever wounded -- the Muslim woman told her Bengali songs are un-Islamic; the Hindu shopkeeper watching his shutter; the Buddhist in the Chittagong Hills, the Christian in the north; and the Bengali Muslim majority too, robbed of something each time a zealot insists their faith can be purchased only at the price of their culture.
The wound has no religion. That is the whole point. It cuts through one body -- ours -- and the blood that runs from it is one blood, whatever name we give it.
Choudhury ends on a hope: A Bangladesh where one may love Tagore, keep Pohela Baishakh, and hold Islam close, with no identity forced to negate another. I share that hope entirely.
I would only extend it by a single clause. The synthesis is complete not when no Bengali must choose between being Bengali and being Muslim -- that is already won, and Choudhury has shown us how.
It is complete when no Bengali must disappear to let another feel whole. A nation does not prove its secularism by the comfort of its majority. It proves it at the temple that is not burned, the mural that is not blackened, the neighbour whose morning prayer -- to whatever name, in whatever tongue -- is simply allowed to be the sound of the street.
Rajani K Saha writes from Stockholm, Sweden, where he has practised medicine for a lifetime, and where, on winter mornings, he sometimes still wakes up expecting an Azan that is five thousand kilometres away.
