To realise that West Bengal is but the smaller part of Bengal and that the bigger part of Bengal (East Bengal/Bangladesh) is a real entity, I had to wait for my American sojourn. Here, in moments of loneliness when I turned to Bengal, I typically turned to those who were not ashamed of their Bangaliness. These were the people from East Bengal.
In USA, I was first exposed to a peculiar phenomenon – how cheap apparel (especially T-shirts) was, so much so that many were given out for free at various events. Being a freebie-lover, I soon owned many, many T-shirts – more than I would ever wear in my life. I had actually bought only a few of them.
I repeatedly encountered a familiar word “Bangladesh” in the unfamiliar setting of the manufacturing tag of these T-shirts. Like popular newspapers that receive absolutely not advertisements, something about the “cheapness” of these shirts didn’t add up. Someone, somewhere was paying the price. It turned out that the price was being paid now in Dhaka, but has been paid in the past by many labourers in many locations.
This was the continuing story of labour exploitatio.n, evisceration of rural life, rural to urban migration and the control of every aspect of the lives of millions of labourers ultimately by people whose faces they will never see and forces which are hard to pin down to a specific nation or institution.
Jeremy Seabrook’s “The Song of the Shirt” is a book that tells that past, present and the future of the “Made in Bangladesh” story, specifically the story of Bengal’s garment industry and its now-defunct colonial manufacturing counterpart of Lancashire.
He provides a magisterial review of Bengal’s famed pre-colonial handloom industry, its forcible decline that was engineered by the East India Company actions and policies, the lives of labour ghettos in Lancashire of yore and today’s Dhaka. The famous Bangla film “Pather Panchali” by Satyajit Ray was translated as the “Song of the Road.”
The similarity of the book title is hard not to notice. But what follows is a dirge set among the expendable lives in a globalisation boomtown. While Britain had colonies, Bangladesh doesn’t. Hence, Seabrook’s musings about a future Dhaka that might share some of Lancashire’s post-industrial prosperous fate lacks reason.
Seabrook has situated his book largely in Dhaka of the present, the capital of the present-day People’s Republic of Bangladesh, but also in various locations in the past which were key players in the story of cotton and the “song of the shirt,” including Lancashire, Kolkata, Manchester, Barisal, Mumbai and Murshidabad.
He draws a multi-century story of Bengal’s bleeding, oozing out riches into the White world and the worlds of their local compradors. This is a book that is more than the plight of garment industry workers. It is more than a critique of present consumer culture.
It is indeed a book about how did Bengal and Britain come to be the way they are, and much more – all accomplished in the inimitable journalistic style of a veteran master. There is extensive material here that may be made into a documentary or a travelling exhibition. I hope they are made. This book will make you look at your wardrobe in a whole new way. Get the book before you buy your next T-shirt.
