Bengali culture came alive in greater Washington, DC over the final weekend of July. The aromatic smell of biriyani and jasmine filled the lobby at George Mason University’s Centre for the Arts.
Tunes that had originated thousands of miles away played within the concert hall, as cultural group Dhroopad’s arrangement of Banglamela 2015 came under way, celebrating the musical soul of Bengal right here, in a leafy university campus in northern Virginia.
Dhroopad, a member of Mid-America Bengali Association, has been holding these annual events to showcase Bengal’s cultural heritage since 1999. For the past 15 years, Dhroopad has been promoting Bengali culture in the greater DC area, and this was an illuminating cultural event.
This year’s show brought in numerous artists from both Bangladesh and West Bengal. Performances included dance, drama, and musical numbers by notables such as Fahmida Nabi, who sang her award-winning songs, Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta, who performed multiple ragas used by Tagore, and Shafi Mondol, whose mesmerising Baul items enthralled the audience.
I went to hear the great baul of whom I had heard so much, and he certainly lived up to his name. Shafi Mondol’s heart-pounding voice, accompanied by the rhythmic dhol and the Sufi-style lyrics, created an ambience that is almost impossible to forget. The syncretic vision of the Baul, who is known to combine elements of Sufi Islam and Hinduism, came alive in this Western theatre.
One particular number, where the Baul proclaims that he will not pray in a temple or in a mosque but within his heart, came to a thundering crescendo as he radiated the words “Allahu Akbar” in a prolonged, high-intensity volume.
A quarter of the audience went into immediate applause upon hearing his invocation of the Almighty’s name. One usually hears this in a ritualistic method in the mosque or in a menacing manner when the Western news depicts Middle Eastern violence, but if one would hear this Baul sing the words, it would provide them with a deeper meaning, one that depicts love for the Almighty, not simply reverence or a call to war.
His vocals harken back to the 10th century, when the nomadic group came into recorded history. The spirit of Lalon Fakir, the legendary folk singer from whom bauls draw their heritage, is ever-present in this music.This devotional music transcends religious and political divisions, and it was aptly represented in Dhroopad’s cultural program that showcases a united Bengal.
Despite the ethno-linguistic similarity, the idea of a united Bengal never materialised due to the bifurcating nature of religion-based politics. The two parts of Bengal were sliced apart, each destined to have divergent paths in global history, with East Bengal undergoing a brutal war of liberation.
Questions still linger about our Bangladeshi identity: Are we Bengali Muslims following a secular democracy, or Muslim Bengalis who still retain Islam as the state religion?
Even though there are enormous differences caused by the 1947 partition, culturally, West Bengal and Bangladesh continue to share the same heritage.
For a brief weekend in the suburbs of Washington, DC, the two Bengals met and exchanged their vibrant cultures, with hundreds of the Bengali diaspora in attendance, marking another milestone for the South Asian experience in the United States.
