What exactly do we celebrate on February 21 every year? Is it to commemorate the ultimate sacrifice made by a handful of college kids in preserving our right to speak one particular language over another?
To bask in the glory of having the world finally recognise our nation’s struggle for linguistic emancipation? Or is it nothing more than an annual guilt-trip over how we’re not paying the appropriate amount of respect to that language -- the same language that we use to whisper words of affection to a loved one, to express trepidation at the thought of losing them, to curse at our third-world miseries, to shoo away the unfortunate when they show the audacity to bother us for our loose change?
A nation’s language (languages, for some of the more fortunate ones) is its identity, and in that regard, no other language could be more appropriate than Bangla for us as a people -- beautiful yet broken, simple yet frustrating.
Contrary to the delusions of those whose conception of time allows them to believe that a human life can last over 2,000 years, Bangladesh has been around for quite a long while. 45 years to be exact. And what exactly does our nation have to show for those 45 years since its birth other than collective lines of age?
Apathy. Betrayal. Corruption. Disappointment.
They are all the same in any language. And no amount of false patriotism or self-delusion will be enough to wash away the indelible stain they have left on us as a nation, as a community, as a people.
What reason do we have to be proud of a language that can have a voice be silenced for simply speaking, the truth or otherwise? How can we even think about respecting that language’s integrity when the simple act of a man apologising for past mistakes can be twisted and mis-interpreted as an admission of guilt for the highest form of sin imaginable in a free state? What kind of a language needs to be “translated” to its own native speakers in order for them to better understand “the truth”?
Questions are all I can offer today, I’m afraid.
Look at me. Sermonising about the fallacies of Bangla as a language by writing about it in some other man’s tongue -- an utter betrayal of the spirit of our liberation! Shock! Gasp! Egad! But even though I have all but abandoned a language for which better people shed blood in the past, my tongue only summoning it when the need arises, I do so in keeping with the spirit of how we have become as a people.
What has Bangla ever done for me? Being proficient in English allowed me to stay competent in my education. Pretending to have mastered it continues to allow me to earn a wage. Can Bangla speak of having done anything even remotely useful for me? Can it? Well?! Speak up, Bangla! I can’t hear you!
Perhaps it’s best that it doesn’t -- I’d prefer keeping a healthy distance between myself and the pale joke that it has become. I have to watch what I say, after all.
If I were any more of a cynic (and a time traveller), I would have suggested those young students back in 1952 to save their breaths and tell them that all their effort will have been in vain -- the future is bleak regardless of what language will be used to write it.
But then … something happens … when I come back home after a rough day of squabbling with the hoi polloi, rest myself on the couch and put my feet up on the coffee table in our living room, turn on the television, give my dog a lazed scratch on her head, and holler at the general direction my mother happens to be at the time, “Ammu, chabanor kichhu aase?” … I realise what a big mistake I would be making.
Rubaiyat Kabir is an Editorial Assistant at the Dhaka Tribune. He can be followed on Twitter @moreanik.
