“Are you from Bangladesh?” a very humble Indian delegate from Hyderabad, coming to attend the ongoing South Asian Conference on Sanitation in Kathmandu, during a tea break, asks me in Urdu.
“Yes, I am, but how did you know I was from Bangladesh?” I ask curiously, in English.
“I saw you asking questions during the civil society meeting. I was sitting at the back. Those were interesting questions,” he tells me, again in Urdu.
I understood his first question, but I had a little difficulty to get the full meaning of his second question. “I don’t speak Urdu,” I tell him.
“Why, don’t Bangladeshis speak Urdu?” he seems quite appalled, adding, this time in English: “I thought all Bangladeshis speak Urdu.”
It’s now my turn to be appalled. I keep quiet, staring at him with eyebrows raised. “Where did you learn that Bangladeshis speak Urdu!?” I ask with a tinge of anger in my voice.
“I always thought Bangladeshis speak Urdu in their country,” he says innocently.
“But we speak Bangla, we’ve always spoken Bangla, it’s our mother’s language. How come you missed that information?” I ask him, this time not with anger.
He turns quite apologetic and says: “I’m really sorry, I never knew about the language about Bangladesh, no one has ever told me. The information about you we get all the time are about politics, garments and cricket.”
I become more curious, suspicious whether he knows that Bangladesh is an independent country.
“But you must be knowing that we are an independent country,” I inquire.
He gives a blushing smile and says: “Yes, that I know, of course, but I didn’t know about your language. It can happen; can’t it?”
“Of course, it can happen,” I continue my conversation. “Have you ever heard of International Mother Language Day?” I keep pressing.
“No, I didn’t. No one actually knows about it where I live,” he admits, with an inquisitive body language.
I start telling him the whole story of how the process of our independence had started with the language movement in 1952. He listens to me for about ten minutes and expresses his admiration.
“I’m sorry brother, it’s my failure that I didn’t know about this great history all these years,” he tells me.
“No, no, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s our inability that we couldn’t let the world know about our magnificent history,” I tell him submissively.
Back in my hotel room, when all plenary sessions ended, the episode with my fellow summiteer kept on haunting me. I really had no idea that a person from South Asia, and that too from a bordering country, wouldn’t know that we speak Bangla in Bangladesh.
Did we actually fail to let the world know about the origin of our independence? The world knows about our politics, our garment industry and our cricket, but not everybody knows about our language, our birth!
One may ask: Why should everybody have to know about the history about your language movement? True. There are a zillion things on earth that a billion people don’t know about. Well, I accept that, but when I find a man from our nearest neighbour wouldn’t know that we speak Bangla in a Bangla land, it hurts.
With the note, the question also crossed my mind as to what actually we, as Bengalis, as many other nations do, have communicated about ourselves to the people of the world. We’ve only transmitted negativism with our own actions in the last forty-two years.
Except for floods, hunger, political violence etc, we haven’t really upheld ourselves so that the world would cheer us.
Communication is so far the best tool that nation-states have used for spreading their message across. We have so many success stories: Our family planning programme, our sanitation reach in South Asia and our agriculture are the examples for many countries to emulate.
On top of everything, there’s no match in the entire world with our language movement. But we haven’t spread the information of what we nationally call “our pride.”
The people, like my fellow summiteer, who don’t know about our glorious practices, aren’t to be blamed for not knowing. It’s we who couldn’t make us heard in the global arena, it’s we who are keeping ourselves from improving our image, it’s we who are fighting against each other and it’s we who don’t let things happen for us.
