One of the tragic pitfalls of the average Bengali’s deeply cultivated preference for focusing on the past more than the future is the creation of angels and devils out of mortal men and women. In our desperation to escape the repeated catastrophes -- natural and manmade -- of the present, we often seek solace in a mythical past where things were simpler, people nicer, and judgments easier to make.
Elaborately crafting this imagined past, we get to a point where the halo of perfection is bestowed on people long dead … unless they are dead people disliked by the powers that be, in which case the horns of the devil are retroactively attached to them.
So, depending on who is at the helm of the affairs of state and its overbearing cultural, literary, and academic tentacles, a valiant freedom fighting martyr can become an agent of the enemy’s intelligence service while the founding president can become a nefarious megalomaniac.
Good luck trying to argue about nuances because chances are pretty high that you will be hauled off by sycophants of the rulers of the day for insulting their feelings, if you are fortunate; if fortune doesn’t smile on you, well, then you will be hauled off to jail on some charge that nobody knows.
And then we wonder why dispassionate historical research or internationally peer reviewed social science scholarship is practically unheard of in Bangladesh more than 40 years after independence.
Never mind broader historical analysis, we cannot even discuss with a scholarly detachment historical individuals who are long dead. I suppose we pick it up in personal lives and then transpose it to society. How many obituaries, memorials, or even annual articles about a dear departed relative follow the standard template of “so and so was born in a respectable Sunni Muslim family in such a place where his father was a great lawyer, mother an awesome social worker, and grandfather a Khan Bahadur … and he went on to be a great man, generous philanthropist, and a member of the Lions Club,” etc.
Trust me, I get it. I would want such impressive stuff written about me too when I am dead. Heck, I’d even want to throw in the line that “Esam’s readers awaited with abated breath his words of wisdom every other weekend.”
But the problem raises its ugly head when such fluff is all we can discuss about public figures, policymakers, and politicians. Making demigods out of mortals is as old as civilisation itself. Indeed no less a personage than the one considered the greatest human being by Muslims -- the Prophet of Islam -- cautioned about this tendency multiple times; there are authentic Hadith of him telling his companions that as a mortal himself, he did not know what would happen to him in the Afterlife.
That was a point driven home again at the Prophet’s death by his successor Caliph Abu Bakr when he gently cautioned the more despondent sahaba against attributing anything super-human to the deceased.
Compare that to the contemporary maulanas who claim to see faces of their leaders on celestial objects or chief executives who claim that their progenitors predicted the Test status of the Bangladesh cricket team back in the beginning of time!
Respecting one’s ancestors is fine. It is dangerous, however, if such respect turns to adulation of a public figure and, eventually, becomes a shade of hero worship.
In societies like ours, where politics, policies, and ideologies are inextricably linked to persons rather than principles, this hero worship serves as a bulwark against frank debate and honest assessment.
In the hands of more nefarious rulers, this artificial taboo becomes a bludgeon to silence all dissent, squelch probing scholarship, and remove alternative narratives from the public sphere.
The irony is that those who are dead really do not care or hear or see; they are literally beyond appreciating the adulation, or angering at supposed slights. The scriptures of all faith traditions will tell us that nobody is an unalloyed composite of wisdom and grace anymore than being a thorough mixture of idiocy and evil.
The here and now is for the living. Blurring the line between private fond remembrance and public quasi-worship serves neither the dead nor the living; the former don’t need it, and the latter are all the less enlightened because of it.
