On one of these hartal days last week (it doesn’t matter which day), I walked out of my DU campus compound and on to the main street. I kept walking until I suddenly stopped. It would have been more dramatic if I wrote that I simply froze in my tracks, like a Kurt Vonnegut character that I had recently read about. I stood on the road for a long time until I realised that I had no reason to move in any direction. I had no direction. I had no reason to go anywhere.
The road on my left led to Nilkhet and onwards to New Market. I had nothing to buy and no reason to go there. The road on my right led to TSC where a cocktail had just exploded. Decades of living in the campus had honed my instincts and I didn’t turn right.
If I walked straight I would be walking towards the mallchattar, but I was in no mood for that. If I turned back, the road would wind towards the Shaheed Minar, but that seemed like the least attractive of all the prospects. In fact, it felt that I had no prospects at all.
My occupation was gone; the hartals had taken away my job. I just stood there for a long time and then slowly retraced my steps to go home and watch some cricket on television.
Today, when hundreds of thousands of men and women and children, clad in combinations of black-and-white saris and black-and-white punjabis and black badges, descend on the campus, they will have, at the very least, a clear physical direction.
All roads in Dhaka today will lead to the Shaheed Minar, all eyes throughout the nation will be glued to the TV, and people everywhere will watch endless processions of people scrambling to place a bouquet of flowers or maybe just a petal on the Shaheed Minar. And it is most likely that living right in the heart of the city, both the physical and the spiritual heart, living right in the heart of the nation, I will remain frozen in despair, and will not venture out.
Once, years ago, going to the Shaheed Minar, being part of prabhat ferries, meant something for me, meant something for all us. The lyrics of that song, the soulful, exquisite melody of amar bhaiyer rokte rangano Ekushey February literally brought tears to our eyes.
We had hopes in our hearts and anger in our eyes and strength in our limbs, and we were all united by a singleness of purpose.
Now when I hear this song, as I will hear it all day today, from loud speakers and loud-throated young men and women, I feel a strange disconnect between what the song signified once and the dark reality that engulfs us today.
As a young college student, and then a university student, in the years just preceding the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, every Ekushey February for us was at once a celebration and a protest: It was a celebration of Bangla in our national life; it was a protest against the establishment, a protest against continuing forms of oppressions that we as Bangalis experienced at the hand of the West Pakistanis. Every time we sang that soulful song, it was with real hope and passion and anger and determination. The song symbolised for us that unutterable desire (at that time) for liberation.
For four to five years after liberation, from 1971 to 1975, the mood I remember was mostly celebratory. We mourned the loss of all the Bangalis who lost their lives in the Liberation War, but we mostly celebrated the nationhood that we had achieved.
We sang the same soulful song, but we sang it in a different way; we sang it as some kind of affirmation of the new nationhood we had achieved at the price of those who gave their lives in 1952 and then again in 1971.
How do young people sing the song now as they march barefoot towards the Minar? At least for 15 years, from 1975 until the fall of Ershad in 1990, the Shaheed Minar and its symbolic value had been appropriated by the governments of Zia and then Ershad. And the appropriation continues in one way or another. When heads of governments have the first right to lay flowers, the Shaheed Minar’s symbolic power is immediately altered and diminished. Does it affect the way we sing?
Now, almost 44 years since the liberation of Bangladesh, as the crowds have swelled and the processions have become longer and the ceremonies have become grander and more elaborate, I wonder how things have changed, and what hopes and dreams young people have as they sing the same unforgettable song.
The clear direction towards the Shaheed Minar is easy to follow. Does the nation know where it is headed?
