Photos by Suvro Kanti Das
And then. After walking through many many tracts of darkness, they discovered themselves in the midst of a large unending procession. Topu and Eva. In this boundless seashore, people are walking in front of them. Boys. Old Men. Girls. Children. Men. Women. Male Youth. Female Youth. They are tired of this long walk. Battered bodies. Battered gait. Where are we? In Vietnam or Indonesia? In Jerusalem or in Cyprus? In India or in Pakistan? Where are we?
An old man with a little tear in his eyes kept ranting: Do you know my child has been killed in Hiroshima. They have killed my mother on the streets of Jerusalem. My father was shot dead in Buchenwald. And my brother was hanged to death because he loved humanity way too much. Beyond the permissible limit.
Topu and Eva stood next to the old man. And then they started walking once again towards that boundless sea shore. Slowly. Moving forward.
(Concluding paragraph of Zahir Raihan’s Aar Kotodin)
No, it did not come as a surprise to me that the 165th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto happens to be February 21, 2013. And February 21 is a special day in Bangladesh. Not just for Bhasha Shahids, not just as UN-mandated World Mother Tongue Day but also as a reminder how language became a Marxian dialectic that triggered off a unique revolution.
Shahbag is the new city of roses. Now that’s getting too romantic. The city of necessary barricades. Or shall we say that it is the new city of Cactus? And before you dismiss the revolution as an act of wanting death penalty forrajakars (collaborators with Pakistan) involved in war crimes or a total decimation of the Jamaat bridge, before you call it an uprising against corruption or misgovernance, before you label it a wanton attempt to influence the judiciary, you have to understand that your analysis is a load of bumkum to a necessary act of correcting a sponsored and biased historical narrative; that consumes the father of a Nation (Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and his family in a planned assassination) and successfully throws out Article 12 of a remarkable constitution (that specified secularism as a fundamental principle of the State).
Before you dismiss this anger as an uprising, please remember that Shahbag is a combination of the spirit of December 16, 1971 (independence of Bangladesh) and January 10, 1972 (when Bangabandhu returned to Dhaka). And this combined spirit wants that hard earned historical narrative to be safeguarded, not frittered away on the altar of moralists and revisionists.
Shahbag carries in its belly the unbearable weight of a constant collision. Between the history that is filtered by the funded-religious, and between the people’s narrative of loss, anger and pain. The history crafted by the rajakaars and the history carried by the lost Bihari faces in the Geneva Camp inside Dhaka. History that will remember Lalon with his followers, standing in front of Kangal Harinath’s press and daring those who want to burn the newspaper premises and this history that turns Lalon’s akhara into an organised mazaar.
That is why Shahbag to me is more significant than Tahrir Square. Shahbag tells me. Don’t just shoot your arrows…give them to the museum. That it is terrifying enough to know that the quiver exists. Let’s study the arrows inside the quiver. Let us try to understand that the arrows are not with the billionaires but the ones who lick the edges of our plate.
That we need to re-configure our violent mindspace. And move on. Not to emancipate others but to brutally interrogate one’s own self.
The fence-sitters in Dhaka (who are a significantly large number, occupying significant positions in universities and peddling their west imported degrees, and surprisingly a lot of them happen to be artistes and art activists) will ask: move on from what?
Shahbag’s reply would be: to move on from that culture of half-baked kindness shown by quarter-baked people. Move on from sunshine to moonshine – from too much light and shadow to too much of dawn and dusk. Only then shall we be not be terrified of mirrors from the past.
It is on the frontiers of such a history we stand. With the crutch called Shahbag. And that crutch is important to shape our history. History that will shape our understanding of the word “secular.” The current upheavals around Shahbag must be seen in the larger context of south Asia. When 11 million people crossed over to India and the churning of bodies and minds finally led to a 14-day war, an important lesson emerged: religion alone cannot be the glue to gloss over issues of identity, nationalism (not patriotism) and ethos. Liberation war is special because it taught us how a language can morph into identity and how that identity shapes thinking. Bangladesh did what Latin America could not.
And Shahbag reinforces that idea of ethos which has been almost successfully pulverised by Justice Sadat Mohammed Sayam, Lt Gen Ziaur Rehman, Begum Khaleda Zia, Lt Gen H.M Ershad and their cronies and then continued by Jamaat-e-Islami, Jam’mat ul Mujahideen Bangladesh, Chhatra League, Khelafat Majlish, Islami Chhatra Shibir, Harkat-ul Jihadi Islami-Bangladesh, Hizb-ut Tahrir, Hizb-ut Twhid and groups and sub-groups, cult and sub-cults and cronies and assistant cronies that are mushrooming in alarming numbers.
There is a large gulf between Dhaka-centric thinking (which would extend to Chapainawabganj, Sylhet, Bogra, Sirajganj, Thakurgaon, Pabna, Natore and Narail) and the current ground realities in Barishal, Tangail, Madaripur, Ghazipur, Jhenaidaha, Narsinghi and the convoluted political landscape of Rajshahi and Noakhali. Then there is the sharply polarised situation in Chittagong, Feni, Kushtia and Khulna which are tugging the lower income group in different directions. Electorally, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and their Jamaat cohorts may have lost out, and may still lose the upcoming election, but the margin of polarisation is on a razor’s edge. And sustained funding for extremist elements may only hasten the looming spectre of a Shariah-propelled nightmare.
What is that nightmare? Very simply, to tear into the heart of a marafaat nation and transform it into a regimented religious remote control. This will not be the true values of Islam but the politics of personal revenge where Islam shall be used as a mask. From a nation whose people like being a river-nomad, forest-nomad, city-nomad, idea-nomad, moment-nomad, the religious radical forces would like to turn a nation of poets and philosophers into that of a land of theocratic nomads.
You are leaving them to fend with their own changed mirror image.
The Shahbag youth put their body in the line of fire and screamed that each time you move from morality mirror to the forest of anarchy, your only destination can be the cactus landscape…meanwhile, your already bleeding body needs urgent treatment.
The Shahbag youth knows that the middle class of South Asia that feeds into the Kathmandu-Kabul-Colombo-Delhi-Mumbai-Male-Yangon-Lahore-Dhaka type of officially approved patriotism have no idea to make a trip towards a work-in-progress revolution. Even in their mindspace.
“That is why Shahbag to me is more significant than Tahrir Square. Shahbag tells me. Don’t just shoot your arrows…give them to the museum.”
And that is why Shahbag is a celebration of artistically alert political nomads. From Gogon Harkara to Lalon Fakir, from Ashwini Kumar Dutta to Araj Ali Matubbar, from Dhirendranath Dutta to Humayun Azad, from Showkat Osman to Salim Al Deen, from Shamshur Rehman to Hasan Azizul Haque, from Akhtaruzzaman Elias to Kalpana Chakma, from Qamrul Hassan to Cholesh Richil, from Gandhi’s Noakhali peace march to a dead blogger in the middle of a Dhaka night, from Kalpana Boarding to Zahir Raihan, from Shahriar Kabir to Shamim Osman Bhulu, from Kofil Ahmed’s brilliant evocation on Ganga to Molla Sagar’s camera that rips open the hungry heart of the jute mill workers, from Shahidul Alam’s unrelenting lens that fixes it’s gaze on crossfire and counter-narrative and from a land of Modhumela to Sanatan Mela, from Jainul Abedin to Piren Snal, from the womb of Jahanara Inam to the spirit of Begum Sufia Kamal… Shahbag extends that list. Celebrates the political nomads.
The real ones. Not the cause-hoppers or the because-hoppers. These nomads are becoming an increasingly lonely tribe whose services are used in their youth and then they are high and dry. Cast away into a statistically irrelevant “leftover” group that will soon be forgotten.
Shahbag tells me that the God that you and I know is neither statistical nor empirical. S/he needs you to know that denial of history only makes us less tolerant. Shahbag has not forgotten how the finest intellectuals were killed by razakars in those early seventies nightmare. Shahbag has not forgotten Zahir Raihan and his incompete classic Let There Be Light inspired from his brilliant novella Aar Koto Din.
Flashforward:
I want to play a private game of chess inside Shahbag. It is a little crowded here. We lay out the chessboard a little far… pass the aromatic flower market… cross the road and then sit at the foothpath adjoining Aziz Market. And I’ll ask my Shahbag friends that same, silly inane question which I keep asking them each time we slug it out on 64 squares- which colour do you prefer black or white? And this time each one invariably retorted with the word: grey.
So, this time, we invented our brand of chess. Neo-shatranj. We devised a new board. We formulated new rules. We start playing the game that will last till the apocalypse. Million evenings make way for billion nights. Finally, the match finishes. It has taken a million years. Fair enough. We shake hands. Shahbag is now clear. Cleansed (mind you, not purged).
Flashforward over: Back to Now
No futuristic chess match happened. It is late afternoon and the Projonmo Chottor (the Boulevard of the Future) is still teeming with people. I file my despatch and am off to the airport.
The flight is boarding.
Where?
Dear Reader, to your house and mine too. Epar Bangla (this Bengal). Opar Bangla (That Bengal).
It will land on your/mine bed of thoughts.
When I finish reading the mind of Shahbag, I will melt into the night. Next morning as and when you wake up (well, you hardly sleep nowadays…you want revolution and Facebook both in real time) – you’ll summon me and ask what lessons have I learnt. And I will tell you, read Shahbag from the prism of painstaking research of Professor Abul Barkat (Dhaka University) that says that under various versions of Enemy Property Law and the later avatar called Vested Property Law that 925,050 (about 40 per cent of Hindu households), 748,850 were ejected from agricultural land, 251,085 from homes, 48, 455 of garden lands, 79, 290 of ponds, 4.405 from commercial land, 114,530 of different categories of land, 1.64 million acres (6640 square kilometers) constituting 5.3 per cent of total area of Bangladesh (which is about 53 per cent of Hindu proprietary land) has been snatched/taken away.
Who are occupying these lands? The ones who have opposed /will oppose/are planning to oppose Shahbag or co-opt Shahbag to their agenda, or leave no stone unturned to begin planned character assassination, and further orchestrate tactical and strategic killings – like the brutal hacking of Mirajuddin Ahmed, brother of Ahmed Imtiaz Bulbul and killing of Class X student Tanveer (son of Ganajagaran Mancha activist Rafiur Rabbir) in Narayanganj. These are the same people who burnt 11 persons including a new born and seven women alive in Tejendra Lal Shil’s house at Banshkhali near Chittagong on the midnight of November 19, 2003 or the murder of Dr Sudhindra Nath Mukherjee (he was stabbed first by a blunt instrument and then his head was ripped open with scissors).
Shahbag tells me what Nirmalendu Goon told me so many times: Ami Jonmer Proyojone Chhoto Hoyechhilam/Ami Mrityur Proyojone Boro Hochhi (I became small to accommodate the act of my birth. I am now expanding myself to accommodate the act of my death).
And when you can shadowbox with death, then you kill the negative shadow. Remember shadows don’t have ID cards.
Personal was always political in Shahbag. Marx is a fakir here. He sings with ektara, he tilts, balances, topples over and says Amar Ghorer Chabi Porer Hate (the keys to me house with somebody else). Who is that somebody? Who are those some bodies?
Every Body. Every One. From Teknaf to Tentulia.
