It was the last Bangla New Year day of Sheikh Hasina’s first term. Upon arriving at a friend’s place, instead of ‘Shubho Nobo Borsho’ (Bangla new year greeting), I was greeted with a barrage of ‘Have you heard the news? Call home now. Hope family’s okay…’
Militant jihadis struck the new year’s dawn cultural events in Ramna, the major park at the heart of Dhaka, killing over half a dozen people. Since these events are attended by most of my family in Dhaka, and by those of most of my friends, we were rightly worried. Frantic phone calls and msn chats (or did we still do icq then — I forget now) ensued. Fortunately, the families of everyone present were safe. But this wouldn’t be the last time such phone calls were made.
Over the following years, militants bombed cinema halls, killed progressive politicians, carried out suicide attacks against judges, and tried to enforce shariah rule in rural northern parts of the country. Things got so bad that when a friend called to tell me about Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Peace Prize, upon hearing ‘Have you heard about Yunus’, my first reaction was ‘oh no, not another assassination’.
Then Bangladesh stepped back from the brink. The government of Khaleda Zia was finally shaken enough to move against the jihadis in 2006. They key leaders were caught under her watch, and hanged by the de facto military regime that ruled Bangladesh in 2007. ‘Zero tolerance’ of militant jihadis is the motto of the current government of Sheikh Hasina.
Truth be told, the jihadis’ brand of violence in the name of Islam probably never had much following in Bangladesh. When some militants were hanged, their relatives refused to acknowledge the bodies — contrast this with the ‘hero’s funeral’ one sees elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Of course, then came the dark years of Hasina despotism.
Like everything else, the darkness engulfed Pohela Boishakh as well.
While there was a rich tradition of Boishakhi mela (fair) and other merryment in rural Bengal, that world was destroyed by the political and economic convulsions of the mid-20th century that wrought famines, partition, war, and mass migration. The way Pohela Boishakh used to be celebrated in rapidly urbanising Bangladesh of the early 21st century was no more than a few decades old, with its origin in the protest movements against the Ayub regime of the 1960s Pakistan. That regime wanted to create a ‘Pakistani nation’. Bangla new year was not conducive to it.
It was ‘too Hindu’, not pure, not halal. The progressive cultural activists didn’t like the Ayub regime, and along with Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary, they made Pohela Boishakh a cause celebre. Singing Tagore songs at the first dawn of the new year became a new ritual. In time, these became the cultural pillars on which Bangladesh’s freedom movement was built.
Fast forward to the 2000s, the day’s festivities would involve much more than Tagore to include a hybrid culture of Bangla folk songs, Tagore, pop and rock, and Bollywood — and not necessarily in that order. This was the stuff of tiger masks, red-and-white saris, and shaplas painted on faces. This bottom up, mass culture was easily chutneyfied (to use Rushdie’s term). The cultural purists scoffed at it for being vulgar.
But the fact is, this was the largest public celebration in today’s Bangladesh. It was one celebration that overlaps various religious communities. And it was one celebration not hostage to the political expediencies of the government-of-the day.
This was remarkable for two reasons.
First, this was a genuinely mass, popular celebration. Even when I was young boy in the 1980s, only the sociocultural elites would go to Ramna at dawn to listen to these songs. But the subsequent decades had changed that. By the early years of this century, it was the working class men and women who dominated the streets.
This was remarkable because it signified that for the first time in generations, if ever, the non-elites had the affluence to celebrate something outside the circle of life (birth/death/marriage) or something non-religious. No economic statistics could capture the celebration of life visible in Dhaka streets on Pohela Boishakh.
And secondly, this mass celebration used to happen without any state direction or the diktat of money.
Until, of course, the dark years of Hasina.
Hasina did not pioneer state sponsored ‘culture’ to Bangladesh (and its previous incarnation, East Pakistan). In the 1960s, Ayub tried to create a ‘Pakistani’ culture. In the 1970s and 1980s, homegrown military rulers tried to craft a ‘Bangladeshi’ culture. The 1970s and 1980s also saw petro dollar inspired Saudi brand of Islam coming to the country. Meanwhile, Bollywood always loomed large over the sky.
But Hasina took it to an unprecedented level, imposing the cult of Mujib, an extremely jingoistic set of half-truths around 1971, and a form of Islamophobia as the basis of the approved culture. All nations are imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson says. Well, the Hasina despotism forbade the people of Bangladesh from imagining any community.
Even the critiques of Hasina regime had an air of awkwardness around Pohela Boishakh over the years. A typical ‘history’ of Pohela Boishakh would tell us that this has its origins in the Mughals playing around with the calendar, never mind that this is a small part of the whole story and the festival pre-dates that. One can even detect a kind of apologetic tone: it’s okay to celebrate Pohela Boishakh, this isn’t a Hindu festival, honest, Akbar was the one who started it so it’s actually okay …
Rushdie has a wonderful passage about migration and translation and separation in Shame, his novel about Pakistan, where he writes about Bangladesh being twice separated in a quarter century. The legacy of that history has been visible in not just the way Pohela Boishakh was officially celebrated, but also in the Hasina regime’s use of history for political ends.
The result was that for the average ‘educated, politically conscious, culturally aware’ Bangladeshi, there is no debate the roles of HS Suhrawardy or Jogendranath Mandal, no appreciation of Bhagat Singh or Binoy-Badal-Dinesh, no commemoration of . We didn’t mark the 150th anniversary of the 1857 uprising, or the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Plassey.
Meanwhile, the Hasina monstrosity saw Maqsudul Huq, whose famous pop song upend Tagore to become the de facto Boishakh anthem, degenerate into a drug addled popinjay of the officially-approved culture.
Now that Hasina is gone, perhaps we can start imagining again. Pohela Boishakh is really a Pan-Asian celebration, with roots stretching from the lands beyond the Khyber to Cambodia, from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean. In Kolkata, TV stations show shots of Chennai, Dhaka, Bangkok, Colombo in the way CNN covers January 1st. In Bangkok, newspaper articles talk about how this is a festival celebrated by a billion people across Asia.
Perhaps we can remove our mental shackles and join the festivities.
Further reading
The Best Books on Books about Travelling in the Muslim World
recommended by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, 13 Feb 2012
Why Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ remains so controversial decades after its publication
Myriam Renaud, 24 Sep 2018
The missionaries and the evolution of the Bengali language
Mou Banerjee, 21 Feb 2023
South Asia’s greatest stupa isn’t in India but Bangladesh. This is its story
Anirudh Kanisetti, 4 May 2023
Can Kolkata’s street life survive India’s record-breaking heatwaves?
Sudipto Sanyal, 11 May 2023
হিন্দি সিনেমার শর্তসাপেক্ষ মুক্তি দর্শক আর শিল্প দুইয়ের জন্যই ভালো
সাদিক মাহবুব ইসলাম, 14 May 2023
Laughter and Thrills: A History of Circus in East Bengal
Hossien Muhammed Zaki, 17 July 2023
Bhortas Are Anything But Basic
Dina Begum, 7 Sep 2023
Antaghar: The tale of 19th-century Europeans-only club in Dhaka
Saleh Shafique, 20 Jan 2024
Bangladeshi Cinema Is Making Waves at Home and Around the World
Ishita Sengupta, 30 Jan 2024
টিঘর বিষ্ণু মূর্তি দিতে পারে বাংলার প্রাচীন ইতিহাসের নতুন দিশা
তরুণ সরকার, 28 May 2024
William Dalrymple, 1 Sep 2024
> A typical ‘history’ of Pohela Boishakh would tell us that this has its origins in the Mughals playing around with the calendar, never mind that this is a small part of the whole story and the festival pre-dates that. One can even detect a kind of apologetic tone: it’s okay to celebrate Pohela Boishakh, this isn’t a Hindu festival, honest, Akbar was the one who started it so it’s actually okay …
These Muslims need to stop being so insecure about their Hindu heritage.
Also just because you acknowledge the over representation of religious violence from Muslims is not Islamophobia. People need to face the facts.
> Truth be told, the jihadis’ brand of violence in the name of Islam probably never had much following in Bangladesh. When some militants were hanged, their relatives refused to acknowledge the bodies — contrast this with the ‘hero’s funeral’ one sees elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Can you find me some evidence of this?