Publication: Race and Class
Publication Date: 01-JAN-04
Format: Online - approximately 4074 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Seabrook, Jeremy
Article Excerpt
The stories nations tell themselves about who they are sometimes obscure their identity and damage their relationship with others. For the sustaining myths which bear people up, particularly in times of crisis and misfortune, come at a high cost. Most countries clearly articulate the heroic nature of their past, which enables them to define themselves both in their region and in the wider world.
Bangladesh is an exception to this, torn as it is by conflicting accounts of its own genesis in 1971. The two principal political formations in the country the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), currently in government, and the opposition Awami League--believe quite separate versions of their brief but bloody past. As a result, there is a continuing low-intensity cultural civil war, which is a quarrel over the ownership of a particular narrative. It is scarcely imaginable that anywhere else in the world so much energy, money, passion, and also blood, should have been spent over the proprietorship of a story, no matter how epic its scope and significance. Perhaps it is a consequence of the literary heritage of Bengal, that its history should arouse such violent feelings; or perhaps it is the tribute of a land with a high level of illiteracy to the oral tradition, to the virtue of stories, that creates such dissension among the people.
It goes without saying that anyone looking dispassionately at Bangladesh will immediately perceive that such disputes are the last thing the people need. Their needs cry out to the world--basic food sufficiency, security, health care, shelter and education. What they get instead are the quarrels of feudal lords (or ladies) over dead heroes.
Landlessness has increased from less than one-third of the population at the time of independence to 67 per cent. Unemployment stands at 35 per cent and as many are below an ungenerous poverty line. About two-thirds of the people are engaged in agriculture, one-fifth in services and just over one tenth in industry, even though the garment sector now accounts for three-quarters of foreign exchange.
Transparency International placed Bangladesh as the most corrupt of the ninety countries it looked at in 2001. The literacy rate is less than 50 per cent for women, about 60 per cent for men. About one-third of school-going children study in madrasahs (Islamic colleges). The number of child workers is unknown but runs into millions; they are heavily concentrated in agriculture, domestic service, small workshops, hotels and eating-houses, as helpers in public transport, in manufacturing, brick-breaking and construction. Life expectancy is about 60 years. The population is growing at a rate of 1.59 per cent a year. The fate of Bangladesh was not settled by the devastating war of independence (the extent of the war's casualties is still disputed. The slaughter of Bengalis makes the event one of the great massacres of the twentieth century, on a scale to equal that of European Jewry, the prisoners in Stalin's gulags and the Turkish massacre of the Armenians.) Indeed, the contested narrative only begins with the country's bloody birth, although conflict was built into its emergence as East Pakistan after the partition of India.
The people of East Pakistan soon realised that they were to play a semi-colonial role in their new country, providing raw materials (especially jute) for the dominant West Pakistan. Their position was made clear soon after independence, when it was announced that Urdu was to be the official language of Pakistan. The Bengalis of East Pakistan were not going to abandon their linguistic heritage, and protests by students at Dhaka University in 1952 led to the army killing of five 'language martyrs' as they became known. Commemoration of their sacrifice is one of the (many) solemn memorials in...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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