There is indeed a ‘Bangladeshi’ language. But it’s not what Delhi police were thinking when they put out a notice looking for interpreters “proficient in Bangladeshi national language”. Nor is it what BJP IT cell convener Amit Malviya was thinking when he defended the letter saying, “the official language of Bangladesh is not only phonologically different but also includes dialects like Sylheti that are nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis”. Neither are TMC politicians quite right when they stoutly lay claim to some uniform Bengali language identity spanning West Bengal and Bangladesh extending into Assam and Tripura.
There is a difference. The first time I went to Dhaka, about a decade ago, a young man who was showing me around asked if I wanted to go to the museum. But he used the beautifully evocative Bengali word jadughar, house of magic, a word I had almost forgotten. In Kolkata, people like us just said ‘museum’ even when talking in Bangla.
When I told my mother, she said they still speak in Bangla there, here you speak in Benglish. In Bangladesh, a country whose birth pangs were tied to Bangla, language felt far more potent than it did in Kolkata where Bengali, English, Hindi had all become mishmashed into a Radio Mirchi-style khichdi. At the liberation war museum in Dhaka, I saw an old clipping from the Pakistan Observer which declared that Tagore songs were deemed “against Pakistan’s cultural values”. The report’s tone was matter of fact. But the headline gave away the shock with a punctuation gasp —Broadcast ban on Tagore!
In a strange way what the current furore over Bengali has inadvertently done is re-ignite pride in Bangla as a language at a time when more and more of us have gotten used to not reading a Bengali newspaper, let alone a Bengali book. Memes have flooded social media reminding everyone that Bengali is not a “foreign language”, that it has given us a national anthem and a Nobel laureate; India’s only Oscar winner for lifetime achievement Satyajit Ray made most of his films in Bangla. Even Vande Mataram, when read in its entirety, was written in Bengali script in a mix of Sanskrit and Bangla. I spotted a meme showing Rabindranath Tagore delivering a stinging slap to a Delhi police officer while saying, ‘This slap is in Unicode Bangla’.
Each side has its own political agenda. BJP wants to root out illegal migrants from Bangladesh from electoral rolls. Some of its supporters think they can use language as a quick and dirty way to mark people as the other. The Trinamool Congress wants to frame this as an attack on Bengali as a language rather than on illegal immigration.
But this political slugfest has ended up being a fascinating linguistic education for the rest of us. For example, in the last few weeks I have learned that not only were there language martyrs in Bangladesh, eleven people protesting the erasure of the Bengali language were killed in Assam’s Barak Valley in 1961. They were Sylheti Bengalis, the dialect Malviya called “incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis”.
The political problem of illegal migration the govt wants to tackle is real. But language remains an ineffective and blunt instrument to tackle it. For example, we keep hearing stories in the USA of Donald Trump supporters calling immigration enforcement on people they hear speaking Spanish in a public space. As a result, immigration raids have swept up US-born Latinos who have served in the US military just because they looked and sounded Latino. Language is not a citizenship ID.
Bureaucrats draw borders but language seeps through them. The Bangla I spoke in Kolkata was very different from the Bangla the woman from Midnapore who raised me spoke. Kotiya chhua, little mouse, she called me, words my mother never used. Her Bangla was different as was the Bangla of my great aunts whose families hailed from what is now Bangladesh. We sometimes laughed at each other’s peculiar turns of phrase. But there was enough room for all of us under the Bengali umbrella.
While WhatsApp forwards claimed an easy language litmus test was to see who calls father ‘baba’ and who calls him ‘abba’, the linguistic roots of all these words defy ‘otherisation’. Baba comes from Arabic. Abba comes from Aramaic. And while people on this side of the border might call salt ‘noon’ and on the other side they might say ‘lobon’, both ultimately trace back to the same Sanskrit root ‘lavan’. But then I read an essay in The Aerogram by Californian writer Nazia Islam about a grandmother who used both in the same breath. “Arre noon/lobon de (give me more salt),” she would say. What will we do with her?
But then, is there any room for the salt of the earth in a world of namak harams?
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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