Language, Culture and the Global Sixties in East Pakistan

In 1971, from the ruins of polyethnic Islamic Pakistan, Bangladesh emerged as the only linguistic nation state in South Asia. Though South Asia has always been a multilingual region with different linguistic communities concentrated in distinct territories, political divisions, based on claims to putative nationhood, centred around the two larger religious entities of the Hindus and the Muslims. Unlike Europe, language played a relatively minor role in influencing South Asian nationalisms unless linguistic identities became part of broader religious conflicts. Indeed, the South Asian subcontinent had been characterized by sectarian violence along Hindu–Muslim religious lines since the early decades of the twentieth century. In many ways such violence was informed by colonial engagement with the construction of ‘history’ and identities of South Asians. The birth of Bangladesh, based upon a shared language among Muslims and Hindus, symbolized a post-colonial journey in culture and politics. The student movement for the declaration of Bengali as one of the national languages of Pakistan in 1952 was the starting point of this journey. Police firing on the students’ movement caused the first critical public expression of disenchantment among students with the idea of Pakistan. In Dacca, Bengali cultural activists invented a tradition of celebrating martyrs’ day on 21 February, memorializing the death of students and ordinary pedestrians in police firing. The martyrs’ column, erected two days after the event, symbolized the making of a ‘secular sacred space’ reflecting a putative nation’s emotional longing. This very act inscribed the language movement on the collective memory of Bengali speakers in East Pakistan. In 1969, at the height of the global sixties, the Awami League, the principal regional organization, raised the emotive slogan ‘Brave Bengali pick up arms and liberate Bangladesh’. There was an assumption in extant literature that linguistic identity automatically trumped over religious–national identity among Bengalis. Such a discourse raises a question: why did Bengali culture and linguistic identity, which had been shared among both Muslims and Hindus, outplay religious national identity of Pakistan? This was more surprising particularly because the Pakistan movement had had such a big support among Bengali Muslims in late colonial India; in fact, the organization that spearheaded the Pakistan movement in Bengal had argued that East Pakistani cultural and literary activities should start afresh in order to break from Hindu-influenced modern Bengali literature.

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