A Bangladeshi looks for his country

Because of the fertility of silt, the deltaic region where the Ganga meets the Brahmaputra made possible the rise of a great agrarian population. It is a low country created by the confluence of geology and hydrology, and made for colonisation by peasantry. And peasantry it is that, today, makes up the vast majority of 121 million Bangladeshis.

This country of agriculturalists and a thin veneer of the gentry, has always been ruled by outsiders, till as late as 1971 when they decided to do the job themselves. Over the centuries, from pre-historic through feudal times, and from when colonisation gave way to a half-Pakistan and that became the independent state of Bangladesh, Bengalees have always grappled with an identity, a personality. Even today, on the 25th year of their independence, they are not sure they have found it with the nationstate that they do, at long last, have.

And whose identity are we talking about, anyway? We mostly discuss elite notions of uniqueness. The vast millions are too hungry to bother. As late as 1971, when the peasants responded, it was to the perception of the violated village rather than to calls for a nationalist war. A village was bigger than any country, and "desh" meant home, not much more. The identity angst is mostly reserved for the intellectual or activist who, in classrooms and tea stalls, wants to discover whether he is Bengalee or Bangladeshi. The angst is also strong among those overseas in self-exile, made melancholy by myth and memory, weeping for a land they will never return to.

After 25 years as a nation-state, can we say to whom does Bangladesh belong?

Pala to Pakistan

The rulers and the ruled have never been one. The earliest dynastic history begins with the Pala, a North Indian clan of Buddhist inclination in the 9th century. They governed from what is presently northern Bangladesh, then Pundrabardhana—the last province of Aryan India to the east of which lay the "impure lands". Two hundred years after the Pala came the Sena, a rigidly Hinduistic Kshatriya- Brahmin clan from South India, who after a century of uneasy overlordship were replaced by Central Asian Muslims under Bakhtiyar Khalji, towards the end of the 12th century.

During each transition, the ruling class was changed but the peasant was left undisturbed, with his land, harvest and personal pantheons. He might change a god or two as a cognisance of altered circumstances, but nothing serious. The post-12th-century rule by Turks, Afghans and Pathans is known as the Islamic Period, though it is unlikely that these various rulers from different races, forever fighting each other, thought they shared anything. However, these Central Asians and Turks did not interfere with the Bangla culture or, revenue collection, which kept the peasantry unruffled.

The Bengalee elites, unable to resist the invaders militarily, learned to cooperate in civil matters. It is a trait that has marked the Bengalee middle and upper classes to this day, a deep desire to please foreigners and earn salaries, because you belong to the working race, born to serve. Bangla history has forever been driven by the tyranny of limited economic choice.

It was Bengalee Hindus who mostly managed the Government under the post-Sena rule, as bureaucracies developed along with the span and prosperity of the regimes. The Muslim aristocracy mostly indulged in the good life. With no resistance in sight, even the Kshatriya caste disappeared from Bengal; it was much more profitable to attend on the foreigner than to fight him. So when the British came, servers were in abundant supply. The Hindu professionals had their silent revenge as the Muslim aristocracy was displaced by the British. They got education and the jobs.

But there were also moments of cooperative pride even as the slavish mentality predominated, such as when Hindu and Muslim chieftains collaborated in a famous resistance against the Mughals. Isa Khan, who fought and defeated a Hindu agent of Akhar in a sword duel, is a legend in Bengal.

There was a reason why the British, when they replaced the Mughals, began with Bengal—this was the only revenue-surplus province in the crumbling Mughal theatre. Sirajuddowla, the non-Bengalee Nawab who ruled over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, fell in 1757 due to the treachery of his loyalists, both Muslim and Hindu, whom the Bntish had bought off with money and promises. Siraj's defeat was not only the end of Muslim domination but also the end of "independent Bengal", as understood by some. It was consumed by the India which the British began to construct with great energy.

Convenience of the Alien Ruler

The British, unlike previous conquerors, changed the revenue system to earn more from taxes. This ruined the peasants but created a new class of loyalists. They also introduced education, and the Bengalee babus ran hard to become clerks, teachers and lawyers, the stuff of colonial administration. The babu became the imperialist's friend and confidant, until he discovered intellectualism and militancy, but that comes later.

The Muslim upper classes, when they had stopped feasting on past glories, too, discovered the advantages of collaboration. But the seats had been mostly taken, and they had to compete with their ex-subjects, a terrible idea. Thus were the economic seeds of communal conflict amongst the elites sown The Musalman elite had always considered themselves foreigners, and proud of it. They had the ruler's plasma. The Hindus were heathen and Bengali was, too, a heathen language.

The Bengalee Hindu, together with his other Indian co-religionists, could look at the Muslim interregnum as a thousand years of infidel rule. He could also share in the emerging Indian dream. The Muslim Bengalee elite could not do that, for he still considered himself as the usurped ruling class.

In 1857, Hindu and Muslim soldiers and many feudal lords revolted against the British. At some point, the titular leadership of the revolt was pushed unto a Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal ruler. It failed, and India was passed from the Company to the Crown. The feudals, many of them Muslim, felt let down. The Muslim aristocrat, who believed in his natural right to overlordship of Hindustan and Mughal rule, was unhappy to see that the idea was not popular among Hindus.

Perhaps this was the defining moment of Bengal's and India's evolution: the response to the crushing of the 1857 uprising pointed out the great divide. The Hindus certainly had no stake in Muslim rule. By conquering India, Victoria Regina had inadvertently created two equal peoples, who now joined the race to please the rulers. It was up to the British to decide whom to reward.

The rise of the Aligarh Muslim Education Movement, a great mobilisation, fed on the fear and ambition of the Muslim, who saw the lowly Bengalee Babu make away with jobs that might have been his. Research shows that his anti-Hindu feelings rose from his loathing for Bengalees, who were many and took jobs away from others. Long before Amenca beckoned, Bengalees were creating a migration problem in Hindiand Urdu-speaking belts of the Subcontinent. All Bengalees were seen as Hindu, and this distrust never deserted the heirs of the Muslim movement, who saw contradiction in the very term "Bengalee Muslim".

Muslim leaders reminded their followers that they had been hit hard by not cooperating with the Bntish and by lack of English education. Unless they wanted to serve out history as janitors, Muslims had better get an education. Thus, a newly cooperative class of Muslims joined the workforce. In Bengal, Bengali-speaking Muslims honed their English and demanded education quotas. They began to argue in courts, and began, for their part, to identify the distinctions inherent in being 'Bengalee' and 'Muslim'.

The year 1905 saw the first victory of this new identification initiative, when the province of Bengal was split into East and West Bengals. This was expected to satisfy the growing demand of the Muslim majority for some space to grow and catch up with the Hindus of Bengal. The Muslim League, which led the movement for the creation of Pakistan, was born in 1906 in Dhaka.

It was a defining moment for India. The Muslim card had emerged. The Indian National Congress had failed to develop as a national multi-communal party. The British manipulated the situation, and formalised the divide.

Under stiff pressure from the Congress, which was the natural choice of most Hindus, Bengal was reunited in 1911. The growing conflict between Hindus and Muslims, both scrambling for economic opportunities, was sharpened further. Thus in 1947, as Pakistan was coming into being as a homeland for Muslims, the demand for splitting Bengal along religious lines reemerged, this time led by the Congress. If India was to be cut up along communal lines, why not provinces? The British agreed, and Bengal and Punjab were sliced, generating a communal carnage whose violent memory still haunts.

Eastern Bengal became East Pakistan, echoing the 1905 division, reflecting not an ideology but the administrative convenience of an alien ruler.

Shadow Knowledge,

Whether in the time of the Pala, Sena or the Turko-Afghans, the peasant culture never connected with that of the rulers. While the aristocrats and the rulers might engage in power plays based on identity, it was difficult for the rural Hindu and Muslim to be too different from each other, confronted as they were with identical challenges thrown against them by nature and society. Whatever difference there was, was not cause for hatred, but opportunity for multiple participation. Some customs and rituals varied, but others did not.

The peasants were brought together in the face of the same problems— floods, droughts and taxsucking landlords. Since a Hindu peasant knew no Sanskrit and the Muslim peasant no Arabic, great theological debates were ruled out and while doubtless there were angry moments, no cow-slaughter riots were reported. Brick constructions were few in the delta country, so there were no mosques to pull down, either.

Since they felt helpless at the hands of floods and fevers, the peasants turned to the village shaman, who used his tantric skills to unite all in some shadow knowledge of a past passed along. A peasant will rarely risk his harvest by refusing obeisance, no matter to which pantheon the gods and goddesses belonged. Water-borne diseases and swampnursed malaria, which wiped off tens of thousands every year, were the great unifiers of rural Bengal. Left to the peasantry, Bengal might have remained one. But the Bengalee elite, Hindu and Muslim, were brought up to believe in their differences, even though they were slightly differently posed portraits of the same person.

Peasant Theology

Islam meant different things to the villager and the elite. The latter was closer to the formal faith, while the former had been converted by Muslim mystics and Islamic shamans. The religion was spread in rural Bengal not by the Muslim rulers, but by the Sufis whose version was syncretistic and laid back. Togetherness, love of God, and "mind the wine and pork" would do. It was a gentle form of Islam, rather like the words of a forgivingschool teacher, and the Muslim mystics had much in common with the Buddhist bhihchhu and the Hindu sadhu. The deity of the Bengalee peasant was not the all-powerful, strict, desert monarch but a singing, soulful, tropical God. His was a religion softened by a thousand monsoons.

The peasantry, Hindu and Muslim, fell behind the Sufi saints. Ignorance and illiteracy encouraged communal harmony. Till the middle of the 19th century, peasant names of both religionists were interchangeable. And so the Sufi prescription and peasant theology survived for centuries, until the political variety of the faith entered with the Islamic revival, with its demand for votes and martyrs.

While the poor villagers sought divine support for day-to-day survival, the well-to-do were more worried about their pedigree. In late 19th century, a book by one Fazle Rabbi sold well amongst the aristocrat Muslims of Bengal. It purported to show that all the leading families were "original Muslims" from West Asia, and not low-caste Hindu converts as common sense suggested. As the politics of representation gathered steam, this alienated group of wannabee foreigners laid claim to speak on behalf of the nearly 50 percent of the Subcontinent's Muslims, who spoke nothing else but rustic Bengali.

The Muslim League claimed to represent all the Muslims of India and tried to invent a uniform religious culture for them. It took its leadership almost entirely from the aristocracy. Its members dressed alike and talked in Urdu and Persian, and heartily disliked Bengalees. Casting around, the local leaders of Muslim Bengal tried the Congress but found that it was secular in tongue but communal at heart.

After an initial growth, the Muslim League faltered in Bengal as the Krishak Praja Party (KPP, Peasants Tenants Party) gained support, led by the legendary A.K. Fazlul Haque. The Muslim League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah included, could not possibly support the KPP's militant anti-landlord manifesto.

Fazlul Haque understood demography: there were more peasants in East Bengal, and they were mostly Muslims. The landlords were oppressive, and they were mostly Hindus. Siding with the Muslim peasants, at one go, the party was able to upset the applecart of Muslim aristocracy and hit at the Hindu landlords. In reaction, the Muslim aristocracy sought support elsewhere through their upper class cultural connections, including from the British.

As more and more Bengalee Muslims became educated and competed with Hindus for jobs, the communal divide widened. Soon, sheer numbers pushed the lowly "Musalman Bangalees" into a position of political strength. A new brand of politician emerged from among them who was comfortable being both Muslim and Bengalee. With the rise of Kazi Nazrul Islam—later canonised as the national poet of Bangladesh— and the popularity of his revolutionary and love songs, urban Muslims, too, could now feel at home with this Bengalee identity. Unlike their aristocratic forbears, they could claim to be part of the cultural mainstream of the Brahmaputra-Ganga delta. This new political class could both pray, and sing.

The Bengal Pact

By the 1920s, Bengal was already steeped in militancy. After eons of subservience, middle class Bengalees were finally up to resisting foreign rule. They overcame the ever-present temptation to collaborate and instead became part of the fight for liberation from the British. Chittagong was liberated for a week, though the revolt crumbled in a short time and all the leaders were hanged. One interesting reflection of this episode is found in the work of Somerset Maugham, a serious Bengalee-hater whose Ashenden spy stories are full of Bengalee villains.

Bengalees were also unpopular with the non-Bengalees, be it the Congress leadership or that of the Muslim League. Mohammad Ali Jinnah hated Fazlul Haque and M. K. Gandhi disliked Chittaranjan Das, and later his disciple Subhash Chandra Bose, founder of the Indian National Army (and even today, Bengal's most popular hero). Das, a prominent Bengalee member of the Congress, proposed the Bengal Pact in 1923, which was to be an affirmative action employment programme for Muslims to enhance their economic status and reduce the causes of conflict. Unfortunately, by then India was already crumbling under the weight of communal forces, and the Congress leadership rejected Das' formula. Had it decided otherwise, many historians believe, there might still be one Bengal.

After the rejection of the Bengal Pact, there were no more serious attempts made to try crafting a Bengalee identity along non-communal lines. The first general election held in Bengal in 1937 by the Bntish under a communal voting system did prove that the Bengalee peasantry was an independent-minded force. By giving Haque's KPP more seats than the Muslim League the rural population showed it was both "Muslim" and "peasant" without being "anti-Hindu". But after having failed to cobble an alliance with the Congress, Haque lined up with the Muslim League. His action destroyed the KPP as a national political party which was entirely peasant-based. It also brought the peasantry firmly behind the League.

Sharing Only the Pain

The Bengalee Muslim's sense of identity peaked during the 1940s. He was aware of his religion, felt he deserved a better chance at the job market vis-à-vis the Hindu, was willing to listen to Jinnah and the Muslim League—but he would not deny his language nor his peasant background. For the Calcutta sophisticate, including the Muslim bhadraloh, of course, he was a 'Bangal', the derisive term used to mean an East Bengal lout.

In 1940, the Pakistan Resolution, moved by FazIul Haque, was passed by the Muslim League in Lahore. Bengalee scholars say the plan mentioned five independent "states", while others claim only one state was meant, a Pakistan with two wings. All in all, by this time, the Bengalee Muslim stood well and truly distant from his Hindu brother. Communalism was sharp enough to resist attempts at healing.

The partition of Bengal in 1947 was a trauma to both the Bengalee Muslim and Hindu. But while sharing a common pain, they did not share the argument. Each blamed the other. Hindus said Muslims took to communal politics which is what led to 1905, and ultimately to 1947. Muslims blamed the Hindus for voting for the split of Bengal. Sadly, they were both correct.

It was absurd for the Bengalee Muslim leaders to have expected support from Hindus for a United Bengal. The proposal, which was forwarded by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (a deputy of Das' who went on to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan) in early 1947, was a last-ditch attempt to keep Bengal intact. Suhrawardy was supported by leaders like Abul Hashim of the Bengal Muslim League and Sarat Chandra Bose of the Congress. However, the Hindus indicated they had had enough. This had to do with the legacy of ten years of Muslim League rule in Bengal, from 1937 to 1947, which was hardly a secular affair— the communal violence of the 1940s, especially the riots of 1946, and the so-called referendum for Pakistan. Bengal was torn apart for the last time.

The Bengal Provincial Muslim League represented the new citizens of East Pakistan. Resentful of Hindus and non-Bengalees—of Gandhi's Congress and Jinnah's Muslim League—they were grappling for a piece in history to call their own. Pakistan was considered a betrayal, for the Bengalees had expected an independent country rather than a "wing" dominated by the other "wing" from across India's vast expanse.

Song Offering

Near the end, we turn to the beginning. Before there was the Bangla language, there were the people. Scholars are divided as to when Bengali evolved fully as a language but it was probably between the 8th and 10th centuries. Charyapad, a collection of Buddhist devotional chants discovered in a royal library in Kathmandu, is considered the earliest example of such literature, but scholars are pushing the dates further back.

The use of chants and music as a vehicle of religious expression created a close link between the language and the people. The numerous mystic cults took devotional poetry as the principal source of communication, and the rural cultural festivals were deeply rooted in oral traditions. Even today, oral poetry for reading out aloud is sold by the million throughout rural Bangladesh. A vanety of musical chants forms the bedrock of Bangla literature. Rabindranath Tagore's best poem is considered to be "Song Offerings" (Gitanjali). Bangla language, thus, binds people to the most spiritually pleasant way there is to worship.

At the first Muslim League Conference in 1906, delegates from Muslim Bengal, while stating their loyalty to the Muslim cause, reminded the audience that Bangla would always be the vehicle of culture and communication where they came from. The Muslim aristocracy of Bengal wanted Urdu, but the Bengalee saw no reason to discard their own sturdy heritage, one that had been tended by Tagore, Nazrul, and the mystic bard Lalon Shah. It meant discarding songs that had been sung for a thousand years. Bengalees felt that they had a fight to their mother tongue, something the Pakistani elite class officially and specifically denied them as soon as independence from the British was achieved in 1947. This sparked the Language Movement, which would ultimately lead to liberation.

The quarrel between Jinnah and the Bengal Muslim League was at least a quarter century old, and it is noteworthy he had always nominated Urdu-speaking Calcuttans to represent him in the party. This distrust spilled over to the newly created Pakistan. When the leaders of Pakistan, including Jinnah, insisted that Urdu alone would be the national language of Pakistan, students and cultural activists braced themselves for a fight.

The Pakistani elite and their East Pakistani friends, ill advised, refused to allow cultural freedom to the East Pakistani Bengalee Muslims and Hindus. It was also obvious that economic power was not about to be shared, and so language became the platform for the political slugfest. Matters came to a head on 21 February 1952, when the authorities fired on students demanding that Bangla be given a status equal to that accorded Urdu. Bodies fell, legend was created, as was a momentum strong enough to sustain an extended political struggle. The martyrs' memorial of Shahid Minar was constructed overnight, and became a powerful symbol. This was where the Bangladesh nation was born as a state.

No Soul Brotherhood

Secret moves to splinter Pakistan began as early as 1956. The same Bengalee leadership which had ushered in Pakistan now fought for freedom for the East. The activists, including Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, said that they had never wanted the Pakistan that emerged.

Constant economic deprivation and lack of cultural freedom, including a ban on Tagore music, was not exactly the means to keep Pakistan together, but the distant rulers in Islamabad seemed unaware, or uncaring. Attempts to tinker with the Bangla script and language to make it more "Islamic" worsened the mood. Pakistan Zindabad gave way to Joi Bangla, and a protest manifested through a slogan, and a language, began to undercut the foundations of an unnaturally created state.

Bengalees came to believe that Islam had been used by the Pakistan Movement leaders only to get them on their side. A deep distrust of religion in politics was sown in the 1950s and 1960s and, as the politicians became more articulate, they spoke of a secular state, with strict separation of religion and governance. In 1970, when the polls were held for the Pakistan National Assembly, with their near-total choice for the Awami League led by Sheikh Mujib, the Bengalees indicated that they wanted release from the domination of fellow Muslims of the West.

This was their finest hour, when the collective voice of Bengalees rang loud and clear—that religion had no role in government, that Pakistan had no egalitarian ideology, that there should be social equity and cultural and religious freedom. Here was identity with a belief structure, which went beyond race, language and religion. The butchery of 1971 was the final straw, which convinced the people once and for all that Islam could not be, and never was, a binding factor. That most Pakistanis thought all Bengalee Muslims were mostly Hindus was probably more disturbing than the fact that Pakistani soldiers killed Hindus before asking questions—just as Bengalees killed many Biharis after the Dhaka massacre of 26 March.

Bangladeshi or East Pakistani? The war of 1971 meant a freed "East Pakistan" to most—a Bengalee state overcoming its past in the Pakistan Movement. It was not a soul brotherhood with the Indian who helped achieve liberation, nor with the West Bengalee Indian, as some thought. The separation of East and West Bengal achieved for the last time a quarter century earlier had, over the period, given rise to separate identities and self-images. It was also true that the people of a united Bengal, East and West, had never together experienced a Bengalee nationalist movement. An alliance of Hindu and Muslim nationalists might have held back in 1947 when the ideological heirs of Chittaranjan Das had pushed for a United Bengal, but their proposal had been quashed by party bigwigs on both sides. Gandhi's mild support for the idea was overcome by the opposition of Sardar Vallabhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Thus, there was no legacy of nationalist unity to fall back upon for the divided Bengalees, and it turned out that cultural affinities alone could not sustain a political movement of the kind that was required. The East had by then its own legacy of blood and death, which had generated a distinctive myth system that could not be shared with the West. This is why the presence of Bangla-speakers in the Indian state of West Bengal did not influence or create identity conflict or convergence in the East. The struggle remained that of a geography-driven, language-based nationalism. Not a tight construct but an original one. The "Bangal" was going his own way.

Joi Bangladesh Zindabad

Sheikh Mujib of the Awami League became the first ever ruler in Bengal to speak the language of the ruled, and this was the way it would be. He was a Bengalee leading Bangladesh, and nothing can wrest that distinction from him. However, after liberation, he ruled less than competently-. the problems of post-war reconstruction, the ever-present crises and conspiracies, and the aroma of state power, were beyond him.

While all history had seen the struggle for identity and insistence on a national personality, now that they had their own sovereign state, the Bengalee was at a loss as to what to do with it. After 1971, it was the politics of governance that took over. Ideology, culture, nation alism, all became one-word mantras in the hands of those seeking seats of power in Dhaka. The tussle now was for the spoils of government, and nationhood had seemingly debased the great ideals of old.

Within three year, Bangladesh had retrogressed into a one-party state. Sheikh Mujib and most of his family were brutally slain by a group of belligerent army men. Another transition of sorts began in 1975, and Sheikh Mujib's successor, Gen Ziaur Rahman, occupied himself with overturning everything that the Awami League had done. Socialism was diluted, and "Islamic" initiatives promoted. To make up for the League's pro-New Delhi position, the government became piercingly anti-Indian. Friendship with India, and with Hindus, was seen as one and the same and discouraged.

This was no identity crisis, it was a political reaction, and India did not help matters by controlling the eternal flow of the Ganga into Bangladesh with a barrage that diverted water into the Hoogly. Much later, the evident support of the Indian masses for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which maintains a strident anti-Bengalee Muslim stance, and the Babri mosque crisis, further exacerbated matters.

Gen Ziaur Rahman was assassinated in 1981, and Gen Hussain Mohammad Ershad took charge a year later. He declared Islam as the state religion, hoping to cash in on what he thought would be a popular anti-Indian move. To his surprise, Gen Ershad made lifelong enemies amongst Muslims who were—a legacy of recent history—vehemently opposed to religion cohabiting with politics. The general was thrown out by a mass agitation in 1990, after which the country's seat of power has been a seesaw between the Awami League (run by Sheikh Mujib's surviving daughter Sheikh Hasina Wajed) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, under Gen Ziaur Rahman's surviving spouse Begum Khaleda Zia).

The Awami League supports "Bengali nationalism" and the BNP espouses "Bangladeshi nationalism". However, the underlying planks of the two parties are nearly identical, the differences more cosmetic than philosophical. Party politics requires creating separate niches, however, and so Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda are forever engaged in the management of perception relating, mainly, to their degree of Islamic commitment and anti-Indianness. One party is probably less loud in proclaiming antipathy towards India than the other, and both are aware of the need to be seen as non-secular. Only the socialists had the seeds of a noncommunal dream in their programme, but they are long since a dead movement.

The Awami League stands for secularism and socialism, along with democracy and nationalism, although practises none very well. For its part, the BNP put "Bismillah" in the Constitution and looks for friendship in the Islamic world. While it cannot trumpet it too loudly, the Awami League considers India its natural ally, which is to be expected, given New Delhi's support for the liberation struggle led by the League.

In terms of slogans, the Awami League having appropriated Joi Bangla, the BNP gave official sanction to Bangladesh Zindabad when it achieved power after 1975. There are, however, those who refuse to mouth either slogan. They maintain that they are Bangladeshi by citizenship and Bengalee by race.

None of this rhetorical babble touches the life of the average Muslim citizen. But it makes Hindus insecure, and they regularly remit their savings to India. They get an education in Bangladesh and hunt for jobs across the border, which is also where they search for grooms for their daughters. The Hindu keeps a constant eye on the religious hate meter, just in case he has to leave on short notice.

Mishkin and Unleavables

The Bangladeshi masses have been marginalised by rulers who have come from afar, and, in the latest phase, by their own kind. Such is the neglect, that the peasantry has turned away from the state and seeks support of the development agency and NGO. A Grameen Bank loanee has much to be grateful to the bank, a school student gets ahead with the support of BRAC, the country's, and the world's, largest NGO. Meanwhile, the distance between the peasantry and the Dhaka aristocracy, once again, only increases.

The politicians are not reliable, they only promise. So, much better to turn to the dollar-mixed sands of the Gulf, or the rubber plantations of Malaysia. A US or a Canadian visa, of course, is the ultimate dream of the middle class. Not only the Hindus, but Muslims, the middle class, even the poor, have been leaving—to Pakistan, West Asia, North America, Europe, Assam, Maharashtra, whoever will take them, wherever. In fact, leaving Bangladesh itself has become a way of life, and there is no nationalist pride affected when Gulf Arabs refer to Bengalees derisively as mishhins, beggars.

In the home country, the role of the "donor community" becomes ever all-encompassing, and the percentage of those who believe that the country has a future declines. A major "donor document" recently announced that most Bangladeshi professionals see a future for themselves outside Bangladesh.

But has not life always been this way? A time to survive, a time to adjust. If opportunity allows, a time to kill. We are survivors, and if it means learning a new trade or visiting a distant land and taking the lowliest job, we will. We did that as part of British India, today we do it all over the world. With Hindi channels on satellite television, we are now closer to Bombay than to Calcutta. Traditional barriers are down and old connections lost. Will they do a music video of Rabindra Sangeet on Channel V? Unlikely. Purity in diet and culture elopes with remix every day. It makes some unhappy, but many today know of no other forms.

However, fanaticism has no root in this soil. Despite funding and favour by a section of the ruling class, the support and vote base of the Islamic fundamentalists remain stagnant. Dollars were remitted but the inter-communal cultural tradition, diluted in recent decades, remain as yet too strong to dismantle.

So, back to the question, who does Bangladesh belong to? It probably belongs to the poor, the stay-at-homes who are forced to experience it all. It is theirs because others do not seem to want it. Those who can, leave, and society becomes more mono-cultural by the day, populated by Muslim "Bangals", the most rustic of them all. They are the stubborn ones, the unleavables, who confront hurricanes, famine, war, pestilence and global economic shock and emerge afterwards to face another day. Unnoticed, history has passed on to them the right to call Bangladesh their own.