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.