8/13/2019 Long Form- Truth crushed to earth

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7Long Form Friday, February 7, 2014DHAKA TRIBUNE

n Garga Chatterjee

F

or the West Bengali bhad-ralok (or whatever remainsof them), East Bengal con-tinues to represent vastlydifferent things to different

people: a Muslim-majority countrynow called Bangladesh, an audaciousdream of ethnic pride and secularism,a land vaguely and culturally similarbut distant in imagination, some oftheir forefather’s homeland, the placewhere cyclones aimed at West Bengalnally end up, a previous hub of ISIactivity, the place of origin of the won-drous Ilish sh, etc. The list goes on.

While every West Bengali’s attitudetowards East Bengal/Bangladeshis formed from one or more suchmemories and connotations, manyof these have a limited acceptabilityin standard discourse, particularlyin public expression. That does notmake them any less potent, however,and forces their manifestation onlyunder very particular instances. I havea personal anecdote from March 17,2007 about this.

That day Bangladesh scored its his-toric win over India in the World Cupcricket match. I must admit that I amno big cricket fan. That day, I watchedthe Bangladesh-India game in anundergraduate house at Harvard Uni-versity. With India being indisputablefavourites, the Bangladeshi team wasexpected to take a beating.

Since live telecasts of cricketmatches are not available on cable TV, the Harvard Cricket Club folks,comprised primarily of Indianshad bought a special subscription.Watching along with me were twoEast Bengali friends. If truth be told, Ionly watched the Bangladesh innings

because I could not wake up in timefor the Indian innings after a latenight’s work.

Regardless, while I was happy thatWest Bengal’s own Sourav Ganguly,the Indian team’s former captain,was in the process of scoring the

highest number of runs for the Indianside, I was not very happy with theIndian total. But slowly, perhaps as Ibecame more and more caught up inthe action on the eld, that reactionchanged.

With Bangladesh starting to domi-nate, I felt the rst of many alarm bellsgoing off in my head. India supporterswere cursing the Indian team for itspoor performance. But as the direc-tion of the game became increasinglyobvious, I did not really see the com-ing defeat as my own.

In fact, I was busy asking some-what quietly and ashamedly questionsabout the Bangladeshi team: Oi bats-man tar nam ki (what’s the name ofthat batsman)? By the time the matchwas nearing its end, I looked happy atthe outcome. This led to a few strangestares.

Nonetheless, it did all feel a bit odd.My cheers, after all, were not really for

good cricket. Forbidden preferenceswere having a free ride to strangedestinations.

After the game ended, the generalambience in the room was distinctlydark. But I found that my own moodwas not part of the gloom. My EastBengali friends treated me to a pint ofbeer, and I learned about the “pola”who really was “aguner e gola.”

As I walked home that evening, Ifelt a nagging confusion – not aboutthe anger of the Indians, nor abouttheir reaction to my cheers for Bang-ladesh. Rather, of my own change ofheart. A side of me had opened upthat had more space for preferencesthan I had imagined.

It is an easy call, perhaps, whenGanguly is on the team – he is anIndian Bengali. But more generally? Inthe games to come, would I continueto root for the Bangladeshi team?And what did this opening mean for

India-Pakistan matches to come? The way my reaction had public-

ly changed during the course of thegame would have been inconceiva-ble had I been watching the matchanywhere within India or Bangla-desh. The split self that I harbour andwhich, I believe, many others do aswell, does not have a legitimate spacefor expression in any but the most lib-eral of establishments in the subconti-nent. But such dual identities remainwithin us, deep down in our hearts,where politically correct stances andobeisance to national symbols cannotcast a shadow.

Ethnicity is a category, as is identi-

cation with a nation state. However,these two differ in one important as-pect. A nation state demands explicitloyalty, and de-legitimises everythingelse. In its eyes, those who balk at this

explicit parade of delity are parasitesat best and traitors at worst, loyal toanother nation state.

The kind of fealty that ethnicityproposes, I like to believe, is at oncemore organic and primordial than thatdemanded by the nation state. In mostcases, the loyalties to ethnicity and tonation state do not come into specicconict with one another. But the var-ying degrees of distance between thetwo can be mapped as a continuum.

On the one hand is the Naga, forinstance, who has no nation state butis held within an all-consuming one,which goes to repressive lengths toextract explicit loyalty. At the same

time there is the Hindi belt, an areathat can explicitly declare its uninch-ing loyalty, as the points of declarationin its case do not interfere with claimsof ethnicity.

The Hindi belt is to the localitiesthe natural claimant of the spotwhere the Indian pulse is to be felt,something that the rest of India onlygrudgingly acknowledges.

West Bengal is an interesting casein this regard, falling somewhere inthe middle of this continuum. To-gether with the explicit declaration ofloyalty to the Indian nation state, wend here a vague understanding andacknowledgement of ethnic kinshipwith Bangladeshis. But of course,almost all Hindu West Bengalis wouldbalk at a declaration of loyalty to thenation state of Bangladesh. And so thesplit self remains masked.

Even among West Bengalis therewould be a continuum of the exactextent to which this kinship is felt,irrespective of loyalty to the state ofIndia. It is an interesting and openquestion: How does the barrierbetween Muslim and Hindu West

Bengalis differ from that betweenWest Bengali Hindus and East BengaliMuslims?

For that matter, can any suchdifference be attributed to allegianceto India? Would the dynamics of WestBengali loyalty to India change ifBangladesh were not a state that borethe primacy of Islam in its Consti-tution? Further, was the nature ofassociation of Hindu West Bengalisany different in the heady days of 1971and in the early months of 1972?

Would it be any different if Bang-ladesh had continued to be a strongpluralist secular democracy fromwhere minorities do not continuallyee from oppression by the religiousmajority?

Days later, the Bangladeshi teamdefeated South Africa, the world’stop-ranked squad, doing much todemonstrate that their win againstIndia was not a uke. West Bengal’s

largest-circulating Bangla daily,

Anandabazar Patrika, carried hugeheadlines trumpeting, “Bengalis stunthe world’s best.”I had guilt-lesshappiness - my conscience perhapscleared by India’s elimination.

Cricket in South Asia is not a game;it is serious business, and a regularmetaphor for war. Cricket has beenused as an acid test for loyalty toone’s country. In general, it does notleave much space to reach across andsupport the neighbours. But primitiveloyalties know no political frontiers,however strong the efforts of SouthAsian states to seek out exclusiveloyalties.

Rather, this more guttural typeof devotion inevitably nds its ownspace in private imagination; cross-border organic connections, afterall, predate the nation-state centricSouthasian political landscape, not tomention cricket itself. But what canbe used as a tool to solidify loyalty toa nation state can also act as an ave-nue of private, almost unconscious,subversion. Because the relationshipbetween a country and its citizens hasbeen moulded into one of either loyal-

ty or deance, this process inevitablycomes with guilt.

But can we not imagine beyondthis? If political identities in SouthAsia are largely imagined, then force-ful transnational identities are potenttriggers for an organic re-imaginingof the region. Guilt makes the privatedissident crave legitimacy, for inti-mate alternative identities do not likesuppression.

The dissident can only hope thatorganic continuities will eventuallymake states negotiate with transna-tional loyalties, with the audacioushope that such negotiations will beobligatory to the long-term survivalof present-day nation states in SouthAsia. We can hope along the lines inthe New Testament of the Christians:“Truth crushed to earth will riseagain.” l

Garga Chatterjee is a freelance contributor.

He can be followed on twitter @gargac.

Truth crushed to earth

SYED ZAKIR HOSSAIN

SYED ZAKIR HOSSAIN

Cricket in South Asiais not a game; it isserious business, anda regular metaphor forwar. Cricket has beenused as an acid test forloyalty to one’s country