Bangladesh is the world’s eighth most populous country. Its national language, Bengali, ranks sixth in terms of the number of native speakers. It has the second largest Muslim population after Indonesia. Among the signatories to Osama bin Laden’s original declaration of jihad was a Bangladeshi cleric. It is among the poorest countries in the world — three years after its birth as a new nation in 1971, the World Bank estimated only Rwanda to have a smaller per capita income than Bangladesh. The story is very different now. The country is still woefully poor but its recent economic and social successes have been astounding. The country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, hopes to make it a middle-income country by 2021. It comprises the world’s largest delta. But then, if climate change causes the earth’s temperature to rise by just one degree Celsius, 11 per cent of Bangladesh will be submerged.
All this should make the world sit up and get to know where this country is and how it is doing. Yet, as the editors of this volume lament, Bangladesh remains “a great unknown”. The only times the world gets to hear of Bangladesh are when natural disasters strike, a calamity like the death of over 1,000 garment factory workers in a recent multi-storeyed building collapse happens or when its never-ending political turmoil turns unusually violent. Or, when its religious zealots threaten to turn it into the “next Afghanistan”.
The essays, stories, reports, documents, photographs and cartoons in this volume offer an escape from the stereotypes and a real encounter with the country and its people. The way the editors have ensured this is remarkably refreshing. The result is more rewarding than dry academic research or journalistic simplifications.
The Reader’s story begins with voices from Bangladesh — as diverse as those of a woman worker of a garments factory, of Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank talking about how mobile telephones changed the lives of poor village women, of young women narrating personal experiences of working for NGOs in the face of threats from religious fundamentalists or of a Hindu woman’s account of the fears and discriminations that bedevil the lives of the people belonging to a minority community.
Such authentic personal stories from ordinary people and from social and political leaders abound in all sections of the book. Together they convey the feeling of the country speaking for itself. There are chronologically ordered parts that trace the country’s history from the earliest recorded times to Mughal and British rules and to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 after its liberation war against Pakistan. Other parts deal with the “Dilemmas of Nationhood”, “Contemporary Culture”, the development debates and the Bangladeshi diaspora.
But the book is unique in that each part offers a mix of scholarly essays of high standards, historical documents, popular literature and the arts and, above all, vivid personal narratives of contemporary characters. The “Early Histories” section, therefore, has accounts of Ibn Battutah’s visit to Sylhet in the 14th century, primarily to meet Shah Jalal, and of the visit of the Chinese scholar-monk, Xuanzang, to two Buddhist centres of learning in today’s Bangladesh in the seventh century. But the section also has two scholarly essays — one by Richard M. Eaton on the “Rise of Islam” in the Bengal delta and the other by Tapan Raychaudhuri on the “Poor and Rich in Mughal Bengal”.
The section on “Colonial Encounters” has an extract from Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, which James Cameron, in his An Indian Summer, called the “most superb study of East Bengal ever written”; Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s touching short story, “Sultana’s Dream”; and Fakir Lalon Shah’s song of his ‘faith’. But it also has David Kopf’s account of the Brahmo rebellion against Hindu tradition, a contemporary newspaper article on the Bengal famine of 1943 and A.K. Fazlul Haque’s maiden speech in the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1913 on the “The Muhammadan Community”.
Some of the momentous events in Bengal’s recent history come alive in historical documents such as Cyril Radcliffe’s account of the boundary-making for independent India, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s declaration of Bangladesh’s independence in March 1971, and the manifesto of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Joya Chatterjee’s essay on the dispersal of Partition refugees in India is among the finest in the book. It is a powerful recollection of how New Delhi cynically discriminated between refugees from East Bengal and those from West Punjab. An equally penetrating study of the economic divergence between East and West Pakistan by Rehman Sobhan shows why the two parts of Pakistan could not stay together. The language movement of 1952 marked only the beginning of the future separation. And, finally, there is the section on Bangladeshis beyond Bangladesh that tells the story of their dynamism, their bitter struggles on other shores and their hopes.
