An Old, Old Story

An Old, Old Story                                                                                                                                

It was a wet and gloomy Saturday morning in Columbus, Ohio, but March 25 of 2017 had begun rather brightly for me. Rising at the crack of dawn, I had watched Bangladesh defeat Sri Lanka convincingly in a one-day cricket match in Colombo. Tamim Iqbal had scored a century and our bowlers had stifled the Sri Lankan innings. It was a powerful and mature performance that I (and millions of Bangladeshis) have come to expect from our cricketers in recent times. I was happy.

With the wonderful feeling of weekend relaxation mixed with the euphoria of a Bangladesh cricket victory, I watched the news on television. Reports of White supremacist attacks on immigrant and especially Muslim communities were on the rise in the United States (U.S.) during the early days of the Donald Trump presidency. Although his campaign rhetoric and the subsequent election victory are likely to have emboldened the anti-immigrant segments of the U.S. population, I did not feel particularly concerned. Of course, there was the possibility of stray attacks by an overzealous individual or by a small group, but I did not feel that our lives were at-risk from the threat of organized large-scale attacks.

The possibility of being victims of targeted attacks, in fact, is a novel theme for non-White immigrants in the U.S. I have lived here since the late 1990s, staying in student housing, low-rent apartments, blue collar middle-income areas, and in relatively affluent suburbs. While their overall characters differed a lot, the diverse neighborhoods held one constant for me – I never felt the threat of targeted attacks. My sense of safety was undisturbed even during the immediate post-911 days.

Thinking along these lines – how immigrants from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are exposed to greater risks in the U.S. these days – it suddenly dawned on me that in 1971, millions of Bengalis in the erstwhile East Pakistan perhaps were in a situation somewhat similar to ours. While Bengalis experienced street violence, disrupted social lives, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty regarding the fate of the country during the early months of 1971, I do not believe that they considered indiscriminate killings of unarmed masses by the Pakistan Army as a realistic possibility.

What were the last thoughts of the people who were killed at work, at home, in bazars, schools, and fields? Did people feel like herds of slaughter-bound animals when forced off public buses to form lines by the roadside? How deep was the sense of inadequacy when their wives and daughters were assaulted in plain sight? The degradation of human life was complete under the ruthless operations orchestrated by the Pakistan government. From my vantage point, almost half a century later and from a different country, what happened on March 25, 1971 in East Pakistan, and continued over the following nine months seems like an impossibility.

How many people do you think were killed in 1971? It cannot be three million. It is impossible. Sheikh Mujib confused the concept of a million – thought it was 100,000 (lakh). His mistake has created this myth. The post-liberation first government should have taken a count. It is their fault that we do not know the actual number of people who died in 1971.

How many times have I heard these statements from Bangladeshi expatriates in the U.S? The exact words may have varied in minor ways but the inherent message has always been very consistent. Three million people cannot have died in 1971. It is bound to be much lower. During my Dhaka days, I was aware that some acquaintances and relatives shared similar sentiments. However, the question was not a frequent topic of conversation in my social circles. As a Bangladeshi expatriate in the United States, I have, however, come across the question far too many times.

 I used to feel rather awkward facing the question. On the one hand, my gut reaction was to ask why some of us were so intent in establishing that the Pakistani armed forces and their local collaborators had not killed as many Bengalis. We were the victims and not the perpetrators of a genocide. Why were we trying to present a less severe picture of the massive crime committed against our people? On the other hand, I could not provide effective counters to their assertions. I was aware that there had never been a comprehensive census of the deaths, and three million was indeed a very large number – a staggering 4.0% of the pre-independence population of 75 million. Consequently, while I disliked immensely their questions regarding the validity of the commonly cited three-million count, I could not provide reasonable counter arguments that were based firmly on reliable documentation.

Thankfully, I do not suffer anymore any awkwardness when faced with the question. I am no longer bogged down by my thoughts on how accurate or realistic the three-million count is as I have come to recognize what the question actually represents. It has taken me a long time but now I am aware that the questioning of the three-million death count has never been about establishing accurate historical records. On the contrary, it has always been about playing down the brutal treatment of Bengalis by the Pakistan authority, an attempt to establish that the horrors of 1971 did not happen.

Why are those expatriate Bangladeshis – I’ll refer to them as deniers in the rest of the piece – so intent on drawing a picture that sharply contrasts the 1971 experience of Bengalis in East Pakistan? I suspect that a majority of them had been deeply affected by the breakup of Pakistan. They are likely to have been strong believers in the original argument for Pakistan – that Muslims needed a separate state to survive the competition from the more educated Hindus in the aftermath of British withdrawal from an undivided India. I also believe that they had identified themselves (and the rest of the Bengali Muslims) as an integral component of the Muslim population in the sub-continent, and the breakup of Pakistan, in their view, had seriously weakened the strength of the Muslims. From this perspective, it was not the liberation of Bangladesh but the breakup of Pakistan that hurt them more. However, while the above possibly explains their anguish at the breakup of Pakistan, it does not tell us why they want to show that the horrors of 1971 did not happen.

Are they interested in developing a stronger bond with Pakistan? Are they looking forward to rejuvenating the Muslim-Bangla spirit, doing away with the remnants of secularism that was once proposed as a pillar of our democracy? I do not know the answers to these questions. However, it seems logical that any attempts to strengthening of ties between Bangladesh and Pakistan or to embracing only the religious (Muslim) aspect of the Bengali-Muslim identity must resolve the issue regarding the 1971 genocide of Bengali Muslims by (Pakistani) Muslims. How does one go about it? One can repent and ask for forgiveness. Alternatively, one can just spread the rhetoric that no significant violence against the civilian population ever took place in East Pakistan. The expatriate Bangladeshi deniers are doing exactly that.

My conjectures on the motive of the deniers are essentially that – my conjectures. Nevertheless, the conjectures are formed by my observations on the characteristics and comments of the deniers. I have found a remarkable degree of similarity among the deniers regarding their political views in general, and their opinions of Bangladesh and Shiekh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the nation, in particular.

Although most of the deniers have had little expressed interest in U.S. foreign or domestic policy issues (with some exceptions) prior to 2003, the year President George W. Bush invaded Iraq, they have always held strongly conservative views on societal questions. Interestingly, their mostly religious (Islamic) stance on issues such as the same-sex marriage coincides almost perfectly with the same of the right wing religious fringe of the Republican Party. It is perhaps not surprising that most of the deniers had supported the Republican Party purely on social orthodoxy, and an overture by George W. Bush to the Muslims in the U.S. had prompted some of them to even campaign for him during his 2000 presidential bid.

When it comes to Bangladesh politics, the deniers appear to be mostly apolitical. They do not admit to supporting any of the two mainstream parties – Bangladesh Awami League or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – and also pointedly refuse to be drawn into the common war of words that characterizes partisan Bangladesh politics.

In spite of their stated neutral position regarding Bangladesh politics, the deniers, however, have been vocal against the International Crimes Tribunal (Bangladesh). In opposing the trials, they usually offer the following arguments. First and foremost, they argue that we should forget our respective roles in 1971 and move the country forward since this is not the time to create divisions among ourselves based on what had allegedly happened almost half a century ago. They maintain that the trial of war crimes is not a pressing issue for Bangladesh, and the government should instead focus on more recent crimes. They also argue that Bengali collaborators of the Pakistan Army did not do much wrong in 1971. Finally, they question the trials themselves, characterizing them as an effort by the Awami League government to shore up its support, and claim that significant procedural shortcomings and a lack of transparency render the trials farcical.

The same group of people also show a marked disrespect to Bangladesh and to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. They sometimes claim that there has not been any clear gains from the independence of Bangladesh and we would have been better off staying with Pakistan. Some of them also refer to the nine months between March 25 and December 16 in 1971 as the period of gondogol (loosely translates into chaos).  Although there are instances of the use of the term in Bangladesh right after independence, this colloquial expression has disappeared from the vocabularies of the most of us. Finally, the deniers also claim that Sheikh Mujib had never wanted an independent Bangladesh; rather, he was interested in being the prime minister of Pakistan.

While I recognize that raising doubts about the three-million death-count is an effective tool used by the deniers to discount the atrocities committed by Pakistan, I do care about having accurate counts of the number of victims in 1971. In my view, preserving the truth is important for academic reasons but mostly because it works as a deterrent for future acts of atrocities. Accordingly, we should try to obtain accurate counts of the number of victims and back it with reliable documentation. An important point in this connection, however, needs to be kept in mind. Once we do have the numbers, will the questioning go away?

A quick consideration of the persistent questioning of the number of victims of the holocaust, the largest case of genocide in recorded human history, suggests not. Close to six million Jews died between 1939 and 1945, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). USHMM states that no one master list of the dead exists anywhere in the world; the numbers were compiled from a wide array of sources including wartime reports generated by Nazi authorities, and from postwar demographic studies on population loss during the war. The presence of detailed records backing the estimates, however, does not prevent neo-Nazis in Europe and the U.S. from questioning the numbers; the former Iranian president Mahamoud Ahmadinejad had even called the holocaust a hoax.

Suppose we overlook the potential non-favorable response of the deniers for the moment, and focus on obtaining accurate counts of the dead in 1917. Suppose we settle on a much smaller number. There have been alternative estimates from studies that have relied on newspaper reports, anecdotal evidence, or results from small-sample surveys; we could draw a range of alternative estimates of between 50,000 & 500,000 from these studies. It should be clear that all such estimates are open to questions. However, let us accept, for the moment, one of them to be more accurate – say the 500,000 number. Now, what does the reduction in the estimated number, from three million to only half a million, accomplish? The 83.3% reduction in the estimated number of deaths could be used to state that Pakistani forces did not kill 333,333 individuals per month on average, as implied by the three-million total death count; rather, the correct average should be 55,556 per month. Alternatively, the same reduction in the estimated numbers imply that the average number killed per month in each of the 19 old districts of Bangladesh is not 17,544, as implied by the three-million count, but only 2,924 if we follow the 500,000 count. One can clearly see the futility of the exercise. It is only a change in numbers, not a change in reality.

While the words of deniers continue to insult the sacrifice of our people, their rhetoric on the death-count is perhaps less powerful today, especially among young men and women who were born after the end of military rule in Bangladesh in 1991. However, I strongly believe that the rhetoric has had a lasting and harmful impact on the generations born before them, particularly on those who grew up between 1975 and 1990. Now in their 40s and 50s, these individuals had lived in a vacuum during their formative years, knowing little of the history of independence from Pakistan as successive Bangladesh governments had blacked out the struggle for independence from key institutions including text books and the media. Consequently, the idea that “three-million people did not die” or “Pakistani atrocities did not happen” was easier to spread among them.

I sincerely hope that the deniers acknowledge that their anguish of being on the wrong side of history in 1971 do not grant them the liberty to belittle the sacrifice of Bengalis. I also hope that they understand that their efforts to make light of Pakistani atrocities in 1971 mimic those of the apologists of the Gujarat massacre in 2002, or of the Myanmar administration that is currently trying to cleanse the country of its Rohingya population. I hope that we can all accept that great injustice was done to the people of Bangladesh by the Pakistan government. Just like injustice is currently being done to helpless people in corners of Africa, Asia, and the Middle-East. As individuals, we do not have the power to right these wrongs. However, we can at least be cognizant of the crimes and not create artificial rhetoric for winning political points.

The W-Problem and Others

How difficult is it to learn a language? According to an ancient Chinese proverb – there are ancient Chinese proverbs for everything – learning a second language is like acquiring a new soul. Since the tender age of five, I have devoted my life to acquiring the new soul as I have tried to learn how to read, write, and speak English. After all these years, I can state without any doubt that the wise men of ancient China were really wise. Speaking English is difficult, and it gets more difficult by the day.

Learning English is practical, more so now than it was 40 years ago. In this age of globalization, English is undoubtedly the foremost language of worldwide communication. No wonder that English-medium schools have sprung up all over the world. Even district towns in Bangladesh these days have one or two schools where English is touted as the medium of instruction. Practicalities aside, the Bengalis from either side of the Padma are also rather proud of their English. Wasn’t there a time when ‘he speaks English well’ used to be the ultimate praise for an educated Bengali?

I have lived in the United States since 1996. Prior to that I had lived in England for a year. Coming from a privileged educational background, I had gathered the basics of spoken English in Bangladesh. The year spent in England, I used to believe, had added the necessary polish to my English. Coming to America, I was supremely confident and proud of my mastery of the language. My new friends and my teachers at the university all understood me perfectly. There were no problems. And why should there be a problem? In addition to my educational background, my native language Bangla had prepared me in a unique way for tough-to-pronounce words. The Bangla alphabet in its abbreviated form has 11 vowels and 32 consonants; there are three whole letters in it just to represent S, and three more for the different shades of T. I could pronounce every English word and some more.

Only now I realize that I had mistaken the politeness of my friends, teachers, and the man on the street as a sign of how well I spoke the language. Now I know (hopefully) the extent of my difficulties with spoken English. I just cannot manage it when any of the three vowels – E, I, and U – appears right after the first letter of the word, a consonant, and is followed by R. To me, ‘firm’ and ‘farm’ have the same pronunciations. There are also pairs like ‘age’ and ‘edge’ with surprisingly similar rings to my ears! Also, when to (or not to) elongate the vowel at the end of a syllable? Is it mono~poly or monopoly? The most serious case, however, arises when W is the first letter of a word. To me, ‘Wood’ is OOD. I have tried hard, without much success, to resolve my problems. I even saw a linguist once.

When confronted with the W-problem, as I have come to refer to it, I try my best to pronounce the word correctly the very first time. However, I often fail, and after multiple unsuccessful attempts, I go to my fallback strategy – using examples such as ‘wood as in furniture’. A fellow Bangladeshi who also shares the W-problem has found what I believe is a more direct and effective solution. He used to live on a street with the name like – Pine Woods Boulevard. When giving his address over the phone, he would say Pine, then spell ‘Woods’, and then say Boulevard. Spelling a word with a leading W is a better alternative to trying to speak the word.

Interestingly, despite our difficulties in communicating with the native English speaking population, we never have a problem communicating in English among ourselves. The observation raises the question about how our English appears to the native English speaker. Do we sound like the opposite of the adventurous Englishman who has learned to speak Bangla? My worst nightmare is being the counterpart of the 19th Century Bangla speaking English Sahib (as portrayed in old Bangla movies).

I have often thought about why I had considered my English to be so good 20 years ago and why I find it so very problem-ridden now. I knew very little of the language 20 years ago, and I did not know of my problems. Over time, I have learned a little more English, and that has led to a realization of the problem. It is almost like the case of the village barber who also practiced surgery; without the knowledge of the human body, he was free of any apprehension regarding his role as a doctor.

As we spend more time in an English speaking country, we speak more English. More practice, however, does not necessarily lead to a better brand of English. It is just that we speak more of the language in our unique way. Unfortunately, after using the language at work, at the supermarket, or when haggling over the price of cable-TV on the phone, English also becomes the dominant language at our homes. The presence of children adds a new dimension to the equation. The children learn their own English at school, and unless the parents take an active interest in teaching them Bangla, they grow up with English. As a result, for the lazy parents, the majority of us, it is perhaps easier to communicate with the children in English. However, I am really not convinced that using English gives us any advantage with the children. If you think about it, what are our options? We could use Bangla, the language the children barely understand, or we could use (our) English, the language they barely understand.

As we adopt English as the primary language of communication at work and home, we are led to believing that English, rather than Bangla, comes to us more naturally. Some of us are actually emboldened enough to take our English speaking skills to other territories. Although I fully support the premise that an individual should be allowed to choose the medium and the language of his expression, the said freedom perhaps should not be widened to include public-speaking at social get-togethers. I am sure that there are hundreds of thousands of expatriate Bangladeshis all over the United States of America who have suffered silently through the speeches of the very confident English speaking members of their communities. As a part of the long suffering silent majority, I am, however, sometimes a little conflicted. Should we attribute our sufferings entirely to the English language? Would the speeches be any better in Bangla?

An inflated sense of his command over English of an individual can sometimes create wonderful comic relief for others. At a social get-together of expatriate Bangladeshis somewhere in the United States, the individual with the microphone in hand announced that dinner was ready. He also urged the ladies to go first (to the dinner table). His exact words, however, were – ‘ladies beheaded’. Of course he was not proposing a mass decapitation of the entire female audience. He was only stating, in his very own English, that the ladies should be heading to the dinner table. Just like the surgical knife in the hands of the village barber, the English language at our disposal can have deadly consequences!

The life of the Bangladeshi expatriate

The 9 to 5 job holding middle aged Bangladeshi expatriate in the United States (please see note) visits Bangladesh once every two to three years. The visits usually last for 14 to 21 days, and generally take place during the summer months to coincide with school and university closings in the United States. The primary purpose of these visits is to meet the immediate family – parents and siblings; meeting old friends in Bangladesh is also an important but secondary purpose.

In recent years, the trips to Bangladesh have been serving an additional purpose – to obtain a Bangladesh National ID card, or to expedite the processing of dual citizenship documents or a machine-readable Bangladesh passport. The documents are necessary to facilitate a safe and potentially legal passage of inheritance money from Bangladesh to the United States. Although a majority of the Bangladeshi expatriates in the United States had originally come here with the goal of settling down in the land of the plenty, there was, perhaps, the flicker of a wish in the back of the mind to go back some time. As the expatriate has grown older and set increasingly deeper roots in his new homeland – moved into his own home, seen the children grow, leave home, and start their own families – the wish to go back has gradually faded. Making arrangements for the inheritance money perhaps is the final confirmation that there is no going back. This is the last stop of the journey.

Almost everyone comes back from Bangladesh with a happy face and a similar set of stories to tell. Conversation topics generally revolve around – Food was excellent – Traffic jams and Corruption, once the two problems are addressed, the country would go a long way – Dhaka has grown so much, you can hardly recognize it – and, Oh, people have got money, loads of it.

The joy from the trip, however, is short lived. In a week or two, the expatriate is back to the routines of the predictable old life – the chores of work, the often mundane conversations at the weekly get-togethers with other expatriates, and the occasional expression of commiseration to friends and acquaintances on the deaths of their near ones.

The first generation immigrant from Bangladesh is essentially an outsider in the United States. He did not grow up here, and he does not have the knowledge of the intricacies of the broader culture of his adopted homeland. He also does not have the time, the energy, or the desire to integrate with the larger society. Although he has lived in this country longer than the span of his life in Bangladesh, he remains firmly committed to the culture of the land he had left decades ago. The expatriate Bangladeshi lives physically in the United States, but the wonderful culture of his adopted homeland that has been shaped by generations of immigrants from the four corners of the world essentially escapes him.

The life lived as a social outsider can be painful. An important manifestation of the life in a cultural cocoon is the marked detachment of the expatriate from the lives of the children who grew up in this country. Although the children remain loving and respectful, they mostly hide the Americans in them, revealing only aspects of their lives with which their parents feel comfortable.

The saddest aspect of the life of the expatriate, however, is the realization that he is an outsider in Bangladesh as well. The land where he was born, went to school, made friends, fell in love for the first time, and had dreams of greatness – he does not have any meaningful connection to that land of his ancestors. He also does not have any chance of developing any meaningful connections during his short visits to Bangladesh. The trips are essentially guided tours – he is chauffeured to people and places – he is always accompanied by a friend or a relative – he does not engage in conversations with the locals – he is scared of the people and the place.

It was not like this before. The trips to Bangladesh used to be magical. The middle aged expatriate was once a young man, and he would be in a state of excitement for months preparing for the trip to Bangladesh. He would go back home with a newly minted degree, with the assurance of a new job, to show off the newborn - a brand new citizen of the United States. With suitcases bursting with gifts, his journey would begin from New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., or Houston. The cramped airplanes and the crowded airports would all be ignored – they were bringing him closer to home. The euphoria would set in when the pilot announced that the plane was in Bangladesh air space. The joy of landing at the Dhaka airport or the wild feeling in the heart when he would spot the first familiar face among the waiting throng was simply priceless.

The pure joy is gone, partially replaced with apprehension. Age does that to all. Also the fact that his connection to Bangladesh was essentially through the people he knew. Some of them have left Bangladesh. His parents, if still alive, are old and frail. His siblings and friends in Bangladesh have their own priorities. They give him time but the connections to the place that came easily to the young man are lost.

The expatriate Bangladeshi now understands the pain of the immigrants who had helped build this great nation. Driven by hunger, famine, persecution, and the desire to build new lives, millions of people from all over the world had come to the United States before him. Most of the early immigrants, however, could never go back to the land of their ancestors as they never had the necessary resources. Also, the persecution and the hunger that had originally driven them out were still there. They had no choice but to live in the United States.

The Bangladeshi expatriate apparently does have the choice of going back. Unlike the early immigrants, he is not constrained by a lack of resources or looming persecution back home. However, he rarely goes back. Leaving the predictable and safe life in the United States is too much of a sacrifice. He also loses the comfort of knowing that his children are only a short plane ride away. Healthcare considerations are another factor. Also, what is he going to do in Bangladesh? Who will help him with everyday chores? How is he going to shape his social life after a gap of two to three decades? Also, most of his old friends are now in the United States. His siblings, if still in Bangladesh, are busy with their own lives. And he has lost completely the street-smarts one needs to survive in Bangladesh. He cannot go back. It is not practical.

The expatriate Bangladeshi does not really have a choice regarding where he wants to spend the coming years of his life. He will stay in the United States. He will grow old here. If lucky, he will be independent, healthy, and will have his immediate family with him until the final days. His only real choice, it seems, is about where he wants his final resting place to be.

A Prairie Home Companion, a long-running National Public Radio (NPR) show is named after a cemetery in Minnesota. The cemetery serves the Norwegian community and was built almost 100 years after Norwegian immigrants started settling in the upper Midwest. According to Garrison Kailor, the creator of the show, it took the Norwegians almost 100 years to realize that there was no going back. How long would it take the Bangladeshis?

Note: Bangladeshi or Bangalee? We have been Bangalees for hundreds of years and we’ll remain so until the end of time. The political identity of Bangladeshi, in contrast, was first used only about four decades ago. However, following the current social practice, I refer to expatriates from Bangladesh as Bangladeshis.