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July 14, 2002
EXCERPTS: Bengali first or Muslim?
Santi Rozario writes about the ambivalence in the national identity of the people of Bangladesh
Bengal has been ruled by Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim conquerors and different periods are accordingly characterized by the religion of the rulers. But the illiterate peasantry has absorbed little of these world religions. It has been argued, drawing on the distinction between the little traditions and the ‘great traditions’ of the villagers, that Muslims in Bangladesh retained the beliefs associated with ‘prehistoric and protohistoric cultures’ long after they dissociated themselves from Hindu rituals or tribal beliefs.
Caste organization developed in Bengal around the fifth century when Bengal rulers brought Brahmans from west, south and north India as religious and legal authorities. The Hindus of Bengal, however, assumed a distinct Bengali character, becoming ethnically consolidated and distinguishable from the Hindus in the rest of India. Yet even in Bengal, the course of Hinduization differed in the eastern and western regions. The east was not as easily accessible as the west and thus the people of East Bengal were relatively free from control by the Guptas and other Hindu rulers.
This remoteness, among other factors, contributed to the conversion to Islam of the great majority of the people of East Bengal in the wake of the Muslim conquest. It is argued that the egalitarian ideology of Islam appealed to the East Bengali people, the vast majority of whom occupied lower positions in the social hierarchy. However, it was not the urban-oriented ulema (Muslim religious teacher) orthodoxy but egalitarian sufi-oriented Islam that won the East Bengalis over. The current Islamization is actually an attempt to impose an ulema definition of Islam on the Muslim peasantry as a social control mechanism.
Despite regional and religious distinctiveness, however, East Bengalis shared with West Bengalis a cultural identity in the form of language, traditions and a value system which predates, but has been influenced by, Hinduism. The dual aspect of Bengali Muslims’ identity has been and still is seen as involving a polarity.
Bengali history shows how the identity quest of the Bengali Muslims has fluctuated between the Bengali and the Muslim with the socio-economic and political climate of the region.... Indeed, at the turn of the nineteenth century, during the period of Bengali renaissance, Bengali language and culture were linked to the Brahmanic heritage and Bengali language was heavily influenced by Sanskrit and Hindu mythologies. In an attempt to be recognized as the true Muslims, Bengali Muslim leaders of the latter part of the nineteenth century made a conscious effort at “purifying Bengali language and culture of its ‘Hindu’ accretions”. Nevertheless, these Bengali Muslim leaders found themselves in the contradictory position of being a Muslim and a Bengali at the same time.
It was this concern about Muslim identity that gave rise to a political movement resulting in the separation of a Muslim Pakistan from India. The Bengali Muslim peasants were told they were different from the neighbouring Hindus; yet the ways and culture of the elite foreign Muslims were out of their reach. As Roy explains, ‘the Bengali Muslim search for a collective identity was clearly caught between the two opposite pulls of an extra-territorial Pan-Islamic ideology and of a local geographical Bengali culture’.
Thus while the partition of Bengal in 1947 seemed to have demonstrated the relative strength of Muslim identity against Bengali identity, subsequent political events in East Pakistan exposed the ambivalence within the identity of the Muslims of East Bengal. A Bengali cultural consciousness re-emerged with the language movement of the 1950s, leading to the separation of East Pakistan from West Pakistan. The issue of Bengali cultural identity was of secondary importance to that of the Bengali bourgeoisie’s desire for access to resources controlled by the West Pakistanis.
With political independence the ambivalence of Bangladeshi identity remains unresolved. At present at least 85 per cent of the population in Bangladesh are Muslims while nine per cent are Hindus and the rest are Buddhists, Christians and tribals. Yet despite this overwhelming demographic domination, the Muslim elite continue to appeal to communalism both at rural and urban levels to achieve their goals. In Doria local level politics is characterized by communalism, and its impact is very real. While this is partly the product of special circumstances in an area with a relatively high proportion of Christian inhabitants, it also reflects a more general situation in Bangladesh.
To understand the intercommunal problems in Doria one needs to go beyond Doria. Since the mid 1970s elites at national level have continued to manipulate Islam for political purposes. There has been a renewed emphasis in the media on Islamic symbolism, which had declined during the Mujib years (between 1971 and 1975). Such Islamic revivalism has no doubt assisted the Dorian Muslim majority in their use of Islamic values (purity and parda) to maintain their domination. Throughout present-day South Asia communalism is at the centre of politics.... Engineer suggests that although there were fights between Hindu and Muslim elites there was no communalism in mediaeval India. He sees it as a modern ideology which serves modern social classes. As Bengal history shows, the categories of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ have been constructed by different interest groups. The British policy of divide and rule when they felt threatened by the United Bengal of Muslims and Hindus, is one of the most telling examples. The Muslim and Hindu elites were equally interested in the game of enhancing their own positions...
It should be emphasized that the alternating use of ethnic and religious identities in elite-level politics has not interfered with the deep-rooted value system of the Bangladeshi masses. But the question of dual identity has important implications for the overall belief and value system of the Muslims of Bangladesh. If they are both Muslim and Bengali at the same time, it is worth inquiring into the varying circumstances under which one identity prevails over the other.
Excerpted with permission from
Purity and communal boundaries: women and social change in a Bangladeshi village
By Santi Rozario
The University Press Ltd, Red Crescent Building, 114 Motijheel C/A, P.O. Box 2611, Dhaka-1000
E-mail:
upl@bangla.net.
Website: www.uplbooks.com
ISBN 984-05-1611-6
200pp. Tk375
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