Who is the Greatest Bengali?

Who is the greatest Bengali?

By Anwer Mooraj

Published in DAWN, April 26, 2004

The BBC seems to be at it again. Fresh from their excursion in determining the greatest Englishman, where science eventually triumphed over politics, they have now turned their attention to a people who have always had an embarrassment of riches. But this time their efforts have hit a hidden reef and resulted in a storm of protest. The BBC Bangla Service recently conducted an opinion survey of its listeners to determine the "Greatest Bengali of All Time". The survey, spread across 12 million listeners in Bangladesh, West Bengal and the Bengali diaspora, took 20 days to compile, and concluded on April 14, the Bengali New Year's Day, after a thousand listeners had responded through email and the post.

The result of the survey showed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as topping the list. This was not unexpected, for politics inevitably dominates over culture in this part of the world. The urban middle class in Bangladesh is, however, sharply divided over the survey which the opposition Awami League regards as "the verdict of history". The survey has nevertheless been roundly condemned by opponents of the Awami League who see the BBC as a partisan villain. And the Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal, which is the student wing of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has rejected the survey outright.

What has astonished a number of critics in Kolkata as well as Dhaka, is that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman has edged out people like Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize winner, Kazi Nazrul Islam, the rebel poet, Subhas Chandra Bose, who led an army of Indian nationalists against the British Raj, Jagadish Chandra Basu, the great scientist, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, who was always a thorn in the side of the West Pakistan establishment, and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the brilliant lawyer, who went on to become prime minister of Pakistan.

However, for a non-Bengali like myself, who was weaned on the romantic fatalism of Marcel Carne and nurtured on the exuberant surrealism of Luis Bunuel, I was truly astounded to learn that in the survey, one of Calcutta's greatest sons, who happens to be one of the world's greatest film directors, did not even figure as an "also ran". I am referring, of course, to the late Satyajit Ray, who is frequently mentioned in the same context as Renoir, Kurosawa and Bergman, and is frequently compared to Pagnol, Cocteau and de Sica. Ray certainly has his admirers in Karachi, and I am sure if the lads from the BBC had, in their quest, ventured to this neck of the woods, they would have acquired a different set of preferences.

In fact, on July 20, 1992, Hameed Haroon, one of the city's cultural giants, ably assisted by Rehana Saigol, paid tribute to the great Satyajit Ray. In a 60-minute illustrated lecture at the PACC, he presented a series of vignettes culled from some of the master's more accessible works, interspersed by crisp, informative and intelligent asides.

Unlike Hameed Haroon, I never had the honour of meeting Satyajit Ray. But I understand from reading Andrew Robinson's excellent biography of the great director (which was more exhaustive than Marie Seton's earlier work) that the latter was an extremely humane person, humble to a fault - a person who was sensitive to the needs of others and who always contrived to suggest a life of unruffled serenity.

What made him different from other directors of the western and eastern persuasion, was that he was equally at home in the West and the East, whether he was chatting with hikers rambling over a pub lunch, or in his native Calcutta where in a matter of seconds a boiling sky could discharge a wilderness of electricity and produce a tropical downpour of such intensity that life was paralysed for hours.

Though he was not averse to operating out of a bed-sitter in Paddington, Ray worked best at home in his study ensconced in his favourite chair — an intermittently functioning telephone within easy reach.

He liked to recline in loose clothes with his bare feet resting on a convenient low table and work at the red cloth-bound shooting notebooks that contained literally every aspect of a film.

There was no air conditioning in the study, and sometimes in the sweltering heat of summer he had to close the louvered windows to shut out the outside world.

The walls of his study were fringed by bookcases crammed with books and magazines. In a corner a bust of Beethoven stood on a piano under a photograph of Sergei Eisenstein (director of Battleship Potemkin) and in a full cabinet, almost spilling out its properties, were cassettes, records and tapes of western classical music where Mozart and Bach enjoyed a special position.

Ray often compared the works of Eisenstein to the music of Bach and the films of Pudovkin to the music of Beethoven. Both directors worked with unwavering discipline over a wide range of dynamics and colour.

There was no image of Tagore who had influenced three generations of the Ray family. When Andrew Robinson casually asked Ray why he didn't display a bust of Tagore, the master chuckled and said "Such a cliché."

Ray, an advertising man, an illustrator, an author, a critic and a filmmaker directed over 30 films since 1955 and always with a telling economy of means. He had an almost dilettante quasi-professional disdain concerning money.

He distilled the urban as well as the rural landscape with equal felicity, whether involved in a pacy drama about a child from a random cross section of metropolitan low life, or while painting a grimly authentic canvas of squalour and destitution in the City of Dreadful Night.

Ray experimented with mood, period and milieu more than any other director and won almost every major prize, sometimes more than once. In 1992, he was awarded an Oscar for a lifetime of achievement in films — a presentation which was made in a Calcutta hospital shortly before his death.

Thirty years earlier, in 1960, the first American homage to Ray was presented at the University of California in Berkeley by Albert Johnson. This Ray programme included the US premiers of The Music Room and The Goddess.

It was also in 1960 that the Apu trilogy was taken up by an American distributor, and the United States was introduced to one of the most prodigious personalities in the history of the cinema.

Akira Kurosawa, director of the Japanese classic Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, described Ray as a giant of the movie industry. And Tim Radford of the Guardian who after seeing The Chess Players, a film about two civilizations, one effete and ineffectual, the other vigorous and malignant, wrote: "Satyajit Ray seems to be able to achieve more and more with less and less".

Some of the other reviewers were not quite so generous. After the screening of Devi one London reviewer wrote: "The story itself is dauntingly alien." Another felt "it was an exquisite bore. The action is as remote as one of those Indian temple friezes depicting the gods about their bloody business."

The reviewer of The Times was a little less patronizing. "The film is more a matter of uncluttered story telling than of atmosphere and the loving accumulation of detail." And Bosley Crowther, doyen of the New York critics, was quite unmoved on the occasion of the US premiere of Pather Panchali (Ballad of the Road), and found the film amateurish in the extreme.

Ray had a lot to say about critics particularly the British and the Americans who insisted on commenting critically on the world of other people without familiarizing themselves with the latter's cultural and historical background.

Once, after reading a particularly unintelligent review of Devi by an English writer, Ray pointed out that in western religious thinking dominated by the Jewish and Christian traditions, God is always represented in male form — whereas in India the female nature of God is also celebrated.

When the citizens of Kolkata and Dhaka read this epistle, one hopes they will give this great human being an honoured place among the other great Bengalis. He certainly deserves every consideration.

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib

BANGABANDHU SHEIKH MUJIBUR RAHMAN

The life of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the saga of a great leader turning peoplepower into an armed struggle that liberated a nation and created the world’s ninth most populous state. The birth of the sovereign state of Bangladesh in December 1971, after a heroic war of nine months against the Pakistani colonial rule, was the triumph of his faith in the destiny of his people. Sheikh Mujib, endearingly called Bangabandhu or friend of Bangladesh, rose from the people, molded their hopes and aspirations into a dream and staked his life in the long battle for making it real. He was a true democrat, and he employed in his struggle for securing justice and fairplay for the Bengalees only democratic and constitutional weapons until the last moment. It is no accident of history that in an age of military coup d’etat and ‘strong men’, Sheikh Mujib attained power through elections and mass movement and that in an age of decline of democracy he firmly established democracy in one of the least developed countries of Asia.

Sheikh Mujib was born on 17 March 1920 in a middle class family at Tungipara in Gopalganj district. Standing 5 feet 11 inches, he was taller than the average Bengalee. Nothing pleased him more than being close to the masses, knowing their joys and sorrows and being part of their travails and triumphs. He spoke their soft language but in articulating their sentiments his voice was powerful and resonant. He had not been educated abroad, nor did he learn the art of hiding feelings behind sophistry; yet he was loved as much by the urban educated as the common masses of the villages. He inspired the intelligentsia and the working class alike. He did not, however, climb to leadership overnight.

Early Political Life: His political life began as an humble worker while he was still a student. He was fortunate to come in early contact with such towering personalities as Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy and A K Fazlul Huq, both charismatic Chief Ministers of undivided Bengal. Adolescent Mujib grew up under the gathering gloom of stormy politics as the aging British raj in India was falling apart and the Second World War was violently rocking the continents. He witnessed the ravages of the war and the stark realities of the great famine of 1943 in which about five million people lost their lives. The tragic plight of the people under colonial rule turned young Mujib into a rebel.

This was also the time when he saw the legendary revolutionary Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose challenging the British raj. Also about this time he came to know the works of Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, Rabindranath Tagore and rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Soon after the partition of India in 1947 it was felt that the creation of Pakistan with its two wings separated by a physical distance of about 1,200 miles was a geographical monstrosity. The economic, political, cultural and linguistic characters of the two wings were also different. Keeping the two wings together under the forced bonds of a single state structure in the name of religious nationalism would merely result in a rigid political control and economic exploitation of the eastern wing by the all-powerful western wing which controlled the country’s capital and its economic and military might.

Early Movement: In 1948 a movement was initiated to make Bengali one of the state languages of Pakistan. This can be termed the first stirrings of the movement for an independent Bangladesh. The demand for cultural freedom gradually led to the demand for national independence. During that language movement Sheikh Mujib was arrested and sent to jail. During the blood-drenched language movement in 1952 he was again arrested and this time he provided inspiring leadership of the movement from inside the jail.

In 1954 Sheikh Mujib was elected a member of the then East Pakistan Assembly. He joined A K Fazlul Huq’s United Front government as the youngest minister. The ruling clique of Pakistan soon dissolved this government and Shiekh Mujib was once again thrown into prison. In 1955 he was elected a member of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly and was again made a minister when the Awami League formed the provincial government in 1956. Soon after General Ayub Khan staged a military coup in Pakistan in 1958, Sheikh Mujib was arrested once again and a number of cases were instituted against him. He was released after 14 months in prison but was re-arrested in February 1962. In fact, he spent the best part of his youth behind the prison bars.

Supreme Test: March 7, 1971 was a day of supreme test in his life. Nearly two million freedom loving people assembled at the Ramna Race Course Maidan, later renamed Suhrawardy Uddyan, on that day to hear their leader’s command for the battle for liberation. The Pakistani military junta was also waiting to trap him and to shoot down the people on the plea of suppressing a revolt against the state. Sheikh Mujib spoke in a thundering voice but in a masterly well-calculated restrained language. His historic declaration in the meeting was: "Our struggle this time is for freedom. Our struggle this time is for independence." To deny the Pakistani military an excuse for a crackdown, he took care to put forward proposals for a solution of the crisis in a constitutional way and kept the door open for negotiations.

The crackdown, however, did come on March 25 when the junta arrested Sheikh Mujib for the last time and whisked him away to West Pakistan for confinement for the entire duration of the liberation war. In the name of suppressing a rebellion the Pakistani military let loose hell on the unarmed civilians throughout Bangladesh and perpetrated a genocide killing no less than three million men, women and children, raping women in hundreds of thousands and destroying property worth billions of taka. Before their ignominious defeat and surrender they, with the help of their local collaborators, killed a large number of intellectuals, university professors, writers, doctors, journalists, engineers and eminent persons of other professions. In pursuing a scorch-earth policy they virtually destroyed the whole of the country’s infrastructure. But they could not destroy the indomitable spirit of the freedom fighters nor could they silence the thundering voice of the leader. Tape recordings of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib’s 7th March speech kept on inspiring his followers throughout the war.

Return and Reconstruction: Forced by international pressure and the imperatives of its own domestic predicament, Pakistan was obliged to release Sheikh Mujib from its jail soon after the liberation of Bangladesh and on 10 January 1972 the great leader returned to his beloved land and his admiring nation.

But as he saw the plight of the country his heart bled and he knew that there would be no moment of rest for him. Almost the entire nation including about ten million people returning from their refuge in India had to be rehabilitated, the shattered economy needed to be put back on the rail, the infrastructure had to be rebuilt, millions had to be saved from starvation and law and order had to be restored. Simultaneously, a new constitution had to be framed, a new parliament had to be elected and democratic institutions had to be put in place. Any ordinary mortal would break down under the pressure of such formidable tasks that needed to be addressed on top priority basis. Although simple at heart, Sheikh Mujib was a man of cool nerves and of great strength of mind. Under his charismatic leadership the country soon began moving on to the road to progress and the people found their long-cherished hopes and aspirations being gradually realized.

Assassination: But at this critical juncture, his life was cut short by a group of anti-liberation reactionary forces who in a pre-dawn move on 15 August 1975 not only assassinated him but 23 of his family members and close associates. Even his 10 year old son Russel’s life was not spared by the assassins. The only survivors were his two daughters, Sheikh Hasina - now the country’s Prime Minister - and her younger sister Sheikh Rehana, who were then away on a visit to Germany. In killing the father of the Nation, the conspirators ended a most glorious chapter in the history of Bangladesh but they could not end the great leader’s finest legacy- the rejuvenated Bengali nation. In a fitting tribute to his revered memory, the present government has declared August 15 as the national mourning day. On this day every year the people would be paying homage to the memory of a man who became a legend in his won lifetime. Bangabandhu lives in the heart of his people. Bangladesh and Bangabandhu are one and inseparable. Bangladesh was Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s vision and he fought and died for it.