Shankha Ghosh
TRANS. BY Anushka Sen
The Language of Community
You know the feeling when you’re about to move up to a new class and you’re afraid your roll number might be at the top of the attendance register? Well, we didn’t have that because we knew our roll numbers would be arranged according to the first letter of our names, in alphabetical order. By alphabet I mean the English one. So Arun came first, then Bimal, then Chinmay, then Dwijesh. A B C D . . . that’s how it went.
But in that case, how did Tarikul end up at the beginning? We didn’t get it at first. Surely “T” should come much later, how did it skip ahead? One day the mystery cleared up. We found out that his full name was actually Abu Saleh Mohammed Tarikul Alam Khan! What on earth! Did people really have names like a long, long train? We could hardly imagine it. To fit it all in, it was abbreviated to A. S. M. Tarikul Alam Khan. Assistant Station Master—that’s the name we teased him with.
On the other hand, Anwar’s name wound up way down the list. Why? Because it started with an “M,” not an “A.” On the page it’s Mohammad Anwarul Islam. Anwar, Nurul, Saidur—all those names came right after one another, because each one had “Mohammad” before it.
We made these discoveries as we moved from one class to the next, and that’s how a connection grew naturally between the two communities. The headmaster liked the fact that Miladsharif’s club met next to his house. When we worshipped Saraswati every year, Tarikul and co. would blend so easily into the festivities. The day our teacher Hussain Saheb left the school, Nirmalbabu cried a river. After Tarikul and his crew left us in Class Nine and moved to Dhaka, some of us felt like the whole school was emptied out.
If this was how things were, with relationships criss-crossing everywhere, how did our country break apart? Why was there so much unrest? Well, it’s true that these portraits of childhood friendship don’t show the whole picture. I remember how those days were filled with schemes to spark hate between one person and the next. “Larke Lenge Pakistan!” “Vande Mataram!” Warring slogans blared all around us. There were endless efforts to turn Tarikul and Bimal, or Anwar and Dwijesh into enemies.
Such efforts continued, but in those days many small schools organized various programs against them. We did too. One way was to teach us beyond doubt that language did not belong to a single community. How did they explain this to us? Did it have to be through a stout and sturdy lecture? Well, we did have quite a few lectures all through the year. No matter what season, our headmaster would bring in all kinds of respected scholars. And so, our small-town school hosted the likes of Wajid Ali, Bidushekhar Shastri, Kaji Abdul Wadud, Debaprasad Ghosh, Shahidullah. It’s not like we really understood what they said. All we could muster was: “Debaprasad Ghosh?
The one who has mathematics in the palm of his hand? Wow!” Or, “Wajid Ali who said ‘The tradition keeps running on’? Will we really get to see him in the flesh? And Bidushekhar, scholar of the Vedas and Upanishads? Shahidullah, the great grammarian?”
Aside from the fact that Shahidullah was immensely learned in grammar, another fact was also buzzing on everyone’s tongue that day. Headmaster had said, “Do you know, Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyay knows Farsi really well, even better than Shahidullah. And Shahidullah knows Sanskrit really well, far better than Sunitikumar.”
Incredible!
But why exactly was it incredible? Headmaster quizzed us: “What’s so incredible about that? Did all of you assume that if someone is Muslim they can’t be fluent in Sanskrit? Or a Hindu in Farsi?”
“They can?”
“Why not! Whoever learns a language seriously will know it well, won’t they? How is Hindu- Muslim talk relevant here? Language isn’t partitioned off for any particular community. There are plenty of white men who want to draw such boundaries, but should they get away with it?”
“In that case why does our Panditmoshai teach Sanskrit only to the Hindu students, and why do only the Muslim students go to Maulvi Saheb for Arabic and Farsi?”
“True, that is how they do it, but we’ll put an end to those practices. From now on our school will have new customs. Here, students will learn whatever subject they want.”
When we heard this, we felt a rush of excitement. What’s more, some of our friends even changed their subjects! Jiten and Ashish went for Maulvi Saheb’s Arabic and Farsi classes. Anwar attended Sanskrit classes taught by Panditmoshai.
Were there no barriers to any of this? Yes, there were and they kept coming. Whenever Panditmoshai ran into Jiten outside the classroom, he would slowly spin his keychain around his finger and say with mock-seriousness, “How’s it going, Jitu Saheb? Done reciting the Namaaz?” On the other hand, Maulvi Saheb accosted Anwar outside the school gates. Glaring red-eyed at the boy, he said: “Acquired a taste for Hindu ways, have you?”
Anwar wasn’t one to stay silent. Instantly, he fired back: “No.”
“Then why do you attend Panditmoshai’s classes? You should quit Sanskrit.” “No.”
“That’s two ‘no’s in a row. Explain yourself.”
“My father said that if I want to know Bengali well, then learning Sanskrit is more helpful. And Besides—besides, Shahidullah Saheb himself is a scholar of Sanskrit!”
“The impudence!” Maulvi Saheb muttered, as he let go of Anwar’s hand and strode off past the gates.
These incidents soon came to the Headmaster’s attention. To lift the boys’ spirits, he would say: “Those words were uttered in anger, don’t be cowed.”
No, Jiten and Anwar did not cower. Their defiance persisted to the end. But in the wider world that stretched far beyond our little school, neither their defiance nor the Headmaster’s vision was worth very much.
Was it entirely worthless? One brawl after another left our society bruised and battered. The country was ripped apart by malicious political games. Arun and Bimal left Anwar and Nurul to go far, far away. Only the Headmaster stayed on for a while at his school, a singular presence in a sea of fragments, secured with a knot of stubborn love. After a few years, when his anxious family finally brought him to the other side of Bengal, several students from his school rallied around him as he walked to the railway station. Eyes brimming, they wrote heartbroken messages of farewell in their own blood, proving once more that language did not lie within the bounds of a single community.
* * *
GLOSSARY:
Names and honorifics that would signal Muslim identity: Tarikul, Anwar, Nurul, Saidur, Miladsharif, Hussain, Wajid Ali, Kaji Abdul Wadud, Shahidullah, saheb
Names and honorifics that would signal Hindu identity: Nirmal, Bimal, Dwijesh, Bidushekhar, Debaprasad Ghosh, Sunitikumar, moshai.
Saraswati: the Hindu goddess of education and knowledge, and a popular deity in Bengal.
The two warring slogans mentioned here are in their original language, since the phrases are iconic and carry the historical weight in their cadences. They are:
a. “Larke Lenge Pakistan”: “We’ll fight for Pakistan!”
b. “Vande Mataram”: “Mother, we bow to you!” This was a patriotic expression from the famous text Anandamath, written in a heavily Sanskritized Bengali during the freedom movement by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. This ostensibly innocuous slogan took on Hindu right-wing valences.
Shankha Ghosh (1932-2021) was a Bengali writer and scholar. Admired for his innovative craft as well as ethical clarity, Ghosh received several literary awards, including the prestigious Jnanpith. Born in Bangladesh before the partition and eventually based in West Bengal (India), Ghosh was preoccupied with the suffering of migrants and refugees and wrote on this subject throughout his life. “The Language of Community” echoes these themes while showing a lighter touch than Ghosh's best-known work.
Anushka Sen is an international PhD candidate in the English Department at Indiana University. An emerging translator from Bengali into English, Anushka was a Peter K. Jansen Memorial Fellow for the 2021 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference. In 2022, she took part in the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference with a translation project on Rabindranath Tagore. Her writing has appeared in the Dalhousie Review, Eunoia Review, Popula, and Hopscotch Translation.