Prisoners of divisions

As a collective, we pay for it by accepting death of dreams, possibilities of plural & interwoven loyalties as absurd

It should not come as a surprise that the subcontinent’s ruling groups are experienced masters at using ‘national security’ and ideologies of difference to perpetuate enmity between peoples. The word ‘con’ is right there in the middle of the ‘subcontinent’. The transfer of power in 1947 created enduring myths of glory in entities to which the British transferred their power. The simultaneous partition of the sub-continental British territories also created other more pernicious myths of ‘self’, ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.  These powerful schemes hatched from the deepest bowels of the deep state have been around for some time now. With the right combination of propaganda and guns, carrots and sticks, awards and torture, celebrations and prison terms, pursued doggedly over decades, these projects have started bearing poisonous fruits to whose tastes we have grown attached. The nation states of the subcontinent have ‘matured’. Selfhoods have been forcibly beaten into post-Partition ‘national’ shapes to serve the interests of the mandarins sitting in Delhi, Dhaka and Islamabad. This is a crime of epic proportions. People pay for it by being killed, maimed and silenced for not toeing the line in silence. As a collective, we pay for it by accepting the death of dreams and possibilities of plural and interwoven loyalties and loves as absurd.

It must be the shallowness of our imagination and memory that we think it is ‘natural’ that our respective unitary nation states demand that loyalty, longing and love should end at the Radcliffe border with clinical precision. In 1971, a struggle made some of these clean-cut things fuzzy. This was the movement leading up to the independence of the landmass that now calls itself the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. It is true that the Indian Union and many of its peoples were supportive of East Bengal’s struggle for independence. But there was something in the enthusiasm of the Bangladesh solidarity initiatives in West Bengal that didn’t quite fit into the neat India-Bangladesh narrative. West Bengal was ‘closer’ to East Bengal in a way that Mizoram wasn’t. This kind of closeness runs against the grain of nation state narratives emanating from Delhi but in reality, often the least embarrassing reaction to such closeness is to publicly ignore it. Think about how Delhi reacts to resolutions about Eelam Tamils in the Tamil Nadu Assembly. Think about what Kabul or Peshawar think about the Durand Line and Islamabad’s attitude towards that narrative.

I am talking of a bygone moment. This ‘special’ closeness that poured out in West Bengal in 1971 does not exist anymore as West Bengal has also learned to look east through a Delhi lens. This erstwhile special closeness was spontaneous. Delhi knew of this ‘affair’ — something that wasn’t quite infidelity or ‘disloyalty’ but a complicated kind of lopsided polyamory that only unfortunate victims of Partition zones can relate to. It is a love that dare not tell its name in a subcontinent divided into nation states that demand total fidelity and loyalty not only in public but also in realms of fantasy. Gobindo Haldar was one such lover. He died on January 17 in Kolkata aged 84 in a very modest healthcare facility. He was born in Bongaon, Jessore district, Bengal. Jessore was one of districts that were partitioned up to the thana level. Bongaon ‘fell’ in the Indian Union. Gobindo worked in the income tax department but was a lyricist for Akashbani, India’s national public radio broadcaster. Later, when the Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra (Free Bengal Radio) was set up by the Bangladesh government-in-exile, Gobindo was asked by Kamal Ahmed to write songs for Free Bengal Radio. And he wrote what became words that stirred a people. The most famous songs he wrote include “Mora Ekti Phulke Bachabo Bole Juddho Kori” (We fight to save one flower), “Purbo Digonte Surjo Uthechhe Rokto Lal” (A red sun has risen in the eastern horizon) and “Padma Meghna Jamuna Tomar Amar Thikana” (The land of Padma, Meghna, Jamuna rivers is where you and I belong). The name of the last song comes from a famous political slogan that was posited against the Pakistan-loyalist religious slogan “Tomar Amar Thikana Praner Bhumi Madina” (Beloved land of Madina is where you and I belong). I have a picture of him holding a Bangladesh flag to his chest.

He was from a different universe, representing a different universe of ‘loyalty’. He lived amongst us, in West Bengal, in the Indian Union. And we did not care, because we are prisoners of divisive ‘national’ narratives that make us smaller as humans. How many such people are there? Let us look around. Let us expand and see the many fights for justice all around us for what they are, for Cornel West says that justice is what love looks like in public. Let us salute such lovers and have the humanity to criticise ideologies that deem saluting love as ‘illegal’. Let us learn to listen to the illicit whispers of Gobindo Haldar. One of the many clues to this subcontinent’s salvation may lie there. After all, this fecund land also teaches to love as did Shah Abdul Karim — “Bondhe maya lagaise, piriti shikhaise, dewana banaise, ki jadu koriya bondhe maya lagaise” (My friend has entranced me, has taught me love, has made me diwana, had entranced me by some magic).

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2015.

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