Finding Cultural Syncretism in Bangladesh

바카라�If you want to study cultural syncretism, you need to go to Bangladesh,바카라� historian Mushirul Hasan told me during a freewheeling conversation many years ago. The idea stuck. Much later came the urge to write India바카라�s migration story. So long we had only listened to the expats바카라� tales of love and longing for home. Are there people here harking back in their evening ghettos to lost sounds and smells from their native land? The question led me to discover Bangladeshi migrants. The story with its branches and roots grew ambitiously in my mind. Then one day in 2010, I took a plane to Dhaka. I had already contacted Ataur Rahman, a senior journalist there. I was off to see the migrants바카라� backstory and also the liminality of faiths as folk culture.

Inside the press club, the mood was decidedly nonconformist. When I asked about Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, someone remarked that though firmly in the saddle, she was overlooking corruption by the Awami League functionaries and encouraging nepotism. 바카라�But her pro-poor programmes are popular.바카라�바카라� At that point, perhaps Hasina herself did not know the danger of riding roughshod over democratic values and aspirations, that political stability was inalienably linked to the art of accommodating dissent.

Rahman took me to the Pratham Alo office. As the paper바카라�s tone was pronouncedly plural, a reassuring liberal air prevailed around. 바카라�There are pockets where the religious right is still well-entrenched,바카라�바카라� writer-journalist Anisul Hoque said. 바카라�Their strongest base is Chittagong.바카라�바카라� The paper바카라�s film critic pointed out that the biggest ever box-office hit from the Dhaka film industry, Beder Meye Jyotsna, was actually an imitation of Bollywood melodrama. But Monpura, with its soft, slow cadence and an elegiac tone accenting a sense of loss and waste, had rallied to emerge as the second-top grosser in Dhallywood history. Interestingly, while the first film incorporates elements from the Hindu folk tradition, the other is critical of decadent Muslim orthodoxy.

A seemingly left-leaning publisher I met was not just dismissive of the right-reactionary Jamaat-e-Islami and similar outfits, but boldly questioned the assumption that Muslims everywhere needed to accept the Arab ritualistic traditions as all-embracing. He did not seem to be an odd or idiosyncratic avant-garde but representative of a significant segment of cultural and political opinion in Bangladesh.

Kamal Lohani, a cultural icon with a background in radio, fondly went back to the day in January 1972 when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had returned from captivity in Pakistan to an independent Bangladesh. He along with the legendary All India Radio commentator Debdulal Bandyopadhyay gave live commentary along the national hero바카라�s route from the airport to Ramna Race Course, the site of his historic rally that sparked the freedom movement on March 7, 1971. He then contrasted the euphoria of secular nationalism of the nation바카라�s early years with the intolerance of Islamic fundamentalists who had assaulted Bauls, chopped off their flowing hair, and thrown bombs at their mela.

In the evening, Rahman took me to a Hindu businessman. The man바카라�s predicament was obvious: he could not think of closing the business he had built over the years but was torn by the uncertainties ahead. He talked about his relatives in India and his trawl for a good boy across the border for his marriageable daughter.

On our way to a restaurant for dinner, a friend of Rahman바카라�s joined us in the car. Not Rahman바카라�s own car but borrowed from a friend for the day. When we got past the Purana Paltan area, they excitedly told me that eminent Bengali writer Buddhadeb Bose had lived here. Over dinner, a younger Hindu man made fun of the political culture in West Bengal: 바카라�CPM activists raise clouds of cigarette smoke over heated political debates and jangle empty cups in teashops, huh!바카라�바카라�

After an eight-hour bus ride, crossing the enormous Padma by ferry, when I reached Khulna, the bay was breathing somewhere close. Salt in the air, in drinking water. Fast-flowing rivers widen into the sea. When I was returning to the guesthouse from the river ghat one evening, I was stranded by a flash flood. The Rupsa at high tide. Whipped periodically by devastating cyclones and the dense-dark Sundarbans beckoning you to the unknown, the lowlands are elemental, far removed from politics and the subcontinent바카라�s bloody trail of religious powerplay.

People here clung to their language as the raison d바카라�être바카라�a petrol pump named Prantik (outlier), a cinema Manihar (gem necklace) and a bare raft with a tattered sail had a Yeatsian resonance in its name바카라�Gaang-chil (seagull). A power-grid employee I befriended took me home one day for lunch. I asked Farheen, his lively little daughter, if she could sing something. 바카라�I can say a poem,바카라� she smiled, reciting a Tagore poem beautifully. Tagore and Sheikh Mujib seemed to represent two major strands of life in Bangladesh바카라�one cultural and the other political. Mujib바카라�s statues dotted the entire landscape. No one knew then that some of them would be hammered down during a right-wing uprising years later.

One morning I went to the dargah of the Sufi saint Khanjan Ali. What drew large numbers of devotees here was not hate sermons but folk belief and lore, voodoo and magic. Two abominable crocodiles, imported from Chennai, roosting in the adjacent lake were like the presiding deities. Devotees made them offerings of goats, hens바카라�if accepted by the ugly alligators, that would be a good omen. The crocs too earned the fundamentalist ire at one point바카라�for being 바카라�un-Islamic바카라�.

The Bangladesh I saw was still solidly based on its founding ideology바카라�liberal, tolerant with strong groundings in culture. Despite a pervading sense of insecurity, Hindus enjoyed equal rights and certainly were not assailed by a sense of persecution. Travelling mostly alone to all impossible places, only once a man, probably a loony, accused me of working for the Indian High Commission. I was surprised too to see women mostly in black burqas바카라�something culturally alien to the robust Bengali sense of gender justness.

In August 2024, the rising fuelled by the religious right targeted the values that inspired and sustained the 1971 Liberation War. A nationalism spurred by a language derived from Sanskrit is anathema to the Jamaat hardliners. They have three clear objectives: deny women equal rights, persecute the minorities and supplant liberal pluralistic ideas with orthodox, obscurantist dogmas.

After some queries, I finally reached the seat of the Bauls. The men in orange robes, long-haired, string instruments in hands, were scattered around the front veranda of the raw structure situated on a high ground. Their leader, who had crossed quite a few borders in his peripatetic youth, returned home and with his savings built the bare home and his Baul group over the years.

Knowing this evening was specially draped for me, I handed Siddiqur Rahman a Rs 500 note. In Bangladeshi taka that should be a bit more. After his chelas, Siddiqur himself picked up the string instrument. Eyes closed in meditation, he bowed, his long hair falling on his face. Then he smiled. 바카라�Nabi/Tum aankhon ka noor/O tum rahte ho Mathura mein바카라�바카라� (Prophet/You are the light of my eyes/You live in Mathura.)

Two Hindu widows in white saris came down the path tacking back and forth. This was the syncretism Mushirul Hasan had talked about. Border Crossers, my migration novel in the future, would be about all this.