Namasudras and Other Things

One of the the real benefits of the web is the cyber-friendships you form. Over the past couple of years I have corresponded with Joanna Kirkpatrick, a retired American academic who taught in Bangladesh in the 1970s and has retained a strong attachment to the country. She has put together one of the best websytes on rickshaws (rickshas) availble. I have listed it before but will do so again as its been updated. It can be found at http://www.ricksharts.com. It contains a lot of excellent photographs plus a list of essential readings. Thoroughly recommended is Metaphor and Motive in Bangladesh Ricksha Arts: A Burkean Reading.

My conversations with Joanna have prompted me to reflect on 'why Bangladesh'? I can remember watching the BBC dispatches in 1971 with a great deal of interest, and horror. As I remember it some of the scenes were very graphic including one where a person walked up to a man and engaged him in conversation and then pulled out a knife and cut his throat. All of this was captured on film, including the death throes of the man as he lay on the ground. Images like this don't ever go away.

In 1972 I returned with my wife and child to Perth after living and working in England and Canada. In 1972 Perth was even more of a backwater than it is today but it provided opportunities not available elsewhere. One of those was return to formal study at the University of Western Australia where I had earlier been an English major undergraduate. When I returned to UWA I checked out the English curriculum and found they had added one book to the syllabus in 7 years. I had been tempted to study at the University of Alberta where I could have studied Poetry of World War 1 (which interested me) among other subjects. The lack of development and choice in English led me to ask 'what do I know least about?. The answer was Asian culture and history, so I enrolled in a history degree and studied Southeast Asian History (Chris Wake), Indian history (Hugh Owen) and Chinese history (Les Marchant). I was extraordinary lucky as UWA then had one of the best Asian history programs in Australia and the South Asian program was outstanding. I was exceedingly well taught and encouraged to go on.

My first dissertation for Honours was the Namasudras of Bengal, an interesting out caste group who followed an unusual path to political empowerment. The usual path for caste uplift was the process of sanskritisation, that is, the lowly caste adopts the practices of the higher Hindu castes. The Namasudras didn't see much future in this and decided to maintain a degree of caste autonomy through education and economic activity. A number of prominent Namasudras became lawyers and then politicians and in 1937, when the British finally allowed a degree of regional, provincial political autonomy the Namasudras supported Fazlul Huq (The Lion of Bengal) and his Muslim party rather than the Hindu dominated Congress. They were rewarded with a number of ministries in the provincial government and for a time exercised power on a regional basis. From 1937 to 1940 the province of Bengal had a Muslim/Namasudra government, which suggested that there were other paths to preferment for the lower castes other than sanskritisation and membership of Congress. In 1947, at partition, the bulk of the Namasudra population chose to stay with Pakistan and it was only in 1971, when they were singled out by Bengali nationalists as a fifth columnists, to closely identified with Pakistan did they leave in large numbers. They are now dispersed throughout the world with quite large communities in Canada and the UK. Interestingly, I am told by a friend of namasudra descent, that this history has largely been forgotten by these communities.

I recently re-read the dissertation and thought it held up rather well although there are two serious lapses. Firstly I didn't pay suffcient attention to the alternative voices in the Namasudra community - those who supported Congress in the Nationalist struggle and the conclusion needs strengthening.

So when the opportunity came to teach in Bangladesh it seemed to me that a certain symmetry was at work!

Photography 2

My technical skills are sometimes deficient! I tried to embed the web addresses of Drik, Pathshala, Chobi Mela and Geoffrey Hiller's photographs in my last post but failed to do so. Still don't know why but will work on it. In the meantime here they are.

Drik - http://www.drik.net/

Pathshala - http://www.pathshala.net/

Chobi Mela - http://chobimela.org/

Hiller's photograph's - http://www.bangladeshproject.com

Photography

For some inexplicable reason there is a strong link between photography and Bangladesh. Compared to other places it is not that photogenic - or put another way it lacks icons such as the Grand Canyon or Great Barrier Reef. In other ways Bangladesh is an incredibly rich tapestry that photographers love to write upon. I have photographs (copies and in books) from nineteenth and early twentieth century that are rich in details and culture. Contemporary Bangladeshi photography owes a lot to Shahidul Alam who set up Drik and Pathshala, the South Asian Media Academy and Institute of Photography . These two institutions epitomise photography and have made Bangladesh, to many people's surprise, a centre for photography in the South. Related to these two is Chobi Mela a biennial festival of photography that attracts all of the great names in contemporary photography.

My interest in photography in this regard is not abstract. My friend and colleague Norm Leslie takes students to Dhaka every year to work at Drik where they learn a great deal about photography and life and Bangladesh and at one time I tried, with Shahidul's encouragement, to bring about a merger between ULAB and Pathshala to create a major degree awarding body for photography in Bangladesh - and one day I may write that story. Suffice to say I regret that it didn't eventuate. But what prompted this meditation on photography was an email from another friend in Dhaka bringing to my attention the recent photographs of Geoffrey Hiller , which are very evocative of the Bangladesh I know and well worth looking at.

And as a disclosure I must add that I proudly own a Shadidul Alam photograph - of a boat on the banks of the Brahmaputra, which my grandkids love.

The Fence

Another long break - justifiable!! We have been in Ubud, Bali, taking some much needed R&R, and very enjoyable it was too. Having been to Bali a few times I have decided that Ubud is the place for me. It is a tourist centre but with a difference - it seems to me that the Balinese actually control access to their culture and determine what happens unlike other places whose economy is so tourist dependent. And the food is fantastic!!

I took a lot of reading away with me. One piece was a recent Guardian Weekly where I came across an article by Delwar Hussain on the fence that India has built around Bangladesh to control the flow of population across the ill-defined and porous borders separating the two nations. Few people seem to know too much about this fence, which is surprising as it is more substantial and longer than any other fence built by a nation to separate people for spurious political reasons. The Berlin Wall, the Israeli wall and the US fences designed to keep the Latinos out all pale into insignificance compared to the Indian wall.

It is some 4000 kms long, 2.4 metres high, which as the Guardian points out

cuts villages in two and divides agriculture lands and markets. It separates families and communities, cutting across mangrove swamps, forests and mountains

and it clearly doesn't work! Between 2000 and 2007 over 700 Bangladeshis have been killed on the Indo-Bangladeshi border, mostly by the Indian Border security Force (BSF). This is scandalous, and its a shocking indictment of the level of disinterest in Bangladesh in the west. If such numbers were killed on the US/Mexico borders there would be outrage.

It is alleged that those killed are smugglers, or illegal immigrants. So its OK to kill smugglers? According to Hussain this is not true. Most deaths arise from genuine confusion among the people who have traditionally crossed the border in the pursuit of their livelihood or, and most likely, because the border guards feel they have been cheated in their illegal dealings with smugglers, or various groups of the BSF fail to communicated their deals with the smugglers to other BSF groups. It is not a pretty picture and something need to be done.