Bangladesh’s National Anthem Controversy Continues
After the publication of my article (southasiajournal.net/make-it-snappy-lets-do-away-with-our-existing-national-anthem/; www.eurasiareview.com/18092024-make-it-snappy-time-to-do-away-with-bangladeshs-existing-national-anthem-oped/), I discovered that some more thoughts and ideas needed to be added as a kind of postscript.
Francis Jeffrey’s review of William Wordsworth’s long poem The Excursion (1814), one of the first reviews soon after the publication of the long narrative-dramatic poem, begins with the famous four-word statement: “This will never do.” Perhaps Jeffrey was right for the poem, not without its own prominent place to reckon with in the Romantic and Wordsworthian corpus as a whole, never did quite the same way as the rest of the great poet’s work did. Rabindranath Tagore’s “Amar Sonar Bangla” (My Golden Bengal) is also such a poem, which, sweetly lyrical as it is, full of Romantic effusion, sentimentality, and euphemism, never did and will never do as the national anthem of Bangladesh.
“Amar Sonar Bangla” is at best what socialist-minded anti-colonialist George Orwell calls a “good bad” poem. In his essay on Rudyard Kipling, who was of colonialist-imperialist bent of mind, Orwell describes him, along with others, as a “good bad poet” and explains what he means by “good bad poems” and “good bad poetry” (Orwell of course gives examples). Such poems or poetry “reek of sentimentality … and are capable of giving ‘true’ pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.” There are many who share a taste for such poetry but are “not always honest enough to mention”.
Orwell continues: “The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form — for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things — some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. The merit of a “good bad” poem is that it has a certain “good bad” sentimentality about it. “Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious.” Orwell remarks that “good” poetry, with exceptions, can hardly have any “genuine popularity.” He adds, “It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts.” Tagore’s “Amar Sonar Bangla”, far from being a ‘good’ poem, is in fact a ‘good bad’ poem.
In consideration of the fact that Bangladesh’s national anthem is unfit and unsuitable (reasons given in detail in my previously published piece), there were many attempts in the past to change it, particularly at the time of President Khandoker Mushtaque Ahmad and President Ziaur Rahman. Unfortunately, the process was halted for unknown reasons and nothing materialized during the course of more than half a century. But the fact that nothing was done before does not mean that nothing should be done or can be done now. Anthems of many countries changed many times over the years!
Also, secularism in the sense of the fair share of freedom for all faiths, majority as well as minority, tribal or indigenous, is, unlike the West, a misnomer in the context of Bangladesh where the term is used, especially during the Awami-BAKSAL regimes, as a cover and camouflage for the promotion of Hinduism to the extent of propagating the communal, fanatical and fundamentalist Hindutva and ISKCON. It’s being done at the expense of the Islamic religion to the extent of eroding, demoting and distorting what is the faith of over 90% majority whereby secularism (ধর্মনিরপেক্ষতা) in Hinduized Awami Bangladesh is reduced and diminished to mean ধর্মহীনতা অথবা ধর্মনিরপেক্ষতা ধর্মহীনতারই নামান্তর। See Ch 11, “Bangladeshi Nationalism: A Cause and Concept Right and Just” and Ch 12, “Secularism in Bangladesh: Questions of Politico-Cultural and Religious Conflict” in Q M Jalal Khan, Political and Literary Reflections On A Divided country (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 367-444.
. In other words (as a retired computer consultant, recipient of a freedom award in the UK and a most dedicated anti-fascist and anti-Awami Bangladeshi-British online activist Zoglul Husain, who is also an author of numerous articles, comments), “secularism has been used for Indian cultural aggression in Bangladesh as a tool of hegemonism. They even printed the picture of a Hindu idol in a Muslim religious book, and after huge criticism by the public, the government amended it.” They changed the school curriculum to remove whatever Islamic content was there only to be replaced by Hindu materials.
Therefore, Bangladesh cannot afford to be a secular country only to be exploited by Indians, atheists and the Awami-BAKSAL-ites, who are fascist, terrorist and autocratic by birth, blood, nature and character. Both officially and culturally, and also in practice, Bangladesh should be a Muslim country with all the rights of the minorities guaranteed, both legally and constitutionally.
The matter of a national anthem, sung in the morning by all school children almost daily and by adults in all state and institutional functions, is not just a matter of human rights and civil rights, which should however equally apply and extend to all Bangladeshis, regardless of majority or minority. A national anthem with all its deep and pronounced patriotism, lofty gravity and forward-looking vision ought to enshrine, as the UK’s anthem “God save the king” and the USA’s coins (“In God we trust”) and oath taking ceremonies do, an element of the monotheistic religious faith that the vast majority of the country’s population subscribes to. Even the Indian anthem, “Jana-gana-mana-odhinayaka joya-hey bharata-bhaggyo-bidhata” (1912), a fantastically great Brahminic song, is a great creation, also by Tagore, with a direct reference to God and the vast expanse of India landscape. However, Bangladesh’s national anthem by the same poet has unfortunately many shortcomings and it never rises to the level of magnitude expected of a national anthem.
As I attempted to articulate in my last version and also in this postscript, (a) nothing by a Hindu lyricist, especially when he is on record to have been devilishly anti-Muslim and when he was from another country and (b) nothing that is merely sweet and melodious and meditative with no content of inspiring and uplifting vision and grandeur and (c) nothing does not have the high-minded component of the religious faith of the overwhelming majority of the country and (d) nothing that hurts the religious sentiment of that majority and (e) nothing that is not directly connected with the independence of that country and its future-oriented goals and aspirations can be acceptable. Now that Bangladesh has been freed of Indian hegemonism and Awami authoritarianism on 5 August 2024 with the student-led patriots and nationalists coming forward in huge masses and their revolutionary reforms underway, a new national anthem should be composed related to this second or third and yet the best liberation of Bangladesh in her about 54 years of history!
Some may argue that “the whole anthem issue is a distraction from the far more serious issues that we face in Bangladesh right now--internal and external security, justice, economic stability, a clear way forward in which we prevent today's liberators from becoming tomorrow's tyrants etc. I'm not saying that the anthem doesn't need to change but it's not the most pressing issue.” The same argument may be made by others saying, “I understand your logic and sentiment expressed herein! But we have bigger issues/challenges at this moment compared to changing the National Anthem itself which will create further polarization and new political unrest which we cannot afford at this stage.” My response to such an argument is that we as a monotheistic Muslim majority nation cannot afford to begin our day with a Hindu idol-worshipping chant! That goes against the very root and grain of our religious faith. Islam’s very morning began with destruction of pre-Islamic idols in the Holy Ka’abah. Let’s fix our very foundation first to be able to put everything else in the right track. First thing first.