Bangladesh Performs Itself

Richard Schechner

Saleque Khan writes from both the inside and the outside of
Bangladesh. He is a citizen politically and culturally of
Bangladesh. And he is trained in performance studies a mode
of analysis of society, and everything comprising society, that
starts with the notion of the performative. Not theatre in the
whats on stage kind; but a more general and pervasive quality
of theatricality that operates in everyday life, in the arts, in
politics, and as Khan emphasizes in the streets. In
quotation marks because street is a euphemism for the arena of
public life not officially controlled by the government or
police (no matter how hard they try); nor by the cultural
police of the academically educated artistic elites. The
street is the theatre of the people; the ocean of social life
where different currents meet, mix, diverge, contend, and to
some degree coalesce, especially during times of crisis.
It is this complex street that is the core of Khans book.
He situates the particular and unique Bangladesh street within
the flow of South Asian history: political, religious, and
cultural. That is, how the street was formed, and resisted
definitive formation (leaving room for new ideas and new
movements), by the Moghul and non-Moghul Islamic rulers of the
subcontinent, the British colonizers and Western-value bringers,
the Hindu nationalists, some of whom desired a Hindu-only (or
mostly) nation and some a united single political state
consisting of multiple cultural-religious components. Khan
outlines and smartly summarizes the emergence of Pakistan from
colonial India; East Pakistan (Bangla Pakistan) from West
Pakistan (Urdu Pakistan); and Bangladesh from Pakistan after the
Indo-Pak War of 1971.
In telling this story, Khan recognizes that nothing is
erased rather, one epoch writes its social codes over what
preceded and continues to co-exist creating both a palimpsest
and a patchwork. As part of this rendition of the subcontinent,
Khan emphasizes the Bangla super-story, wherein people living
in (todays) West Bengal, a province of India, and Bangladesh
(an independent nation) consider themselves Bangla first and
Muslim or Hindu second. In fact, prior to 1947 the year the
British departed sundering one India into Pakistan and India
serious proposals were on the table to combine West and East
Bengal into a single, sovereign Bangla state. That did not come
to pass, though the dream of such an entity continues to
saturate many Bengali-speakers on either side of the India-
Bangladesh border.
Khan discusses the struggle to ensconce Bengali as the
official language of East Pakistan/Bangladesh rejecting the
imposition of Urdu, the Muslim language of Moghul India and
later post-partition Pakistan. But in Bangladesh, it is neither
Urdu nor Hindi, but Bengali that dominates. The sharing of a
common language both leads to and is evidence of a Bangla
integration that transcends the Muslim-Hindu divide. Banglas
hybrid culture is more evident in the countryside than in the
cities: it is a function of how ordinary rural people construct
their lives no matter how much the separatists campaign for a
strict religious segregation. But for all this, narrating the
political-religious-social history of Bangladesh is not Khans
main aim. Rather he focuses on the theatre in/of the street(s).
His book is thoroughly performance studies.
Khans range of inquiry is correctly and invigoratingly
broad, from Ekushey February through Nabobarsho (New Year) whose
vast range of celebrations includes baul singers, the colorful
Mongol Shovajatra, and even Hindu saints and on to putul naach,
a puppet show that includes interludes of erotic dancing. Putul
naach originated in India but after Partition and later the
independence of Bangladesh, it was taken up by Muslim artists.
Khan starts his analysis of 21 February (a neat amalgam of
Bangla and Western calendaring) by noting that the Ekushey
February song is the nucleus of all East Pakistan/ Bangladesh
street performances, political and cultural. So it is no
surprise that everything Khan deals with, and it is a big range
of events, is hinged on a celebration that is both militant-
festive and mournful, full of both zeal and solemnity, Khan
writes. The experience of martyrdom rather than a battle per se
is deeply embedded in the Bangladeshi imaginary. And the
commemoration of this experience is a whole month of
performances. But, as Khan details, the emergence of Ekushey
February was not linear. It took decades, and is still evolving
drawing into its energy field a very broad spectrum of
activities and ideas linguistic, poetic, visual, political,
social, festive, religious all expressed in essentially
performative ways. Khan provides both ample detail in terms of
thick description and visual illustration as well as a flowing
analytic chronological narrative of the whole range of
performances both within and beyond Bangladesh as Ekushey
February is widely observed-celebrated in the Bangladeshi
diaspora. Khan also introduces readers to new performances such
as Bashonto Baron, welcoming the spring, which Khan describes as
undoubtedly the most significant invented celebration of
present-day Bangladesh.
Khan links these three key performances events which Khan
illustrates with many beautiful photographs with the emergence
of Bangladeshi national-cultural identity. Khan notes that all
of them evolved from protest performances to celebratory public
ceremonies folding into themselves many different kinds of
performances. These performances are within a Muslim society,
but not (yet) an Islamist nation. He goes out of his way to
emphasize that being a Bangladeshi is not synonymous with being
Muslims, even if Islam is by far countrys most widely practiced
religion. Khans thesis, or at least one of his theses, is to
show that Bangladeshi identity is performative, distinct from
religion even when religious practices comprise part of this
still emerging identity. In fact, Khan goes further. He asserts
that performance is the primary vehicle and on that vehicle
rides religion, national identity, and many various kinds of
individual and communal artistic and political expressions. Khan
does not shy away from noting that although Bangladeshs
imaginary is that of a more or less liberal Muslim state
(think Indonesia rather than Saudi Arabia), advocates of
fundamentalist Islam are gaining strength and are pressuring
the society. As Khan notes near the end of his book: The future
of Bangladesh in this regard is up in the air.
Khans admirable book gives English readers and non-
Bangladeshis a concise, clear, intriguing, and important insight
into a nation and culture still too little known outside its own
immediate sphere.