The Bangladeshi mind

Within that interchangeability, there is a multi-layered unease within each of us, social, political, psychological, and religious, a kind of Freudian anxiety that churns our emotions into pathological storms. We are greedy and needy, hopeful and despaired, shameless and embarrassed, badly torn between conscience and convenience, between here and yonder, this life and the next world. We want to have the best of both worlds, heaven on earth and then heaven again afterwards.

That makes us like everybody else, except for something which sets us apart from rest of the world. From time to time, writers and scholars have depicted that peculiarity in both sardonic and serious terms. Rabindranath Tagore lamented that Mother Bengal had kept her children as Bangals, who were yet to grow up as humans. Another limerick described us as a race of strange animals which hopped on the trees, but didn't quite sport a tail.

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The serious words came from an outsider though. Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in 1840 that what the horns were to the buffalo, what the paw was to the tiger, what the sting was to the bee, what beauty, according to the old Greek song, was to women, deceit was to the Bengali. Large promises, smooth excuses, elaborate tissues of circumstantial falsehood, chicanery, perjury, forgery, were the weapons, offensive and defensive, of the people of the Lower Ganges.

The tragedy of a Bengali mind is that it could not prove Macaulay wrong in hundreds of years. Instead it got itself locked in that stereotype, culminating in the crowning shame that the only Bengali nation on earth wins the title of the most corrupt nation for five years in a row. The political, religious and cultural transformations of many centuries have silted contradiction upon contradiction to give the Bengali mind its bedrock of a mass psychosis.

It is important to understand the background in order to understand that psychosis. The journey started since the days of the roving Buddhist monks called Charjapadas. The first conceptualization of distinct Bengali culture and religion was done by Hossain Shah, who set out to create a distance from Delhi by creating the first centralized territory of Bengal in the kingdom of Gaud. He undertook to translate Hindu epics into Bengali. Mahabharata and Ramayana were first translated by a Muslim named Paraghal Khan. Thus the awakening of the Bengali mind started with contradictions. Many years later the Holy Koran would be translated into Bengali for the first time by a Hindu named Girish Chandra.

The initial contradictions within the universal Bengali mind showed the signs of confluence in religion. Chaitanya preached Bhakti, which claimed that one could attain a near unity with Vishnu through complete surrender. Incidentally, the Sufi school of Islam embarked on a similar trend, which expounded that the surrender to Allah the eternal was the core of Islam. The Fakir tradition started viewing Kanai (Krishno) and Allah as one and the concept of the Prophet in the lap of his mother Amina ran concurrently with the Jasoda-Krishno relationship. People started worshipping pirs, dervishes, baul-goshains, and sanyasis with same reverence. Ramkrishno accepted the kalma and followed namazes five times a day. The Christians of Bengal adopted Krishto-kirtan in their churches instead of western hymns.

But that confluence soon met with new contradictions. The Bengali renaissance created a middle class which would be Bengali by birth, but European by education. The discriminatory British policies had set the tone for another contradiction. Permanent Settlement of 1793 by Lord Cornwallis created a mainly Hindu landed class. Then in 1843 the switch from Persian to English further handicapped Muslim chances of social mobility. In their search for a new synthesis, the Bengali Muslims sought emancipation both from the grip of British colonial rulers as well as their local Hindu overlords.

At this point the universal Bengali mind split on the razor's edge of political conflict. The religious identity which was implicit now came to the foreground, putting Bengali Hindus against the Bengali Muslims. The weekly Mussalman launched by the Calcutta-based Bengali Muslim elite indicated further division in their mindset. It declared that the Indian Muslims, politically and economically, were Indians first, Muhammadans afterwards. Morally, they were Muhammadans first and Indians afterwards.

The creation of Pakistan favored moral over political victory, and the Bengali Muslims secured a separate homeland for themselves on the basis of religion. But that victory would prove temporary as soon as the Bengali identity resurfaced in their pride for language. This time religion receded to the background as ethnic aspirations rose to prominence.

Perhaps this is where the Emersonian frame of mind never fit the picture. The Bangladeshi mind, which splintered from the universal Bengali mind, failed to reconcile between the genetic memory of the whole and the kinetic energy of the part. If we are asking today whether we are Bangladeshis or Bengalis, Muslims or Bengalis first, it is because our quest for identity has been a long and arduous journey from identity crisis to identity crisis. After all that hard rowing, it appears that the boat had never left the shore.

The outcome is a mental block. The Bangladeshi mind is trapped in the mass psychosis which works like a pyramid scheme where the politicians seek to become cult deities and the economic elites seek to become admired nobilities as the mass people wobble in the void of their mental block. What that block does to the people is a pretty scary thought. In their unthinking moments people refuse to topple their idols and they resist their own liberation.

In 1957, CG Jung wrote in The Undiscovered that resistance to the organized mass could be effected only by the man who was as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. In the Bangladeshi mind that remains the ultimate contradiction. The individual doesn't make the mass, but the mass makes the individual.

Is there anybody who can break this cycle?

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.