Cross Talk
Four hundred years of solitude
OLIVER Wendell Holmes, Sr., one of the best regarded American poets of the 19th century, once observed that the axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city. Dhaka had already seen that axis when the first urban settlements started in the 7th century. For many centuries since then the city remained eclipsed under the Buddhist and Hindu kings until it proved its mettle in 1608. The Mughals arrived and made it the capital of Bengal.
This year is a significant milestone, when Dhaka enters 400 years as a capital city. The fortune of the city has waxed and waned many times in these 400 years. It lost its place first to Murshidabad in 1717 and then to Calcutta in 1772 as a principal city. Then its stars rose again through a series of partitions.
The partition of Bengal briefly made it the capital of the newly formed province of East Bengal and Assam. The partition of India made it the capital of the eastern wing of Pakistan. Finally, the partition of Pakistan shot her to fame as the national capital of an independent country.
So what do we celebrate after 400 years? Speaking of London, American writer Henry James said that a great city isn't necessarily a pleasant place. It's not agreeable or cheerful or easy, or exempt from reproach. It's only magnificent.
How much of that magnificence can we celebrate in Dhaka? The city, which measured 12 miles in length and 8 miles in breadth, was inhabited by nearly one million people in 1608. Today it's a much more sprawling city of over 10 million people packed like sardines in an area of 360 kilometers.
Obviously, Dhaka is now more densely populated. Power shortage, contaminated water supply, inadequate drainage, crime, traffic congestion and deplorable sanitary condition make it an unbearable city. On the other hand, tall buildings, spanking new shopping arcades, growing number of cars, mobile phones, restaurants, etc. give it the flavour of a thriving metropolis. What do we celebrate and what do we regret on the 400th anniversary?
Babylon was the first great city of the ancient world, but as the Bible says, it was "the mother of harlots and abominations on earth." Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum. The grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate and traffic jams. Roman poet Juvenal complained that he was hampered by the crowd of Rome, so much so that they almost crushed his ribs from front and back. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that one could smell the odour of its gutters two miles from the city.
Where does it place Dhaka? Is it a modern city? Or, is it still a backward urban settlement struggling to cope with the pressures of modernisation for four centuries? It's definitely not a comfortable city like Stockholm, Geneva or Johannesburg. It's not a beautiful city like Venice or Florence. It's not a commercial, financial and cultural capital like New York. It can't be compared to Moscow, Shanghai or Peking in terms of culture, history and size. It's not the axis of world politics like Washington DC, Moscow or Peking.
As the French proverb has it, Rome wasn't built in a day. It took London three hundred years to build its first city wall and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop. Rome laboured in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history. The upshot is that it takes time to build a city, both physically and reputationally.
Dhaka has reasonably advanced as a physical city, but has lagged behind in reputation. It started as the captal of "a bottomless basket" as the country was once described by an insensitive western bureaucrat. It's now the capital of one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Rightly or wrongly, it's also known for growing religious fundamentalism, which makes it the center of an alleged breeding ground for religious intolerance and terrorism.
Four hundred years ago, there was no sign of communal tension in Dhaka as people of all religions lived in peace and harmony. Dhaka attracted many foreign traders from Arabia, Persia, Armenia, China, Malaya, Java and Sumatra, who enriched its commercial and cultural fabrics. Then the Marwari bankers, and the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Greek investors came and turned Dhaka into a manufacturing station.
It's said that the most important element of a great city is the spontaneity of free human exchange. In other words, a city doesn't classify as great if that limits human contacts either through repression, distance or other impediments. Dhaka, like Calcutta and Mumbai, has enough people, but gives the impression of a dysfunctional city because too many of them are living in misery.
That resonates the question, which Sicinius asked in William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Coriolanus: "What is the city but the people?" If we celebrate 400 years of Dhaka, what do we celebrate: the splendour of the city or the grandeur of its people? If we look at a couple of instances, they give us hints about certain immutability.
Lower class women worked as hard as men, including carrying bricks and other heavy things on their heads, four hundred years ago. During the Mughal days, corruption was rampant amongst the government officials. One official named Syed Raja Khan used to give lashes and even kill those who failed to provide him bribe on demand.
In his Nobel lecture, Gabriel Garcia Marquez elaborates on the solitude of Latin America. "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary," he suggested. "A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth," he concluded.
Four hundred years of Dhaka have been eventful. The conquerors and plunderers came in equal strides, the Kamarupa kings, the Sena dynasty, the Turkish and Afghan invaders, the Mughals, the Portugese, the Marathis, the English and the Pakistanis. But they pushed us into evermore solitude as the fate of people always slipped into the hands of outsiders who interpreted our reality through their patterns.
With depleting water level, growing population, failing infrastucture, and bickering national politics, we don't know what will happen to Dhaka in future. So far, the shell has changed but not the core. That alone looms the solitude which could haunt us for the next 400 years.
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