Durga and the Bangali identity crisis
Growing up, I've always lived beside masjids. The house I was born into–my father's childhood home–stands wall-to-wall with the 'elakar masjid'. But I live beside a mandir now and it is an interesting, noteworthy change. As a child, I thought of mandirs as synonymous with Puran Dhaka, where my khala lives, and with Bharateswari Homes, where my nanu was a teacher for 42 years. A mandir? In my good, Muslim neighbourhood? Unbelievable. And yet, that is what I see now. On the road next to my workplace is a mandir. On my way to Dhanmondi from Mirpur, I see a mandir standing bright and glistening just opposite the nicest looking masjid on the very same road.
While the secularism written into my nation's constitution exhibits quite visibly on paper and metrics in today's Bangladesh, its manifestations on social counts are… interesting. I hear people comment on how there are "so many" Hindu bureaucrats "in higher up positions". Hijab-clad girls in katan sharee visit the Banani puja mandap to take pictures that they would caption with "dhormo jar jar, utshob shobar." My mother and some of her Muslim friends fondly recall how all the girls, no matter their ethnicity, class or religion, used to be assigned duties for the preparation of the Durga puja festivities at Bharateswari Homes. They would play with shidoor and try to sneak prashad off the mandap. Yet, along the same breath, they emphasise that they were only having fun; they know better now.
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Even as a liberal Muslim speaks about the Hindu community, utterances of "oder," "ora" ring in the air. And these are all very present issues going viral on Facebook–just as the very freshly viral video of a group of young men allegedly taking over the puja stage at a Durga puja and singing Hamd-o-Naat. It is because of these very microaggressions that the apparent coexistence of our communities are so quick to turn into violence, as evident from the communal attacks following August 5.
However, the ugliness of those incidents are what exemplified the beauty of this nation's pluralisms as madrasah students and hujurs stayed up to guard the mandirs and prayed their fajr namaz by its gates. What I find to be posing the biggest threat to this beauty is the question of identity: in spite of our differences in varying faiths, we Bangalis, as an ethnic group, bear similarities superseding our religious precepts. Yet, the muslim majority of the population often casually terms them as "Hindu customs." I am speaking of customs such as the gaye holud, shatosha, and the mukhe-bhat ceremony, etc. But these customs continue to be observed in Bangali households, regardless of their religious beliefs. Furthermore, these customs are threatened with erasure on both centrist and far-right avenues by either the pervasion of similar Western customs such as bridal showers and baby showers, or the strict and modest regulations of Islamic scholars.
As such, I am compelled to ask what being a Bangali even means today: What shapes our ethnic identity? The obvious answer of course is the language. The most popular one is the food—the Bengali cuisine with its assortments of maach, bhorta, shaak and bhaat. And yet there is so much else to pick apart, especially of the distinctly Bangali aesthetic, most popularly depicted with vibrant bursts of red, iconographies of Bengali goddesses, the royal bengal tigers, and other natural motifs, like capturing the essence of the six Bengali seasons or shoro ritu. Each of the six seasons bring about their own festivities with Pohela Falgun ushering in boshonto, Pohela Baishakh marking the advent of grishma kal, sharat kal commemorating Durga's victories, hemanta celebrating the harvest with the pitha utshab. Considering the context of greater Bengal's origins as an agrarian society, I see how emblematic these festivities are with the farmers' annual agricultural journey. Thus, I think of the mythology of Durga's battle against Mahishasura as an agricultural allegory: the farmers struggling to protect the new sprouts (re: Kumari Puja) against the stubborn buffaloes invading their land for grazing and lazing. And you can apply this allegory to Prophet Muhammad's (SAW) hijrat, especially in its concluding strife against the Quraysh clan. You can also apply it to your interpretation of the July uprising, particularly to what is colloquially known now as 31st to 36th July.
Essentially, mythologies are stories of heroes and heroines triumphing over evil—a universal template you can revise infinite times with elements of whichever religion you subscribe to or whichever generation you hail from. Just look at Hollywood's incessant reiterations of Greek heroes, expanding now to Egyptian and Norse heroes. Look at the Hellenic inspirations behind Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam," and the entire iconography of Renaissance art, merging the telling of Christian stories with the aesthetics of Greek mythology. The Renaissance church's Hellenic interpretations of Biblical stories do not dilute their faith—rather, these aesthetic choices and symbolic interpretations become the vehicle for their establishment as classics.
Thus, with this Durga puja marking the first in our apparently "new" Bangladesh, I urge fellow Bangalis as well as the rest of the native ethnic groups, especially the muslim majority, to reevaluate and reflect on Durga's bijoy and its deeper implications rather than only its surface-level aesthetics. There's a lot for young muslims, hindus, buddhists, christians and atheists alike to learn from her resilience at the face of crisis, the unity of the deities who supported her from the backdrop, the etymology of her name originating from the meaning "durgam" (difficult or impassable), and much more as you apply its teachings to the context of your individual identity and experiences.
Tashfia Ahmed, 28, is a teacher at Scholastica and a contributor for Star Books and Literature. You can reach her at her Instagram, @tashfiarchy, or her email, finitestinfinities@gmail.com.
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