Swathes of tradition
A new work charms Syed Badrul Ahsan
Pronomohi Bongomata, Saymon Zakaria, Nymphea Publication
You judge the place of a nation in history by the culture that has deepened its roots. And when the matter is one of Bangladesh, the idea of it that is, you need to go back a pretty long way in time. There are those who will inform you that in a very proper sense, it is a time frame of a thousand years within which you can place the evolution of Bengali culture. And, of course, everything else --- politics, governance, poetry, music --- comes within it. But how does that culture begin? Where does it begin? These are some of the questions you could push Saymon Zakaria's way. And he, for his part, appears ready to come forth with the answers. Those answers are, in a sense, this work under review. It is the very variety of the subjects the writer covers which goes into the business of fortifying our understanding of our culture. The subjects are local. All culture springs from a local ambience and that precisely is what Zakaria emphasizes through his segmentation of the themes he brings into play. Overall, as he would like to put it, it is indigenous culture that constitutes the Bengali legacy or, more properly, the heritage Bangladesh is heir to. Such indigenous culture, again, is fundamentally culture as it has shaped itself in the diverse regions of the country, in a local manner of speaking. Together, these variants of local culture become the sum leading to a whole. Take, as an instance, the Nathjugi, people who practise a certain cultural tradition in remote regions of northern Bangladesh. It happens to be a tradition which comes close, as the writer points out, to Buddhism and meditation. The practitioners of this tradition, we are informed, spent a lifetime, or a very large part of it, in searching for 'answers to spiritual and metaphysical questions.' Once the background of the Nathjugi is made clear, it becomes easier for you to comprehend the message emanating from the play that comes associated with this aspect of Bangladesh's culture. You move on, with Zakaria, to an understanding of jari songs. When you do that, you will likely feel that you have travelled quite a distance from aspects of Buddhist tradition to an area where Islamic history comes to the fore. In jari songs --- jari gaan in Bengali --- what you have is a fundamental premise of folk culture in this country. The background is the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, grandson of the Prophet of Islam, in Karbala. The tale, despite all those hundreds of years having gone by since the hostilities drew to an end and left Islamic history pursuing a course not foreseen before the battle, continues to exercise a strong hold on the rural imagination in Bangladesh. Interestingly, the jari songs draw extensively from Mir Mosharraf Hossain's seminal literary work Bishadh-Shindhu. The story, set on a simple scale, involves two boyatis questioning each other on the stories related in the work and then coming forth with the answers on their own through what is known as singing the disha. Zakaria's exposition of indigenous culture is, in a very significant sense, an involved examination of the spirituality or the mysticism which has gone into the making of heritage. If he details the martyrdom of Hussain in Karbala or, in other words, the defence of faith that such martyrdom exemplifies, he also is in a proper mood to take you by the hand into a narration of the tale of the saint Gazi. It is in places like Dudhshar (literally meaning milk and cream), a village in Jhenaidah, that the story of the saint yet exercises a powerful hold on the popular imagination. Indeed, the very concept of a secular Bengali culture encompasses such practices as Krishna lila and such thoughts as those that deal with the personality of a sannyasi. Mind you, the sannyasi is no monk or even a properly definable spiritual being. He is, simply, one who wanders in search of the divine, all the while making known his unfettered devotion to the divine. In a very important way, the sannyasi, especially in terms of looking for the gems which have provided credence and moral validity to Bangladesh's culture, is one who reads this work. It is through his intellectual wanderings along the Kali river flowing past Bashantapur that the reader will come squarely up against traditions he perhaps had not earlier been aware of. Baleghat has its asto gaan. Take me across the river, as Zakaria puts it, is what the story is all about, the theme of it. You become one with the river; and the river is deep. The culture is therefore profound. Pronomohi Bongomata is Mother Bengal as we have known through the generations. It is only natural or perhaps a happy coincidence that Saymon Zakaria has now taken us back along a trail many of us have rather faint ideas of. Zakaria's specialty is research into culture, into unlocking the innumerable secrets of tradition which have lain embedded in our collective consciousness. This work is one more instance of unlocking. And, after that, it is an opening of new windows to old tales for us. It is a narrative that should be in the libraries of educational institutions and in homes, the better to revive our interest in ourselves.
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