Hindu bengali culture may possibly have a base in culcutta at a stretch. It has no impact on BD or Bangladeshi culture which is basicly Muslim.
I wish Bangladeshi culture
was truly Muslim. Bangladesh could have developed its own vibrant Muslim Bengali culture and identity rather than mimic ( rather poorly) its West Bengali counterpart. So some one wrote a nice song "
Notun Bangladesh bolbo mora..." but it rapidly faded into obscurity, and a century old "
Dhono Dhanne Pushpe bhora " reigns supreme ( sans the Sanskrit vandana that is sung as a prelude. ).
The success of " Hindu" ( rather Indian) Bengali culture is due to its inclusiveness, and at least in its literature, and art form essentially secular.
This makes it attractive to even a non-Bengali Urdu speaker like myself. My own mother tongue which I love very much has been inclusive also and not limited by religious parochial boundaries. Like Urdu, Indian Bengali culture keeps evolving in genre and content, from the Baul culture, to the independence struggle led by Subhas Bose to the modern liberal Marxist culture of Jadavpur and Calcutta University. The Indian Bengali culture keeps evolving and getting a wider acceptance and audience beyond those whose mother tongue is not Bengali.
I am therefore not impressed by Suvorna Mustafa (
Kan kota Ramzan ) but find Debashree Roy in "
36 Chowringhee Lane " very acceptable. Indian Bengali culture is linked to the Bengali Renaissance which pulled the old India from medievalism into the modern age even though this was due to
British colonial influence.
Which is why Indian Bengali movies, by Satyajit Ray get subtitled and win awards at international film festivals and Champa remains unknown as an actress outside Bangladesh but Konkona Sen Sharma is known globally.
West bengal is entirely irrelevant for the future of BD. No one in their right mind would want to have anything to do with them.... wishful thinking....
Actually this is not true. Bangladeshis make a beeline for Kolkata, and go splurge shopping in the malls and in New Market and Burrabazaar for sarees and female apparel. The return Biman flights to Dhaka are overloaded. When possible, Bangladeshis also travel to cool off in Darjeeling, Mirik and Kurseong, Wealthy Bangladeshis send their boys to study in the fine missionary schools such as St.Patrick's Darjeeling, or Goethal's memorial school Kurseong. West Bengal has some of the finest technical colleges such as IIT Kharagpur, College of Engineering Jadavpuur and REC Durgapur amongst others. Kolkata is only a provincial capital in India but there is no comparison with Dhaka and a comparison of the two cities would need a separate thread in itself.
I am afraid the Partition of Bengal was lopsided. India got the cream of the region, with a beautiful Port City, a resource rich hinterland with coal mining and steel and iron industries, beautiful tea gardens, hill stations and a diverse highly literate, population.
With apologies but there is just NO comparison between West Bengal and Bangladesh.
Hafeez Jalandhari the author of pakistans anthem was also born in India.... does that also
make pakistans cultural identity questionable ?
A good point ! No it doesn't make Pakistan's
past cultural identity questionable. If it was present then , yes.
Our current cultural identity is reforming and so is India's. Pakistan is not borrowing any attribute from elsewhere to define itself.
In fact when Pakistan became independent it's national song (as distinct from national anthem) was written by a Hindu poet from Lahore whose name was Jagannath Azad. His song "
Aye sar zameene Pak..." was broadcast from Radio Pakistan on 14th August, 1947 and it continued to serve as a national song till 1953, when Hafeez Jullandri wrote the National Anthem."
Pak sar zameen shad bad " Hafeez Jalandhari was a Pakistani citizen when he wrote this song. Pakistan could have taken one of Iqbal's poem "
Ya rab dile Muslim ko ..." or some other and adopted it but we didn't because Iqbal died before Pakistan was formed and none of his poems were inclusive. The Pakistani national anthem was specifically written to be inclusive and secular. Pakistan didn't have to borrow from India or any other country to define itself.
West or east bengali.... still a bengali...who wrote BDs national anthem. As a bengali also wrote indias national anthem does it make indias cultural identity questionable?
Of course the person who wrote the Indian and Bangladeshi national anthems was Bengali.,
So the question is
which Bengali?
Because we already agreed there were two cultures. Wouldn't it have been better for a modern Muslim Bangladeshi to have written a secular inclusive national anthem just like Pakistan did ?
Yes, Tagore wrote the
a poem which got adopted as the Indian national anthem. This was highly controversial because the poem had originally been written in praise of the Prince of Wales though the poetry is such that it can be interpreted to mean the praise of the nation. Which is why the Azad Hind Fauj ( Indian National Army ) under Subhas Bose did not use the Bengali version of the anthem but used only parts of it in a Hindi anthem titled "
Sab sukh chain"...
(All joy and contentment ...).
But India adopting a Bengali language ( rather 90% Sanskrit mix) as it's national anthem is perfectly acceptable. India is a multi-iingual
country, and adopting one Sanskrit song is no big deal. India has numerous patriotic songs. in every one of its 21 + languages. A multilingual environment helps.
You really do not understand what a bengali is....does a federalist indian identity trump being a bengali.... if so they are not really bengali... are they?
Don't fully understand the question. There are generally two kinds of Bengalis. Indian Bengalis and Bangladeshis. Yes, Indian Bengalis do consider themselves Indians first, whatever their political orientation, whether it is the rightwing Shyama Prasad Mukherji, Centrist Siddhartha Shankar Ray, or Marxist Jyoti Basu. Having said that, their Bengali cultural identity remains. This is the case with most states of India barring states where there is active insurgency such as Kashmir and Nagaland. This is also the case with Pakistan. We are Pakistanis first, and then Baluchi, Sindhi, Pashtun, Punjabi. We have a link language. A Punjabi and Pashtun will talk in Urdu just as an Indian Bengali will talk to a Bihari from his neighboring state in English or Hindi. Pakistan and India are multicultural, multilingual states where individual cultural identity is acknowledged. Bangladesh is a mono-linguistic monocultural country. So Bangladeshis find it hard to understand how different cultures and languages can coexist.
Tagore died before india or Bangladesh was sovereign....he was nothing but a British colonial subject....indias claim to him is as strong as a sovereign Bangladeshs.
Of course India has
a claim to Tagore, and likewise India has
a claim to
Iqbal also. India will have a claim on everything pre-1947. Driven by logic, India can claim everything not just poets but the people and land with the argument, this was ours, we want it back.
Which is why unlike Bangladesh Pakistan is developing it's unique identity separate from India. Only one of our provinces shares any cultural link with India, and that is Punjab, and that too only the smaller southern eastern portion.
Even here Pakistan has moved away from the Devanagari- Gurmukhi script in Punjabi and adopted the Shah-Mukhi ( Urdu) script.
Our national language Urdu, has evolved as a robust link and administration language. Our dress is now different since the
lungi kurta was abandoned in favor of the
salwar kameez which is universal. Our ladies no longer wear saris.
Our Saraiki, Sindhi Baluchi and Pashtun culture long subdued has revived.
Yes, we have a secular national anthem; our very own written by a post-1947 Pakistani , with only one Hindi grammar article "ka" in it. It is in Persianized Urdu which is understood not only across Pakistan but across Iran, Afghanistan and much of the Farsi speaking world. Our cultural evolution continues as we dump our last links with the India of today and look west and north to our natural links with Central and West Asia . Yes, our residual cultural links with Northern India yet remain so as of now I culturally identify closely with an Indian Hindu Punjabi from Haryana or Delhi, and also with an Indian Hindu Kayastha from Lucknow. These links will fade away in the next 30 years as India Sanskritizes its culture as we Persianize ours. However, we have nothing in common with Bangladesh. Even for me who learned a tiny bit of Hindu West Bengali culture from my social circle and learned to speak a tiny amount of Bengali it is extremely difficult for me to connect with someone from Bangladesh. I can connect far better with West Bengalis because like me they coexist in a multicultural multilingual environment so were interested in my culture as I was interested in theirs. With Bangladeshis it's a one way street.
To sum up: Pakistan before 1971 was unsustainable by geography, culture and population. Post 1971 and the establishment of Bangladesh has been the greatest development ever allowing my nation to become a geographical and cultural cohesive entity. Above all my country can no longer be held hostage by its mortal enemy due to an indefensible and logistically unsustainable territory.
You see.... troll as you might.... you really lack historical knowledge or context.... try again
Trolls make one line provocative posts insulting other posters. I try to understand and ask questions. If my historical knowledge is lacking then please correct me.,
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