Happy Belated IMLD

Did you know that February 21st was International Mother Language Day? No? It's "international" because it was adopted by UNESCO in 1999, but it started out as a Bangladeshi holiday: February 21 was Language Movement Day, a national holiday commemorating the 1952 death of university students who were protesting a decision to make Urdu the national language for all of Pakistan, East and West. (Modern-day Bangladesh was East Pakistan at the time.) Bengali was eventually granted official status in 1956, alongside Urdu, but the tensions from the language movement eventually led, in part, to the independence movement and the Liberation War of 1971. When the name for the new nation was officially chosen, East Pakistan became Bangladesh -- "desh" means country in Bangla, so it's the country of Bangla, make no mistake about it.

Needless to say, people take their language seriously here. They are very proud of their linguistic heritage and especially of authors and poets such as Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. They have a month-long Bengali-language public book fair leading up to the 21st, and lots of events associated with Mother Language Day. On the day itself, people wear black and white, and huge crowds of people go to the Central Shaheed Minar, the monument to the students who were killed, to pay their respects.

Juxtapose all of this pride and reverence with the statistics that came out recently from a report on primary education in Bangladesh. The report found that nearly 70% of children with five years -- five years! -- of primary education could not so much as read a newspaper headline correctly. Bangladesh has put a lot of effort into bringing more children, especially girls, into the classroom, and the government spends as much on education as it does on defence and health combined. (17% of government expenditures go to education, 10% to defence, and 7% to health; for comparison, in the US, only 3% of government expenditures go to education, while 20% go to defence and 25% to health.*) However, the quality of the education these children are getting is clearly lacking.

One issue is undoubtedly the language itself. Bangla is most definitely not an easy language to learn. I have been taking Bangla classes for six months now, five days a week, two hours a day, and I struggle with it -- and I don't have the challenges of a crowded classroom (or no classroom at all), or a poorly trained teacher, or a lack of teaching materials, or an empty belly, or lower cognitive ability due to poor nutrition, or all of the above. I have all the tools I could possibly need to learn this language, and it's still a challenge.

First of all, the sheer number of letters that one has to remember is borderline preposterous. It's not as bad as some other languages, like Chinese -- the number of letters is finite, not infinite -- but it's pretty bad. There are 11 vowels, most of which have two forms. Plus 39 consonants. Plus a sort of indeterminate number of combined letters, in which two or even three consonants and/or vowels come together in completely new forms. One of my Bangla teachers told me that he tried listing all the letters once and came up with something approaching 200, but that was just an estimate. Apparently there are too many letters for anyone to have bothered with an official list.

On top of that, the letters are not always written in the order in which they are spoken. Letters are sometimes written in backwards order to the way they are spoken, or they can come above or below other letters, and some are not written at all. Can you imagine being a small child and trying to figure out which letter you are supposed to pronounce when, if you can even remember what the letter is? Sure, there are rules to guide you, but how is a child going to remember them all? An example: the word "kobe," which is one of several words for "when," is spelled k-e-b in Bangla. The "e" is written before the "b" but spoken after it. The "o" is not written at all, but you are supposed to know it is there. It's madness! And yes, of course, I know English is its own brand of crazy, but our alphabet is only 26 letters, and they are all relatively simple in form, compared to the roundabout curlicues and flourishes of Bangla. I just cannot imagine how difficult it must be for a small child of 6 or 7 to learn to read and write such a complex language with any fluency. It happens, of course, for many people, but... for many more, it never does happen. And for a language with such a rich history, and in a country that celebrates Mother Language Day with such fervency, that is a shame.

As with so many things, there seem to be two sides to the relationship between Bangladesh and Bangla. There is the relationship in its ideal form, as embodied in Mother Language Day, when the Shaheed Minar is cleaned up and decorated and people remove their shoes as they approach it to show their respect. We made an attempt to visit the monument on this day, to be part of something festive and to see Bangladesh as it wants to be seen, as it sees itself. However, the roads were blocked and clogged with people, and we would have had to get out of the vehicle and walk an unknown distance to the monument (with Kaya, who naturally had chosen that moment to fall asleep). Even on this one special day of the year, the reality of Bangladesh overwhelmed the ideal; we decided to go somewhere calmer instead.

More often, what we see are images from the other side of the relationship, from one of the other 364 days of the year. When we visited the monument one day last October, it looked sadly forlorn, littered with trash and populated by beggars and farm animals. This is its normal condition, and perhaps a more accurate reflection of the relationship between Bangladesh and Bangla. It's a symbol of genuine sentiment overshadowed by poverty, neglect, and indifference. To me, it is form without substance, promise without action. But the fact that it is there at all -- and that thousands of people still come to the book fair every year, making it bigger than any literary event I've seen in the States -- has to mean that at least some portion of the population still values language and reading. One can only hope that they find a way to pass those values on to the 70% of children who are struggling with their Mother Language.

*Government expenditure data are from the UNICEF State of the World's Children 2009 report, Table 7, pp 142-145.