By Gidita Rema
DearBangladeshi elites,
As I sit here in Shillong, reports from cousins in Mymensingh have brought me back to the perennial question: “Why do you hate us so?” What did we ever do to you? What do my distant relatives in Dhaka do to offend you so much, that you must seek their extinction as a people? Is there some problem with the way they wash your floors, guard your buildings, serve you drinks at your clubs?
My father was born in Mymensingh, and my view has not changed since he first told me about the way you massacred my people in 1963, 1964, and 1965. Of course, you were Pakistanis then. We were then what we are now: Garos.
Mymensingh it seems that you hate us because we, as a people, as a culture, are a standing rebuke to your cowardice, your venality, and your inexplicable, irrational hatred of women. We are your shame!
After the educated, cultured, pious Mir Jafar sold himself to the British, who was it who fought back against the colonialists? Not the Bengalis. For decades after the Cornwallis settlement, we raided the plains, invariably in retaliation for some zamindar trying to take what was not his, or some sahukdar trying to cheat us.
My ancestors dragged the British into a gruelling jungle war against their will. They called the result a victory. We kept our freedom here in the hills. It was put on a legal footing with Regulation X. Under the kampani raj. The year was 1822.
And if you knew your own history, you would know that that regulation was the basis of the Chittagong Hill Tracts protections seventy-eight years later. The basis for the Peace Accord in 1997. Which you haven’t implemented because obviously you hate the Jummas too. And what were your ancestors doing after the Cornwallis settlement, after 1793? Falling over themselves to kiss British feet, trading in their Mughal sanads for British titles, to ensure their unearned income, and to be left in peace to rack-rented theirpeasants to death, and rape their women.
The Garos were among the first to fight them. Alwaysthe first to fight and the last to benefit. That stings, doesn’t it? We, along with the Khasis, the Mundas, the Mal Paharias, the Santals, the Chakmas. We all fought the British decades before you found the nerve in 1857. It stings so much your stinking left-wing intelligentsia had to invent the preposterous fairy tale of “proto-nationalism”; we were too backward apparently. We could not fight politically, because we lacked the tutelage of some suitably qualified intellectual and appropriately Bengali vanguard.
We needed to be taught. Liberated from our backwardness and false consciousness, which were obviously one and the same. But to paraphrase Lefebvre, the Garos fought for their own reasons, and they were more than sufficient.
And what of the Qader Bahini? So few, so very few of you know about the Qader Bahini. Our standing rebuke to you. My father fought in the Qader Bahini. His enemy was the military regime that took power after they gunned down the Father of your Nation. And who were his fellow freedom fighters?
Not the Bengalis. They were cowering in their apartments, relieved to find that all, indeed, would be forgiven. If they just kissed the right feet. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss. “Ji sir, ji sir.” Obviously it was the Garos who fought. The first to fight.
The veterans of Sector 11, who moved to the Hills over the border to contest the dreadful verdict of 1975. The first to fight, the last to share in the fruits of what you still insist on calling “Liberation”.
Who was liberated? And from what? Some of those freedom fighters, the only ones to go to war over the outrage of 1975, are alive and here still. I think they are the smart ones, from what I hear about what is going on in Sherpur, and Baksiganj, and Moulvi bazaar. They stayed when others went back, because they were the ones who understood that they would receive no thanks for their patriotism, for their quest to avenge Bangabondhu, and to punish his murderers. They were the ones who most clearly understood how much you hate us. You in fact, hate us more than you hate your own women, which is saying something.
I remain convinced that this is a major reason that we have to disappear. Because when we are gone, your uppity middle-class feminists can be safely dismissed as acolytes of a foreign religion, brainwashed by neo-colonialism. It is hard to appeal to “Bangladeshi values” or “local culture” when right in the heart of it is our beautiful system of village endogamy, safeguarded by our lineage system; the ma’chong: Ritchil, Rema, Mankhin, Mrong, Mree, Nokrek.
I think you know some of the names. For your reference, they typically appear in your newspapers under headlines like “X gang raped in Mohammadpur” or “murder remains unsolved X years after….”.
Our system isn’t perfect. No system is. But the fact remains, if Bangladesh became 100% Garo tomorrow, your dreadful 50% reported Intimate Partner Violence rate would be cut in half. At least. It would be hailed as a miracle, worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Here in Meghalaya, the rate is 35%. But we do have rather a lot of you here, and the statistics aren’t disaggregated.
I note with some amusement that IFAD is trumpeting “dual titles” as a way of promoting women’s land rights in Bangladesh. The decades-long Cadastral Survey of Bengal saw dual titles in Garo communities; this took place in Mymensingh around 1918, four years before the British themselves afforded their own women equal rights to property. But of course, those are the documents that don’t exist, right? *wink wink* Because, you know, the Forest Department.
Which brings me to the reason I have been brought back to this question of why you hate us so.
I was wondering why you Bengalis, in solidarity with your fellow Muslims, have done so little about the camps in Xinjiang. Then I found out you’re rounding up my people into camps of your own.
You are are pleased to call them guccha gram, but they look like camps to me. Being built right now, in Sherpur, in Haluaghat, and in Jamalpur, funded by the World Bank, neo-colonialism being perfectly acceptable insofar as it matches your own ends.
These camps are so very strange to us, with our a’king territories, where Garos can roam as they will through their own forests. Their forests, not the Government’s. We never made the distinction, you see, between land and forest. Through contesting British military power, we saw that this was respected in 1822 and in 1869, and your ridiculous Forest Acts were never implemented here.
As I understand it, you people still think the distinction between land and forest is “vital to conservation”. Good grief, but why? Why do you think this nonsense? Ah wait, of course, because the British told you so: “Ji sir, ji sir.”
You may be interested to know that there is not even a proximate translation of the phrase “ji sir, ji sir” in Abeng, the dialect of Garo I speak, nor indeed any dialect of Garo of which I am aware. And here in the Hills, the President of the World Bank defers to the humblest nokma chief. We have no need for World Bank money, you see, whereas you are painfully dependent on it for your camps.
I believe the World Bank project is called SUFAL? A cursory search on the internet gives the acronym: Sustainable Forests and Livelihoods. I applaud the fan service to Orwell.
What a strange place is Bangladesh, where the pious huzur and left-wing liberal are united, both in applauding the death of American neo-colonialism in Afghanistan, and staying silent about camps in Xinjiang, and camps in Sherpur.
I am pleased to have been born in Ampati, and to live in Shillong. I am glad my father never went back to the village of his birth. I am glad he had that level of understanding of how much you hate us. It allows me a certain level of detachment you see, and I am morbidly curious.
The languages of the Bodo group have been heard in speech and song east of Jamuna since before the birth of the Prophet.So when we, the last of its speakers, have finally been civilised out of existence, it will be a historical moment of enormous significance. Few of you will mark this change; people in your elite circles who simultaneously pay obsequious deference to your own vaunted language movement with little if any grasp of literary Bengali.
But the passing of our own mother tongue, and the other strange, backward languages spoken by indigenous peoples in Bangladesh,will be a significant moment for you. You haven’t realised it, because you are so short sighted. But it really will be. Because it will require you to find someone else to hate. Like I say, I’m morbidly curious. Who’s next on the list? And who will you blame for deforestation, while you’re at it? Because lord knows the true culprits must be protected.
On the upside, the “equal rights for women = neo-colonial imposition” thesis won’t have to contend with our matrilocal residence practices as a fly in the ointment. Maybe after all is said and done it really is all about being left in peace to rape your peasants. You can call that “Liberation” if you want. There is not even a proximate translation for it in Abeng.
(The author is a Garo woman living in Shillong. Gidita Rema is a pseudonym, paying homage to a Garo woman activist from Madhupur who was assassinated in 2001. At the time of writing, the case remains unsolved)