Dhaka: Retired Major General Syed Shafayetul Islam’s expansive study room in his bungalow in Dhaka’s upscale Baridhara neighbourhood is stacked with books. The former Military Secretary to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina says that books have been his constant companion through war and peace. And occupying a place of pride on his bookshelf are the collected works of Bengal’s tallest bard, Rabindranath Tagore.

What does Tagore mean to him?

A figure that united Indian Bengalis has now become a symbol of divide among Bangladeshis. To some, Tagore is beyond the divides of class and religion and threads the nation together; for others, he was a privileged, extractive landowner who should be looked at with a critical eye.

When the winds of change swept across erstwhile East Pakistan, Bengalis, both Muslims and Hindus, rejected the imposition of Urdu by West Pakistan. Clinging onto Bengali with all they had, it was Tagore they turned to. It had a disastrous consequence — genocide.

The West Pakistan army tried to crush East Pakistan’s love for the Bengali language and its cry for a more pronounced sub-national Bengali identity. The military attacked Tagore’s legacy too. Besides abetting mass rapes and murders, the Butcher of Bangladesh and Pakistan’s first Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Tikka Khan, ordered a ban on Rabindra Sangeet. These songs spoke directly to the Bengali identity as distinct from the larger Pakistani identity. However, his ban could not keep the bard away from the hearts of those who came together to fight for the Bengali language.

After much blood was spilt and East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, Tagore’s song, Amar Shonar Bangla, became the national anthem of the new country. Tagore had written the song to protest against the 1905 partition of Bengal along communal lines. Now, it was the raison d’etre of a new nation.

A young muktijoddha or freedom fighter at the time, Islam remembers the importance of Tagore in his country’s bloody history. But does today’s Bangladesh embrace Tagore as much as the retired major general’s generation did?

Also read: Abanindranath Tagore rejected European art. Promoted Hindu spirituality to convey ‘Indianness’

Poet of the privileged

On 19 February 2023, ThePrint published a report on how a newly-installed statue of Tagore disappeared from the Dhaka University campus and was later found in a garbage dump. It was reinstated soon after — a blue tape was pasted on Tagore’s mouth, and a nail pierced in the book that he held. Standing at 19.5 feet and made of bamboo, thermocol, and pages from discarded books, the statue was put up by students of Dhaka University’s Academy of Fine Arts to protest against the increasing censorship of free speech in the country. University authorities admitted to removing the statue, saying it was an act of “apasanskriti” or distortion of culture.

Dhaka University, the nerve centre of the most critical debates on Bangladesh’s society, culture, and politics, now stands divided on Tagore.

“Tagore has a contested legacy in Bangladesh,” says Bangladeshi Hindu rights activist Jayanta Karmakar. “Do you know [that] once, Dhaka had roads named Chittaranjan Avenue and Subhas Bose Avenue in memory of freedom fighters Chittaranjan Das and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose? These roads are now called Najimuddin Road and Khalid Bin Waleed Road.”

Also read: ‘Abandon Santiniketan, stop being Gurudeva, devote yourself to painting’—Jamini Roy to Tagore

Bengali to Bengali Muslim

Although religious identity was diluted during the 1971 war and Bose and Tagore were venerated, soon after, Bangladesh became aware of its Muslim majority status. Bengali identity, which had transformed East Pakistan into Bangladesh, slowly started giving way to a Bengali Muslim identity. “Tagore gave us the national anthem, yes, but his Sanskritised Bangla, his obvious Hinduness became anathema to the newer generations of Bangladeshis,” Karmakar says.

Not everyone sees Tagore and his work through the communal angle, though — Muslims in Dhaka want to keep the fear as far as possible.

“To say [that] Tagore is contested in today’s Bangladesh because he was Hindu is letting go of nuance,” says a Muslim mass communications student at Dhaka University on the condition of anonymity. The Tagore debate, she says, is a “polarising one”. “Plus, I have a lot of Hindu friends, and I do not want them to think of me as communal,” she adds.

Meanwhile, Dhaka intellectuals explore the underbelly of the poet’s patriotism and pride — his societal privileges, zamindar family background, and ‘elitist’ writings.

“Tagore came from the landowning class, and it is no secret that he was an exacting zamindar. The family-owned large tracts of land not only in what is today the state of West Bengal but also [in] our country Bangladesh. And zamindars like Tagore were unkind not just to Muslim sharecroppers but [also] to their Dalit Hindu counterparts as well. Tagore’s sanskritised Bangla, speaking mostly about lofty ideals and pride and patriotism for India, needs to be critically examined in independent Bangladesh from that lens. Tagore was the poet of the privileged, specifically the poet of the Hindu upper castes. Why should he not be debated?” says the Dhaka University student.

In his seminal work Bangali Musolmaner Mon (The Mind of the Bengali Muslim), celebrated Bangladeshi writer Ahmed Sofa writes that a vast majority of Bengali Muslims were sharecroppers, weavers, craftspeople and fisherpeople, subservient to the mostly Hindu landowning class. This class divide was the basis of the 1947 partition of Bengal — the Muslim-majority provinces became East Pakistan — and the reason for the waves of communal clashes that continued even after the birth of Bangladesh.

Maybe it is the same divide that makes Tagore a figure of contention.

Nilay Kumar Biswas, a post-graduate mass communication student at Dhaka University, says that many Bangladeshi Muslims today regard Tagore as communal because they do not find an adequate representation of Bengali Muslims in the poet’s works. “It doesn’t help that Tagore came from the Hindu landowning class. The memory of that class of Bengali Hindus is not a very pleasant one for Muslims,” he says. However, Biswas cautions against making sweeping generalisations about Tagore, emphasising that the poet needs to be read more critically.

Interestingly, on the other side of the border, in 1960s Calcutta, a group of poets known as the Hungryalists revolutionised contemporary Bengali and challenged the status quo, rejecting Tagore’s language as elitist. “They chose instead to speak of the angst of the people on the road. New conversations and a new language became the need of the day as opposed to the bourgeoise sentiment that found reflection in Tagore’s writings,” says Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, author of The Hungryalists: The Poets Who Sparked a Revolution.

Also read: When Rabindranath Tagore sent 3 men to study agriculture in US so they can…

A contested but important legacy

The debate on Tagore’s legacy, though, seems to be hot potatoes only for students, activists, and civilians in Dhaka. The Bangladeshi political class is unflinchingly loyal to the country’s national anthem giver.

“Be that as it may, Tagore remains our tallest poet,” says Khaza Khair Sujon, a young politician of Hasina’s Awami League. “Tagore is taught in our schools and colleges, and our national identity is shaped by him. What he was in his personal life is a separate matter; his literature remains as relevant today as it was when he penned them.”

Sujon says that today’s Bangladesh needs Tagore more than ever. As sectarian violence rises, the international press questions the Hasina government’s secular credentials, and religious dogmatism threatens to rip apart Bangladesh’s social fabric, it is Tagore who can show the way. “The idea of Bangladesh was a country for all Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims. To discard Tagore is to disregard that idea. We cannot afford that,” says Sujon.

(Edited by Humra Laeeq)