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Bangabandhu and Bangladesh’s Landscapes
FAKRUL ALAM
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was rooted in the land and loved Bangladesh’s natural features. He wanted them to be as they were—green, open spaces full of water bodies and flora and fauna. That was one of the reasons why he would speak up for its people and demand that they could breathe amidst the beauty and bountiful of its landscapes freely. That is why too why while honoring him, we can also try to learn from his writings and do what we can—each and every one of us—to preserve the beauty of our country, and mend it where it has been marred, attempting to do our best to restore it to the way it was when he wrote about it whenever he put his thoughts to paper—even his prison notebooks.
Consider as a beginning instance of his love of Bangladesh’s landscapes the young Mujib’s trip to Ajmer after he had gone to Delhi to attend a convention of the all-Indian Muslim League in 1946. In this quite desert-like landscape, one of the highlights of his Ajmer trip is a visit to Anar Sagar. He had been to the neighboring Targarh mountains previously but has not anything much to say about it. Why then is he attracted to the lake, spending an entire paragraph describing an “entire evening” he spent there, along with his other companions? Isn’t there a lesson in this for us to keep our environment as beautiful as they were and as he found them to be? To quote the relevant passage of The Unfinished Memoirs (2012), “We are people from a riverine place and love our waterbodies. How can I explain how difficult it was for us to leave this lake in a land otherwise a desert?” ( UM , 60).
After partition, Bangabandhu, disillusioned in no time like other most other Bangalees who had opted for the division of India under the banner of the Muslim League, became actively involved in claiming political autonomy for Bangladeshis and their freedom from the clutches of feudal-minded, domineering Muslim League politicians. While campaigning with others to raise Bangladeshi consciousness against them, we find Bangabandhu on a boat with his companions, probably on the Meghna, listening to songs by some prominent singers accompanying them such as Abbasuddin Ahmed. Bangabandhu is simply enthralled by his singing in that riverscape. As Bangabandhu records his reaction to the scene created by the great singer’s rendering of bhatiali songs then: “… it seemed to me that the gently lapping waves were entranced by his singing” (119). Clearly, the songs sung in such a setting had created a corresponding breeze in Bangabandhu’s consciousness. Had he been listening to Abbasuddin sing, “O Dheu Kele re” (The waves keep playing) or “Padmar Dehu Re” (The waves of the Padma)?
Bangabandhu loved Bangladesh’s water bodies and the breeze that drifted across them. Confined in prison on and off but at times seemingly endlessly hours and days in the next few years, they were among the things he yearned for in confinement. Then, too, he would “peep” out of his cell window “to catch a glimpse of a moonlit night or the stars in the sky” (175).
Out of prison, Bangabandhu plunged into organizational work for the East Pakistan Awami League. In doing so, he had to go to Karachi to meet Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Looking at the desert environs of what was then Pakistan’s capital city, Bangabandhu reads his feeling of alienation by that time from the country he had once striven for. Spontaneously, the man who is the chief architect of our independence, and who was ready to sacrifice everything for this cause in his lifetime, reflects on the scene before him thus: “We were born in a country that was green everywhere; wherever one looked in Bengal one saw a sea of green. How could we ever get to like the pitiless sandscape? …. We were born into a world that abounded in beauty; we loved whatever was beautiful” (214).
In The Unfinished Memoirs , Bangabandhu mentions that in the extended period of detention he had spent in Dhaka Central Jail between 1949 and 1952 he had taken advantage of the time he was given to go outside his cell during the day to cultivate the garden he had created there. But it is in his notebooks of the period he spent in jail in the 1950s and the 1960s, now preserved in print as Prison Diaries , we find extended accounts of his gardening in the days spent in confinement. By reading them we get to see Bangabandhu not only feeling rooted in Bangladesh’s landscapes and inspired by them, but also as someone who felt like nurturing them to make them even more beautiful.
In the second note book collected in Prison Diaries (2018), for example, we find him surrounded in his tiny cell by 93 other cells. Undaunted, he decides to make good use of the one advantage it had over the others---“some open space in front of it.” Seeing some plants and trees flourishing in that space, he concludes that he can do his bit to improve the prison landscape even more by planting “flowers and fruit-bearing trees” in it ( PD , 90). And we see him do just that in a few subsequent entries. But he is also sensitive to the fauna as well as the flora in this little bit of Bangladesh that he feels is open to him and can inspire him even amidst the walls of the prison. He thus yearns to glimpse once again the “two yellow birds” he would feel stirred by day after day when in 1958-59 he had spent 16 months continuously in prison (95). He thinks now that they were not there “because they had become upset at me for not being there then” (ibid)!
Bangabandhu’s moment of joy in a place where he is either forced to stay in solitary confinement inside his cell, or walk outside in the open but guarded spaces for some time of the day, comes when he is gardening. As he says in his 23 June, 1966 entry, he loves then the sight of “green grass…swaying to the rhythm of the wind. It looks so lovely” (113)! But of course, there are weeds he has to pull out, “just like our country where we have parasites bent on destroying real patriots and striving to do so” (ibid). In other words, care must be taken to allow nature to bloom but also protect it from harm. Though there are crows attacking the little birds, there is a rooster around to protect them; nature, after all, is essentially benign though it may have its share of weeds and cantankerous crows. Rough “human beings often betray their friends” but “animals are never unfaithful” (ibid).
In his next entry of 24 June, 1966 Bangabandhu reveals his delight in the beauty of the prison open spaces after the monsoonal rains surely because they remind him of how his land is always revived by changes in the weather. He records the fragrance of the Kamini flowers that he smells in these prison days, prison trees that had become even greener after the showers, and the prison field that has become so “full of green grass”. He sees them all and writes in his prison notebook delightedly afterwards: “I saw them to my heart’s fill. They seemed to have taken on a new and even more beautiful look” (115).
What must be done, he implies in an entry in notebook three, is strive for freedom and ensure it for all inhabitants of the animal kingdom as much as possible. In Bangabandhu’s words, “a bird doesn’t want to remain in a cage even if it is a gilded one. Even animals dislike being made to spend life in captivity. And how can we humans think of enduring such a life” (190)?
In Note book four, Bangabandhu, in prison for two years by now, deeply disturbed by Pakistani machinations outside the prison and unable to sleep at night in such an environment, finds relief only in the strolls he can take in his “flower garden in the morning” that enable him to lessen the “agony” he had experienced the previous night. This is because “the morning breeze sweeps away all the sorrow from my mind” and “two yellow birds” show up, as they had done some months back (229). Nature heals better than anything else and thus must be valued and nurtured! In solitary confinement by this time, Bangabandhu finds companionship and solace only in “the trees, the yellow birds, the swallows” and even the crows in his “lonely corner” (230).
Undoubtedly, the bleakest of the notebooks is the one Bangabandhu kept when interned in Dhaka cantonment on false charges in the Agartola conspiracy case. Denied even the open space he had previously, he feels mentally choked. Only his will power, and eventually the movement launched to release him, were able to give him hope and let him breathe freely. Fortunately, he was able to return to the open spaces of Bangladesh he loved so much and wanted to see flourish so dedicatedly afterwards.
In the last of Bangabandhu’s books published based on his prison experiences and the note books he kept during confinement in the eleven years or so he was in prison, New China (2021), we find too Bangabandhu’s love of nature, as when he goes to Sun Yat-Sen’s tomb, or when he is able to sail in a boat in a lake in the resort town of Hangzhou. He is particularly moved by his trip to the lake and the experience of rowing a boat on it. When his interpreter is amazed by his boating skills, Bangabandhu explains to him how as a man from a deltaic country he had become skilled at rowing. He also communicates to readers his joy at the sight of an island in the middle of the lake. But what is most telling for us now is what he says in concluding his account of the visit: “But we have hearts made of stone. We seem to relate best to lonely prisons and their rock-hard walls” (107).
Among the lessons we can learn from Bangabandhu’s life and times as recorded in his writings and speeches, then, is his absolute delight in Bangladesh’s landscapes and his conviction that we can be at our best amidst nature’s bounty. He was all for development but he surely would not have been impressed by the desecration of the environment in the name of progress. He must have had a green thumb and a very developed ecological consciousness and would have detested the walls and imprisonment of people in cities, the toxic air and the dirt and debris strewn everywhere nowadays in the name of development. As we read him a century after his birth and close to fifty years of his death anniversary, let us learn from him the importance of valuing our environment and doing what we can for our water bodies, flora and fauna as we move forward as a nation.
Fakrul Alam is Supernumerary Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka, and translator of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Unfinished Memoirs, Prison Diaries and New China, 1952
In the last of Bangabandhu’s books published based on his prison experiences and the note books he kept during confinement in the eleven years or so he was in prison, New China (2021), we find too Bangabandhu’s love of nature, as when he goes to Sun Yat-Sen’s tomb, or when he is able to sail in a boat in a lake in the resort town of Hangzhou.