13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

CHOWDHURY, Shafiqur Rahman

The Role of Oral History in the Rediscovery and Reinterpretation of National and Cultural Identity: the liberation war of Bangladesh

The identity crisis in Bangladesh has passed through crucial phases over the centuries and has been taking shape around language. The language movement began in the distant past with the emergence of Bengal’s earliest poetic genre ‘charyapada’ or Buddhist mystic songs (750-1050).

The gentry of that time did not like this language of the people. Instead they tried to preserve the great tradition of Sanskrit language and the high culture of the elite. Also in the middle ages, the Hindu nobility and Muslim elites tried to impose their own languages, Sanskrit and Persian/Arabic, on the people. Against this background the seventeenth century Bengali poet Abdul Hakim said very bitterly in his famous poem, “He that is born in Bengal and hates the language of the people has no definite paternal identity.”

Since the assassination of the father of the nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the facts and processes of the liberation war have been distorted systematically by successive autocratic military and so-called democratic rulers. I have tried to reconstruct the history of our liberation war recording unofficial, local and personal experiences of the common people including peasants, students, freedom fighters, Bayatis (village bards), village elders and women. My research deals with constructing the hitherto untold local history of the liberation war of the Feni district of Bangladesh using such oral historical elements as are still available.

It is only through the meticulous preservation of the history of our glorious liberation war that the spirit, principles and value of independence could be rekindled and the national and cultural identity rediscovered and reinterpreted through the writing of the history of the people.