Memorial Flag

Swirling sarees and silk scarfs, bodies gyrating like enchanted snakes, hands twisting to pounding beats and the warbling overtones of harmonium and voice. Crowded in a dark square opposite the guesthouse, the residents of Gowair gaze up at a shaking stage, bathed in fluorescent light. The audience sat in blue plastic chairs, cheering and bobbing their heads to the beat. The dancers came on in ones and twos, starting their performance of repetitive dance moves to repetitive music and flowing into a flurry of pulses and swings. Then, without a word, the dancer would twist to their left and slink offstage.

On the 26^th of March, 1971, freedom fighters in East Pakistan declared Bangladesh an independent nation and began a nine month war with the Pakistani occupiers.

It was another cramped bus ride from Gowair to Farmgate, this time with Mohsin along with us as well. We passed through and under the construction site of a new flyover system. Dotted around us, pillars of concrete stood their ground. From their changing angles and heights, I pictured the new overpass snaking overhead, allowing more traffic to crawl through Dhaka.

“They are building a new flyover because now in Dhaka there is big traffic problem, so many cars.” Mohsin turned to me and continued, “I think it is in your country there is no traffic. I have friend in America and they tell me there is no traffic.”

I tried to ask where in America they lived but he did not know.

We arrived in Farmgate and I headed straight for the same street-vendor frying chappattis and eggs in the open air. Solomon led us on, bound for his hostel, and left us sitting on the wooden bench, disappearing back outside himself. Five minutes later he returned with two brown paper bags, both stained with grease. He dumped his excursion’s prize and headed off again, retrieving a plate and up-ending the bag of fried eggs onto it.

We had just finished eating when Solomon popped up and led us back to the streets. As we emerged from the darkened alley, Fiona noticed ahead of us two westerners clambering out of a rickshaw. The sight being so rare, my eyes were glued. As I continued to glance back over my shoulder I realised the feeling many Bangladeshis must have when seeing my lanky body lumbering down their streets.

I had thought, when I first arrived, that I would be stared at by locals who had never seen a foreigner before, yet here I was, a westerner myself, gawking at another pair of foreigners. It was not that they had never seen a white person; it was that they hadn’t for a month, maybe more.

Solomon took us past the street market again, where we stopped for some time awaiting a friend of his from university. We perched on a set of stone steps, half a metre above the flowing crowd in the stalls below. The current fluctuated like a tide: mobs of pedestrians would trundle through one way, reaching high tide and the peak of traffic before switching direction.

The crowd was mainly men and older boys, sometimes hand in hand, walking through from home to school or work. With so many on the street, I thought, perhaps, that no one worked in this city. It was hard to believe that there were enough people to fill the market and still have enough left over to fill the offices.

Shohan, Solomon’s friend, arrived, and we headed up to a footbridge, saving us the terror of weaving between honking cars and jingling rickshaws. The commotion below felt so far away, though some of the bustle had followed in the stream of pedestrians also on the overpass.

Torn posters lined the low walls, shredded by the skims and bumps of others walking by, making it look like a paper maché bridge; scraps of newspapers and magazines plastering every surface.

We returned to street level, dropping past a tangle of wires with loops and hoops and loose ends: the telecommunication and power lines of central Dhaka. It was an old spider’s web of cables, unkempt for years and out of sight of the people strolling along below, not thinking to look up. A dented bus took us outside the campus of Dhaka University, and we made the rest of the journey on foot, passing beneath a banner announcing the campus and entering onto a dual carriageway lined thick with trees.

Along the pavement, make-shift vendor’s huts attached themselves to the brick wall, akin to the river walls of Paris. An overflowing blue dumpster stood at the kerb, dunes of rubbish drifting past its base with a murder of crows attacking the carcasses of empty wrappers and discarded banana skins.

In an orchard off the road, the mess of the streets cleared in the fresh green leaves of the trees. At our feet, however, the ground was still littered with crushed plastic cups and burst balloon pieces. In the distance, someone tapped a drum, warming up for a performance, with a small crowd gathering. We stuck around and watched a play about the independence—or so I assumed; the play was in Bengali.

Grand for a lecture hall

The park also held a large memorial with low, faux-marble walls and a dancing yellow paraffin flame sat between two wriggling flags. Nearby, an art exhibition assembled itself, with large photographic prints hung on a long wall. These photos, taken during the nine month liberation war, depicted scenes of extreme poverty, over-run refugee camps, devastated city streets with bodies and rubble mixed like a box of Lego, and the marches of jubilation at the end, freedom fighters jutting their weapons into the air: bows, arrows, sticks and rusted rifles.

1971. ’71. Ekattor. Is it a number? A word? A history? To any Bangladeshi, it embodies the pride of our nation, the struggle for our independence, the pain of loss, the humiliation of being violated, the joy of victory.

The events leading up to ’71 were documented almost entirely by local photographers. It was a story that international media neither knew nor was interested in. The crackdown in the night of the 25th March went barely recorded. For local photographers it was too dangerous to be out there with a camera. A few foreign journalists managed to sneak out or film through the windows of Hotel Intercontinental. They provided the only tangible record of those fateful hours. Others, who recorded these moments, were amateurs who took exceptional risks in preserving the only visual records of the atrocities.

Has ’71 indeed brought liberation to the women and men who toil on our land? To the garment workers and migrant labourers who bolster our economy, but struggle to meet basic needs? Does ’71 only mean freedom for some?

The preservation of these rare documents remains of crucial importance. Memories and emulsions both fade with time. We owe it to all future generations to retain what exists of the only material evidence of our glorious past. We need them to remind us and the world. “Never, no never again.”

—     Shaidul Alam

Nearby, a memorial stage cleared the land and a raised concrete platform lay empty in front of us, skirted by dirt fields one hundred metres wide. Bare footed kids ran across the hard ground, chasing cricket balls and running to their wicket. Our path curved away from the hot flat and back into the orchard, passing wooden Ferris Wheels, cranked by hand, and more vendors wheeling their shaking carts of biscuits and crisps from the shade of one tree to another. At the exit gate, a cluster of more permanent stalls had invaded, hawking water and energy drinks to the sweating passer-by’s.

Our next destination was the Bangladesh National Museum, a square building fronted by a high gate and armed guards. We bought tickets and passed through the first gate. At the glass doors of the building, a secondary security post had been set up, with an x-ray machine and metal detector. We all beeped as we passed through but the guards only said to hand in our bags at a desk to our left. Up a grand staircase, we came to the museum proper; a series of rooms set out around the perimeter of the building, circling around each level before sending you upstairs once more to the next section. Starting with a glorious map of Bangladesh with LEDs dotted across the key landmarks and major towns, we circled this room and begun our travels around this level.

It started with a static zoo: taxidermy and plastic flowers. The display ran through all the flora and fauna of Bangladesh with short descriptions written for each. On the second level, the displays went a little into ancient history, showing pictures and models of village life and an array of boats and river vessels. The museum had cabinets of tools and weapons too; iron sickles and wooden ploughs, bows and arrows, spears, and knives. Far from being old, however, the plaques said most of the artefacts were from the 1980s or 1970s.

You forget, travelling in Dhaka and living in the slums, that seventy-five per-cent of the population of Bangladesh live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their living. Too poor to afford heavy machinery, they continue to rely on traditional techniques and all equipment is made and used by hand. There were photographs too, showing the independence armies of 1971 wielding any weapon they could find: the bows, arrows, spears and swords now found in the museum.

The displays moved on to cultural relics; modern and traditional artwork and techniques ranging from clay pots to woven bamboo mats. We passed briefly through an art gallery of sketches and paintings taken, I could only presume, from the period of revolution in 1971. The pencil drawings were aggressive and free: quick, dark lines conjugating on the paper to form loose representations of figures and places. There was a heavy influence from western cubism and many of the paintings took reference from Picasso’s Guernica, using his violent abstractions in their own way to depict the suffering and neglect of their independence.

The final room through which we passed was still under curation: huge canvasses hung from the walls, crooked and half covered by yellow-stained tarpaulin. Many more paintings and printed photographs rested against each other amidst scraps of wallpaper and mounds of dust. The fans in this room were broken and there was no air conditioning, the air was heavy with heat. We left for lunch.

With the hottest part of the day begun, events and activity petered out, sweltering under the sun and disappearing into the shade. We wandered back to Solomon’s accommodation, resting under the thrum of a fan. The sun dropped, lowering the temperature to a tolerable level, and so we headed back to Gowair. People had begun to venture back onto the streets and stores opened their shutters once again. By sundown, the bustle had returned and amplified. In the darkness, careering rickshaws and bikes were low lit from motorbike headlamps. Occasional trucks thundered past, blinding all and pushing the commotion to the sides of the road. Walkers ambled past teashops and pharmacists, stopping to browse or observe others. Men sat on benches jutting out from stores, sipping small glasses of sweet tea. Carts of cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes and gourds lined an alcove at the side of the road.

We returned to the guesthouse and rested a while, until the pounding music from across the street disturbed and intrigued us.