What’s now called ‘Bangladeshi’ language was excluded by secular sadhu-bhasha long ago

Amit Malviya is correct that Sylheti is not the same as Bengali. But what he and his team seem to lack is any sense of the history beyond that statement.

Trinamool Congress MPs protest outside Parliament over the alleged 'attacks' and 'insult' to Bengalis in BJP-ruled states | Image for representation | Photo: X/@AITCofficial

In a bizarre recent development, the Delhi Police, in an official FIR, claimed that alleged illegal Bangladeshi residents in the city were communicating in “Bangladeshi” language rather than Bengali. This set off a whirlwind of arguments on social media between right-wing ideologues and progressive Bengalis. BJP leader Amit Malviya, responding to Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee’s objections to this “insulting” claim, doubled down and asserted that “Bangladeshi” is different from “Bengali.”

“The term [Bangladeshi] is being used to describe a set of dialects, syntax, and speech patterns that are distinctly different from the Bangla spoken in India,” Malviya wrote, adding that the official language of Bangladesh is phonologically distinct and also includes dialects like Sylheti that are “nearly incomprehensible” to Indian Bengalis. “There is, in fact, no language called ‘Bengali’ that neatly covers all these variants. ‘Bengali’ denotes ethnicity, not linguistic uniformity. So when the Delhi Police uses ‘Bangladeshi language,’ it is a shorthand for the linguistic markers used to profile illegal immigrants from Bangladesh—not a commentary on Bengali as spoken in West Bengal.”

The debate has brought to the fore a deeper fault line within greater Bengali society: of caste, class, and communalism. Both right-wing and progressive Bengali politics have contributed to it.

In discussing the underlying history behind the category “Bangladeshi” or “Musalmani-Bengali,” I contend that it does not pertain to the conversations around illegal immigrants or Bengali culture. Rather, being a colonial and Bengali elite invention, it poses a dangerous and limitless threat of disenfranchisement for millions of non-urban and non-Savarna Bengali-speaking migrant workers.

I further contend that the prime culprit is not Musalmani-Bengali, but a sanitised and Sankritised colonial language (sadhu-bhasha)—stripped of Arabic, Persianate, and colloquial roots—that came to define progressive secular Bengali politics.

 

The ‘secular’ Bengali language

Bengali speakers are no strangers to language politics. The quest for a Bengali language, among other factors, drove an entire province to secede from Pakistan in 1971 and form Bangladesh. To honour the Dhaka University martyrs, massacred on 21 February 1952 for protesting the mandatory imposition of Urdu on millions of Bengali speakers in East Pakistan, UNESCO in 1999 declared the date International Mother Language Day (Bhasha Andolon Dibosh).

Progressive Indian Bengali politics celebrated this struggle as a win for the Bengali language. Never mind that the movement for Bangladesh had little to do with the progressive politics of West Bengal or India. Activists in East Pakistan wanted to carry out their everyday affairs in Bengali instead of Urdu, while asserting their Bangla identity and their separation first from India and, later, Pakistan.

File photo of artists painting Bangla alphabets on the eve of International Mother Language Day in Kolkata | ANI

For progressive Indian Bengalis, however, a victory for Bengali in Bangladesh implied a win for their own version of Bengali history—one defined by upper-caste Hindu role models. Bengaliness, in this view, is celebrated only as long as it exists in a secular state stripped of its Muslim, Dalit, or other hyphenated identities.

Why, then, is Bengali understood by Indian-Bengalis as a secular language devoid of religious, casteist, and classist impulses?

What is ‘Bangladeshi’ or ‘Musalmani-Bengali’ language?

The distaste for a Muslim-Bengali language (or “Bangladeshi” language) goes back to the colonial period.

Reverend James Long, while compiling an exhaustive catalogue of Bengali literary works in the mid-nineteenth century, coined the seemingly innocuous term “Musalmani-Bengali”. As the historian Anindita Ghosh pointed out, this term, for long, denoted the “language of fictional works lacking in taste, and read by Muslim boatmen”. What started as an eccentric ethnographic detail was later formalised into academic discussions.

Over the next century and a half, the term Musalmani-Bengali uncritically occupied the analytical palimpsest of most major scholars of the Bengali language, from Sukumar Sen to Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, and even Rafiuddin Ahmed, author of the seminal The Bengal Muslims, 1871-1906.

Ahmed argued that Musalmani-Bengali became the medium of orthodox Bengali Muslims who broke away from a tolerant pre-colonial culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He claimed that pre-colonial Muslim authors often used Hindu terms such as “Iswar” for God rather than “Allah”, whereas in the colonial period the Maulvi (or “Mullah”) came to define the tradition. Since then, the general understanding of Bengali Muslim culture has uncritically echoed many of Ahmed’s concerns.

However, early-modern or middle-Bengali Muslim authors did not simply use “Iswar” instead of “Allah.” Rather, they incorporated Islamic metaphysical concepts into existing non-Islamic philosophies, such as Vaishnavism. They dwelt effortlessly in multilingual worlds to “translate” Islam—to use the literary scholar Tony K Stewart’s words—into a Bengali context. Departing from his intellectual predecessors, Stewart understood this “translation” as a means of establishing connection with, rather than displacing or converting, non-Muslim cultures.

Middle-Bengali authors were no less Muslim for this engagement. An absurd binary persists among progressive Bengalis today, where Sufis are framed as “less Muslim” and reformers or theologians as “more Muslim.”

Research by scholars like Thibaut d’Hubert and Ayesha A Irani shows otherwise: writers such as Alaol (1607-80) and Sayyid Sultan (1550-1648) were devout Muslims even as they engaged intelligently with non-Muslim philosophical and religious ideas.

Ahmed was also harsh on the “Mullahs” — the much-maligned theologians in both progressive and right-wing discourse today— whom he accused of pushing towards an Islamicised Bengali in the late nineteenth century.

Contrary to such claims, Bengali has always displayed rich Persian and Arabic loanwords in both Hindu and Muslim authorship, a fact Sukumar Sen had observed in his magisterial History of Bengali Literature. Mere usage of such loanwords did not imply the author’s religious affiliations.

In the middle-Bengali and early colonial period, a wonderful group of multiliterate authors, Hindu and Muslim alike, wrote in dobhashi — a Bengali deeply infused with Persian and Arabic literary styles. Two great proponents of dobhashi were Hindus: Biprardas Piplai in the fifteenth century and Dvija Giridhar in the seventeenth.

In the same vein, the phenomenal research of the late Kumkum Chatterjee brought to light that it was the Hindu scribal literati, working under Mughal or Nizamat patronage, who took the lead in using Mughal Persian vocabulary and idioms to embellish Bengali poetry in the eighteenth century.  One such writer, Bharatchandra Ray (1712-60), captivated Bengali audiences with his Persianised Bengali classic Annadamangal (The Mangal-Kavya of the Goddess Annada).

Musalmani-Bengali is therefore an ill-defined term without limits. From boatmen’s literature and Perso-Arabic embellishments to Quranic cosmologies, Persian-Bengali courtly works, and Islamic reformist writing, it captured everything distinctive about Bengali literature.

The term, in fact, was devised to express elite displeasure toward practiced Bengali language. It is this limitlessness of the term which gets periodically invoked —by colonial and upper-caste Bengalis on the one hand, and right-wing Hindu and Muslim ideologues on the other—to purge ‘non-Bengali’ elements from their respective versions of the language.

Sanskritised sadhu-bhasha

In all such discussions of Musalmani-Bengali, the real culprit is conveniently elided: a chaste, upper-caste Bengali language known as sadhu-bhasha.

A nineteenth-century creation, sadhu-bhasha sanitised Bengali of its multiple communitarian roots. Anindita Ghosh argues that “sadhu or polite language had a vocabulary that comprised intact Sanskrit loanwords known as tatsama”, whereas common language, or chalit, “was marked by the inclusion of tadbhava, or Sanskrit loanwords distorted over time, as well as non-Sanskritic, indigenous, and alien words.”

Ghosh also shows that well before the Hindi-Urdu divide became part of the politics of North India, missionaries and Bengali elites had already begun to “artificially Sanskritise and standardise a loose, undefined [Bengali] language”. This new secular Bengali became a conduit to express anti-colonial pride while simultaneously disregarding everyday Bangla speakers.

Expressing dissent, Rashshundari Devi (1809-99), considered the first Bengali woman to pen an autobiography, refused to write in this chaste language. Instead, she wrote in the colloquial Bengali of the mid-nineteenth century.

The limits of progressive Bengali politics

The progressive pushback against the right-wing framing of “Bangladeshi” rests on the idea that Bengali is a capacious language that accommodates and democratises variations. But this notion is a myth and needs to be called out.

Let’s say two upper-caste migrant Indian Bengalis meet in Bengaluru or London. Once they realise and bond over their Bengaliness there’ll always be a follow-up: Apni kothakar Bangali? (Where do you trace your Bengali identity to?). Or: Apnar bari kothay? (Where do you originally belong to in Bengal?).

Simply being Bengali doesn’t suffice. The authenticity of the identity is constantly tested until someone is proven a “Proper Kolkatan”, which is the epitome of bhadralok Bengali identity.

The distance to “proper Kolkata” determines civilisational strata in the state. Bengali spoken by a Kolkata elite is perceived as superior to that spoken by a wage labourer from Dinajpur, a fisherwoman from the Sundarbans, or a homemaker in Silchar.

The right-wing in Bengal, appealing to the upper-caste elite, has latched on to the fissure, unleashing a ruthless campaign of disenfranchisement. As they prepare to label anyone speaking a different version of Bengali as an outsider, the response cannot stop at “We are all Bengalis” or the myth of a unifying Bengali identity.

Bengali culture is rife with hierarchies. It is therefore essential to draw the limits of the Bengali language—not to exclude but to acknowledge those hierarchies and differences. Only then will empathetic solidarities emerge without flattening language and identities.

Amit Malviya’s painstaking research targeted Sylheti as an example of a non-Bengali language and its speakers as “illegal.” Progressives won’t like to hear this, but he’s correct that Sylheti is not the same as Bengali.

But what he and his team seem to lack is any sense of the history beyond that statement. While many Sylhetis speak Bengali today, the region nurtured its own language from as early as the fourteenth century, with a distinct script called Sylheti-Nagri. They had separate printing presses and readership in the colonial period.

Sylheti tests the limit of the Bengali language. A Sylheti may belong to Assam, Meghalaya, or Bangladesh but they deserve voting and citizenship rights for being Sylheti. They don’t have to be subsumed into a homogenous Bengali or Assamese identity for that.

The same goes for the Rajbanshis, an indigenous community in north Bengal who recently have been bizarrely accused of being foreigners. Affixing a Bengali identity here will only create unbridgeable gaps in the region’s politics, fragmenting and alienating identities.

For instance, in the northern Bengal duar, where I’m from, the insistence on a monolithic Bengali or Nepali (Gurkha) identities has marginalised Adivasi, Rajbanshi, Lepcha, Lama, Bhutiya, Bihari, and Marwari communities as they don’t fit neatly into either category.

 

The cost of Bengali dominance

Bengali language, much like modern Hindi and English, is also a language killer. Along with Sanskritic sanitisation, Bengali became a dominant force under colonial patronage and upper-caste practices since the nineteenth century. Between Grierson’s linguistic survey in the twentieth century and the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (2012), Bengal lost several marginal languages.

Today, 38 distinct languages other than Bengali are spoken in the state. West Bengal, incidentally, also has the highest number of scripts among Indian states. Despite such diversity, the number of languages nearing extinction in Bengal is alarming. Out of 310 languages precariously positioned in India, GN Devy, the scholar behind the People’s Linguistic Survey, posits that ten in Bengal are “critically endangered”. Some of the lesser-known languages surveyed in 2012 were Sobor, Goya, Tharu, Jalda, Asur, Hemal, Bedia, and Mogor. In 2012, Mogor had just one speaker. This incredible but neglected linguistic diversity is fading quickly in the face of both right-wing and progressive politics around Bengali and Bangladeshi languages.

Upper-caste Bengali language and migration under colonial rule led to the displacement of colloquial (cholti) variations of Bengali as well as other languages. In the postcolonial period, such migrants earned the ire of indigenous local communities, creating an unwelcome problem.

For instance, few people are aware that in the late eighteenth century, a unique Bengali-Khasi community lived in the Mughal estates of Sylhet, alongside Garo, Khasi, and other groups. Colonial policies that drew hard lines between the hills and the plains, along with the migration of caste-elite Bengalis over the twentieth century, turned Sylhet’s politics into one of binaries: Muslim and Hindu, Bengali and Khasi.

In the history and politics of Shillong and Silchar today, anti-Bengali sentiment abounds instead of histories of acculturation.

While Bengali people are undoubtedly victims in some places, they appear as ugly perpetrators in their own state. In the northern Bengal duar, histories of assimilation between Nepali, Bengali, Adivasi, Rajbanshi, Boro, Bihari, and Assamese communities are rudely interrupted by administrative orders from Kolkata imposing a homogenous, chaste Bengali language over non-native speakers—such as making Bengali compulsory in schools.

Beyond binaries

The emptiness of the term Bangladeshi (or Musalmani-Bengali) and the secular celebration of chaste Bengali language both contribute to the bane of the binary. For language politics to evolve, diversities need to be respected and histories remembered.

A language as hierarchical as Bengali cannot be celebrated through empty secular gestures, such as commemorating Bhasha Andolon Dibosh while emphasising only the Bengaliness, not the Muslimness, of that struggle. In this regard, hyphenated identities, for those who prefer it, might offer a more inclusive and less hierarchical cultural space.

In the same vein, variations of Bengali must also be respected instead of promoting a standard chaste version of the language. Differences in speech should not be measured against Kolkata-Bengali, since every dissimilarity—intonation, phrasing, dialect—carries with it coded caste, class, and communal histories. These variations should be documented, researched, and taught at institutions, not erased.

Bengali is also not a boundless linguistic category, and its limits must be acknowledged. Communities like the Rajbanshis want to preserve their own language but that does not make them any less connected or empathetic to Bengali speakers. Recognising and respecting differences builds solidarity; enforcing a single idea of Bengali only deepens the tensions already at play.

Finally, Bengali language policy urgently requires a framework to preserve endangered languages. Any uniform policy of homogenisation will only widen rifts, resulting in either disenfranchisement or the loss of voters. The future must move beyond simplistic oppositional categories, encouraged by the right-wing, and the hollow Bengali cultural pride practised by Bengal’s ruling party.

Arighna Gupta is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Views are personal. 

(Edited by Asavari Singh)