by Piash Karim

Overuse may make it sound like a tired trite, but the fact remains that Pahela Baishakh is a celebratory moment in our collective consciousness. It marks a moment of affirmation, an act of self-definition in the history of our stormy, fractured sense of collective selfhood. Cultures need their symbols, symbols that are potent with concreteness of everyday lives. Pahela Baishakh is one of those concrete symbolisms, one of those practical metaphors that the memory, present, and anticipation of a people are made of.
   But let’s not allow ourselves to forget that like any other moment of affirmation, Pahela Baishakh also contains its moments of resistance. Celebrations of the historicity and lifestyles of peripheral nations (peripheral in relation to the world capitalist system, as Wallerstein has it) provide potent counterpoints to an aggressively homogenising cultural imperialism. Pahela Baishakh stands up as a de-totalising impulse against the totalising narrative of a Eurocentric calendar/discourse. At least potentially, it articulates itself as the defiant other of a hegemonic universalising chronology. This articulation, however, does not need to amount to a nativist retreat from modernity. Instead, by constructing itself as a radical reconfiguration of time and space, it can actually be a vital constituent of a revolutionised global modernity, a modernity that promises to undercut its own colonial/imperial genealogy. In this way, Pahela Baishakh, an observance of national heritage, is also a gesture of trans-national solidarity. It signifies a promise of alliance with plurality of other celebrations, multiplicity of other cultural assertions all across the world.
   The trajectory through which Pahela Baishakh has evolved has been secular in character. Whether through its origin in the promulgation of an emperor with reconciliatory position in regard to diverse religious traditions, or the ways it penetrated and shaped our collective folk life, or in a more recent historical juncture, the ways it has attained a different set of symbolisms through the anti (Pakistani) colonial consciousness of the Bengali middle class, Pahela Baishakh has become a primary sign of our secular festivity. It has become a milestone of our desire for a secular social life and statehood. The struggle to defend and enlarge the secularity of our public sphere is even more urgent today not only because of the enduring presence of fundamentalism (the militant version of which, in spite of all its rhetoric and temper tantrums, is a farcical failure when it comes to challenging, let alone altering the fundamental reality of imperialism) but also because of the way the current power that be finds it necessary to remind us that religion is an important component of our national identity. Tracing the history of Bengal to 12th century when this land came under the Muslim rule (an act of erasure of the pre-12th century memory), valorising the ‘Muslim majority’ character of East Pakistan as the historical predecessor of Bangladesh (a rationalisation of the ‘two nations’ theory), rehashing the ‘moderate Muslim country’ rhetoric (a submissive nod to the ideology of imperialist globalisation), as they were articulated in the much talked about recent meeting of political scientists, adds a new sense of exigency to the striving for secularism. In that context, Pahela Baishakh, all over again, may become the rallying point for the struggle ahead.
   But the celebration, significantly enough, also needs to be defended against itself. Pahela Baishakh, for instance, needs to be defended against the danger of its transformation into a Bengali chauvinistic celebration. As Ekushey February may easily slide into a collective amnesia in regard to the languages of the small nationalities, Pahela Baishakh can also become a Bengali nationalistic marker at the expense of the aspirations and observances of the marginalised nationalities. Bengali nationalism, like any other nationalistic discourse, may have its own anti-colonial emancipatory instances, but like any other nationalism, it also has its reactionary undersides. Nationalism may become a narrative/practice of reaction not only by obscuring its internal antagonisms in relation to class, gender and ethnicity, but also by situating itself in a chauvinistic position in regard to other nationalities. Subverting the exclusively Bengali character of Pahela Baishakh, accomplishing a radical interfacing of its Bengali symbolisms with the historical-cultural celebrations of new year by small nationalities in Bangladesh should be the task of our counter-hegemonic politics today.
   Let’s also remember that Pahela Baishakh’s appropriation in a narcissistic middle class subculture empties the celebration of its oppositional contents. It becomes another exhausted ritual, another festival devoid of any organic nexus with the larger democratic life. It becomes articulated with the most recent fashion statements, with the latest ‘pop-cultural’ trends generated by the culture industry. (The self-encapsulation of Pahela Baishakh also happens, sometimes more conspicuously, through ‘high culture’. How many times you hear a peasant woman or an urban rickshaw puller sing ‘Esho hey Baishakh’, really?) Against this, the only way through which we can remain agile to Pahela Baishakh, the only means through which we can keep it alive to our consciousness is by constantly reclaiming its radical democratic essence, by reconnecting it with the subjugated narratives of the subaltern mass. The struggle for Pahela Baishakh is a struggle to unleash the democratic cultural energy of society. But then again, this unleashing should not be a simple cultural folkism. Cultural democratisation is also an act of opposing commodity fetishism. Disconnect with popular democratic culture, under capitalism, occurs through the commodification of cultural memory and symbolisms. If we fail to fight this commodification on every possible level, how else can we continue to reclaim Pahela Baishakh for our national-popular consciousness, in the best Gramscian meaning of the phrase?