Masculinity at Centre Stage

Exactly ten days after the fall of the fascist regime in Bangladesh, I flew back to Melbourne from the other side of the Antimeridian. My coveted month-long vacation to the Central Americas had ultimately turned into a jumble of sleepless nights, of nightmares speckled with corpses, gunshots, blood and bullet-wounds, and a minute-by-minute unravelling of the longest fascist regime in the history of independent Bangladesh. My time zone in Guatemala was GMT minus 6 – exactly 12 hours behind Bangladesh. That is how I kept track of time. What was ‘am’ in Bangladesh was ‘pm’ in Guatemala, which made time-keeping both easy and hard. The final journey of 27 hours from Guatemala to Melbourne on Aug 15 felt like a flight right into the future. Terms like ‘watershed moments’ were coined for moments like these. I dragged my two suitcases full of travel-time necessities and junk and entered my two-bedroom unit in inner-city Melbourne. There I sat on my bed and felt my excitement slowly fading to doubt. The 24-hour news cycle has been spinning faster than ever, and it can bring someone to a dizzy yet palpable state of knowing. Welcome to the second chapter of Durpallar Deshprem: another stretch of suffering. Suffering without consequence, worrying without effect: (to date, I am not sure if expat Bangladeshis even have voting rights; what is the point of anything?). But I must not digress. There will be ample opportunities for me elsewhere to go on about the special hell our otherwise dull state of expatriation affords us: the distance from our homeland, the anxiety, the helplessness, the exasperation, and the deep awareness that we do not matter at all.

It is that deep awareness of my not mattering that has made me wait until I throw in my own commentary, concerns and apprehensions. Like everyone else, I have repeatedly relived the common trauma. Like everyone else, I, too have spent hours on the internet to get first-hand accounts of the student-led movement, played the gruesome clips of street-violence with a perverse yet profound need to fully feel the trauma, zoomed in and out on pictures of graffiti on the street-walls of my beloved old city, watched with dumb disbelief videos floating on the internet: bloodied human bodies being thrown on top of a cycle van, bodies piled up like a hundred flattened cardboard boxes that people discard after moving a house. The killing was done; now was time for the logistics of disposal. The in-between lining for the bodies was made from some random off-cut of a party-campaign PVC paraphernalia that had Bangabandhu’s face printed on it. Dystopia is here, forever. Then came in the news of armed robbery, mob-lynching, arson, attacks on religious minorities and the Jumma people, destroying places of worship of the marginalised Muslim sects, violence against women in public and private spheres, arrests of fascist masterminds, freeing of people detained and kept in custody and the secret torture cell during Hasina’s regime, inaction and non-cooperation in the ranks of the army, police and civil admin, hostile takeover of institutions and political score-settling leading to more incidents of assault, violence and deaths. Along with them, came in the polarising – and often populist – discourse from the multiple epicentres of power, and the often-controversial appointments in policy-making roles showing a clear tendency towards majoritarianism (Biological men of Bengali ethnicity and Muslim religious background occupying almost all such positions). The culture of hate-speech against women, non-heteroes, non-Bengalis and non-Muslims saw a serious explosion (both offline and online), ironically with ‘inclusive Bangladesh’ turning into the flavour of the month from the chosen rhetoric for lip-service. Never in the history of modern states has ‘inclusiveness’ been used to justify a reign of exclusionary populism. After decades of puritanical policing of the cultural sphere by the pro-Awami forces, a new culture war has been waged against everything that is not emblematic of the (often Salafist) outlook of Islam, almost reflecting the flipside of the same rulebook previously used by the Indian Hindutva brigade to coopt all homegrown, diverse cultural inscriptions and expressions of South Asia. (I’ve seen my fellow Hindustani classical musicians of India sitting under the ‘lotus feet’ of Lord Ganesha in an event organised by a patron of ‘ancient Hindu art’, publicly perform the oldest bandishes penned by Emperor Muhammad Shah Rangila AKA Sadarang, and casually avoid the conventional mention of ‘Muhammad Shah’ in the last line of the lyrics, in an attempt to not inadvertently offend the Hindu deity by singing the name of a Muslim composer). In this climate, there is no history anymore – only narrative. There is no imagination – only the severity of correctness. There used to be a gentleness when we told our own stories, a note of pathos when we sang our own songs – but all gentleness is gone now; what has replaced that is a morbid, combative spin on every word we tell ourselves. In this move to reclaim power, the aggressive, militant brand of hypermasculinity is serving as both the strategy and the spirit of the ‘oppressed’ majority.

Pretty evidently, there is a ‘sausage fest’ going on. The collective sound that is emanating from our consciousness has a very characteristic testicular focus. And it is not at all inclusive.

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What Does a Revolutionary Look Like?

He looks like a man, talks like a man. It is always a ‘he’, always a man. Our popular imagination cannot stretch itself beyond that. A handful of female insurgents and revolutionaries of history have been eulogised almost entirely on account of their not being men – so much so, that it is hard to see them as anything other than a rare, preposterous mutation of the world that is essentially masculine. Most, if not all, these female figureheads of revolution have actually been martyrs of the female condition even before any other form of hero-like attribution could be done to their names.

I am about to make a point about the comparatively simpler part of the masculinity problem. My point is visible representation. My question is simple: Are women of Bangladesh represented, anywhere close to a fair demographic proportion, in politically radical acts? Put even more simply: where are the women? Did we or did we not see them on the streets? Were they not active in their acts of dissent and defiance before or during the anti-fascist movement? How many of the Anti-discrimination Students' Movement coordinators identified as women? Does anti-discrimination also imply anti-discriminatory? As the movement came to its natural end, where did Rafia Rehnuma, Nusrat Tabassum and Umama Fatima disappear? How do they inform and influence the many reforms that are being scheduled as we speak, under the interim government’s leadership? Why do the newly formed committees and policy bodies under the new government have such a disproportionately high number of men in them? Exact same questions can be raised with regard to representation of people from religious, ethnic and sexual minorities. Where are they? Do they have a voice now that the country faces constitutional (and many other) reform? Are they being consulted, or are they being condemned to invisibility? Did their politics and polemics take into account the unique sufferings of their people? Or were they just an odd outcrop of the movement that was solely concerned with the exclusive sufferings of the majority demographics, and, worse, that branded those exclusive sufferings as the ‘common sufferings’ of the people of Bangladesh? If the latter is true, who belongs to Bangladesh, and who does Bangladesh belong to? The khadem of a majar who just got their place of worship burnt to the ground, the Pahaari family who lost their home and their sense of security to ethnic violence led by Bengalis: do we deny the existence of their ‘uncommon’ miseries, because the sacred bucket of ‘common’ miseries of Bangladeshis is all that counts, and that is proprietary to people of the majority demographic?

I understand that social scientists, academics and subject matter experts might differ as to whether representation is the most effective strategy to minimise discrimination against disadvantaged groups, and there is that famous quote by Edward Said too that goes like, “All representation is misrepresentation”. (I somewhat agree and somewhat disagree with this quote). The effectiveness of representation notwithstanding, an inclusive society would stand against the erasure of its people already on the margin. In all honesty, I listened aghast to the rhetoric of “There is no minority here; we all are Bangladeshis” – unfortunately uttered by our Honourable Chief Advisor Dr. Yunus at Dhakeshwari Temple following the alleged violence against Hindus right after the fall of the fascist. The denial of systemic discrimination, the politics of obliteration, and the violence of erasure only expose the ugly beginning of our journey toward democracy. What we have right now is a form of toxic majoritarianism. At this rate, the future is male – a Bengali, Muslim, heterosexual male.

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Please do not misunderstand me when I use the word ‘male’ loosely. What I mean by ‘male’ can have the face of a woman as well, and very befittingly so. If Sheikh Hasina’s brand of fascism could be captured in one statement, it would be: aggressive hypermasculine rancorous politics, turbo-charged by crony capitalism, sycophancy, Islamism, new technology and the (wannabe plush but actually quite unsophisticated) rhetoric of economic growth. When her appointed leaders talked about economic growth, they always meant growth at the expense of human dignity, freedom of expression, equity and justice, physical, mental and intellectual well-being, and the living world and the environment. This is a grand hallmark of hypermasculine leadership. Sheikh Hasina was the largest effective figurehead of toxic masculinity at the helm of state leadership. (If I am not mistaken, she is one of the longest-serving female Heads of State of all times.)

The History.com page allotted to Ivan the Terrible describes the Russian ruler in this way: “one of the most paranoid, bloodthirsty and unpredictable men who has ever ruled the country, maybe the modern definition of ‘extremely bad’ isn’t so wide of the mark after all?” It is a pity Sheikh Hasina has not been awarded an encyclopedia page with such a scathing description. Hasina’s sole preoccupation was to remain in office and in supreme power by a trident strategy: 1) criminalising all dissent through silencing, torturing and extrajudicial killing, 2) fattening and morally disempowering a big group of loyalists who would only care about the wellbeing of their own corrupt class, 3) foiling the hydra-headed opposition through creating a hyper-divisive political multiverse. The third strategy passed its first efficacy test during the Shahbag Ganajagaran Mancha movement. Since then, it has always been the testosterone-laden campaigns of this group against that group: atheists against believers, Hindus against Muslims, Islamists against Secularists, Hefazat against Jamaat and so on and so forth. The country never had a shortage of morbidly unemployed and under-educated angry young men, always ready to engage in a fight against the immediate adversary, unknowingly partaking in a savvily designed format of crowdfunded aggression. In many cases, this adversarial social contract between citizens was nothing but an artificially imposed construct. For example, many would say that Jamaat-e-Islami, the expressly stated nemesis of Bangladesh Awami League, was also the party with many of its workers on Awami League’s payroll to work as goons to maintain local clout and create local unrest. Even if there is no discernible evidence yet, many first-hand anecdotes have indicated that the communal violence during Durgapuja 2021 would not have been this severe if grassroots-level Awami League activists had not initiated or stoked it in the first place, despite the party’s superficial reputation of being the only Hindu-friendly political party.

The July 2024 uprising reached its final deafening pitch after the indiscriminate killings on the streets. But, surely new blood cells carry the memory of old blood cells. Why else are we still acting out the old Awami matrix? Are we pitting ourselves against each other, or being pitted against each other through a deliberate design drawn by someone else? The oppressive rule of Awami League has finally come to an end, but what has followed it? Did we ‘escape the matrix’, or have we recreated it? Why did a thousand of our boys give up their lives during those weeks of July? Was it out of a primal yet arbitrary impulse? What is the exact pathology of accruing so much sacrifice to boot out the oppressor, and then becoming the oppressor himself?

The performance of being a man: is that what a revolution is to Bangladeshis?

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Almost two months since the 36th of July, the state of my mental well-being is still not great. On one hand, I feel an all-eclipsing fatigue from refreshing my FB homepage and from the unstoppable stimuli of contentious discourse that follows; on the other hand, I fail to permanently tap out of it. Sleeps are still sparse; dreams are still full of horrors of the recently stored memory. Motivational literature tells you that the future happens in our dreams, that you can manifest your future as such, but even the future that my dreams reveal to me is horrid. In one recurring dream, I am 55 years old. Someone calls me on my phone to tell me that my younger brother (who, in fact, lives with my parents in Dhaka now) has been murdered, and throughout the dream, I keep waiting for someone else to tell me that it was just fake news, that he is not dead indeed, that it was somebody else’s brother, and it was just a mix-up. In my waking hours, multiple threads of what I call my existence are being frayed. Thanks to the algorithm (I guess), at times it feels like my homeland is not mine anymore – that I have lost it fully, conclusively, forever.

Some displays of algorithmically propagated ‘culture war’ madness are so terribly idiotic that one has to give off a sad chuckle. The third-rate debate of our childhood around Rabindra vs Nazrul is back in vogue, to the extent of shoring up public support in favour of discarding our national anthem penned by Rabindranath. (A group of TV actors and cultural workers have been ruthlessly trolled and mocked for visibly tearing up and letting their raw emotions out while singing the national anthem in a video clip from an unknown public ceremony). The forced purge of Rabindranath Tagore and rebranding him as the figurehead of Indian imperialism and Awami-led fascism (I fail to see why Tagore cannot be reclaimed by us, despite all these unsavoury associations), and the equally forced masculinisation of Kazi Nazrul Islam is a rather sorry attempt at finding the most suitable contemporary Bengali alpha man zeitgeist in an epic face-off between two literary powerhouses of colonial Bengal (the historical time-window that they were a product of, albeit implies their minimal political relevance today). However, the fact that this idiocy will not stop soon was clear to me when I caught a glimpse of a newspaper interview of the newly appointed Executive Director of Nazrul Institute – his picture showing his buffed-up arms protruding out of the rolled sleeves of his shirt and his tightly closed right fist up in the air, the headline quoting him saying “I hereby pledge to give constitutional recognition to our national poet Nazrul”. But of course, all a rebel poet could ever dream of is to be immortalised in the dull pages of the constitution of a nation state! Who knew Carl Jung’s archetypes are actually a hierarchy system where the ‘Rebel’ eventually gets promoted to a ‘Hero’? Under this special grade of intellectual and artistic competence of our new Nazrul-custodians, we might have to get used to seeing Nazrul being reduced to a silly caricature where he is busy performing a politically weaponisable masculinity dance.

Speaking of the masculinity dance: the Qawwali fever is all the rage. These men-only cultural spaces have been slotted in conventionally co-ed higher education institutions, where bands of young men are seen performing the devotional genre in – honestly – poor form. The sense of irony is hard to miss when you recognise that most of these Sufi-spirited numbers penned in Persian, Urdu, Hindi and Hindustani dialects needed the mediation of Bollywood – the arm of the ‘Indian cultural hegemony industrial complex’ with the highest penetration rate – before any regular Bangladeshi listener actually knew these songs existed. A lifetime musician myself, I find it hard to make peace with the idea of performing without formally practicing a form, in this case: through the Qawwalbaccha convention of Shagirdi, Taalim and Riyaaz, though I would not have minded so much had it not been thoughtlessly appropriated from a community of largely disenfranchised practitioners of an age-old musical tradition with almost no profit motive. I can understand the spirit of spontaneity and resistance with which the fad of Qawwali programs are being adopted by the urban youth – but this is looking like another tragicomic identity experiment because of its ingenuous politics, its inability to account for the indigenous musical elements of Bangladesh, and simply just how horrible and out-of-tune this exacting genre sounds when sung by rookie musicians. This insensitivity, this pigheadedness, this arrogance: this is another sign of hypermasculinity in cultural space. The only example of a Qawwali event with a documented presence of young women has already stirred controversy due to reports of organisers installing a purdah – a separating curtain – between the stage (where the male-only bands would be performing) and the row consisting of female-only audiences – paradoxically made to sit in the front row for reasons such as ‘security’ and ‘protection’ (from whom?).

Flexing cultural products, religious fervour, neoliberalism and national identity rooted in the masculine condition makes a funny cocktail that we are all too familiar with. This cocktail is regularly served under the banner of Hindutva in our neighbouring state. Are Bangladeshis, like many Indians, reaching out for the lowest-hanging fruit of the tree of national identity: masculinity? Will our songs, speech and spirit become enmeshed with political populism and religious radicalism – both borrowing heavily from the traditional expressions of masculinity? Moreover – and I know that over this question, there may be both exaggeration and understatement – when did Bangladeshi men start thinking about their masculinity in a politically meaningful way? And what precipitated this sudden awareness?

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The longest story of my first book – a collection of short stories – was written in hybrid Urdu-Bangla. I named it Khatme Pabandi (Urdu for ‘The End of Enslavement’). It is an epistolary story of the liberation war of Bangladesh narrated by a protagonist whose second language is Urdu, first language is unknown (perhaps their first language is music) – whose wife ended up a Birangana and then committed suicide after giving birth to a war-baby, who in his late life starts imagining a pregnancy in his body, and tends to choose an androgenous existence for himself. I do not know exactly why I made it so hard for the average Bengali reader to place the protagonist in any one of the neat boxes of politico-cultural identity. Maybe I wanted to gently tell a story that frees the human condition from artificially imposed constructs of language, gender, nation-state and the perceived power-differential all these bring in. I started writing the story in the year 2013 – right after the disbanding of the Shahbag movement. The post-Shahbag disillusionment and the Shapla killings made us clearly see the fascist elements drawn from the spirit of the movement, and the ever-widening gap between the two sides of the cultural faultline. Sometime around that year, in an international cricket event’s inaugural program aired on national TV, I watched Runa Laila sing a flawless rendition of Duma-dum mastqalandar. Sportsmen and sports officials from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were seen going bananas over the beats and Runa’s unparallel vocals. I struggled to cope with the controversy resulting from her singing an ‘Urdu song on Bangladeshi soil’ that ensued the next day on the internet. The parochial version of Bengali-ness that had rendered us so incapable of finding joy or meaning in music made me very irate. Writing an Urdu story using the theme of our war of 1971 was my act of defiance against the proposed obliteration of music, art and imagination that we surely owe to people who lived beyond our national borders, beyond what we tightly define as our time and our place. It was an anti-narrative to the dominant narrative of our war of independence. In my opinion, I did an okay job as a debutante author.

I could not come up with a complete piece of book-length work after my first book came out in the fateful Ekushey bookfair, where Abhijit Roy was hacked to death – the same year that saw murders and attempted murders of bloggers, LGBTQ activists, publishers (including the publisher of my first book), rationalist thinkers and writers. Since then, I had been struggling to write my first novel for five years continuously. ‘The North End’ finally came out in 2020.

My journey as an author making a somewhat political choice of writing fiction mainly for the Bangladeshi readers in Bangla – instead of the so-called Lingua Franca – is special to only me and must be inconsequential to anybody else. The latest leg of this journey started on the 5th of August this year – and I wish the joy of this new chapter would not fizzle out in the vital flux of a heartbeat. However, being artistically active during and after a fascist regime also reveals to me that we are part of ever-shifting power relationships. Our identities and our privileges are not static but deeply contextual. We who are silenced may yet silence others in a great ardour of Byatagiri (the most widely used Bangla term for hypermasculinity): the premise that believes in zero sum games – “only when you lose, I win”. The premise that imposes before it listens. The premise that asks us to value the spectacle of progress more than progress itself. The premise that demands that we cry when the Metro Rail system is disrupted, but not shed a single tear when hundreds die on the streets while protesting. The premise that prefers things over lives, singular ideology over pluralism, GDP over freedom, power over dignity, spin-doctoring over truth-telling. The very premise that we rose against. The very premise that we threw out.

Modern history tells us that a movement’s long-term inability to adapt and accommodate the diverse radical pain-points of its powerless – in our case, women, religious, sexual and ethnic minorities – makes newer movements inevitable. If we are to course-correct, we better do it now. The present eclipses what’s in the past; it also eclipses what might be in the future. Such is the authority of ‘the now’. It drinks up everything else like a tiny drop of water.●

Barnali Saha is a Bangladeshi author of literary fiction. She is also a Khayal musician of the North Indian tradition.