We present in this section issues of contemporary concern and increasing interdiscipliniary views. So finally, we have decided that let this section be a confluence of ideas, criticisms, views and anything that add on. So starting with a geopolitical debate, we feature a reader's letter. Just like people can never be totally indexed, we cannot also provide a fully indexed page and hence consider it more natural and intimate to keep it like a flow that unfolds on its own. We urge you to contribute anything of contemporary concern here, which we will dutifully put along with credit once you send at wordsmith.
O n 26th March, 2001, there was a seminar held at Assam University, Silchar with the presence of a Sylheti researcher Mr. Lloyd Williams of London University.He has spoken about his research work. You can see the report of the seminar at Seminar Report
THE GREAT GEOPOLITICAL DEBATE-FIRST DRAFT Discussions about an International Transport Corridor between South Assam and Bangladesh. Feedback required from readers to make the idea more refined and technically detailed.
Below we reproduce a letter from Mr. Farid Akhtar who has sent the letter to webmistress and has given us his views on Sylheti Language and People. Also he has introduced the transnational species called "Londonees." We thank him for his permission to put it in the site and also is wordsmith's reply, reproduced below.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Farid Akhtar"
To: webmistress@syhlleti.org
Sent: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 13:15:57 +0000
Subject: Sylheti language & people.
Hello there,
Let me say I am impressed by your website and the detailed information it contains. I am surprised that people in some parts of Assam also speak Sylheti. I had thought that only people from the Sylhet region in Bangladesh speak that distinctive language.
I am a British person living and working in London, though I was born in Sylhet and enjoyed my best childhood there, the best was the kite flying! I went to Sylhet three times for holidays since arriving in London with my mother to join my Dad, including one trip with my parents to get married. We in London take the language seriously that, local jobs advertised in newspapers carry a job requirement that applicants must able to speak fluent Sylheti, as local Sylheti people find difficulty in understanding Bengali. Sylhetis in England are known as 'Londonees'. Sylhetis find it embarrassing to speak their language in Radios as they feel they are speaking 'incorrect Bangla' and try to speak broken Bangla, because it's not their mother tongue. Even though a real Bengali person listening them would identify them as non-Bengalis. We should be proud to speak our Language and feel not ashamed. It is not a dialect of Bangla as there are dialects within Sylheti in various parts of the Sylhet region.Let me tell you some facts and information about the Sylhet district and its people:
As you know or don't know that over 95% of all Bangladeshis living in UK are from the Sylhet region alone! It all started by Sylheti seafaring men serving in British ships during and before the First World War, when they had settled in England, they brought their families along. Their families in turn have been making frequent trips to the region to see their relatives and take their children to get married in Sylhet, consequently more and more people are emigrating from Sylhet and arriving in England. As a result the Sylhet people in Sylhet district are prosperous compared with other districts of Bangladesh, due to 'Londonee' Sylhetis remitting money to their relatives, who in turn have been building lavish villas, living in relative luxury compared to other regions, in the town of Sylhet. Sadly the hills of the area are starting to slowly disappearing.
The reason Londonees marry in Sylhet not in Dhaka any other parts of the country is due to the language. Sylhetis consider non-Sylhetis as foreigners who speak a different tongue and does share common traditions with them. As Sylhetis in Bangladesh are rich compared to other districts they don't like to work , instead they rely on money sent by relatives in England. Young people dream of marrying visiting Londonees to go to England. It's very hard to find Sylheti labourers, servant in Sylhet, instead you would find non-Sylhetis coming from other districts being employed as servants, labours, rikshawallas etc. Indeed many educated Bengalis come to Sylhet to start their business and seek transfer in Civil jobs to Sylhet as they can get more bribes from wealthy Sylhetis. All non-Sylhetis in Bangladesh consider Sylhet as a 'second England' due its prosperity.
The Sylhet airport is causing sever difficulty for Londonees as it doesn't have proper runways for big planes to land, causing Londonee travellers to land in Dhaka, where they have to stay overnight in a hotel, where some passengers have been raped and robbed, then local small planes take them in several flights to their homeland in Sylhet. Despite the fact Londonee travellers are main customers for the national airlines, Biman, the Govnt. ignores it. I understand they are doing some work at the moment to the airport.
I am interested to known what Assamese is. Is it like Sylheti or Bangla or different from both. I was unaware that Sylhet had been part of Assam region.
Please feel free to comment and reply.
If you want, you can add this to your website.
regards
Forid.
From wordsmth@ekm.vsnl.net.in Mon Dec 17 15:37:39 2001
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 11:29:56 +0530 (IST)
From: wordsmth@ekm.vsnl.net.in
To: farid.akhtar@uk.royalsun.com
Subject: Re: fwd : Sylheti language & people.
Dear Farid,
Thanks for your comment. And *shukria* for your offer to put
your letter on the .org page. My name is Pritam Bhattacharjee
and I am Barsha's brother and also a contributor. I work in
Cochin, Kerala in India as a network manager in India's
international telecom carrier.
Just like you mentioned the Sylheti *Londonees*, there is a huge Keralite population working in Persian Gulf areas and some economists have told Keral economy as "MO Economy" or Money-Order Economy. I think the same model holds for Sylhet in Bangladesh. In psychological terms also, the migrant workers have created a "class" of their own and remoteness has given them an aura of *class-prestige* which is a much sought-after thing. In Kerala also, i observe that the non-resident remittances are not going into capital investment (and thus opening local jobs) but are pumping consumer economy in terms of consumer durables. Thus the flow for migrant workers increases along with sharply divided commodity-based classes. Like Mercedes-class, Santro-class, qualis-class, maruti-class and so on. I think your observation about lack of infrastructural development at homeland (i.e in Syhlet airport) is a paradox and the same is true here at Kerala also, in view of a rich earning class. These transnational issues are a treasure trove for sociological research and it is one of our aims to undertake this task for Sylhetis.
As for your comments on UK Sylhetis, yes we are aware and
presently working along with Mr. Lloyd Williams of London
University on this. We had arranged one seminar with Mr.
Lloyd at Silchar.
Now, about some half-a-million Sylhetis who do not
"live" in geographical Sylhet. This contains almost
entire South Assam, part of Tripura, part of Meghalaya,
some pockets of Calcutta, some pockets of Nagaland.
These communities came in batches - slow migration
since 1870s in search of better education and employment
and largely as settlers. Then in 1905, the first divison
of Bengal made lots of Sylhetis spill over to present
West Bengal, predominantly Hindu. Another spill came
in 1947 and this was a slow process and by that time
Sylhetis were qucikly spreading into undidvided Assam,
including Silchar and Barak Valley (the second largest
river of Assam in South, after the mighty and majestic
Bramhaputra) . Then in 1971, when Bangaldesh was born,
another religious cleansing started and came another
spate of Sylhetis, diverging onto "neo-colonies" already
established.
Now, my personal opinion is that Sylhetis live in three
linguistic space : Sylheti the dialect, Bangla the
standard written version and English to communicate
with the rest of the universe. And like every
dialect, all tongues have left their polish and
roughness onto the dialect. Sylhetis as a community
and as a language-speaking community remain in the
fold of the Greater Bengali Culture, irrespective of
geography and that is the only element that is
really and practically common. Whether Sylheti is a
language or a dialect of Bangla is a matter of
scholarly debate as well as a thing of interest
for its speakers. But the "shame" of speaking the
Sylheti dialect as observed by you is due to the
presence of three layered lingusitic sphere.
As for Assamese, it is spoken in Assam and has the
same script of Bangla. It also belongs to the same
Indo-European family of languages just like
Bangla, Hindi and other northern languages are.
The development of Bangla influenced lots of
literary works in Assamese and in spite of
a very difficult geographical terrain, both the
languages were networked through poets and
common speakers. However, when in 1961, Assamese
was imposed on South Assam instead of Bangla
as a state policy, it gives me pride that 11
people from Silchar died in police shooting
in protest to keep Bangla as the official
language. I dont know any other community in the
world other than Sylheti/Bengali/Bangladeshi
who died for something as abstract as language.
We have tried to tell that in
http://203.197.150.140/preev/lang.html
Thanks again and pardon as the mail seems to me to
be quite a long one. We will put your mail and
will also send a link for view.
To sum up, i remember one Urdu verse, which you might
have heard - *Guftgu bandh na ho/ Bate hi bate chale*
best regards,
//pritam