Desacralisation is beyond envisioning in South Asia. We, on the subcontinent, cannot think beyond religion. The sacred and the profane are kept asunder under vigilant surveillance.
'The return of the repressed', in Freudian language, refers to the tendency of repressed psychic material to reemerge in the life of an individual - or society. Thus, in Europe there was 'the spectre of communism' and, today, fascism and, in America, racism, and anti-Semitism in both have resurfaced to bedevil society. In Bangladesh, the repression of Islam under Sheikh Mujib was reversed by General Zia; the repression of the love of English, banned from schools by Mujib to blinker the eyes of students steadfastly away from that vile, foreign tongue, never quite succeeded in pushing it below the surface, and has come into its own in full daylight. Under the Nehru dynasty, Hinduism was kept briefly in check and has flowered fully today, locating an internal enemy, the Muslims. Ataturk and the Kemalists suppressed Islam, even annulling the elector victory of Necmettin Erbakan's Refah (Welfare) party. A non-electoral strategy was pursued by an imam called Fethullah Gulen, whose followers spread like bees throughout Turkish society, settling in every niche, subverting Kemalism from within: after the failed coup of 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan initiated a mass purge of suspected Guleninsts, for the two men had fallen out (Mr. Gulen has been living in America, where he wisely betook himself after the army ousted Erbakan). But the Islamists under Erdogan are triumphant today.
Take the Language Movement of 1952 in East Pakistan, when a few young people died, it is said, for the Bengali language (apparently, the wicked Pakistanis had been attempting to kill our mother tongue and substitute it with Urdu: those who believe in this sinister plan for linguicide ignore the fate of the 74 languages spoken in West Pakistan, then and now. To date, only one language in the world has been deliberately rendered extinct - Hawaiian, due to American imperialism, but it's back.)
These children are designated shahid. And the innumerable mausoleums erected throughout the country are called shahid minars. Now, shahid is someone who dies for Islam - not for a language. But the religious appropriation is fascinating, to say the least. It is an explicit attempt to sanctify a nationalist movement with Islamic overtones. The day of their death is shahid dibosh, a curious amalgam of Arabic and Bengali. But even more curious is the date itself - Ekushey February, an amalgam of the Bengali and Gregorian calendars. Surely, a people's movement would have been recorded in the local calendar. (One thing to note in passing is that the country is a paedocracy, to use Elie Kedurie's term.)
This brings us to the origins of nationalism in Bangladesh, and South Asia. "The educated, multilingual cosmopolitan elite of Europe grew weaker," writes the historian Norman Davies of the era before the Great War, "the half-educated national masses, who thought of themselves only as Frenchmen, Germans, English or Russians, grew stronger."
However, in South Asia, it takes considerable education to be a nationalist, for only in schools and universities is western education imparted. And nationalism is a western ideology.
S. E. Finer, the historian of government, explains the explosion in the size of the military in Western Europe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thus: "In the old days, no state could have supported the cost of paying so many troops. But now they did not have to pay them more than a mere pittance. Here was a complete contrast to the eighteenth century: after all, it was the cost of the American War that led to the financial crisis in France and thereby the Revolution. This was all turned on its head, and the reason for it was that by now the ideology of nationalism had gripped the masses. It no longer seemed exceptional to be a soldier. Every able-bodied man regarded this, now, as a sacred duty. That is how, when 1914 came, so many millions of men went to their graves like sheep (italics original)". Rational, monetary considerations gave way to extra-rational loyalty.
The best expression of the sentiment are these words by Rupert Brooke, from the only nationalist poem in English known to me:
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