Shared Dreams of the Bengali East & the American South

Growing up as a Bengali with roots in East Bengal in what is now Bangladesh, one hears a lot of tales about the prosperous past. A plush villa set amidst a landscape dotted with lakes, tall coconut trees flanking paddy farms is an image one’s mind creates. Besides paddy, the farms also produce vegetables, & maybe even some cash crops. The ponds & nearby meandering river are teeming with all kinds of fish. Add in an East Bengali Bhadralok reading his Shakespeare while sipping his Darjeeling tea, the portrait emerges fully furnished.  This image has also become a joke in some quarters, a stick by which Bengalis from the west of the Padma river have whipped us with. Their claim is that if every Bangal had so much land, then what would the total land area of the East be?

The American South has similar tales to tell. The black soil, the cotton plantations, the black slaves, the Southern Belles have all formed part of the popular imagination. Little known is the fact that during the American Civil War, less than 40% of Southern Americans possessed slaves, but it was the very idea of slavery abolishment that led to enlistment (later conscription) of some 700,000 males for the southern army. Not for nothing is the Civil War known as “a rich man’s war, a poor man’s fight”.

There are many things that bind these two seemingly disparate people. It is the hope of the seemingly attainable. The slave holders in the American South & the Zamindars of East Bengal may have been way above the level of most common folk, but they provided a bulwark against domination by the ‘other’. In America (South), the ‘other’ was a fear of black resurgence & an industrial dominating North. In Bengal, the ‘other’ included the British & the Muslims. So in both the places, even the most humble sharecroppers as long as they did not belong to the ‘other’ saw the powerful elites as their own people. The sense of belonging provided a bulwark against divisive forces. No wonder the South was able to enlist such a large volunteer army & the East got embroiled in its own religious civil war rather than one based on class.