In search of a homeland

I’ve just watched a classic Bengali film called Ontorjatra – Inner Journey.

It’s about the emigrants’ search for a homeland and a sense of place, so it resonates strongly in Bangladesh.

Many Bangladeshis leave the country every year, mostly heading for the US and Europe. Once settled there, they start calling themselves citizens of that particular country and enjoy all the benefits of being a Westerner. While the first generation of immigrants are alive, they will naturally call Bangladesh their homeland, but will the successive generations?

This applies to Bangladesh’s immigrants as well as its emigrants, as there are at least three communities here which are virtually stateless.

Around 500,000 tea workers in the northwest are tribespeople brought from various Indian states during British rule, lured by the British tea planters for a better life which never materialized.

Most of them are poor and landless, living a life that is segregated from the majority of native Bengali people, in allocated shanties called ‘worker lines’. Cut off from their roots after the partitioning of India, they are slowly forgetting their language and culture.

Then there are about 160,000 Muslims from the Indian state of Bihar who left their home for West Pakistan after partition. For over 40 years they have been forced to live as refugees in ill-equipped camps across the country. I’ve seen how they have to live; it’s an animal existence.

They call Pakistan their homeland, even though they were not born there and have never seen it. There have been a few repatriation initiatives but nothing concrete.

Finally, the Rohingya Muslim refugees in the southeast have always called Rakhine state in Myanmar their home. But they have been consistently denied citizenship, generally persecuted and are officially stateless.

Rohingyas can trace their roots in Myanmar since the 8^th century but the majority of people in Rakhine, who are Buddhists, consider them to be foreigners and deny them citizenship.

So what does patriotism mean? Is homeland just a fiction that exists only in someone’s imagination? I think it may well be.