Nazrul's Immaculate Rizz - My Experience with Bangla and Internet Culture

My relationship with the language I was born with has changed significantly over time, and this particular metamorphosis has come at a time of self-actualisation as I grow into adulthood.

I strongly believe that language shapes the way we perceive the world. There is the English I speak and breathe, then there's the broken business English that my father uses to communicate emotionally difficult confessions because Bangla strikes too hard on the heart. There is the Bangla I hated so strongly in fourth grade and the Bangla the people in my life speak with patient, observant love. All of these languages in their many faces coexist in my life and my perception changes with every one of them.

A couple of months back, I wiped the dust off my mother's dying hard drive to upload it to Google. After shifting through random wedding photos and quite a few birthdays, I found an old video of me speaking to my parents. I was four years old at the time and talked a lot. What I did notice was that my speech was entirely in Bangla.

As a child, the media I consumed (over which I had no control) consisted of UNICEF's Meena cartoons and children's poetry my parents would make me learn. Another major source of content were the stories that my aunt, a cultural anthropologist, would read to me. Two years later, I would have a music teacher who would teach me how to play harmonium and sing Rabindra Sangeet, all of which I have now forgotten.

It seems very impossible now. I have to put in a lot more effort to speak entirely in Bangla, or even read it. I genuinely try, but constantly find myself unable to express my thoughts the way I want to. English has become the language that I think in and exercise so much control over. I understand its tones, its nuances and cultural references. In my mind, it feels like home. It was the language that accepted me, or understood me in an intolerant society. That allowed me to exist as more than my mother's thinly veiled "do you have a different type of problem?" - the concept of queerness being so shocking that she never said it out loud.

I hated learning Bangla when I started going to school. I was mostly guilted and shamed into it for the entire time I had to learn it there. We had only one class for it and had very little exposure and practice with its written form. On the other hand, English literature classes had books so pretty they never felt like studying for me. Bangla had stories written in verbose words I was too young to comprehend. (This is why Shakespeare should be taught in tenth grade, not seventh).

তোমার নিজের মাতৃভাষা তুমি শিখবা না?
Won't you learn your own mother's tongue?

When I write in English, I have verisimilitude, the "truthiness" that makes you believe that what I'm saying really is true. In English, I have flow, and more importantly, experience. I have a sense of belonging. Unfortunately, with Bangla, I have none of that.

I find myself having cultural clashes with my mother, someone I have been living with for the past 18 years. I feel a sort of guilt and disconnect. I struggle to understand her completely. I write unfinished poetry in a language she was beaten into memorising. Despite that, through many conversations and introspection, I have narrowed down the reason to the fact that we as a generation simply no longer occupy the cultural or literary spaces that our parents did.

Instagram and TikTok (far, far more than Facebook), are a sort of abstract neighbourhood that we hang out in when we have time. As a former 14 year old, I understand the lack of demand to learn the language because Bangla simply isn't how we communicate on the internet. Our generation has moulded English into further sub-dialects that don't belong to an area and introduced nuances that would be indiscernible to the outsider who has no concept of what "rizz¹" is. Teenagers in the 80's did not speak in fluent, well articulated sentences and they will certainly not start now. Language will continue to evolve as long as people evolve. Languages are fluid and English has changed, Bangla, at least for us, has not.

This abstract space that we occupy is an oversaturated representation of reality in the middle of the AI revolution. It is not a real place yet it is the unshakeable town square of our generation. It is the perfect place for us to lose our sense of self. In our hyper-targeted, curated feed, we see so many people in there from around the world (mostly from the US) and so many cultures (again, US immigrants). Our desire to fit in contradicts heavily with the notion of learning a language we speak well but cannot write properly.

Our consumerist, secular, modern life leaves very little scope to break from the perceived norm. The way we have built up our lives in my particular demographic, has left no room for original thought, or a moment of calm. Relaxation is essentially consuming hyper-curated media (that sometimes create echo-hells) on our phones, and all of this is in English. Language shapes thought, and thought shapes culture. And that is the one that we internalise and inhibit.

On another observation, my brother is six years younger than me, on the cusp of adolescence. His clashes with my mother remind me exactly of the miscommunication that I faced when I was younger, precisely due to this cultural disconnect. Only I had no one who would understand me at home back then.

I noticed a friend of his, Samara, shortening her name to Sam, and eventually changing it to Samantha on Instagram. A complete deviation from the original Bangla. This anglicisation of her name was deliberate, yet very much a subconscious move to fit in with a growing global world. Another attempt at avoiding social rejection.

My goal is not to critique social media but to provide a window for understanding and consolation into the growing cultural disconnect that I have with my parents, and that the vast majority of my generation and peers have had.

It is also important that we recognize what the world is as of now. After 200 years of British rule over Bengal, and English being the language of the ruling class, it has been ingrained into our collective consciousness that English is the superior tongue.

We also lose more of our own culture as we try to fit the mould of another, and our literature reflects that. Rabindranath's writing has incredible undertones of femininity in it, despite him being a bearded man. The concept of gender being intrinsically fluid in nature is prevalent all throughout his work. It is not black and white. His characters are androgynous and the ideas are far more freeing: a break from the monotony we face with the English (precisely due to the church and the state deeming all of this as savage demonic ideas from an uncivilised people).

He was from a wealthy family that had supported the humanities for generations. He learnt English well enough to translate his own work, ultimately winning himself the Nobel Prize in Literature and exposing Bengali literature to the West. By comparison, Kazi Nazrul was born to Bengal's poorest of the poor. He had no interest in English. His works were later crudely translated, which the then British government used to label him as an anti-British, anti-government rebel.

English was, and still is, the lingua franca for the world we live in. Ignoring it would be a grave mistake but not learning Bangla as well provides a hole for us to fall into wherein we lose our identity.

Very recently I have started to reconnect with the culture I grew up in. I started watching movies by Satyajit Ray, and listening to Nazrul Geeti (which I wish I understood as well as I understand Sylvia Plath or Arundhati Roy).

Because after all this time it gives me a handle to a part of my psyche I had forgotten. Self-identity has always been something every person spends their adolescence and perhaps a fair part of their twenties trying to find and establish. I enjoy listening to this music, despite not understanding it fully. I love watching these movies. It gives me a space to occupy in the abstract neighbourhood I call home.

সৃজন ছন্দে আনন্দে নাচো নটরাজ
হে মহকাল প্রলয়–তাল ভোলো ভোলো।।
- কাজী নজরুল

Oh Notoraj!
Dance to the joy of creation
Bury your fervour of destruction
 - Kazi Nazrul

Rizz ¹ - 2020s internet lingo for one’s ability to attract another person in a romantic sense. Short for “charisma”

Notoraj ² - The deity of dance. A depiction of the Hindu god Shiva as the divine cosmic dancer.