Est. inOklahoma City
OKLAHOMA DESHI YOUTH
ASSOCIATION
Unity | Culture | Service | Future
Our heritage — for the next generation
A short introduction to the country their parents and grandparents come from — the language movement, the liberation war, the rivers, the food, and the writers worth knowing.
The guide — six things to know
Enough of the country to hold a conversation about it — the two dates that made it, the water it sits on, and what is on the table.
On 21 February 1952, students in Dhaka marched for Bangla to be recognised as a state language of what was then Pakistan. Police opened fire and several were killed. The Shaheed Minar monument in Dhaka stands for them.
UNESCO named that date International Mother Language Day in 1999. It is the reason a Bangladeshi child is told early, and plainly, that the words in their mouth were fought for.
Independence was declared on 26 March 1971. The war that followed ran nine months and cost an enormous number of lives; it ended with the surrender in Dhaka on 16 December 1971.
Both dates are national holidays — Independence Day in March, Victory Day in December. The association marks Victory Day every year, which for the younger children is usually the first time they hear the story told through rather than in pieces.
Bangladesh sits on the largest river delta in the world, where the Padma (the Ganges), the Jamuna (the Brahmaputra) and the Meghna meet before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Hundreds of rivers thread through the country, and the monsoon redraws their edges every year.
In the south-west is the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest on earth and home to the Royal Bengal tiger. On the south-east coast, Cox's Bazar runs roughly 120 kilometres — among the longest natural sea beaches anywhere.
Machh-bhaat — fish and rice — is the everyday answer, and ilish (hilsa) is the fish worth arguing about. Shorshe ilish, cooked in mustard, is the dish most households will defend. Dal, bhaat and a vegetable bhaji is the plain daily meal.
Then the things made for occasions: biryani and tehari, pitha in winter, and the sweets — roshogolla, mishti doi, chomchom. Panta bhaat, rice soaked overnight, is eaten on Pohela Boishakh for reasons that are half history and half stubbornness.
Pohela Boishakh, the first of Boishakh, is Bangla New Year — 14 April on the Gregorian calendar — kept in red and white, with processions, music and panta bhaat. Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Adha are the two largest religious holidays; Durga Puja is marked across the country, and Nabanna is the harvest festival.
The association runs its own versions of these in Oklahoma. They are smaller than the ones back home and the weather is wrong, but they are the same festivals.
Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 and wrote Amar Shonar Bangla, now the national anthem. Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poet, wrote Bidrohi and thousands of songs, and is read as the rebel voice against Tagore's lyric one.
Jasimuddin put the countryside into verse. Lalon Shah's songs carry the baul tradition — wandering mystics with a one-string ektara — which is still the music most likely to stop a Bangladeshi adult mid-sentence.