Samir Karmakar
First, they garlanded us with the title of “classical.” Soon after, they unleashed an endless stream of hatred against Bangla-speaking communities – most brutally against poor migrant labourers. At first glance, these developments may appear unrelated, even coincidental. It may seem that such hostility has erupted all of a sudden. But this is a dangerous misreading. What we are witnessing today is not a spontaneous outbreak of intolerance; it is the outcome of a long and careful cultivation of hate.
Across different parts of India in recent years, Bangla-speaking communities – particularly migrant workers – have been subjected to harassment, detention, public humiliation, and even lynching. Their crime is neither illegal activity nor social deviance; it is language, accent, and cultural identity. Speaking Bangla has increasingly become grounds for suspicion, where the mere sound of a mother tongue is enough to invite the accusation of being “Bangladeshi.” This reduction of linguistic identity to foreignness has normalised a politics of profiling, where citizenship is questioned not through law but through prejudice.
The geography of these incidents is wide and telling. In Odisha, Bangla-speaking migrant workers and street vendors have been assaulted by mobs after being falsely branded as illegal immigrants. In Haryana, in Gurugram, workers have been detained, interrogated, and forced to prove their citizenship despite possessing valid Indian documents. Similar accounts have emerged from Rajasthan and other states, where labourers from West Bengal have been confined, threatened, or compelled to flee in fear. These are not isolated errors of administration; they form a recognisable pattern of linguistic and cultural targeting.
To see these incidents merely as law-and-order failures is to miss their deeper political logic. The repeated misidentification of Bangla speakers as foreigners, the indifference to documentary proof, and the public legitimacy granted to vigilante suspicion together point to an organised atmosphere of hate. This hate is not only directed at bodies; it is directed at ways of living and thinking. Language here becomes the most visible marker of difference, and therefore the most convenient target.
If we fail to recognise this situation as an orchestrated campaign aimed at annihilating the Bangla way of life and thought, a time will come when Bangla will survive only as a historical remnant. What is under threat is not merely a linguistic community but an entire cultural ecosystem shaped by migration, labour, mobility, and plural coexistence.
Even though the protests and voices of resistance emerge from affected communities, civil society groups, and individuals, the silence of the bhadralok remains striking. This silence is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. Bangla literature has long subjected the bhadralok to critical scrutiny – from Aalaler Ghare Dulaal by Pyarichand Mitra (1857) to Hutom Pyanchar Naksha by Kaliprasanna Singha (1861), from the caricature of the Babu by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1873) to later self-reflexive critiques. These texts repeatedly exposed a class comfortable with moral commentary but hesitant in moments of real political risk. Today, that hesitation has acquired a more troubling meaning. While Bangla-speaking workers are beaten, detained, and displaced, the bhadralok often retreats into debates about culture, heritage, and symbolic recognition.
And this brings us to the cruelest irony of our time. Bangla is ceremonially elevated to the status of a “classical” language – celebrated in official announcements, academic conferences, and cultural proclamations – while Bangalee lives are rendered increasingly disposable. The language is preserved, archived, and canonised, even as its speakers, especially the poor and the migrant, are criminalised and erased from public sympathy. We are first adorned with the dignity of the “classical,” and then quietly escorted towards the crematorium.
What will survive, then, is definitely a fossil – safe, silent, and politically uncritical. What will be perished is a living language, carried by labouring bodies, contested streets, and mobil lives. Classical status, in this sense, does not arrive as recognition. As if it arrives as a final ritual, performed just before burial.
Pic: Partha Chakraborty
