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RE: A Gentleman Lost His Gentility Mohammad Asghar�s response to Setara Hashem�s write up
Late
Shah Aziz-ur-Rahman, one of the Prime Ministers
of Bangladesh, appointed by Gen. Ershad during
his long reign over the country, had once really
taught us, the Bengalis, the use of real Bangla,
while having a civil encounter with late Abdul
Malek Ukil of Awami League. The encounter
developed over a letter of invitation Gen.
Ershad had sent to Mr. Ukil. Mr. Ukil had objected on the use of the
word �Dawatnama�
in the letter of invitation. He had insisted
that since the government was committed to the
use of Bangla in all spheres of Mr. Rahman had responded: If we were to
comply with Mr. Ukil�s request, in that event,
we must start by converting his mostly
Arabic-sounding name into Bangla first. And he
did convert his name to Bengali, which read as
follows: Shri
(in place of Janab, or Mr.) Bhagwan
Das (in place of Abdul Malek) Ainjibi
(in place of Ukil). Since the conversion of his name into
Bangla failed to come up to his satisfaction,
Mr. Ukil dropped his lawyerly pursuit for good! According to many Muslim thinkers, names
carry very important implications, especially
for the Muslims. For instance, one female Muslim
physician of I wrote a letter to the Editor of the
newspaper, seeking clarification on the above (un)scientific
fact from its disseminator. In it, I wrote: A
patient, with the name of A.R. Biswas, came to
you and sought your medical help. Because his
last name, Biswas, is generally supposed to be
used only by the Hindus of the
Indian-sub-continent, you assumed that he was a
Hindu and, accordingly, you prescribed a
medicine, you believed, was suitable for his
treatment. But the medicine failed to help him out
of his problem, because the patient was a
Muslim, and not a Hindu. In fact, the initials,
A and R, he used along with Biswas, were
actually the abbreviation of �Abdur Rahman,�
a so-called Muslim name. Conversely, if you had
thought that the patient was a Muslim, and
prescribed a medication that was suitable for a
Muslim�s body, here again, you made another
mistake, as the alphabets �A. R� could very
well be the short form of the name �Ajit
Ranjan,� a name the patient�s Hindu parents
might have given him after his birth. The lady physician never responded to my
letter. I narrated the above two anecdotes with a specific purpose in my mind,
and it is this: Neither it is practical nor
possible for the Bengali parents to give their
children purely Bangla names, as the meanings of
the Bengali names are very likely to change the
perceived Islamic characteristics of their
children. Though I am well aware that the name �Setara� is deemed by we all Bengalis to be the name of a Muslim female, yet I
dared analyze its meaning, with due deference to
the bearer of this name, not to belittle or
degrade the name itself or the bearer�s
persona, but to draw the readers attention to a
fact that all humans, including our parents,
were/are susceptible to making mistakes. To make
my point clear, I used the names Setara and
Shamsuddin, the latter being my former last
name, as two examples of our parental mistakes,
and then asked: Can we call our parents ignorant
or illiterate for their innocent mistakes? (To
learn more about my thread of discussion,
readers are requested to read �Re: Gender
Sense of A Gentleman� published in Vinnomot
and Mukto-Mona). My opponent missed my above point, and claimed that the word �Setara�
is the �famine {sic} gender of the word
{sitar}. Before I proceed to refute the above claim on the feminine gender of
Sitar, it might be useful to state here that our
Bangla language is not gender oriented. From a
spoken or written Bangla sentence, it would
never be possible for a listener or a reader to
determine the gender of the subject the speaker
might be speaking of, or the writer wrote about.
For elucidation, let us consider the following
Bangla sentence: �Shea gaan gaicchea.�
(� singing a song). In this Bangla sentence,
the word �shea� used for the subject does not indicate whether it is a
male or a female. In contrast to our Bangla, Urdu is heavily gender oriented. Almost all
Urdu sentences are constructed on the basis of
the subjects� genders. Here is an example: �O gaana ga rahi hai, or ga raha
hai.�
(She is singing/He is singing). The word �rahi�
indicates the subject�s feminine gender. The
use of the word �raha�
reverses the subject�s gender, as it is used
only in case of male subjects. Now, here is the rebuttal to the gender claim of the word �sitar.�
For the information of the learned debater, I
must point out that the word �sitar� is not
a Bangla word. It owes its origin to Hindi,
which borrowed it from Persian. Sitar became a part of English vocabulary during the period 1835-45 (ref.
Random House Webster�s College Dictionary). In
its original form, the word sitar did not have a
feminine gender. Neither does it have even
today. It is evident from the fact that no Hindi
speaking person is ever heard saying �Sitar
Acchi lagti hai.� (�The Sitar looks beautiful�-the word �acchi� being
the feminine form of the masculine word �accha).
Rather, they say:
�Sitar Accha lagta hai.� However, in our Bengali culture, the word �sitar,� and not �Setara,�
is always taken to denote a feminine object,
due, probably, to a sound, called �jhankar�
in Urdu, its strings, upon striking, produce.
Jhankar is a sound that resembles the one that
is created by the collision of glass-bangles
worn by females, hence the phrase �Churiun
ki jhanker,�
i.e. the sound of the bangles. On the other
hand, surood
is always taken in a masculine sense, probably,
because of the heavy sound it originates. And since Bangla is not a gender oriented language, it does not have a
feminine word for �sitar.�
Therefore, to claim that the word �Setara�
is the feminine form of the masculine word
�sitar� is absolutely false. Moreover, Bengali Muslim parents are never known for naming their
children after musical instruments. Had it not
been the case, we would have had among us a lot
of �doogdoogis, tablas, saranghis and
harmoniums� to please our pleasure-deprived
ears! The word �Awaami� or �Awaam� is not a Bangla word, nor is its
usage common in Bangla literature, or among the
Bangla speaking people. We have the Bangla words
�jonogon� or �jonota� to denote the same
meaning both the above Persian words carry. The
word �Awami� is used only in
conjunction with the Awami League, and not for
any other purposes whatsoever. If I am mistaken in my foregoing assertion, in that event, I shall feel
obliged for being corrected by anyone with
proper references. Rest of the points/assertions made by the debater are of no consequence,
hence I am not commenting on them intentionally.
Mohammad Asghar writes from USA. |
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