INVITED SPEAKERS

In this short paper, I will try to provide a rough outline of the political-ideological dimension of developments in the field of language policy and language planning in postcolonial Bangladesh. This emphasis on rather abstract, underlying ideas in the field of language policy and planning is based on my conviction that the story of Bengali in postcolonial Bangladesh is largely a political-ideological story, an invisible sociocultural wall, and that this dimension is too often overlooked in analyses of language planning. It is often assumed that the general orienting ideas underlying language policy and planning are linguistic-theoretical or sociological ideas. The fact that these ideas are often already pre-inscribed in the political ideologies of interested groups in society (including the government, but also other groups such as intellectuals, scientists, artists...), and that their scholarly phrasing is often more a post-factum rationalization than an autonomous and practice-oriented scientific argument, is not always taken into account.

In his essay Sirajul Islam Choudhury (1994), has tried to illustrate how practical, utilitarian or scientific aspects are subservient to, and modeled according to, arguments that are based on perceived practical or ideological congruencies between the language situation and the political situation in the country. Thus, the development of postcolonial Bengali language policy was governed by crucial metaphors of “development” and “modernization”, and these in turn were to a considerable extent modeled on Bengali nationalist discourse. Other developments in the scholarly field, e.g. the development of a local historiographic tradition of 21 st February in Bangladesh can also be read as responses to or reactions against political developments (Rafiqul Islam 1994). What I want to do in this paper is to re-politicize the arguments used by various participants in the debate on language in Bangladesh since independence of Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971. This way, I hope to show that analyses of what happened in the field of language cannot be made in and of themselves, but have to be placed in a wider framework of political actions and developments such as Bhasha Andolan (Bengali Language Movement) of 1952 and the War of Liberation of 1971, in fields as diverse as education and literary criticism. The theoretical implication of this would be that we get a clearer idea of how political ideologies actively structure society, or, in other words, how hegemony can be made visible.