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Is it because she is a woman?
[Dhaka Tribune] Sometime between my birth and my realisation that the world is quite a long way from right, I must have missed the lesson where it is explained to me that culture is something which is static.Perhaps, it is a defect of my bourgeois middle-class English-medium education, and I was under the wrong impression that culture, by definition, is anything but static. Friday was a great and terrible day. Lady Justice is no more. Islamists all over the country are celebrating this as a great blow towards the spectre of Western influence that she represents. Perhaps, in some obscure verse by some obscure scholar, reading whose work would get me on some watchlist somewhere, it has been written that the problems of Bangladesh can all be traced to that poignant symbol known throughout the world. Let us ignore the heavy-handed symbolism. In a country where so many major crimes remain unsolved, where the headlines consist of the faceless dead, where murder, rape, and arson are par for the course — the forcible removal of the symbol of justice due to capitulation to the religious right is so absurd that it defies belief. It’s like a bad joke, and as the forces of “good” become more emboldened by this show of cowardice by the government, the deaths that will follow will be the punchline. Islam forbids the worship of idols, and we can all agree that justice is something which is not exactly revered in Bangladesh. How about Justice Man, then? A couple of points — does anyone in their day to day lives really care what is in front of the Supreme Court? I’ve driven past the Supreme Court numerous times, and I can quite frankly admit that I’ve never been seized by an ineffable rage at the usurpation of our country’s culture. Be honest — have you? Why Lady Justice though? Is it because she is a woman and that goes against the deeply conservative and patriarchal country that we are? Would Justice Man — heroic purveyor of justice have been more acceptable, Qur’an in one hand, machete in another have sufficed? It goes without saying that Justice Man would wear no blindfold, because, in Bangladesh, it is all about who you know. The crux of the argument then comes from the fact that she is a foreign symbol, implanted as a cipher by the godless imperialistic Western hegemony — the faux new world order turning the fickle minded youth away from their culture and towards destruction. I forget, which Western democracy did Nibras Islam kill for again? If that is the case and the act of preserving culture is the act of preserving the past, what becomes the cut-off point? What past is the one that must be preserved? If the symbol of justice is a foreign symbol and we must keep the Bengali cultural heritage pure, why not the automobile? Why not the air-conditioner or the Coca Cola can or the ever popular tool for murderers nowadays, the machete? What exactly separates the symbols of a foreign culture from the culture of our country? When is the standard against which all advances are measured against? Is it before 1971, when our country was known as East Pakistan? Is it before 1947? 1757? 1526? Why statues? The question then becomes how long does an idea take to become appropriated? None of the religions present in our country, aside from maybe Hinduism, is exactly endemic to the region. Why haven’t those been rejected as anathema? What about cell-phones, the computer, the iPad, Nike (named after a roman goddess as well), the laws of physics, and so many other things? Reject one idea as foreign and you must reject them all. This writer ponders why, with all of the horrific problems that are present in our economy, where the headlines are as much written in blood as in ink, do people believe that the cancer that infests us will be excised by yelling about statues? What this move will do is nothing, except tell the murderers present in our society that it is their society. Things will regress further and further, and if the government continues to capitulate to the demands of madmen, the country will become one where it is dangerous to even speak. Posted by: Fred 2017-05-28 |
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