We’re diving deep into Bangladesh in this episode, exploring the significance of the national anthem, "Amar Sonar Bangla." From its poetic roots to its role as a symbol of national identity, this anthem encapsulates the spirit of a country shaped by colonialism and the renaissance, not that one though. We'll be learning about a song that not only echoed the sentiments of an era but also resonated with the struggles and aspirations of the Bengali people. As we navigate through Bangladesh's history, we’ll uncover how geography, politics, and artistic expression intertwine to create a narrative that's as rich as the country itself.

1. https://archive.org/details/records-indian-museum-23-001-096
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20210204222711/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/area/country-comparison/
3. https://greatersundarbans.org/theme/conservation
4. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/panam-nagar
5. https://www.bbc.com/bengali/articles/c4grpv04p90o
6. Nitish Sengupta (2001). History of the Bengali-speaking People. UBS Publishers' Distributors. p. 211. ISBN 978-81-7476-355-6
7. https://www.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%82%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%87-%E0%A6%AB%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%9B%E0%A7%87-%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%AE-%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%97%E0%A6%B0
8. https://rsis.ramsar.org/ris/560?__goaway_challenge=meta-refresh&__goaway_id=c19aa9ea4154a8b3c956014aafc839ce&__goaway_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2F
9. Ali, A. (1996). "Vulnerability of Bangladesh to climate change and sea level rise through tropical cyclones and storm surges". Water, Air, & Soil Pollution. 92 (1–2): 171–179. Bibcode:1996WASP...92..171A
10. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Amar-Sonar-Bangla
11. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Awakening/QqtVC-IUu2QC?hl=en
12. Baxter, Craig (1997). Bangladesh: From A Nation to a State. Westview Press. pp. 24–25. ISBN 978-0-813-33632-9.
13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44478532
14. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Calcutta/y-W6TjM2n1AC?hl=en
15. Willem van Schendel (12 February 2009). A History of Bangladesh. Cambridge University Press. p. 57. ISBN 9780511997419.
16. https://qz.com/india/810668/rabindranath-tagore-not-bob-dylan-the-first-lyricist-to-win-the-nobel-prize-for-literature-was-actually-indian https://onbeing.org/programs/anita-desai-andrew-robinson-the-modern-resonance-of-rabindranath-tagore/
17. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Population_Redistribution_and_Developmen/tGiSBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA6&printsec=frontcover
18. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-33543786
19. https://www.online-literature.com/tagore-rabindranath/my-reminiscences/14/
20. https://www.countercurrents.org/comm-chatterjee310803.htm
21. https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.3639
22. https://mchistelibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/A-History-of-Bangladesh.pdf
23. https://web.archive.org/web/20171201040219/https://www.bookdepository.com/History-Bangladesh-Willem-Van-Schendel/9780521861748
24. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1913/tagore/facts/
25. https://www.google.com/books/edition/History_of_Freedom_Movement_in_Banglades/DedtAAAAMAAJ?hl=en https://web.archive.org/web/20141006074103/http://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd/sections_detail.php?id=367&sections_id=24551
26. https://carnatic-circle.com/tabla-lessonsnotes/taals-kisme/dadra/
27. https://www.rhythmoftabla.com/post/dadra-taal
28. https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/BGD/

Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Anthems Podcast.

Being able to do that and not have it be a missile strike though, is much harder math to work, and we don't have time for that here in this episode.

Our benign target country does have its own space program, but they piggyback on other nations rockets to focus on monitoring meteorological data and keeping an eye on their water and other ecological resources. It's not much, but it gave me an excuse to mention that humans are going to be near the moon again, which is exciting.

Unrelated to that is the Mahalanobois distance, a mathematical statistical obscurity identified while addressing the problem of properly cataloging skulls.

It's an interesting side read, but it is more than slightly racist, so be prepared if you do choose to read it regardless, if you knew where the discoverer was from, you knew that I was going to talk about Bangladesh, officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh.

Today we are in the 10th most densely populated country in the world because a whole bunch of people that live there have spent a bunch of time time listening to me talk about national anthems. Seriously, I have many, many Bengali listeners in more than 80 municipalities, numbering second only to my own country in audience size.

So I extend a genuinely heartfelt Don no bad to all of you.

As of this writing I have had listeners in 134 countries in fact, which is not bad for a project started as a lark because I figured I should listen to all the anthems if I was going to criticize them, but it has become a different thing than that.

Anyway, we're in another country that I knew very little about before the reading for this episode, and the only thing I knew besides that they have a big chunk of my listener base was there is a Bengal tiger and that there was an actual country is another thing. My education sort of failed at letting me know it's prevented me from knowing what lots of cool stuff and so boo to finite time.

I guess this country has more to tell you than I will fit here. And that's true over and over again, at least for me.

So scratching the itch to know more is the reason that I'm telling you about Amar Sona Bengala or My Golden Bengal.

After getting into a deep, time consuming dive about reading about things to cook, I can tell you I have eaten a bunch of food that could have come from Bangladesh is a very interesting fusion of Halal and Indian, which means beautiful dishes of curried beef or fish, depending on your cultural background. But I'll stick with the Siobhan Biryani that I get up the hill. Also, here's Here's a song. Sam. Shout. Shadow. My.

My initial reaction is that I like it because finding a version that's performed as the piece was originally composed is a good bonus for me. I like to do it if I can. I'm not going to say anything about the song here though. We got some unpacking to do about this first.

For now I want to talk about urban exploration, what some people will call Urbex. I love that stuff, if people are respectful at least. But it's a difficult thing to do without possible legal penalties or wildly unsafe conditions.

So places like Panam Nagar are very cool. This is an abandoned city left to the forest and accessible via bus and a rickshaw.

So I suppose this is not really Urbex at all and it borders on urban archaeological history or something. I think it's a cool place if you're into the forest swallowing things aesthetic, and I really am. It resonates with me in a lot of ways right now.

So where do we go to find Bangladesh and get lost in the forest? Unlike recent countries on my show, I don't get to say.

Well, this one's actually pretty easy to find because it doesn't leap out at me as a prominent and easy to find spot. But I will assume we all know where Africa and Australia are.

In between the two continents is the Indian Ocean, and as we proceed north up the middle of it, we approach the Indian subcontinent, which juts out from the bottom of Asia. There are two large bays on either side of India. To the west is the Arabian Sea and to the east is the Bay of Bengal.

As you may have guessed, at the northernmost reaches of the Bay of Bengal are the shores of Bangladesh. This is not a huge country at 93rd largest, but it is the 8th most populous place.

The 174 or so million people living there enjoy a place where they've never recorded temperature below freezing.

Bangladesh is a country that is geographically defined by rivers because there are 57 of them and pretty much all of them come together to discharge into the Bay of Bengal via the roughly 2/3 of the Ganges river delta that make up almost 80% of the country.

Unfortunately, that means that this tropical country is very vulnerable to climate change, with 1 meter sea level rise inundating about 20% of the land and displacing 30 million people, which is scary sounding stuff. It's a concern that only gets exacerbated by deforestation and erosion.

So I will add it to the existential list of worries that I can't functionally do anything about what I still sometimes think about. I realized that I didn't finish telling you about the border here.

Very nearly a semi enclave state, it is enclosed almost entirely by India and the Bay of Bengal, if not for the slightly more than 6% of the border that is made up by Myanmar at the extreme west of the coast.

I've not looked up if there is a term for semi enclave countries because I'm sidetracked enough as it is for the, I guess, Earth Science portion of the show. I'll tell you a little bit about the Sunda Barnes. It is the world's largest mangrove forest.

It's about the size of Brunei, which is episode 37 if you haven't heard it yet. It's an incredibly important place because it helps protect part of the Ganges river delta from said erosion.

Now, Ganges is arguably the most important delta in the entire world. It is the largest and it directly supports more than 140 million people.

Now, I am not a poet, so I cannot give you a great description of how excellent this place looks. So you've got to look it up for yourself.

A mangrove forest is quite something, but due to climate change and direct human influence that are beyond the scope of this show to delve into, this forest is like a third of the size it was when it was originally measured in the early 19th century, this has led to a more vulnerable delta because the forest was an effective tide break, or it still is just less so. Now, conservation efforts do continue and I support them. See reference 3 if you are curious about them yourself.

Despite not making some kind of a reference to it before, now we are again in a country that has its history veered off trajectory by colonialism. The first Europeans in the area were not from England, even though England is the nation that had the largest effect on said trajectory.

The colonial involvement began properly well into the development of a unique Islamic dominated blend of Hinduism plus Buddhism plus indigenous culture. And that did not actually stop with colonial involvement. It just became heavily interfered with.

Or a stolen narrative is a term that I thought that I thought of and discovered that I did not think of it because of course not real scholars in this area have us covered and have got colonialism explained well before it got to me.

By the time the Shah expelled the Portuguese and was out of power, the British had already moved in and taken control of the former Portuguese outposts. There were other colonizers involved, but the British were the dominant force.

This was a social reform movement that happened between the 18th century and early 20th century. At least initially it was just that. But it grew to be exactly what you think of when you think of Renaissance.

And it's one of the dense intellectual coalescences, which is a fun history nerd interest list that I like to keep track of. And it's another thing that I will eventually talk about if I have the time. But. But what does it mean?

I'll stop because I could go on, but the point is that this roughly century long stretch is one of the most creative periods of time on the Indian subcontinent, full stop.

Some of my favorite periods of time are when a bunch of people that are way smarter than me are given the chance to just be interested in stuff, learn about it and then share it with the class. The entire arc of this Renaissance, though, while sort of relevant to the anthem, is far past the scope of what we're here to really talk about.

But the general idea is that the British providing stability for an intellectual flowering that happened to be a mostly anti colonial flowering, but they did it by oppressive force and forcing a certain kind of education on people. It's purely sad that over and over again the colonial experience is forced oppressive stability with education from the conqueror.

To me, stability coming to people in an area or culture ideally should be allowed to happen without outside people stealing everything that they perceived as useful fantasy. Sure, Gene Roddenberry agrees with me that it's science fiction, but I digress.

The Renaissance might be functionally said to have been begun with a guy named Raja Ram Mohan Roy and he is on the interesting but as far as I know, not terrible human being category. His work was foundational to so much, but we are not going to discuss his story at all. But do look him up because this guy is a character and a half.

We are much more interested in the man at the complete other end of the thing.

Roy is said to have been the leading edge of that the Bengal Renaissance ends with the person that allows me to get to the point of the show is a nice coincidence. Our writer is Robin Dranath Tagore.

This man bucks the trend of national anthem writers that I generally see and he is a properly famous person and his impact on history is still playing out. He is also a guy that you're not going to get the entire story about in this episode because we will visit his life again in India.

So in case you know about him, because like I said, he's super famous and lots of people know lots of stuff about this guy. The gaps that I have left in this story are partially on purpose.

His mother died when he was very young and his father had a very heavy travel schedule. This was in part because his father founded Brahmo wism.

Today I learned that it's a Hindu religious movement that had a large effect on India's post 19th century development.

So he was raised mostly by the servants and his older siblings and a series of teachers that his father handpicked from the Bengali Renaissance and it resulted in he and many of his siblings being high achievers. At age 11, he took a formative trip around India with his father on tour as part of a Hindu coming of age ceremony called the Upan Ayan.

Sorry if I mispronounced that. It's not really something that we do in the United States for kids. If I'm thinking about it, email me or something.

US listeners, we do lots of stuff like Sweet sixteen, that kind of stuff, but there's nothing that's really like a universal thing in the United States. And I would be curious to learn if I'm wrong about that.

Reading about Tagore's life really nails home the point about how rich people's lives are so incredibly different from mine. His dad wanted him to be a barrister, which is a British lawyer.

So he was shipped off to Brighton in Sussex to enroll in public school and somehow was shortly reading law at University College London. I don't know how all that stuff works, but it works different when you're rich.

The writer didn't enjoy it and he ducked out to do an independent study on Shakespeare and Thomas Browne. And he was into folk music, in part because it was so very different from traditional Indian composition.

And I gotta tell you, reading about this girl's life is one of the most profoundly sad things I've ever done for this show or in a bunch of other places in my life. She lives a short, privileged life in a gilded cage, and part of that was having a child when she was 12.

I'm not sorry for bringing up some of the terrible parts of history, but we have to talk about some bad stuff sometimes. Also though, the time that Tagore spent with Devi were among his most productive writing years.

So it is time that I have to mention my general disdain for this guy marrying a child aside, it's actually hard to overstate his output or his impact on the cultural landscape of India and Bangladesh. He kind of like a Mark Twain in that he seems to know everyone famous that was alive when he was alive.

And he had some sort of influence on a whole bunch of these folks. He met with Henry Bergson, Einstein, Robert Frost, H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann, etc. Etc. Etc. He was the guy that first called Gandhi Mahatma.

He had a complicated and well thought out opinion on philosophy, religion, politics, and innumerable other topics. The guy opened and funded schools.

Honestly, the amount of information out there about Tagore is kind of overwhelming, and it's almost absurd how ridiculously influential in world culture that this guy is.

There is an annual Tagore fest in Urbana, Illinois, in my country, which is kind of wild, but it makes sense in a college town, if you know anything about American college towns. The man has a historical reach that is far beyond my scope, far beyond the scope of the show.

Tagore died at the end of an intellectual and social flowering in Bangladesh. That, of course, had a political element to it.

That is a can of worms that we're going to leave at the table, but I'm trying not to open completely, at least. We may have to smell it, though. Politics at the time in India was dominated by religious and cultural division.

So basically the same as now and the same as a whole bunch of other places. We're going to delve into the specifics of what happened a little bit more in the episodes for Pakistan and India.

There is so much detail here that I have to skip entirely, but you should read at least some of this history on your own. It is dense and it is interesting.

The Bangladesh region basically fell victim to political considerations and was divided largely against the will of the majority of the people living there, which should sound familiar to listeners of my show as such. There were a whole bunch of people that were real unhappy about what happened.

The key event was when Bengali politician Sheikh Mujabar Rahman won the first Pakistani general election for premier and the army decided to take a hard pass on that and they arrested him.

This and the resulting stalemate prompted India to unofficially intervene and just sort of overpower Pakistan. By December of the same year, they signed an instrument of surrender and the country of Bangladesh was established.

They had already chosen Amar Sonar Bengla as the national anthem after it was first proposed in a manifesto written on March 2.

Musically speaking, we have something that I can't say I've heard a lot of before the homework for this episode. It is music that I am really beginning to enjoy listening to though, and learn more about.

It's something called the Dadra Tala and it's part of Indian classical music, so if you know about that, you're way ahead of this podcaster. I'm amateur in the styles that I was raised listening to, never mind a culture that is thousands of years older than mine.

Sources tell me that it is a six beat rhythmic cycle in a generally symmetric three and three style. For the listeners that know what this means ahead of time, the teka for Dajra Tao is da di na da tun na for unfamiliar folk, da is Bold and resonant.

D is soft and muted. Na is a sharp open sound and tun is a sharp and resonant sound.

I might not be enamored with the music of this anthem, but the musical style speaks to me and I will be diving deep on it for months. It's very percussive and I. I used to be a percussionist. I love that stuff.

Lyrically speaking, we have a piece of lyric poetry that is focused on nature.

Tagore draws very heavily on the Bengali mystical folk tradition, something called Bao B A U L. The way it's written dumps me immediately deep into the weeds of Sanskrit prodigy or Chandras and its entire limb of Vedic study that folks have devoted lives to, possibly many if your belief system includes reincarnation. The focus here is on poetic meter and verse. Obviously I have not the ability to do a dive of any kind on that on this little show.

But know that it's been added to the kinds of music that I'm accumulating information on. It's an endless list, honestly. The short version, the meter is based on syllable length rather than word count.

And it is supposed to be like a rocking pace, like rocking a baby, not rock and roll. Couple that with bow and we get a six beat cycle that comes from the Dodger towel that I mentioned earlier.

And you mash all of that together alongside Tagore's genius and we are greeted with a patriotic protest song that that was written during the Swadeshi movement and was meant to rekindle the unified spirit of Bangladesh during partition. We'll talk a little bit more about it though after we read it.

The version I'm using is the official English version, but it was originally written in Bengali. My golden Bengal the I love forever Thy skies be thine Air like a flute set my heart in tune O mother.

Aroma of mango orchard in felgon driveth me crazy. Ah, such miraculousness. O mother.

Time seeth in O gro aon smiles sweet all through fields of paddy what beauty, what shades, what affection, what tenderness. What a quilt thou hast spread at tip of banyans long every bank O Mother.

Words from thy lips like nectar to my ears Ah, such miraculousness if sadness, O mother.

Cast a gloom on thy face My eyes filled with tears Spending my childhood in thy playhouse Thy soil o' er my body smeared I consider myself privileged. Wonderful lamp at dusk thou lightest Ah, such miraculousness. At once I quit playing and sprint back to thy lap O mother.

In cattle grazing field on pier for crossing stream Shaded village walkways serene with calling birds, Open porch with heaped rice paddies My life goeth on. Ah, such miraculousness. All thy shepherds and farmers are my brothers. This time I offer my head beneath thy feet Bless me with thy dust.

Obliged shall I be to flaunt overhead to thee I shall offer meagerly whatever I have at home. Ah, such miraculousness Ne' er bothered to buy thee from others a hanging rope, coronal guise.

I will say that despite not really finding a performance I enjoy if this has a song, it's a pretty good poem.

When I read it in a language I understand, and it makes it make sense that this was chosen as the anthem because it checks so many of the boxes that I like anthems to check. It's nothing short of a love poem to Bangladesh as a mother figure. Reminds me a fair bit of romantic era writing that we run into here on occasion.

Although this stuff was roughly a century earlier, Tagore was heavily influenced by it. Think elevated and intense emotion coupled with reverence for nature, but also shot through with an individualism.

Different traditions land on similar sentiments kind of often.

This time I'm not going to step a whole bunch on the translator's idea of Tagore's writing, because it's pretty good and the sentiment mostly speaks for itself. In this case, I do want to make some notes for listeners that don't know things because I had to look this stuff up.

Falguna, or the falun, is the 12th and last month in the Hindu lunar calendar. The month corresponds to roughly the end of the winter in the Northern hemisphere. Something else for me to read about.

A lack of deep poetic consideration here doesn't mean an anthem with nothing to say about about it. Some controversy does get wrapped up in this anthem, and it wouldn't have made as much sense to talk to you about it before the read through.

The roots of the roughness here are in the partitioning of the country that I hand waved my way through before and will continue to assume that was enough to say about it because it's too detailed to really get into here, other than to say that there was some serious religious division that spawned out of it. Muslim people largely supported the partition and Hindu people largely did not support the partition.

So a song that called out against the division fell flat with a lot of people.

There were also a bunch of people that consider the mother imagery to be specifically Hindu depiction of a goddess, and the Madras Sago go as far as to consider it blasphemous. The Madra Sago are a particular sect of Islam, but as it is with all the anthems I've read about there are supposedly mired in controversy.

It's kind of cultural background and all of the alternative proposals have fell flat. It's still the anthem.

Interfaith and community friction aside, this song does profess a deep love for a beautiful country throughout all five verses and it fits very well as a national anthem.

Yes, it is different from many others in that despite the Islamic or just anti Hindu opposition, it is not dripping with religion or trumpeting violent rebellion or talking about a specific historical event. And the difference is what makes it very Bangladeshi.

I think this is a country and people that have had their future decided for them for a long time by other people. I don't typically read too much about a country past where it matters for the anthem, but I did hear and it's really quite the place.

Despite current difficulties, this was an informative episode to read for we met another properly famous anthem writer and I think the first one that we will meet again someday and I got to dip my toes into a part of history that I knew very little about, but I have come to depend on in more than one way. So much of my modern experience has its roots in this part of the world and you folks in Bangladesh are 9.6% of my listener base and that's amazing.

Hopefully this stuff continues to appeal to you because it scratches my itch to learn more and more stuff and I'm excited to share it with you. On to the next country and on to the credits.

The writing, recording and production for the show are done by me and I wrote and played the theme music, which I used with my permission. Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are free to play.

I have reached out to the Bengal foundation to see if they're cool with me using their version, but as of this writing I have not heard back from them. My sources are in the show notes and they [email protected] I can be found on Facebook as the Anthems podcast.

I post about the show in the rare Anthem News, but I am mostly asking you to help me by using the hashtag anthemspod and perhaps that will somehow do something to quell the economic demon that we call inflation.

It's really hammering on the Bengali economy and they have the highest inflation in East Asia right now, although I do not understand the interplay between money supply and everything else because that's so complicated.

255 Are on the website at creator accountability network.org you can even go there and volunteer your time or join up as a creator.

Maybe you're home from work because drastic incoming storms do this really miserable thing where you get a debilitating sinus headache and you're not writing your podcast right now. I don't have a segue, just a headache so bad that I'm sharing it with my meager audience.

Anyway, listeners, I I hope that you are a repeat customer of this show and you enjoy my nonsense because I'm digging the project so far. Let's learn more stuff next month. None of the writing for this show is done with generative AI.

It's all my fault and it's also my copyright and may not be used to train AI. Sa.