Being Sylheti – Beyond The Dialect

For those who can read, and understand, the above limerick’ised version of the opening scenes of the Ramayan, the rhymes bring both a smile to the lips, as well as a sense of sadness at the lack of awareness, and apathy about so lyrical a language, at least among Bengalis in India.

For those who can’t read the above Bengali script, or understand the Sylheti rhymes within, it is a simple four line introduction to the Ramayan, describing King Dasharat’s marital status with his three wives, and his childlessness.

I found this poem on the home page of the somewhat ambitiously titled ‘Global Sylheti Homeland in Cyberspace‘, a website that is a storehouse of information about the Sylheti language, folklore, history and surprisingly, literature. My surprise is, of course, due to the fact that like many Sylhetis of my generation, I was under the impression that the language was really only a dialect, a provincial variety of ‘mainstream’ (read West Bengal) Bangla. I had no idea that a Sylheti script existed and that Sylheti literature flourished at one point in time. 

The website, maintained by Ms Barsha P Bhattacharjee, isn’t perfect. The layout leaves a lot to be desired, the links do not always work and the language is bombastic at times and difficult to understand. Clearly, a work in progress. But the small write-ups under ‘Our Memory’, ‘Our Experience’, ‘The Language’, ‘The Story’ and ‘The Paradox’ are worth checking out. The section with the most information, though, is Sylheti Documentation.
There are other websites, such as STAR – Sylhet Translation and Research, which provide further information about Sylheti literature and even a Syloti Nagri font. Moulvibazar.com is another such content provider. But most of these are Bangladesh-centric websites, and do not really tell OUR story, a gap that I hope Ms Barsha’s website will fill.

When we were growing up, we were constantly drilled to avoid the usage of Sylheti words in our language, lest we corrupt the ‘good’ Bangla that we were learning. This was very surprising, coming from parents who took enormous pride in their heritage, but maybe it needs to be seen in the context of their desire to see their children integrate with ‘mainstream’ Bengalis and be more ‘Indian’, as it were. So the result is the rather hotchpotch Bengali that I speak today, which is neither here nor there.

The Sylheti language is alive and thriving in the plains of Southern Assam, though. But if my family is any indicator, the generation with all the knowledge of the traditions and the history of our heritage is on its last legs. The current crop is adapted to the cultural demands of a more integrated world than the one our parents lived in, but this has come at a price. The gradual erosion of interest, apathy and sometimes even embarrassment about our culture and traditions. How many of us know the words to the Dhamail folk songs sung traditionally at weddings, for example? I struggle to even recollect the names of the villages and towns in Sylhet where my grandparents hailed from. It is only now that I am trying to find out (from my mother) about the circumstances in which my family moved to post-partition India two generations ago.

There is a silver lining though. There is a new sense of confidence in India’s youth today, and for Sylheti youngsters with roots in Silchar or a hundred other small towns in North Eastern India , it translates to new-found pride in their own heritage. They are proud of their language, and unlike me, speak it with fluency and added flourish, and give a contemporary touch to the famed Sylheti sense of humor.

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~ by Shubho on March 7, 2007.