How Bangabandhu's 7 March speech was recorded and distributed against all odds

On 7 March 1971, although many citizens of the then East Pakistan looked forward to listening to Bangabandhu's speech, only those at the Racecourse Ground were lucky enough to hear it that day as the Pakistani government did not permit a live broadcast 

But AHM Salahuddin, who was the chairman of Pakistan International Film Corporation (PIFC) at that time, and MA Khayer, a member of the National Assembly (MNA) from East Pakistan and also the managing director of PIFC, made arrangements to record the video and audio of the historic speech. 

Actor Abul Khair, the then director of Films under the Ministry of Information of Pakistan, recorded the video, while HN Khondokar, a technician at the Ministry of Information, recorded the audio.

The audio record was then developed and archived by Dhaka Record, a record label owned by Abul Khayer. Later, copies of the audio and video recordings were handed over to Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, while a copy of just the audio was sent to India. 

Some 3,000 copies of the audio were then distributed by the Indian record label HMV Records throughout the world.

The details of how the speech was recorded and mass-produced, as well as the events in the month of March 1971, were recounted in great detail in a book titled  "Salahuddin," which has been published by Bangladesh Film Archive and authored by one of Salahuddin's assistants, Harunur Rashid. 

When Salahuddin was recording Bangabandhu's speech at the Racecourse Ground, he did not know what he was going to do with it, his wife Ruhia Salahuddin recounted in the book. 

But soon after, he decided to turn that into a record. He edited the 19-minute speech himself and trimmed it down just enough to fit in a single platter of 45 RPM extended play or EP record. 

The EPs were made at a factory in Savar and then brought to Salahuddin's Indira Road residence. "I used to maintain the accounts of the records and their stocks. There was so much demand for Sheikh Saheb's speech that it was difficult to keep up. Dealers would come into the office and demand more," Ruhia recalled. 

Salahuddin was no ordinary record producer. He was a prominent Bengali filmmaker, whose 1965 super hit "Rupban'' set the benchmark for commercially successful films. 

Salahuddin was also interested in Bengali folk songs, leading him to found Dhaka Records in 1968. All of the prominent Bengali artists, including Ferdousi Rahman, Khaleq Dewan, Malek Dewan, Jane Alam, and Firoz Sai, among others, started to work with Dhaka Records.

The 7 March speech was produced from Salahuddin's factory and then spread to all corners of Bangladesh, including the villages. After the 25 March crackdown, the Pakistani army began to look for Salahuddin, who fled the country to save his life. 

What happened on 25 March 

Salahuddin was at the Savar factory on the morning of 25 March, unaware of the events taking place in Dhaka. He got back home late at night with his car filled with records of Bangabandhu's speech. He was shocked to hear what had just happened, Salahuddin's wife Ruhia recalls. 

Panicked and terrified, Ruhia and others stayed up all night to dig a hole in the backyard of their house where they buried all the records. The records were wrapped up in polythene bags before putting them underground. They left the house as soon as they finished hiding the records. 

And the next morning the Pakistani military came to the house, according to Ruhia's account, they ransacked the house and screamed, "Where is Salahuddin? Where are the records?" 

"We first fled to the factory in Savar and later went to the Kulya village. The military also came looking for us there. But Salahuddin managed to leave the country," said Ruhia. 

Born in 1926 in Noakhali, Salahuddin is remembered for his pioneering role as a director and producer. But he is perhaps less known as the person who recorded the 7 March speech and played a crucial part in immortalising it.

The filmmaker passed away in 2003 in the United States. 

"The Speech" documentary 

Filmmaker Fakhrul Arefeen Khan of "Bhuban Majhi" fame made a documentary on the people behind the audio and video recording of Bangabandhu's 7 March speech. 

After Yahya Khan suspended the scheduled inaugural national assembly session on 1 March, Bangabandhu wanted to see MA Khayer and Salahuddin, Khayer recounted in Fakhrul Arefeen's 2011 documentary. They met at Hotel Purbani for a closed-door meeting.  

MA Mobin, the cameraman who recorded the video, had asked Khayer to tell Bangabandhu to face the camera when speaking so that his face is not obstructed by the microphones. Bangabandhu remembered this, Mobin said in the documentary, and turned his face slightly toward the camera.

As soon as the war broke out, Mobin quickly hid the reels at a house in Mohammadpur. Amjad Ali Khandaker was the assistant cameraman who helped Mobin. 

After 15 days, Mobin took the films from Mohammadpur and made a perilous journey to Nawabganj's Dohar, where the films would be better protected. The documentary also reveals interesting details about what Bangabandhu was actually planning to say in his speech. 

Haji Mohammad Golam Murshid, Bangabandhu's personal assistant at that time, drove to the Racecourse Ground from the Dhanmondi 32 house. The meeting was scheduled to begin at 3pm, but the area was filled with people by noon. 

"We got out of Dhanmondi 32 at around 2pm. I was driving the car. After arriving at Satmasjid Road, I asked Bangabandhu, 'What will you say today?' 'I will say whatever Allah makes me say,' he replied," Murshid said in the documentary. 

After the liberation

The Salahuddin family recovered the records after returning home and sold them. Subsequently, Bangabandhu's speech was recorded on cassettes.  

Bangladesh Film Archive, which was established in 1978, received the video of the speech from the Department of Films and Publications in the 1980s. But the reels had accumulated dust by that time, which made the image blurry. 

The historic document was restored and improved after the Film Archive made negatives of the reels.     

In 2011, the archive acquired a digital transfer machine, which was actually a scanner made by British Cintel. With this, the archive could scan and transfer the still images to a computer from 35mm video reels.

Rashedul Alam Gazi, sub-assistant engineer with the Film Archive, said the machine took a long time to complete the transfer as it scanned the video frame by frame.  

"I think I scanned the 7 March speech at the end of 2011 or early 2012. You may find the previous video of the speech a bit blurry since there was too much dust on some of the frames.  

"But we were able to clean them. So, the latest video is brighter and cleaner," Rashedul Alam said. 

In 2017, the archive got a more advanced scanner which they used to scan the video again. 

"The audio is now much clearer and louder, while we have the capability to export the video to 4K. We restored the speech. The DFP has a DVD that is 16 minutes long. The government's ICT Division has developed a colour version of the speech after taking input from us," Rashedul added.

The film is currently in a vault at the Film Archive building.

A version of this article was first published in The Business Standard on 7 March  2022