Dhaka University: A trek through time

Walking through the campus of Dhaka University, all the way from Curzon Hall --- past the Arts Faculty, the Vice Chancellor's residence, the many residential halls, the Teacher-Student Centre, Kazi Nazrul Islam's grave, Suhrawardy Udyan --- to Shahbagh is a heart-warming trek through living history. 

And in that walk rise in your imagination, indeed in your indelible memories, remembrances of the great souls who sacrificed themselves on the altar of national freedom in the early hours of the struggle for Bangladesh's liberation. 

G.C. Dev, Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta and other academics, together with scores of students at Jagannath Hall, were mown down by the Pakistan occupation army in the early minutes of the genocide it euphemistically launched as Operation Searchlight. 

There were to be more killings, more abductions of teachers and students through the nine long months of suffering. Dhaka University has shaped our worldview even as it has offered blood sacrifices in defence of liberty.

It is all this you recall, a hundred years after Dhaka University came into shape and took substance, as you walk along. It is the voices of all these martyrs, voices ancestral because they were part of us, because they were our fellow Bengalis, that are heard as we walk by. 

You stop before Madhu's Canteen, a spot where in your days as a student of the university you spent time with your friends in happy laughter, serious debate and meaningful silences in the company of tea and shingaras day after day. 

Madhu's Canteen has been much more than a place for tea or for lunch. It is an embodiment of history and you remind yourself you are part of it. You never met Madhu da, but you know he is everywhere.

In this centennial year of Dhaka University, it is the little things along with the big events you recall. Sharif Mia's canteen, a contraption we loved to distraction, was the perfect place for my generation of students to come by cheap but delicious food. It was a spot where poets and raconteurs and young men ready to drink of life always came together, in rain or shine. 

At the university library, many were the hours we spent browsing the shelves in search of works that would help us prepare our weekly tutorials and term papers. There are the footsteps of the illustrious men which sound behind you as you walk through the corridors of the Arts Faculty. 

Back in the 1920s, the university was not here where you are. Even so, it is the men of history, personified by the likes of R.C. Majumdar, who come alive a hundred years into the birth of the university. The literary genius of Buddhadeva Bose assails you once more. 

You recall, from your times, the political slogans of 'mukti chai' raised by senior students through the corridors as you tried listening to your teacher declaim on modern poetry. There are the warming thoughts of A.G. Stock, the intellectual you met rather late as a college student, which makes you smile. And those corridors take you back to the old romance which made a poet of you, which convinced you that the world was yours to grasp and mould to your specifications.

History and Dhaka University have always been in lockstep with each other. Bengali nationalism, the powerful weapon we wielded in the War of Liberation and prior to that, was nurtured and shaped to perfection at this university once Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had informed us that our destiny was freedom. 

It is the same university which would not let the Father of the Nation carry on with his academic career, for he had dared to speak for the menial workers of the university in 1948 and would not say sorry to the university. 

And yet history had its own plans in store. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as Bangladesh's President, would be the chancellor of the university. His was the call we heard as we went to war against the enemy in 1971. 

You walk on, recalling in the sad depths of your soul the day when you planned to hear Bangabandhu speak at Dhaka University. That moment was never to be, for conspiracy had already felled him in the darkness that preceded dawn. 

In your walk through history, you hear the roar, rising to a crescendo, of the young men and women of the university, in the tumultuous days of the mass upsurge against Ayub Khan and in defence of freedom in March 1971. 

That lockstep takes you back to the students' movement against the education commission report in 1962. Your memory turns into passion at thoughts of the aborted convocation in 1964, when the students of Dhaka University would not permit Abdul Monem Khan to be part of it.

Dhaka University made the Bengali come alive in 1952. The agitation in defence of the Bengali language would steer the nation to different moorings, to the destination that was national liberation nineteen years later. 

But then you recall the loud 'No, no, no!' which greeted Mohammad Ali Jinnah's insistence that Urdu be the language of the state. That was another March, in the year 1948. That protest left Pakistan's founder stunned. And from that protest would rise the flames that would consume the world of the oppressors who tried to commandeer our heritage in defiance of generational truth.

Images of the vice chancellors --- Sir Philip Hartog, Sir Ahmed Fazlur Rahman, Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury and others --- rise in the imagination as you walk, the breeze through the trees making music around you and the sky giving you all the intimations of a monsoon downpour. 

You stand at the gate leading to the Arts Faculty from the library, looking out at the spot at Suhrawardy Udyan where the Kali Mandir used to be. The genocide makers, having reduced the Shaheed Minar to rubble, blasted it to pieces within days of their ferocity coming into undiluted fury. 

You remember the links that have bonded Dhaka University and Suhrawardy Udyan (or Race Course as it once was). Our spirit of nationalism sprouted on the university campus. The spirit found fulfillment when the enemy bit the dust at Suhrawardy Udyan on a December afternoon a half century ago.

Dhaka University keeps us in thrall to the world it has been for us these hundred years, keeps us rooted to tradition, to the love it has consistently filled our souls with. 

A long-ago February day shapes up in your vision. And you hear Edward Moore Kennedy, that unforgettable American friend of ours, declaim on the grassy spot before the building where you happen to be, the poetry of Tagore:

 'Where the mind is without fear, where the head is held high … into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.' 

You walk on.