21st February: Tribute or Self-Deception?
Agartala Feb 21: Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri recently said in an interview: “I have always lived in a kind of linguistic exile.”
At first glance, the sentence feels like a deep personal confession—almost poetic in its sorrow.
But if we pause and listen carefully, we realize that it carries something far beyond individual pain.
It contains the shadow of a civilization, the uncertainty of immigrant life, and the most familiar colonial wound of all: guilt toward one’s own mother tongue.
Jhumpa Lahiri is brave—there is no doubt about that. Learning Italian, choosing to write literature in it, and even distancing herself from English reading is not an ordinary act.
It is an act of fierce artistic discipline. She walked away from comfort and certainty, stepping into an unfamiliar language as if it were a new homeland.
Yet within this courage exists a strange kind of sadness—a quiet indulgence of sorrow, a kind of luxury of pain.
Because Jhumpa’s struggle is not the struggle of dying for a language. It is the struggle of reinventing oneself through language—an intimate and romantic journey, not a political battlefield.
It is her freedom. Her choice. Her artistic thirst. But that is precisely where a larger question begins to rise: is this exile for everyone?
Or is it only for those who possess passports, privilege, time, and security—those who can afford to love language as an aesthetic pursuit?
Jhumpa’s pain is real, but it is also surrounded by beauty. Because the language she chose—Italian—is not a marginalized language.
It is a state language, a globally respected literary language. In escaping one linguistic identity, she did not fall into darkness; she stepped into another established world.
There is courage in that, yes—but there is no revolution. There is struggle, but no street.
And this is where the question of 21st February becomes sharper.
For us, 21st February is not merely a day of flowers at Shaheed Minar.
It is the ultimate claim of identity. Those who gave their lives for Bangla did not romanticize language.
They did not treat it as a poetic preference. They chose death because the state denied them the right to speak their mother tongue. They proved something we often forget: language is not just culture—language is power. Language is rights. Language is survival.
But after so many decades, are we still standing in the same truth?
We celebrate Language Day with pride. We march, recite poems, sing songs, and declare that Bangla is our honour. Yet the reality is uncomfortable: how far have we truly carried Bangla into the world?
How much confidence do we place in Bangla when it comes to science, technology, research, economics, and global knowledge?
The truth is brutal. We love Bangla emotionally, but we do not trust it as our future.
This is the most dangerous hypocrisy. We worship Bangla, but we hesitate to use it.
We remember the martyrs, yet we raise our children with the first lesson that matters: without English, you cannot succeed.
We sing the songs of 21st February, but the moment we enter the workplace, we hide Bangla in our pockets like an embarrassment.
We have turned Bangla into a festival, but not into a tool of progress.
This is the real linguistic exile—not the exile of living abroad, but the exile of becoming a stranger in your own homeland.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s exile was the sigh of an immigrant child trapped between two languages.
But our exile is far more tragic. Because we are not trapped. We are not forced. We are simply surrendering.
Standing on the soil of Bangla, we have willingly reduced our own language to second-class status.
We have built a mindset where Bangla belongs only to emotion, not intellect; only to poetry, not progress; only to home, not the world.
And this is how languages die—not through government bans, but through silent neglect. Not through prohibition, but through preference.
Not because someone else silences them, but because their own speakers begin to doubt them.
No state today is forbidding Bangla. No law is declaring it inferior. Yet in boardrooms, in universities, in scientific journals, in digital innovation—how often does Bangla stand confidently at the center?
We may blame globalization, but globalization did not ask us to abandon our language. It only demanded competence. We answered by replacing confidence with imitation.
The martyrs of 21st February fought so that Bangla could exist. But existence is not the same as excellence. Survival is not the same as leadership.
A language survives when it is spoken. It thrives when it produces knowledge. It leads when it becomes a medium of power.
Have we built enough institutions that generate research in Bangla? Have we invested enough in translating global knowledge into Bangla?
Have we ensured that a student can dream of becoming a scientist, an economist, a technologist—without feeling that their mother tongue is a handicap?
If not, then what exactly are we commemorating?
Are we honouring sacrifice—or performing memory?
Because remembrance without responsibility slowly turns into self-deception.
21st February should not be a day of comfortable nostalgia. It should be a day of uncomfortable questions.
The martyrs did not give us a language merely to decorate stages with poetry. They gave us a foundation. It is we who must build upon it.
To love Bangla is not to reject English or any other language. Multilingualism is strength. The world does not demand isolation.
But self-erasure is not cosmopolitanism. Progress does not require apology for one’s mother tongue.
If we truly want to honour 21st February, we must do something harder than laying flowers. We must create textbooks, research platforms, technological tools, policy frameworks, and economic spaces where Bangla is not ornamental but operational.
Where Bangla is not sentimental but structural.
Otherwise, every year, we will gather at Shaheed Minar, bow our heads, and sing of sacrifice—while quietly preparing the next generation to believe that their own language is not enough.
And that is the deepest betrayal.
So the question remains—
Is 21st February our tribute?
Or has it slowly become our most elegant form of self-deception?
The writer may be contacted at enewstime2017@gmail.com