My parents left what was known as East Pakistan in the early sixties and although I was born in the UK a decade on, my siblings and I were raised to think of Bangladesh as our homeland. For me Bangladesh, until the age of 17 when I made my first trip there, was always a bit of an imaginary territory that was based on fabled descriptions from my folks.
Back then it was unforeseeable that almost twenty years later I’d be travelling as part of a Foreign Office delegation selected to reflect British Bangladeshi achievement. Yet it was in this capacity I found myself the other week as part of a five-strong team in with a four day programme travelling the country to visit institutions including the British High Commission, the British Council, education from primary school to universities, and television and radio studios. These made for a radically different set of sites to visit to the usual round of aunties and uncles on previous family trips and made me appreciate Bangladesh more.
In a country with a literacy rate currently running at around 40 per cent it was interesting to hear from the British Council that book piracy is a real concern whereas in the UK counterfeited media are more likely to be dodgy DVDs. At a press conference in Sylhet, the region with the biggest number of sons and daughters having left for the UK, we were asked why expats choose to build themselves palatial houses which lie empty most of the year rather than investing in the community.
In Dhaka meanwhile, we were quizzed on the issue of immigration restrictions on curry chefs to the UK. This latter point was interesting, as for much of the week we were continually having to refute the notion that Bangladeshis in the UK predominantly work in restaurants and suffer from racism and Islamophobia.
In Q and A sessions with students of universities in Dhaka and Sylhet a common question put to us was a hypothetical along the lines of: if there were to be a confrontational issue pitting one against the other would we ultimately choose to be British or Bangladeshi – positing the two in a straight dichotomous choice which I found deeply reductive. There was an eagerness to hear about the UK from us but at the same time scepticism about the idea of us simultaneously inhabiting a duality or plurality of cultures.
Deeply memorable were the scenes, at a government voter registration centre, of women (accompanied by their children) queuing patiently to enrol for this year’s probable elections. It was often news to those we spoke to that protecting all minorities from racial and religious discrimination in the UK is not just a fiction; it is enforceable in law. It may be one of the world’s biggest Muslim democracies but much of what we take for granted in the UK is still the subject of negotiation in Bangladesh.