Editor,
The recent celebration at UNM of International Mother Language Day by the Bangladesh Student Association focused, as usual, on the formation of a sovereign Bangladesh out of East Pakistan, seeded by protesting college students there demanding the right to continue having their mother tongue Bangla as their official language and not have Urdu imposed upon them from the domineering West Pakistan. The police killed a few, but the protest succeeded.
That is all very well but, before that period, English was the language learned quickly among their rich and powerful under British rule, to suck up and so get better living conditions. Over more than a generation of post-independence postcolonial malaise, English is used there to this day to express superiority and foster classism.
So the language of one oppressor may be gone, but the language of another prevails. Thus English-speaking Bangladeshi middlemen are getting fat contracts in the huge garment factories to which the English-speaking West outsources production, and workers get hired who know no English and therefore can be paid low wages.
Arun Ahuja
UNM student
