We are taught to love our country from an age when we did not even know what a country was, or what its history, politics or national identity meant.
We simply follow the instruction, along with inheriting a language, a family history, a set of customs and memories that gradually teach us what ‘home’ feels like.
And after all this time, as Bangladesh still debates what it means to be Bangladeshi, we rarely ask how these small experiences gradually become the larger idea that we call nationalism.
But above all, the bigger question is: what happens when someone else starts deciding what that idea should contain.
I think the recent controversy over Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s photographs at DUCSU archive is an interesting place to begin this argument.
The renovated archive showed photographs of Jinnah on 14 September this year, including the one from his 1948 speech on Urdu as Pakistan’s state language.
Students later protested and tore down Jinnah’s images, while DUCSU representatives defended the pictures as historical depictions.
Following these events, Dhaka University administration formed committees to investigate this issue.
Now, what we have to understand is that the disagreement was not simply over a photograph.
Rather, it was about how a country remembers its history and how that memory relates to national identity.
Jinnah can in fact be part of the history of a territory that was once known as East Pakistan.
But it doesn’t have to necessarily represent the values through which Bangladesh identifies itself today.
Remembering history is not the same as celebrating it.
To understand why the dispute happened regarding the display of Jinnah’s images, we first need to distinguish several ideas that sometimes overlap in our daily conversations.
A country refers broadly to the homeland and territory the people living in it identify with.
But the idea of state and nation is different from a country.
A state is the political and institutional structure that governs over that territory.
On the other hand, a nation is the people imagined in that territory as a collective with some sense of shared identity or belonging among themselves.
But even with these distinctions, there is still room for debate regarding what the criteria for patriotism and nationalism should be.
This is where culture enters the debate.
Culture refers to the languages, memories, practices, traditions, beliefs, arts and ways of living through which that collective life acquires meaning.
The idea of culture is especially important when we try to differentiate between nationalism and patriotism.
Patriotism is broadly an attachment to one’s country, while nationalism gives the idea of the nation a political expression.
Let’s think of it this way: before a child understands the word “nation”, they are surrounded by a much smaller world.
They learn a language at home, hear family stories, observe religious and social customs, participate in festivals and develop memories attached to the places and people they live with.
These experiences create familiarity and belonging.
Their surroundings gradually expand from family to society and, eventually, to the much larger ideas of country and nation.
Nationalism can give political expression to that belonging, while patriotism can provide emotional attachment to the country.
But culture is what gives both the substance needed to develop our ability to understand and express our identity independently.
So culture becomes the ground on which nationalism stands.
However, culture itself is dynamic and fluid.
It changes when its practitioners reinterpret customs, abandon harmful practices and absorb new influences.
Some traditions deserve to disappear; others deserve preservation.
The important question is whether its the people who live the culture are the ones bringing the changes or is the change occurring due to some some powerful actors deciding what the culture must become.
When the latter happens, cultural identity becomes politically engineered.
A political movement, religious organisation or other influential actor can select particular traditions, histories, symbols or beliefs and present them as the authentic expression of the nation.
These actors then may dismiss other existing elements of culture as foreign or incompatible with national values.
When this engineering happens, nationalism stops being a political expression of belonging and starts being used as a tool by these actors to make their own expression appear to be the collective expression.
Let us look at the CHT case.
Bangladesh has its own indigenous communities who have their own distinct languages, traditions, religions and social practices.
Article 23A of our Constitution directs the state to protect these cultures and traditions of indigenous communities.
Yet OHCHR have recorded allegations concerning marginalisation and violations affecting indigenous cultural rights in the CHT.
These concerns raise a fundamental question: does being part of the Bangladeshi nation require complete cultural assimilation?
It should not.
Article 9 of our Constitution recognises Bangalee nationalism on the language and culture of the Bangalee nation.
On the other hand, Article 23A recognises cultures and traditions of other ‘ethnic’ communities in Bangladesh.
So ultimately, the challenge is to understand how a national identity can accommodate the diversity that exists within the state.
That brings us back to the Jinnah controversy.
The question should not be which historical figures deserve a place in our history, or should uncomfortable history be removed from public memory.
The larger lesson should be that neither history nor culture should be rewritten merely to force uniformity upon the nation.
Rather, national identity must have the capacity to remember contested history and accommodate living cultural differences without turning either into a test of loyalty.
Bangladesh therefore needs more than a louder nationalism.
It needs a deeper cultural self-understanding.
We should neither romanticise every inherited practice nor surrender our cultural inheritance to those who claim exclusive authority over it.
We do not need to return to our roots.
We need to know that we have them.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
