A Foreign Policy for the Bengali Language Willem van Schendel I am a native speaker of Dutch.

This is the language I learned as a child, the language I dream in, the language I can best express my thoughts and feelings in, and the language I speak with my children. Chances are that you are a native speaker of Bengali and that you know little or nothing about the Dutch language. You may not know that the two languages are distant cousins and that some words are similar. For example, the white things in your mouth that you call , I call . And when you say or or , you are speaking Dutch without knowing it. There are many more similarities, such as the fact that the first recognizably Bengali texts date from about the 10th century CE, and so do the first Dutch texts. Each language has developed a huge and distinguished literary tradition. And Dutch is the national language of three countries (the Netherlands, Belgium and Surinam), just as Bengali is the national language of Bangladesh and a state language in India. Hardly any Bengali speakers know anything about Dutch. Hardly any Dutch speakers know anything about Bengali. Does that matter? After all, there are thousands of languages in the world. Why should others know about Bengali? But it is not only Dutch speakers who know little about Bengali: beyond the Bengal delta and Bengali migrant communities around the world, Bengali is almost invisible. This is very unfortunate and worrying. Bengali may be among the seven largest languages in the world but internationally it is by far the least known of these languages. In fact, you could argue that Bengali is less visible now than it was fifty years ago, when a scholar wrote about Bengali: The literary tradition is unbroken, from the ninth or tenth century Buddhist esoteric texts to the present. It is somewhat surprising that little is known in the West about a literature so old and so rich. Fifty years ago, it was possible to learn Bengali at many universities in Europe, North America and Asia. Today, this is no longer the case. Nowadays, far more universities worldwide offer Dutch courses than Bengali courses, even though there are ten times as many Bengali speakers. As the University of California at Berkeley writes on its website: in the United States, Bangla is regularly taught at only one institution of higher education and

sporadically at a handful of other universities. As a result, the Bengali language has lost a lot of its global visibility and appeal. Teaching Bengali abroad has markedly declined. Clearly, we urgently need a foreign policy for Bengali. It is surprising that Bangladesh, a country that prides itself on its Language Movement and has successfully established the International Mother Language Day, still does not have an effective policy to promote the learning of Bengali abroad. Here the Dutch experience may perhaps give some inspiration. In 1980 the governments of the Netherlands, Belgium and Surinam joined hands to create the Taalunie (; Dutch for Language Union), an organization to support the teaching of Dutch worldwide. It is a unique organization: nowhere else in the world does such a treaty exist between countries with the same language. And it is very effective: now annually over 15,000 students from Mexico to South Africa, from Turkey to Japan, from France to the United States study the language, and the best of them are invited to a summer school in the Netherlands. Could we not think of the governments of Bangladesh, West Bengal and Tripura developing something similar? Could the Bangla Academy not coordinate a dynamic foreign policy for the Bengali language? And could the many probashi associations around the world not be involved in such an effort? Surely, a community as proud of its language as the Bengalis would benefit enormously from projecting that language globally far more vigorously than it is doing today. -------

Willem van Schendel is Professor of Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam. His next book, co-edited with Meghna Guhathakurta, is The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press). It will be out in Spring 2013.