When the Mango Tree Blossomed Fifty Short Stories from Bangladesh

I N T R O D U C T I O N On 21 February 1952, young men and women gathered at amtala, in the shade of the mango tree, on the campus of the University of Dhaka – at that time, the southern portion of the Dhaka Medical College and Hospital. The mango tree was in full bloom, but few of the young people noticed it at the time. They had other, more important, things on their minds. They were protesting the imposition of Urdu as the state language of Pakistan and were demanding that Bangla, spoken by the majority of the people in Pakistan, should be made a state language: rashtra bhasha bangla chai. The question of what would be the state language of the new state of Pakistan had been raised before. Twice, it had been squashed. Both Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Governor General of Pakistan, and later Khwaja Nazimuddin, the Prime Minister of Pakistan and an East Pakistani, had categorically stated, at different times, that the state language of Pakistan would be Urdu.

Section 144 had been imposed the day before, preventing the assembly of more than three persons. However, the young people under the mango tree were not to be deterred and,in small groups, they emerged from the university campus demanding recognition of Bangla as a state language. The story is too well known to bear repeating, and yet, it is important to recall what happened. On that day the spark of Bengali nationalism was lit and would inspire a nation to independence a little less than twenty years later. As the small groups emerged, the police, as