The Language Movement, 1947–1952: How Bengali Became a State Language

When Pakistan came into being in August 1947, it was a state of two wings separated by more than a thousand miles of India, united by religion and divided by almost everything else. In the eastern wing, East Bengal, the people spoke Bengali — and they were not a minority pleading for a concession. Of Pakistan's roughly 69 million people, some 44 million were Bengali speakers, a clear majority of the new country's population. Urdu, the language the central leadership intended to make the sole state language, was the mother tongue of only a small fraction. The demand that arose in Dhaka within weeks of independence was, on its face, a modest one: that Bengali be recognised as one of the state languages of Pakistan, and as the official language and medium of instruction in East Bengal itself. The five-year struggle over that demand — the Language Movement — would cost lives on 21 February 1952, reshape the politics of Pakistan, and write the first chapter of the road to 1971.

A New State, A Contested Tongue: 1947

The first organised voice of the movement appeared within a fortnight of independence. On 1 September 1947, Professor Abul Kashem of Dhaka University founded the Pakistan Tamaddun Majlis, which turned almost immediately to the language question. On 15 September it published a pamphlet, Pakistaner Rashtrabhasha: Bangla na Urdu? — "The State Language of Pakistan: Bangla or Urdu?" — the first printed demand that Bengali be made a state language. The argument was democratic and practical at once. Writers such as Abul Mansur Ahmed warned that if Urdu alone ruled, East Bengal's educated class would be rendered effectively illiterate in the eyes of the state and shut out of government employment, for which examinations and administration would run in a language they did not speak at home.

Events in Karachi soon gave the pamphlet urgency. In late November 1947, the first Pakistan Educational Conference, chaired by the central education minister Fazlur Rahman, recommended Urdu as the common language of the country. Word reached Dhaka quickly. On 6 December 1947 students met on the Dhaka University campus and demanded that Bangla be made one of the state languages of Pakistan, and towards the end of December the first Rashtrabhasha Sangram Parishad — a State Language Action Committee — was formed, with Professor Nurul Huq Bhuiyan of the Tamaddun Majlis as convener. The movement now had an organisation, a slogan and a grievance that reached far beyond the campus: the stamps, coins and naval recruitment tests were already appearing in Urdu and English alone.

Dutta's Proposal and Jinnah's Answer: 1948

The question entered the legislature in February 1948, when Pakistan's Constituent Assembly met in Karachi. It was proposed that members speak in the Assembly only in Urdu or English. Dhirendranath Dutta, a Congress member from East Bengal, moved an amendment to include Bengali among the Assembly's languages, pointing to the arithmetic his opponents could not escape: the majority of Pakistan's people spoke it. The amendment was opposed by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and — to lasting bitterness in the east — by Khawaja Nazimuddin, East Bengal's own chief minister, who assured the House that his province's people wanted Urdu. After days of debate the amendment was rejected on 25 February 1948.

Dhaka answered within a day. Students struck on 26 February, the Sangram Parishad was reconstituted under Shamsul Huq, and on 11 March 1948 a general strike shut down towns across East Bengal. Police broke up pickets outside the Secretariat; leaders including Shamsul Huq, Oli Ahad, Kazi Golam Mahboob and a young Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were arrested, and Mohammad Toaha was badly injured. Strikes rolled on from 12 to 15 March, and on 15 March Nazimuddin climbed down, signing an eight-point agreement with the Sangram Parishad. It promised the release of the detainees, an inquiry into police conduct, an assembly resolution recommending Bengali as a state language with equal standing in central-service examinations, and Bengali as East Bengal's official language and medium of instruction. Within weeks the provincial assembly duly passed a resolution on the province's own language. It looked, briefly, like a negotiated victory.

Four days later, Governor-General Muhammad Ali Jinnah arrived in Dhaka — his first and only visit to the eastern wing — and swept the agreement aside. At a vast rally at the Racecourse Maidan on 21 March he declared that "the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language", and warned that anyone who said otherwise was an enemy of Pakistan. Three days later, addressing Dhaka University's convocation at Curzon Hall, he repeated it in words that drew cries of "No, no" from the student audience: there could be only one lingua franca, "and that language should be Urdu and cannot be any other… Make no mistake about it. There can be only one state language… that language… can only be Urdu." That evening he received the Sangram Parishad's leaders and conceded nothing. Jinnah died that September, but his verdict outlived him: the centre never implemented the March agreement.

The Quiet Years and the Return of the Question

Open confrontation subsided after 1948, but the movement did not dissolve — it organised. Each 11 March was observed as State Language Day, an annual reminder of the 1948 strike. The Dhaka University students kept a standing committee: on 11 March 1950 a Dhaka University language action committee was formed with Abdul Matin, who would lead the students in 1952, as convener. Around the campus, new political formations were gathering the province's wider discontents — the Awami Muslim League had been founded under Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani in 1949 — and language became the idiom in which economic grievances against Karachi were increasingly expressed.

The centre, meanwhile, kept finding new ways to press its case. At the end of 1948 the education minister Fazlur Rahman proposed that Bengali be written in the Arabic script, the better to fit an Islamic state; the suggestion was renewed at official education meetings in 1949 and met with derision and student protest, and the provincial government was driven to appoint a Language Committee under Maulana Akram Khan. In Karachi, the Basic Principles Committee charged with framing the constitution worked on the assumption that Urdu would stand alone as the state language. Every channel of redress — assembly, agreement, committee — had been tried and had failed. What remained was the street.

January–February 1952: The Road to Ekushey

The trigger was pulled by the man who had signed the 1948 agreement. Liaquat Ali Khan had been assassinated in October 1951, and Khawaja Nazimuddin was now prime minister of Pakistan. On 27 January 1952, speaking at Paltan Maidan in Dhaka, he announced that while the province might choose its own provincial language, only Urdu would be the state language of Pakistan. The students who heard him answered on the spot with the slogan that would define the month: "Rashtrabhasha Bangla Chai" — we want Bengali as the state language. Dhaka University struck on 30 January, and on 31 January representatives of the political parties and cultural organisations met under Bhasani's chairmanship to form an All-Party Central Rashtrabhasha Sangram Parishad, with Kazi Golam Mahboob as convener. It called a province-wide hartal, with demonstrations, for 21 February.

The movement's most famous prisoner followed events from a cell. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been in jail since 1949; by his own account in his memoirs, he kept in touch with the organisers, urged that 21 February be observed as State Language Day, and in mid-February began a hunger strike. The authorities transferred him from Dhaka to Faridpur jail, where he heard, on the night of 21 February, that students had been shot in Dhaka; he was released at the end of the month, his health broken by the fast. By February 1952, in any case, the demand for Bengali united students, opposition parties and much of the province's public in a single committee with a single date.

The government answered with prohibition. Section 144 was imposed on Dhaka, banning assemblies and processions. On the evening of 20 February the Central Sangram Parishad met under Abul Hashim's chairmanship, divided over whether defying the ban would hand the government its excuse. The students settled the argument themselves: they would go out the next morning.

21 February 1952

Thursday, 21 February 1952 — Ekushey — began with students streaming onto the Dhaka University campus, whose grounds at Amtala became the day's centre. At eleven o'clock a student meeting formally resolved to defy Section 144. The Vice-Chancellor and senior teachers came and pleaded with the students not to break the ban; the meeting, led by Abdul Matin and Gaziul Haque among others, held firm. Thousands of school and college students had gathered, and armed police waited at the gates.

The students came out in small groups, shouting slogans. Police baton-charged them — women students were not spared — and the students answered with brickbats. Tear gas followed, and when that failed to disperse the crowds moving towards the Assembly Hall, near the Medical College hostel, the police opened fire. Three young men were fatally hit: Abul Barkat, a master's student of political science at Dhaka University; Abdul Jabbar; and Rafiq Uddin Ahmed. Among the many wounded carried into the Medical College hospital was Abdus Salam, a young government employee, who lingered for weeks before dying of his wounds on 7 April. A nine-year-old boy, Ohiullah, was also killed that day. Inside the nearby Legislative Assembly, then in session, opposition members including Maulana Abdur Rashid Tarkabagish walked out to join the students, while Chief Minister Nurul Amin's government held its line against the demand. The news ran through Dhaka within hours, and shops, offices and courts emptied in protest.

The Shaheed Minar and the Days After

The next day the city buried its dead and marched again. After funeral prayers on 22 February, a vast mourning procession was attacked by police and troops; more people were killed, among them Shafiur Rahman, a High Court employee and law student, shot in the Nawabpur area. Others whose names survive in movement lists — a rickshaw-puller, Abdul Awal, among them — died in the two days' firing; no complete official toll was ever published, and the uncertainty itself became part of the grievance. Protests spread to towns across the province, arrests multiplied, and Dhaka lived under curfew.

The movement's answer to erasure rose overnight. At midnight on 22 February, students of Dhaka Medical College resolved to build a memorial where their fellows had fallen. Work began on 23 February — an old-city community leader, Pearu Sardar, supplied materials — and through the night the students raised a small monument, some ten feet high, designed by medical students including Badrul Alam and Sayeed Haider. By dawn on 24 February it stood complete, a handwritten plaque naming it a memorial to the martyrs. Shafiur Rahman's father, Mahbubur Rahman, inaugurated it. The government understood exactly what the pile of bricks meant: on 26 February, after the Daily Azad's editor Abul Kalam Shamsuddin had formally inaugurated the memorial that morning, police cordoned the Medical College hostel and demolished it. They could knock down the monument; they could not knock down what it commemorated — and the Shaheed Minar would in time be rebuilt, in permanent form, on the same ground.

Recognition: 1954–1956

Blood had moved what argument could not. In the aftermath, even the East Bengal Legislative Assembly adopted a resolution recommending that Bengali be recognised as a state language, and the demand became the centrepiece of the province's first great electoral test. The United Front — an alliance of the Awami Muslim League, the Krishak Sramik Party and smaller parties, formed in December 1953 by A. K. Fazlul Huq, Bhasani and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy — put recognition of Bengali as its 21-Point Programme's very first point, and promised a Shaheed Minar and a public holiday on 21 February besides. In the elections of March 1954 the Front won a landslide — 223 of the 237 Muslim seats — and the ruling Muslim League was reduced to nine. Within weeks the Front's ministry was dismissed by the Governor-General, but in Karachi the arithmetic had changed: the Muslim League's own parliamentary party, under Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra, resolved to recognise Bengali, and on 7 May 1954 the Constituent Assembly resolved to grant it official status.

The constitutional seal came two years later. On 16 February 1956 an amendment moved by Adel Uddin Ahmed of Faridpur was adopted unanimously, and Pakistan's first constitution, adopted on 29 February 1956 and brought into force that March, declared in Article 214: "The State languages of Pakistan shall be Urdu and Bengali." Eight years after Dutta's amendment was thrown out, the demand for which students had died was the law of the state. The 1956 constitution itself would be abrogated by military rule in 1958 — but the language clause expressed something no regime thereafter attempted to reverse.

Legacy: The First Chapter of Bangladesh

The Language Movement's formal demand was won in 1956; its deeper work had been done in 1952. For the first time, the people of East Bengal had organised across party, class and district around an identity that was theirs — Bengali — and had defied the state that claimed to speak for them, and won. Ekushey became the template and the calendar of everything that followed: the autonomy politics of the Six Points, the mass uprising of 1969, and finally the Liberation War of 1971, in which the question of 1948 — whether a Bengali majority would be ruled in someone else's language and interest — received its conclusive answer. The Shaheed Minar, rebuilt in concrete in the following decade, became independent Bangladesh's central shrine of national memory.

The martyrs' day itself travelled far beyond Dhaka. Bengalis have kept 21 February every year since 1952, and in 1999 UNESCO proclaimed the date International Mother Language Day, honouring the principle for which Barkat, Jabbar, Rafiq, Salam and Shafiur died — a story told in this site's companion account of International Mother Language Day. A demand that began in a Dhaka pamphlet in September 1947 had become, within two generations, a date on the world's calendar.

Conclusion

The Language Movement was not, at bottom, a quarrel about vocabulary. It was the first democratic argument of the Bengali people within Pakistan: that a majority could not be governed as a cultural minority, and that a state which refused its people's mother tongue would eventually refuse them everything else. The students who walked out of the Amtala in February 1952 did not know they were beginning the history of Bangladesh — but the line from the Sangram Parishad to 1971 runs straight, and it begins with a pamphlet, a rejected amendment, and a morning when unarmed students decided that a ban on assembly was a smaller thing than the language they spoke at home.