Rapping Resistance

The iterative hook in the rap song আওয়াজ উডা বাংলাদেশ (Awaaz Uda Bangladesh), translated here as “Raise n shout Bangladesh,” became an anthem of cultural resistance during the most recent socio-political crisis in Bangladesh.² Hannan Hossain Shimul, the writer and singer, was arrested on July 25, 2024 soon after the song was released on worldwide streaming platforms. 

Hannan is one among many young singers and songwriters who deployed their music to participate in a nation-wide student movement. This movement turned into a mass rebellion against the Bangladesh government when the police and political cadres of the ruling party repeatedly resorted to violence in order to suppress it. A growing public outcry finally led to the removal of Sheikh Hasina from her role as the Prime Minister of the country. Hasina fled the country with her family members, while those who had been arrested for speaking up against her regime, like Hannan, were released. 

In a recent interview, Hannan testified that he was unaware of the impact his song was having on the young protestors who played a significant role in overturning what a majority of the population considered an increasingly autocratic government.³ However, Awaaz Uda Bangladesh is neither the only rap song to emerge from student protests nor the first protest rap from this region. Why did it then turn into an anthem of the recent student movements? Why did a hip-hop artist suddenly become a threat who had to be arrested in order to be silenced? What is it about rap as poetry, music, and performance art that continues to remain a form of dissent despite the fact that some of its populist formations in South Asia have become dominant modes of celebrating affluence, misogyny, and jingoistic regionalism?

A counter-legacy of blood

The student protests in Bangladesh began in June 2024 as a form of demonstration against the country’s quota system. This system reserved 30% of all civil service jobs for descendants of freedom fighters who participated in the 1971 Liberation War.⁴ At the end of the war, Bangladesh ceased to be the eastern part of Pakistan and became an independent nation-state. But the seeds of liberation movement had been laid as early as 1948, when erstwhile students of Dhaka University called a general strike to oppose the Pakistani government’s omission of the Bengali language from official use. Marginalization of Bengali exposed the racial discrimination perpetrated by the ruling class in Pakistan along linguistic lines. Their attempt to forcefully impose Urdu as the official language of the nation-state would alienate millions of native Bengali speakers and limit their social mobility. 

The final push toward a mass movement was provided by public outrage when police forces deployed by the Pakistani government killed a number of students during a demonstration for language rights on February 21, 1952.⁵ This ensued in a series of resistance movements until an independent government was formed under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur (“Mujib”) Rehman, who has since come to be known as Bangabandhu (literally translated as “Friend of the Nation” but also used interchangeably as “Father of the Nation” by his followers). Mujib’s gift to his fellow countrymen who actively participated in the liberation war was the quota system. Fifty-three years later, this “father’s gift” to his people became a threat to his own daughter’s throne in June 2024, when police forces opened fire on unarmed young students protesting against the continuation of the same quota system.

The iterative hook of Awaaz Uda Bangladesh is preceded by an opening verse that dives straight into the history of Liberation War and its attendant violence. It invokes Mujib’s famous speech on March 7, 1971, when he “informally” declared the independence of Bangladesh in a public rally at the Ramna Race Course in Dhaka. Mujib’s speech in his own voice has been re-recorded, re-mastered and used by Hannan’s collaborator, SnareByt, another young music producer, to situate Awaaz Uda Bangladesh in a legacy of blood:

Mujib’s call to action for his own countrymen began a civil disobedience movement that transformed, 18 days later, into the Liberation War, as the Pakistani government began its infamous Operation Searchlight. This operation involved abject violence when human beings were reduced to bodies as sites of torture and dissident voices were forcefully silenced. The victims of this violence were students, women, intellectuals and innocent civilians. One of the major forms of resistance on the ground came from a Bengali revolutionary guerilla force known as Mukti Bahini (literally translated as “Liberation Army”).

In order to combat Mukti Bahini, a counter-revolutionary force known as the Razakars was introduced by the ruling classes of Pakistan. While the Arabic etymology of “Razakar” means “volunteer,” in Bangladesh it is a slur and a direct reference to a paramilitary force that worked for the Pakistani government. The Razakars as a force began as a contingent of Urdu-speaking migrants who had adopted East Pakistan as their homeland, but during the war it went on to recruit members from a number of local religio-fundamental organizations like Jamaat-e-Islami. In the public imagination, Razakars are associated with heinous war crimes in the 1970s, particularly rape and massacre in broad daylight.

The national trauma and stigma associated with the Razakars became a major point of contestation when Sheikh Hasina used it as a jab against the student protestors in a futile attempt to defend her arrogant political stance. While addressing a question in a press conference regarding her take on the student protests, she noted in a moment of mounting public pressure what eventually became recognized as a political blunder:

Spurred by this outrageous comment, the student protestors turned the loaded meaning of the word on its head. They adopted the slogan “Tumi Ke? Ami Ke? Razakar! Razakar” (translated as “Who are you? Who am I? Razakar! Razakar!”) to note the irony of the situation: students protesting for equal rights being labelled as traitors in a nation-state where national liberation had begun through student movements in the first place.

Hannan’s bars following the first hook in Awaaz Uda Bangladesh provide a poetic map of this ironical turn of events by situating them in a longue durée of state violence:

Hannan’s poetry situates the historicity of violence in Bangladesh associated with student movements with its most recent and visible formation. While the first quatrain accuses the government of being autocratic, the second relates ecological problems like recurrent floods in the countryside to systemic issues of governmentality. But the strongest statement is made by invoking the death of Abu Sayeed, a 25-year-old student activist who was killed by the police while organizing peaceful protests at Begum Rokeya University on July 16, 2024. Videos and photographs of Abu Sayeed standing with his arms extended as senior police officers repeatedly fired shots at his chest went viral on social media. Such visuals had a powerful impact in the public sphere as thousands of people began occupying the streets, demanding justice.

While public outrage against Hasina’s autocratic stance intensified, the government decided to respond by shutting down the internet. It stifled intellectual as well as artistic voices through arrests without warrants, and increased the ruthless suppression of the student rebellion through more killings across the country. The third and fourth quatrains of Hannan’s verse relate Abu Sayeed’s death to the similar fate of a number of other students by constantly asking rhetorical questions to those wielding power. By naming students like Asif Hasan from Northern University, Abid Al Rafi from Dhaka City University, Wasim Akram from Chittagong College, and Adnan Sayed Rakib from Dhanmondi College, Hannan humanizes the foot soldiers of the movement. He reclaims these names in the death toll, transforming them from just numbers to real people, in order to establish their martyrdom.

The final lines of the fourth quatrain crucially revitalize the expression Sonar Bangla (literally translated as “Golden Bengal”) and invoke the national anthem of Bangladesh — “Amar Shonar Bangla Ami Tomay Bhalobashi” (translated as “O My golden Bengali, I love you”). Removing from the phrase the euphemistic idea of Bengal as a land of eternal hope and prosperity, Awaaz Uda Bangladesh claims that it is only the daring voices of youth that may allow Bengal to remain golden. Sonar Bangla is represented as a utopic imagination that requires collective labour in order to become a lived reality.

Interjections of a revolution

Awaaz Uda Bangladesh moves away from the two most dominant yet contested narratives of student politics in Bangladesh to open up a new space of collective political intervention for a new generation. Bangladesh Chatra League and Bangladesh Chatra Dal are the student wings of the two largest and arch-rival political parties in the country — the Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), respectively. Both of these parties were founded and consolidated in an atmosphere of political murders, military coups, rape, and massacre, as testified by Anthony Mascarenhas in both of his reportages on Bangladesh.⁸ Such a violent history has divided the public discourse into two distinct narratives where one political party accuses the other of foul play. Yet heinous crimes committed by party members on both sides have continued to increase over the years. 

Instead of taking any particular side in this rivalry, Hannan gives voice to an emergent consciousness that could possibly go beyond binary polarizations based on existing parliamentary politics or communal sentiments:

The fifth quatrain begins with the glaring fallacy of a student organization that claims to have led the most important student revolution in Bangladesh, culminating in the liberation movement. After coming to power, members of the same organization shoot at the current generation of students when they come out to protest on the streets. Furthermore, he points to the lack of freedom of expression in a country that proclaims itself to be free for all. This is followed by strong opposition to the rhetoric of accepting Hasina as the unchallenged leader of the country just because she is Mujib’s daughter. Such a critique points simultaneously to the obsolete nature of the quota system, which hinges on filial rights even after five decades of official independence, as well as the composition of the ruling class in Bangladesh.

Keeping true to his tendency to jump from the historical to the immediate, Hannan creates a visual-visceral image of bodies that deserve medals for courage but only received bullets to commemorate the history of martyrdom in Bangladesh. The sixth quatrain concludes by invoking the memory of February 21, 1952 and making it comparable to the events of June and July 2024. The throughline of both events, despite their separation by a period of 53 years, is a certain apathy toward the educated youth of the country. Identifying education as a threat to sovereign power, Hannan seems to posit a democratized version of student protests. 

This democratized idea of student movement in Bangladesh acts as an ideological counterpoint to a number of conspiracy theories that have attempted to reduce every protesting student to a cog in the wheel of anti-democratic forces. These theories dismiss the mass movement as one that is initiated and controlled by powerful world organizations. The possibility of vested international interests leading to the recent change of political climate in Bangladesh cannot be completely ruled out. However, it is extremely reductive and naïve to reduce a spontaneous movement to a simple power-wielding exercise by major world powers, who use collective rage for their own vested interests. Hannan questions the public discourse in which every act of student protest is considered to be induced by forces beyond their immediate control:

The final two quatrains of the rap move away from the historical and the immediate to make a claim on the future. They remind the listener how the common people of Bangladesh have always been considered fools to be exploited and used for the benefit of the ruling classes. While a ray of hope remains with the raging anger of the common people, Hannan’s bars also cautions against the tendency for the collective anger to be misplaced once the existing government is overturned. This caution becomes especially relevant at the present moment, when the ousting of Hasina has been accompanied by reports of violence against religious, linguistic, economic and gendered minorities. In addition to these reports, there are allegations that the existing religio-fundamental forces are trying to sabotage the recent student movement in order to claim sovereign power.

Hannan pre-empts such counter-revolutionary possibilities in Awaaz Uda Bangladesh even when the protests had not become a mass movement. His concluding verses hammer home the fact that the movement belongs to hundreds of students who have resolved to fight together, setting aside differences of class, caste, religion and gender. This artistic stance puts the youth, specifically students with a certain level of socio-political commitment, from the margins to the centre of socio-political change. Rap as a poetic form reiterates their radical subjectivity that becomes visible during moments of major crisis. 

The rap song comes full circle with an outro that is yet another re-recording and re-mastering of Mujib’s voice. The quote cited here is from the same speech on March 7, 1971 that was used in the introduction and acts as a supplementary reading of Hannan’s rap. This is an ultimatum that had become an inspiring slogan for millions of people in Bangladesh, and by invoking the same slogan in 2024, Awaaz Uda Bangladesh transforms from being just another protest rap into a manifesto for bottom-up revolution:

The context in which Mujib had raised the slogan “Victory to Bangla” during the Liberation War is rather different from that of Hannan, who invoked this slogan during the students’ protests. Mujib’s call was directed toward the people of erstwhile East Pakistan who were facing linguistic and racial discrimination from the newly formed nation-state, after the partition of the Indian sub-continent. Hannan, on the other hand, uses this slogan to underline the fact that while Bangladesh has officially emerged as an independent nation-state, there are some serious failings in its democratic structure. 

Furthermore, rap re-introduces freedom as something that needs to be achieved through constant human labour, rather than merely a temporal idea to be conceived and nurtured by the ruling class for its own benefits. By bringing in the rhetoric of fighting, Hannan posits freedom as a long, drawn-out process of human struggle that cannot be tied to a singular event — be it the Liberation War or the recent student movements in Bangladesh.