Sadly, I spent most of this year’s annual celebration of all things Bengali with foreigners. I had planned on making the festivities a part of my day, but there was simply too much work to do at the office.

But maybe I should back up and explain some of this mother-tongue stuff. A little history lesson: before India gained its independence from its colonial captors in Britain, the nation included the ethnically separate region which is now Pakistan, and its great Muslim ally in the east, Bangladesh. But India’s struggle for independence created an uprising, and an alliance, between these extreme eastern and western reaches of the country, and in 1947, they declared their independence under the name Pakistan, which later became an Islamic state. All was well and good for about 20 years while this new nation of Muslims found peace. However, trouble was brewing between the larger, stronger region of West Pakistan, and its little brother, East Pakistan. With little government representation and even less in terms of aid for the never-ending flood of natural disasters (cyclones, floods, mudslides), Bengali Pakistanis were disgruntled, to say the least. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was West Pakistan’s insistence that East Pakistan adopt Urdu as the official language. And that was the end: there was rioting in the streets. Major uprisings. Bengali, spoken since the 8th century among not just 150 million East Pakistanis, but almost an equal number of Indians in West Bengal, was under attack. And, in 1971, after a bloody war that lasted for 9 months and borrowed the support of Indian forces (take that, Pakistan!), the nation of Bangladesh was created.

So, today we celebrate the mother tongue: the language of the people. The language fought for by the people. The language that will never die.