Hay Festival Dhaka
Poems in Dialects
Photo: Prabir Das
Poetry defines the charm and beauty of literature, and when a poem is written in a local language it not only describes the spirit of the poet but it tells the story of a particular culture, location and its people.
In the open lawn of Bangla Academy, the Hay Festival venue, poets from different districts of Bangladesh gathered with poems written in their own dialects. Syed Ahmod Ali Aziz recited a poem in Sylheti dialect. It's uniqueness and its relationship with Nagri and Dev Nagri of Assam region was quite clear. A stanza of his satirical poem:
Doa korio Allah amar asha jano furai
Titna puri bia kortam tesalia burai
In these lines an old man (tesalia in Sylheti means a man in his sixties) wants to marry a virgin. (Titna puri means young girl, in standard Bengali it would be kumari meye). Besides the linguistic diversities, the poem also takes us back to the days when girls were married off even to senile old men only for dowries or just to get rid of the "burden''.
Old Dhakaite dialect is a mix of Urdu, Bengali and Hindi, carrying the remnants of Mughal and Nawab rule of this land. In Aslam Sani's poem, the rather reckless nature of the Dhakaite tongue and its swear words give the readers a curious feeling. From one of his rhymes:
Puran Dhakar pola ami nam Aslam Sani
Lalbagh Killai bari amar khai Bakarkhani
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