Ekushey February

The twenty-first of February, 1952

When Pakistan was founded, Urdu was to be its single state language, though the majority of its people lived in East Bengal and spoke Bengali. On 21 February 1952 the provincial government imposed Section 144 in Dhaka, banning any gathering. Students of Dhaka University assembled on their campus from nine in the morning anyway, with armed police around them. When a group tried to force their way towards the East Bengal Legislative Assembly, the police opened fire.

The government reported three dead and sixty-nine injured; the real figure was disputed, and censorship meant it stayed disputed. The names that are read out are Abdus Salam, Rafiq Uddin Ahmed, Abul Barkat and Abdul Jabbar. Medical college students built a monument to them on the spot during the night of 23 February and finished it at dawn on the 24th. The police destroyed it on 26 February.

The minar that was built anyway

The monument standing there now was designed by Hamidur Rahman with Novera Ahmed. Work began in 1957 and finished in 1963. It is fourteen metres high and made of marble: a half-circle of columns standing over a central dais — a mother, with her fallen sons. It sits beside the mathematics department of Dhaka University, next to Dhaka Medical College Hospital, on the ground where the shooting happened.

The day itself had become a holiday in 1955, after a provincial declaration the previous April. What is sung at the minar is Amar Bhaier Rokte Rangano — "my brothers' blood spattered" — written as a poem by Abdul Gaffar Choudhury in 1952 at the bedside of a wounded activist. Abdul Latif set it first; Altaf Mahmud recomposed it in 1969, and that is the tune everyone knows. Listeners of the BBC Bengali Service voted it the third best song in Bengali.

The probhat feri is the dawn procession, walked barefoot, that carries flowers to the minar. By morning the dais is under marigolds several layers deep.

A national day that became everyone's

In 1999 the UNESCO General Conference approved Bangladesh's proposal to make 21 February International Mother Language Day; it has been observed worldwide since 2000, and the UN General Assembly took it up in resolution A/RES/56/262. A date that began as one country's grief for four students is now the day the world is asked to count what it is losing when a language stops being spoken.

February belongs to books

The Ekushey Book Fair takes its name from the same twenty-first. It runs the whole of February in the courtyard of the Bangla Academy and across Suhrawardy Udyan in Dhaka, organised by the academy under the Ministry of Culture. It began in 1972, when one publisher laid out books for a single day, and became official in 1984. In 2024 it drew 5.9 million visitors and 3,751 new books were published into it; in 2025, 708 institutions took 1,084 stall units. For Bengali publishing it is not a trade fair so much as the year itself.