Learning Bangla collaboratively through art

Banglay Boli is a collaborative project by Humairah Shams, Omiya Hassan and maliha mohsin. "We have been friends for years and have worked together on several collaborative art and storytelling projects," says maliha, who spells her name in small letters.

Omiya is a graduate student from the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA. She is also an illustrator, a designer, and the founder of the art store, MiyaBhai. Humairah is an illustrator, a designer, a calligrapher, and the founder of the art boutique, Made With Love. maliha is a writer, researcher, DJ, and community organiser, with a focus on queer-feminist political intersections in the arts. She also focuses on the use of arts as a community practice.

The three friends started Banglay Boli as a collective learning process. They were all raised as predominantly English-speaking, and they believe that it is important to be able to communicate in Bangla to have constructive and critical conversations with their immediate communities, especially about matters of social and political importance. "We have often found that we don't know the appropriate vocabulary for many conversations in Bangla," explains maliha. "We have all recurrently tried to reconnect to the language and learn it. But the pandemic has been a big transitional period for all of us, in terms of acknowledging socio-political issues. We have also come across various projects on the internet made by and for Bengali people to translate, and communicate political campaigns in Bangla within their communities. It is important for us to acknowledge these sources of inspiration, when we talk about our own motivation."

The resources that served as their inspiration reached them on Instagram, as all of them actively learn from independent artists and community organisers who use Instagram as a medium to disseminate essential information, news, and knowledge visually. Since Humairah and Omiya are artists, they knew from the beginning that this was going to be a visual project. "Instagram is a very easy and approachable platform for a visual portfolio. Although we could have a broader audience on Facebook, we realise that reach has become increasingly limited on Facebook for those who do not boost their posts," explains Omiya.

They work on a set of three words at a time. Each set is based upon a relevant issue, and they select keywords that they find are most frequently used when the issue is discussed. "When Black Lives Matter reached its peak on social media and the news, we found that some of the most relevant keywords were 'racist' and 'discrimination'," adds Omiya. "We work together to select the words and appropriate translations and usage. This curatorial process is driven largely by our political contexts, awareness, and conversations. For example, we preferred to use the word 'physical distancing' instead of 'social distancing', because of the casteist and classist connotations that the usage of the latter term can have in South Asian contexts." However, this process is always a work-in-progress for the three of them, as they are all constantly learning and unlearning.

Visually, Humairah and Omiya work together. With their two distinct lettering styles, they handwrite every word. They fuse their styles together for each set of words. They also set the colour schemes together. maliha mostly works on the texts and research.

"Banglay Boli has been fairly easy to manage, because this is mainly a personal and educational project for us, and we have a great working relationship," says Humairah. However, a major difficulty they face is the compression of the artworks on Instagram. "Oftentimes, the videos we post are compressed and recoloured to a slightly different variation of the original. Another important challenge is conducting actual research on Bangla and the vocabulary, and deciding on the most appropriate word for a given context," adds Humairah. "We understand that language is not monolithic. It has diverse uses and practices, and the same word can be expressed and used in many different contexts and meanings."

"I grew up as an immigrant in the UAE. My Bengali roots are sometimes as distant to me as are Western values. As someone who didn't grow up speaking Bangla, I learned most of the Bangla that I know today from people, and not from books," adds maliha. "For someone like me whose first language is English, it can get difficult to find resources to learn Bangla. However, I am trying to break away from it and understand the world in Bangla too, because it is socio-politically very relevant for me to do so."

Moving forward, Banglay Boli's team intends to stay relevant to the social realities and political events around them, at any given time. However, they don't think of themselves as teachers or trailblazers. They are just three friends trying to learn Bangla together, while welcoming suggestions and including others in the process.

Madiha Athar Khan gets by in life with books, art exhibitions and making fluid art, hardly remembering that her day job is in technology. Reach her at madihak1923@gmail.com.