In 1971, nearly ten million people left their homes and crossed the border. For a great many of them, the route was Jessore Road. An American poet who walked that road wrote what he saw, and the poem travelled the world. Fifty-five years later, it has come to the stage in Dhaka as a musical narrative.

On Friday evening, the Narsingdi theatre troupe Bandhanhara performed "Jessore Road", a musical narrative based on Allen Ginsberg's "September on Jessore Road," at the Chhayanaut auditorium in Dhanmondi. The event was organised by the 27 Dhanmondi Gai Banglar Gaan Parshad.

One poem, two Americas

The most thought-provoking remark of the evening came in the opening address. Fazlul Kabir Tuhin of the organising group said that in 1971 the American government of the day opposed Bangladesh's independence, but the American people stood with Bangladesh.

He offered two pieces of evidence. One was Ginsberg's poem. The other was the Concert for Bangladesh, held at Madison Square Garden in New York in August 1971, one of the first major charity concerts in the world, staged to raise funds for refugees.

"When a government stands against its people, the outcome can never be positive," Tuhin said. Thanking Bandhanhara, he described the staging as Bangladesh's token of gratitude to those Americans.

Witnesses to history

The first half of the evening belonged to people who had seen refugee life first-hand or fought in the war. Freedom fighters Razzakul Haider Chowdhury and Satyajit Majumdar shared their direct experiences of the refugee camps. Dr Sarwar Ali, a trustee of the Liberation War Museum, and Mahbub Zaman, a freedom fighter and former general secretary of the Dhaka University Central Students' Union (DUCSU), also spoke. Their recollections brought out the hardship of camp life and the human catastrophe of the war.

A translation in three steps

The programme itself followed a deliberate logic: first the original poem, then its Bengali rendering, then the stage adaptation. Reciter Belayet Hossain opened with Ginsberg's "September on Jessore Road" in English. Regina Wali Lina then recited the Bengali translation. The sequence quietly made its own point: a poem written to speak to the world was now coming home in its listeners' own language.

Between the recitations, singer Abida Sultana Setu performed "O Amar Desher Mati," and a guest singer performed "Dhana Dhanya Pushpa Bhara." After the interval came the main piece. Directed by Kamzzaman Tapu, Bandhanhara brought the poem to life in a 35-minute musical narrative.

Why it still matters?

The weight of the events behind the poem is, if anything, clearer today. The people of this land who once stood at the doors of strangers as refugees are now hosts themselves: Bangladesh shelters nearly a million Rohingya in Cox's Bazar. A nation that has known the pain of displacement in its own body inevitably faces the question of how it should regard refugees, and an evening like this one draws that question in unprompted.

The organisers said their aim was to keep the history of the Liberation War from being confined to formal commemoration, and to present it to a new generation through poetry, music and theatre. Over roughly 90 minutes, testimony, recitation, song and stage performance came together to bring a painful chapter back into view.