Something I really struggled with as a kid was making friends with other Indians in my community. When I moved to the neighborhood I live in now, every child there spoke solely Hindi or a language along with Hindi. In India, although the language is taught in school, a lot of people do not speak their mother tongue along with Hindi- and I am no exception. My parents have never spoken it to me, nor have they ever taught me. When I was trying to meet the kids in my neighborhood for the first time, I felt like an intruder or an outcast for not even knowing how to introduce myself in Hindi. There was no child there that I could understand.

However, the time came in high school where I finally found a community of Bengali individuals that I made friends with. It is definitely one of the things I appreciate in life. Something I have noticed though is that there is a lot of confusion between Bangladeshis and West Bengalis; not many people I have met know the difference between the two, or, they don’t know that West Bengal exists. 

I love talking about where I’m from; I would never change it. So, when people ask me, you can imagine my excitement. To start off, politically, the two areas were one nation called “Bengal” comprising East and West Bengal. However, after the Partition of India in 1947, the two split into their own nations. Bangladesh became its own country holding roughly 160 million people and West Bengal stayed as an Indian state with at least 96 million people. Don’t ask me why West Bengal’s name hasn’t changed; I don’t know. Nobody does. 

There are slight differences between the Bangladeshi Bangla and West Bengal Bangla, but, it isn’t something that would be too hard to understand if one from each country talked with each other. It’s small words or phrases- like how the language differs when people from one of the two say “how are you”, or “water” or a name for the same food.

Talking to my friends from Bangladesh is always so fun because I get to learn about their language and culture, too. I think a lot of people forget that Bengalis also come from West Bengal because of the difference between being a country and state, which is understandable. Canadians don’t know about all of America’s states, but the country as a whole. I believe that more people associate Bengalis with Bangladesh because it’s more well-known as a country. A lot of non-Indians don’t know about our states as well (I didn’t even know we had states before I was ten), so that plays a part.

Overall, I always thought it was interesting that the people I talk to get curious about how being West Bengali isn’t the same as being Bangladeshi.