by Obaidul Hamid :

A MUST-GO-TO place for me during my frequent travels to Dhaka is Ramna Park in the heart of the capital city. I utilise this urban green facility to maintain my routine of physical exercise away from home. Usually, I visit the ‘lungs of the Dhaka city’ all by myself. Occasionally, I have the learned company of a journalist friend who studied with me at the University of Dhaka. Whether or not I have someone with me, I never find myself alone in this popular public space which records innumerable footprints every day.

I take two rounds of medium-paced run around the 68.5-acre park to fulfil my dose of physical exertion for calorie burning. Built during the colonial era, the park has a lake inside. It also offers recreational opportunities including a wooden walkway around parts of the lake, playgrounds for children, small-sized picnic facilities, and places for sitting, relaxing, and breathing fresh air. Ramna Park is an ideal place for social and political addas for people who are brought together by the primary agenda of fitness, health and well-being.

My time-poor visit to the park does not allow me to enjoy the recreational offerings; I restrict myself to the singular purpose of running and walking back to my short-stay home nearby. However, my stint in the park shares one feature with my running in all other places in Australia and elsewhere.

My modest pace of running turns me into a philosopher on your feet, enabling me to reflect and theorise countless things and happenings at national, regional and global levels. Inspecting my own life is recurrent in all places where I engage in this form of physical activism.

Every place of my running also invokes various thoughts. I remember my pseudo philosophical rambles about British society when I found myself in Hyde Park in London. Running along the riverside in a regional city in south Vietnam also forced me to run my thoughts about people and society in the communist country. My body and mind also ran together in the city state of Singapore, a place that has invited me many times.

I find Ramna Park exceptional in encouraging me to make connections between the park, people and society. I read the park as an open civic book and consider it an emblem of pluralism. It not only reflects societal plurality but also calls for more social investment, so inclusion and diversity become defining features of social, cultural and political lives in a ‘new’ Bangladesh.

Ramna Park comes alive in the presence of the multitudes of visitors — women, men, elderly and young adults. Children including teenagers are not that common, attesting to limited physical activity among this age bracket. My scanning of the people in the park tells me that there are Muslims, Hindus and people of other faiths. I take note of the diversity in the dresses of both men and women. If the dress code is a reliable marker of religiosity for Muslims, I would locate them at all points on a continuum. This imagined sequence would have ‘religious’ on one end and ‘non-practicing’/‘secular’ on the other. Women also present themselves in all sorts of dresses — some in hijab, some in niqab, some with their heads half-covered with scarves, while others with uncovered heads. I also note a variety in how people’s clothes relate to physical activity — many in everyday clothes, while others in running or walking gears of all sorts.

I presume that people choose dresses on their own to visit Ramna Park. While they may be free in their choices, they may also be guided by a sense of modesty required in a public place. I read this modesty as a societal principle and goal. We can choose to wear whatever we want, making sure that we take modesty as a threshold based on our own interpretation. If people wish for more freedom in how they dress, they will have to enjoy it in private spaces. We are not 100 per cent free in every aspect of our life. Probably the beauty of freedom lies in a broader framework of societal principles.

The people in the park are mostly from middle and upper-middle classes. Not many can be found from lower- or working-class backgrounds. This is because, as they say, poor people burn calories in earning whatever they earn while their counterparts from higher classes do so outside their means of earning. But we may not need representatives of each class everywhere in society. If places are defined by their goals, people can decide where they should go to meet their own needs.

The underclass is not excluded from the park. As it has no gatekeeper, anyone can enter the green facility using one of the entry points on each side, regardless of their social standing. As the downtrodden may not have reasons to enter the park, some members of this group meet their needs from outside. The park accommodates commercial begging of some people who pursue their incomes from outside the iron fence. Similarly, the park facilitates the business of some street venders including several commercial health checkers at each entrance. They will check your blood pressure and glucose levels for small fees.

Pluralism defines the motives as well as the ways by which people pursue those motives in the park. Physical activity is the defining one. Within and beyond this official goal, people socialise and enjoy the natural and pleasant offerings of the green space. For example, women flock together in the women-only sitting areas chasing their individual and collective goals.

The park users seek their goals in their own preferred ways, marking the desired pluralism. People do activities individually, in pairs or in groups — small and large. Most people use the one-directional main walkway around the edges of the park while others use the many lanes and bi-lanes criss-crossing the park. They can freely move away from the main track and enter the smaller ones and vice versa. Most people walk at their own paces while some are found running at varying paces. Some groups in the park are more organised as they do physical activities together under the guidance of their instructor.

People from different situations come to the park on their own, without compulsion; they pursue their goals in their own ways, without being forced into any normative way of working out. They define the duration, frequency, mode and format of their stint in the park at their free will.

Ramna Park embodies homogeneity and heterogeneity, unity and diversity, national and sub-national and identity and difference. It shows a fine balance between freedom and compliance, norms and exceptions. The park works as a public pedagogy and offers civic lessons in individuality and plurality, co-existence and respect. Such values need more cultivation as Bangladeshis seek to rebuild their society which was brought to the brink of collapse by a pre-August 5, 2024, autocratic regime.

The regime politicised the park by installing a digital video of Awami propaganda. It was nice not to have to hear that digital noise that broke the natural serenity during my last two visits. It must have been removed after the fall and flight of the autocrat to political refuge in India.

Obaidul Hamid is an associate professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. He researches language, education and society in the developing world.