Tofazzal is a common name in Bangladesh. I found that out around 10 years ago when I had gone there as part of a fact finding team asked to measure English language proficiency among students and teachers at schools in Dhaka and Sylhet sub-divisions.
There was always a Tofazzal or two in the lists of names handed to me every day. I met Tofazzals of all kinds, shapes and sizes – some cheerful, some sullen and grim, some looking at me and my paraphernalia with avid curiosity. They all had their stories etched clear on their young faces. There’s one Tofazzal (whom I never met) fewer in Bangladesh now. His stories are everywhere. They began when he died.
We live in an age where reporting news is no longer a privileged, professional act but something that gets uploaded just as easily as a picture of your cat. In an age of high speed internet and smartphones, the social media in our country is constantly flooded (among other things) with images of atrocities directed at the disenfranchised, dispossessed, minorities, and the marginalised.
They are all unregulated and therefore have greater claim to ‘reality’. Yet all such posts, when they are not fake, find themselves either projected or received according to established narrative patterns inherent in this kind of media. They become footnotes in ongoing discourses of hostility, animosity, and fear, their reality constantly shifting and morphing to suit the loudest notes of the echo chambers we as netizens tend to inhabit.
Tofazzal Hossain became a story and a viral post on social media after he was tortured and brutally murdered by a few students of Dhaka University who suspected him of being a thief. There’s something heinously vicious about the tortures. He was beaten with stumps. A stump was placed on his arm while his murderers took turns to jump on it.
Yet in the middle of tortures and beatings they gave him food, took pictures of him eating and then proceeded to kill him. The story goes that he was never the same after he lost his parents and brother and roamed around Dhaka University in a state of mental distraction. There’s more, because some of these posts say that his decline into apparent ‘madness’ began when he was spurned by the woman he loved who married someone else.
Everything came together to make Tofazzal’s murder the perfect social media post – the kind that allows all of us to react the right way, and having felt an appropriate amount of anger, disgust, and shame we can reaffirm our essential humanity, compassion, and ‘rightness’ of being.
But Tofazzal’s story is actually a number of different stories, none of which happen to be his. They are more like narratives, in which the same actor plays all the roles we want him to play – a jukebox of social media’s greatest hits. Tofazzal’s there somewhere, visible for flickering moments of harrowing sadness between one mask and the next.
Tofazzal who wandered around the campus looking for food in a haze of mental confusion was without family but there was a lot more he didn’t have – he had no job, a place to live or proper clothes to wear. Bereft of any of the markers of normality, Tofazzal had evidently lost any claim to be human. He slipped through the cracks and become not very different from the strays that roam around a campus. And so could be treated like one.
For many, the violence unleashed on Tofazzal is yet another reminder that civil society and its mechanisms of law and justice are for those who fulfil its basic criteria of being a person deserving of those privileges. Tofazzal didn’t fulfil any and so was subjected to what many would consider the true barbarity that lurks beneath the guise of a civil society. So did Tofazzal in his death tear the mask of hypocrisy off society’s smug façade?
Or does the fact that this happened in a university campus make it worse? Tofazzal was murdered inside a university campus, a space we have come to associate with educated dissent against all that is unequal, exploitative, criminal, violent, and oppressive, a space where silenced voices find articulation. It defines itself as a bastion of the highest ideals and in opposition to the ‘real’ world where along with other things there is the dark night of ignorance, cruelty, and random violence.
His ‘madness’ made him an easy scapegoat for the students who orchestrated this macabre and monstrous series of events that ended with him being lynched. But the sheer savagery of the torture and the deliberate cruelty of a last meal not only defiles the principles of this hallowed space but more importantly upsets and destroys this happy binary that we create between educated and uneducated spaces. So is his death a story about deconstructing hallowed spaces?
Or is it about his madness? We do know that he lost three members of his family in rapid succession, something which must have put an unbearable strain on his mental health. And if one is to believe the story about spurned love, then Tofazzal was a tortured man in desperate need of intervention by qualified professionals.
Yet, in a space where one would have expected him to be treated with compassion, he was conveniently classified as the ‘other’, the ‘mad’ person who exists not as a human being but as a metric by which to judge our smug sense of our sanity. Tofazzal, like many who don’t conform to what everyone knows to be ‘normal’, drifted along till he was made to pay for his sins.
Is he then a comment on how we construct ideas of ‘madness’ and how some must be sacrificed at the altar to maintain our precarious sense of the ‘normal’ and the ‘sane’?
Or maybe he is the most recent of the Devdases we love to celebrate – an individual who sets his life on auto self-destruct because he can’t get the woman he loves. There’s a twist though – his death is not a long self-indulgent suicide because he never wished to die.
He was hungry and in his troubled mind he thought that confessing to thieving will get him a meal. Not very Devdas of him, even though the angle does elicit an extra sad react or two on social media.
Or maybe it’s the wanton cruelty of that last meal. There is something so conceptually convenient about it – the last meal of the condemned on Death Row or maybe the Last Supper before being betrayed by a kiss.
Well-intentioned it might be, but Tofazzal in going from mad to martyr burdened with the sins of humanity remains invisible, passing from one narrative to the next with little lost – give or take a life! These are all roles that Tofazzal, as long as he survives in public memory, will play. For many he is an opportunity to castigate a university, a nation or humanity in general. Sometimes all three between Sunday lunch and dinner!
The stories of Tofazzal are grist to the internet mill – a vast collection of individuals secure in their moral and ethical stronghold, with a clearer understanding of why others are wrong than what is right, and who measure their lives from one outrage to the next.
For many of us who now get their news from social media, our sense of reality is being constantly moulded and manipulated by a plethora of videos and images that are coming to our devices all the time. We would like to believe that that this is a raw engagement with the truth out there but we are largely passive consumers of media that is tailored in one way or another to keep us interested and clicking.
The cycle of consumption moves quickly and so stories are usually reduced to single emotional or ideological notes lacking subtlety or nuance, a multiplicity of noises that are either cacophonous or with very little long-term impact. Tofazzal is many things to many here – yet he remains inarticulate, silent, exploited even as the fickle sun of public knowledge slowly sets on his memory. There is one Tofazzal fewer in Bangladesh. We knew nothing of him. We still don’t!
Arjun Sengupta teaches English Literature at the Department of English, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata.
