Because of the fertility of silt, the deltaic region where the Ganga meets the Brahmaputra made possible the rise of a great agrarian population. It is a low country created by the confluence of geology and hydrology, and made for colonisation by peasantry. And peasantry it is that, today, makes up the vast majority of 121 million Bangladeshis.
This country of agriculturalists and a thin veneer of the gentry, has always been ruled by outsiders, till as late as 1971 when they decided to do the job themselves. Over the centuries, from pre-historic through feudal times, and from when colonisation gave way to a half-Pakistan and that became the independent state of Bangladesh, Bengalees have always grappled with an identity, a personality. Even today, on the 25th year of their independence, they are not sure they have found it with the nationstate that they do, at long last, have.
And whose identity are we talking about, anyway? We mostly discuss elite notions of uniqueness. The vast millions are too hungry to bother. As late as 1971, when the peasants responded, it was to the perception of the violated village rather than to calls for a nationalist war. A village was bigger than any country, and "desh" meant home, not much more. The identity angst is mostly reserved for the intellectual or activist who, in classrooms and tea stalls, wants to discover whether he is Bengalee or Bangladeshi. The angst is also strong among those overseas in self-exile, made melancholy by myth and memory, weeping for a land they will never return to.
After 25 years as a nation-state, can we say to whom does Bangladesh belong?