WhatsApp with my clan

September of last year, I launched a group chat for my maternal grandmother’s side of the family. This clan has eight branches, with 36 siblings and cousins in my mother’s generation, followed by 65 in my group, and 47 in the cohort after us. Since mid-1900s, the clan has scattered to Europe, North America, and Australia. Gathering their contact information and starting this group chat was an ambitious project, to say the least.  

Every group chat needs an eye-catching profile photo, so I selected an 1817 painting of Dakhil Darwaza, the principal gateway into the city of Gaur, capital of the Bengal Sultanate. It was from here that my great-grandmother’s ancestor arrived in Sylhet back in 1303. The group chat description was straightforward: A connectivity platform for the descendants of Ghulam Yazdani Khan and Syeda Kamrunnesa Khatun. 

Now, we are carrying forward with 50 plus members of the clan. Although 10% of us are active contributors to the site, the progress has been measurable. An aunt from Dhaka called to ask who this one person is posting her wedding photos. 

“This is your cousin from the UK,” I replied. 

“My goodness, I didn’t recognize her formal name! Her kids have grown up so much!” 

 A second cousin who immigrated in 2021, going from tropical Sylhet to freezing Buffalo, New York, remarked, “See, something like this would have been unimaginable just a few years back. Now, my daughters look at all these postings from family members, and keep asking me to write something.” 

Regarding our regular contributors, there is an uncle in Sylhet who sends videos of his acres long, meticulously cultivated garden home that is worthy of any family picnics. Next is our eldest second cousin, the first to settle in US back in 1989, who wants to share about her life in sunny Florida. Third is her son, who previously did not know many of us, but has now taken his mother to the garden home in Sylhet, their first visit to this scenic site. 

WhatsApp was launched in 2009 by two engineers as a fast, free, and secure method of exchanging messages. As it leapt into the fingertips of millions of users globally, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Facebook himself purchased it in 2014. Now, WhatsApp has about 2.78 billion users worldwide, being the globe’s preferred instant messaging platform, according to Statista. As Facebook’s trajectory has flatlined in the US, WhatsApp is taking on some of this growth. This application has been installed by over half of Americans ages 18 to 35, earning nearly $10 billion in revenues last year, according to the company’s reports. 

On a weekly basis, I distribute curated messages and images to the clan, either regarding an aunt who launched a Bengali poetry collective in London, a cousin who held an art exhibition in Melbourne, or a nephew fund raising for a mosque expansion in New York City. We in the Bangladeshi diaspora are separated by thousands of miles from the homeland. This is one way for us to remain linked, even as the common ancestry gets farther with each generation. Most likely, we will all never be in the same hall, so this group chat is our virtual town square, our wire of connectedness. 

Tamim Choudhury is a public affairs specialist for an international volunteering agency in the US.