Read more
This book traces the cultural and political economic roots through which an independent Bangladesh was created, exploring the social, cultural and political strands that informed and influenced the experience of Bengali-speaking people in the region from 1947 to 1971 and beyond.
Featuring cutting edge contributions from scholars from across India, Bangladesh, the Netherlands, Canada, the UK, and the US, the book highlights the complex and contested ways in which a Bengali homeland was imagined, articulated, and, when the subjects were removed from it, remembered. Chapters engage with several significant historical issues that led to the 1971 India-Pakistan war: the refugee exodus and process of minoritization caused by the partition of 1947; the struggle for the Bengali language against Urdu hegemony; and the role of the Communist Party in resisting Pakistani colonialism (while remaining conscious of how Bengaliness was revitalized by the events of 1971). The book consequently provides a complex picture of nation formation through genocide, ethnic cleansing, the minoritization of nested communities, and a community's cultural sense of belonging.
Through a sustained analysis of social evolution on both sides of Bengal, this book demonstrates how a sense of affection transforms into a political struggle for freedom and nation formation. It will be of interest to researchers of Bengal, Bangladesh and South Asia studies, as well as Asian History.
List of contents
Introduction: Towards Bangladesh, from East Pakistan
1. Uncovering the Political Unconscious in a Socially Symbolic Act: Sayeed Ahmad's
The Milepost2. Masud Rana and the vernacularization of popular Cold War geopolitics in East Pakistan, 1966-1971
3. Neorealist Wave in Bangladeshi Cinema in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: A Metamorphic Drive towards Novelty
4. Bangladesh in the Cold War
5. Dynamics of the people's cultural and political struggles in an Emerging Bangladesh
6. A Continued Marginalization - The Chittagong Hill Tracts and the 'Colonial States'
7. Dispossessed Families and Disposable Daughters: Iphigenia in Calcutta
8. Considerations on Utopia, Partition, and Bengali Women's Writing and Activism
Barnita Bagchi9. Of Homes and Homelands: Muslim Refugees from West Bengal to East Pakistan, 1947-1971
About the author
Subho Basu is a South Asian historian who specializes in social movements in twentieth-century South Asia. He has published two monographs
Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh (2023) and
Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Jute Workers' Resistance 1809-1940 (2004). He has also authored
Paradise Lost: State Failure in Nepal (2008) with Ali Riaz and co-edited two anthologies: (with Crispin Bates)
Rethinking Indian Political Institutions (2005) and (with Suranjan Das)
Electoral Politics in South Asia (2000). His work also includes articles on labour history and social movements.
Sandeep Banerjee is a scholar of Anglophone and World Literature and Associate Professor of English at McGill University, Canada. His research focuses on questions related to aesthetics, politics, and the environment in the context of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. He is the author of
Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony (2019). He has published in venues such as
Comparative Literature Studies,
Modern Fiction Studies,
Utopian Studies,
Victorian Literature and Culture,
Modern Asian Studies. He is also one of the series editors of the
Routledge Series in the Cultures of the Global Cold War and serves on the editorial boards of the journals
positions: Asia critique, and
Mediations.
