Utopias Eroded and Recalled: Intellectual Legacies of East Pakistan

Abstract

The short-lived geopolitical entity, East Pakistan (1947–71), left a deep impact on its successor state, Bangladesh, through the networks of intellectual kinship it enabled for its young elites who subsequently became Bangladesh’s nation-builders. Drawing on memory studies and literary critical reading methods, I examine the testimonies of nine such elites interviewed by the ‘Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project’ (BIOHP), alongside their writings published before and after the creation of Bangladesh. This first sustained account of East Pakistan’s intellectual legacy thus also illustrates how a post-colonial intellectual history may be extracted from oral histories as the private and inchoate domain of memory.

Keywords:

• Bangladesh Liberation War
• Bangladeshi Muslim identity
• Bangladeshi textiles
• Bengali intellectuals
• East Pakistan
• intellectual history
• oral history
• Partition of India
• post-colonial memory studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have explored these issues in Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013).

2. Anwar S. Dil and Afia Dil, Bengali Language Movement to Bangladesh (San Diego, CA: Intercultural Forum, 2000), p. 130. On the ‘geo-body’, see Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

3. Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, p. 45.

4. Anwar Dil, however, is perhaps best described as ‘Bangladeshi by affiliation’.

5. I initiated this endeavour through my examination of the work of Professors Dani and Zainul Abedin at the University of Peshawar in the 1960s; see Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, pp. 84–94. This current article offers another, related entry point.

6. See here Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

7. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2012).

8. Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, p. 33.

9. Neilesh Bose, personal communication with author, 12 June 2018.

10. See Seán McLoughlin, William Gould, Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Emma Tomalin (eds), Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas (London: Routledge, 2014).

11. Ibid., pp. 137, 153, 154, et passim.

12. See, for instance, Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Gary Wilder and Jini Kim Watson (eds), The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

13. The day is commemorated as Intellectual Martyrs’ Day in Bangladesh. Two days later, the Pakistani army surrendered to Indian troops in Dhaka (see n. 2 above). See Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘The “Dead and Their Double Duties”: Mourning, Melancholia, and the Martyred Intellectual Memorials in Bangladesh’, in Space and Culture, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2007), pp. 271–91; and Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, pp. 56–60.

14. The bari–basha binary is explored by Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 31, no. 32 (1996), pp. 2143–51.

15. Interview with Anisuzzaman, 20 October 2011, Dhaka (2:43, 4:45–5:10).

16. See the broader discussion of Darjeeling as a ‘safe haven’ in the concluding chapter, ‘Darjeeling Chai’, in Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, pp. 215–36.

17. Interview with Hameeda Hossain, 20 January 2011, Dhaka (2:13).

18. Unpublished interview transcript, Kamal Hossain, 19 September 2010, p. 7.

19. Unpublished interview transcript, Anwar Dil, 6 February 2011, Dhaka, Bangladesh, pp. 4, 6.

20. Interview with Hameeda Hossain (12:05).

21. Ibid. (13:05).

22. For a summary of Bengali language activism during the East Pakistan years, see Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 109–20.

23. Interview with Sufia Ahmed, 23 October 2009, Dhaka (46:09).

24. Interview with Anisuzzaman (33:25).

25. Ibid. (34:18).

26. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity’, in Public Culture, Vol. 11, no. 1 (1999), pp. 109–45; and Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (New York: Macmillan, 2005). See also Esha Sil, ‘Representing Adda: Radical Capitalism, Bengaliness and Post-Partition Melancholia’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2013).

27. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

28. Sufia Ahmed, Muslim Community in Bengal, 1884–1912 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 373.

29. Ibid., p. 374.

30. Interview with Anisuzzaman (51.06, 52:54).

31. Anisuzzaman, Creativity, Reality and Identity (Dhaka: International Centre for Bengal Studies, 1993), p. 91.

32. Ibid.

33. Interview with Rehman Sobhan, 1 September 2010, Dhaka (35:20).

34. Rounaq Jahan, Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 180.

35. Ibid., p. 29.

36. Ibid., p. 180.

37. Ibid., p. vii.

38. Ibid., pp. 179–80.

39. Anisuzzaman, A Handlist of Uncatalogued Bengali Manuscripts in the India Office Library and Records (London: India Office Library Records, 1975).

40. Anisuzzaman and A. Abdel-Malek (eds), Culture and Thought: 3rd International Seminar: Papers (New York: United Nations University in association with Macmillan, 1983); and Anisuzzaman, Creativity, Reality and Identity (Dhaka: International Centre for Bengal Studies, 1993). See also his Indira Gandhi Memorial Lecture of 1991, ‘Cultural Pluralism’ (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1993).

41. Anisuzzaman, Creativity, Reality, and Identity, p. 23.

42. Hameeda Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal: The East India Company and the Organization of Textile Production in Bengal, 1750–1813 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 45.

43. Niaz Zaman, The Art of Kantha Embroidery (Dhaka: Bangladesh Silpakala Academy, 1981).

44. Ibid., p. 2.

45. For a detailed discussion of how this discourse manifested itself in nation-building across India and Pakistan in the pre-1971 era, and how this initial divergence led to a further divergence in policies and attitudes towards handicrafts in post-1971 Pakistan and Bangladesh, see the chapter ‘Terracotta Memories’, in Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, pp. 83–131.

46. Ibid., p. 3. I discuss Zainul Abedin’s educational work in Peshawar in ibid., pp. 89–92.

47. On this museum, see ibid., pp. 111–3.

48. A similar attempt to ease the artisan into the market characterised the early decades of Indian nation-building, particularly the work of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in setting up the Cottage Industries Emporium and its relationship to Gandhi’s praxis. I have explored this history and its complex repercussions on post-colonial India’s attitudes towards the artisan in Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 107–32; see also my discussion of Chattopadhyay in Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, pp. 104–8. I would argue that the Bangladeshi relationship to the artisans and their craft was from its inception marked by a greater market-based pragmatism and driven by a clearer gender-based imperative, both of which elements were made possible by the looser relationship to Gandhian ideals.

49. Interview with Hameeda Hossain (79:34).

50. Ibid. (82:54).

51. Ibid. (88:03–4).

52. Zaman, The Art of Kantha Embroidery, p. 5.

53. As I elaborate in Kabir, Partition's Post-Amnesias, pp. 200–1, this discussion forms part of the overall argument of the chapter ‘The Enchanted Delta’ (ibid., pp. 172–214), namely that pre-Partition, elite Bengali (largely Hindu) engagement with a romantic idea of the (East) Bengali ‘folk’ was divergently inherited and utilised by post-Partition discourses in Indian (West) Bengal and its eastern counterpart both before and after 1971. This discursive separation means that Bangladeshi engagement with ‘folk Bengal’ does not necessarily route itself through a Bengali-Hindu genealogy (for instance, the work of Gurusaday Dutt or Dineshchandra Sen), instead seeking explicitly to align itself with the Bengali-Muslim poet Jasimuddin's iconic verse narrative ‘Nakshikanthar Math’.

54. Interview with Hameeda Hossain (80:17).

55. Nayanika Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

56. Interview with Hameeda Hossain (82:04).

57. Ibid. (81:28).

58. Ibid. (87:34).

59. Zaman, The Art of Kantha Embroidery, pp. xiv–xv.

60. Kamal Hossain et al. (eds), Human Rights Commissions and Ombudsman Offices: National Experiences throughout the World (The Hague/London: Kluwer Law International, 2000), p. 55.

61. Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh's Unexpected Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

62. See in this context the work of Naila Kabeer, especially Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought (London: Verso, 1994) and The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labor Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso, 2002). Kabeer’s life and work fit very well the patterns I have traced here, but as she was not amongst those interviewed, their consideration lay out of the remit of this article.

63. Jahan, Pakistan, p. 204.

64. Interview with Kamal Hossain (23:33).

65. Interview with Hameeda Hossain (76:12, 74:42).

66. Jahan, Pakistan, p. vii.

67. See Pippa Virdee, ‘Women and Pakistan International Airlines in Ayub Khan’s Pakistan’, in The International History Review (2018) [doi:10.1080/07075332.2018.1472622, accessed 21 Aug. 2018].

68. Interview with Hameeda Hossain (61:05).

69. For the psyche’s swallowing of trauma, see Ranjana Khanna, ‘Post-Palliative: Coloniality’s Affective Dissonance’, in Postcolonial Text, Vol. 2, no. 1 (2005) [http://postcolonial.univ-paris13.fr/index.php/pct/article/view/385/815, accessed 29th September 2018].

70. Sufia Ahmed dedicated her book, The Muslim Community in Bengal, to her father; Niaz Zaman, her The Art of Kantha Embroidery to the women of Bangladesh; and Anwar and Afia Dil, their Language Movement to future generations in South Asia.

71. Interview with Sufia Ahmed (46:09).

72. Dil and Dil, Language Movement, p. 14.