The history of Bangladesh’s leftist politics is a story of unity and division, of shared ideals splintering into competing paths.
While Europe experienced an age of evangelical awakening in the eighteenth century, political circumstances in India posed challenges to the work of missionary preaching.
In the immediate aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War, as world attention fixated on the harrowing human toll of conflict and the fate of 93,000 Pakistani POWs in Indian custody, a darker, largely buried chapter was quietly unfolding in Pakistan.
The history of Bangladesh’s leftist politics is a story of unity and division, of shared ideals splintering into competing paths.
While Europe experienced an age of evangelical awakening in the eighteenth century, political circumstances in India posed challenges to the work of missionary preaching.
The 1947 Partition of South Asia is usually associated with divisions, disruption, and the melancholia of displacement.
Reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation of Gaza is both illuminating and depressing.
Before taking a close look at the three feature films that comprise Ray’s tribute to Tagore we might note a few similarities between the two cultural giants.
While the July Uprising was sparked by economic problems, political repression, and a desire for democracy, it found a strong and surprising voice in a new form of music for Bangladesh: rap. Two songs, “Kotha Ko” (Speak Up) and “Awaz Utha” (Raise Your Voice), came to represent the sentiment of the movement in July.
In his analysis of the Estado da Índia, which was the official name of the Portuguese Empire, George Winius distinguished between the formal administration by the Estado’s headquarters at Goa over overseas possessions and the ‘informal empire’, which he called the ‘shadow empire’, that the Portuguese established in the Bay of Bengal. The shadow empire was a unique experiment carried out by sailors, merchant adventurers, pirates, and missionaries, with little formal sanction either from Goa or from Portugal.
In the immediate aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War, as world attention fixated on the harrowing human toll of conflict and the fate of 93,000 Pakistani POWs in Indian custody, a darker, largely buried chapter was quietly unfolding in Pakistan.
“If properly planned, even now, Dhaka can be transformed into a very decent, liveable city. We can take advantage of the river, the khals, the lowlands, and the richness of the soil for the growth of trees and plants.
“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” — Frantz Fanon had thundered, as if pleading with flesh and sinew to refuse silence, to resist obedience.
