"The tears that still bind", Daily Star, Star Magazine, 25th August 2017 (original) (raw)

(2014) Imagining Bangladesh-contested narratives (South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal).pdf

2014

Bangladesh is a country that appears only on the margins of western news and academic interest. When it does, it is usually in the context of catastrophes. In this Introduction to the special issue, we agree with Lewis (2011) that this large, complex and dynamic country merits more attention. Looking at it through the lens of ‘contested narratives’ centring on identities, notions of home and belonging in transnational Bangladeshi communities and the development, economy and politics of the country, we identify areas in which these contested narratives are particularly pertinent to current events in Bangladesh and which the papers in this special issue touch upon.

Projecting and Rejecting Indigeneity: 'From Bangladesh with Love'

In: Erik de Maaker and Markus Schleiter (eds): Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, p. 150-170, 2020

By analysing the film "Bideśinī – From Bangladesh with Love" (Bangladesh 2005), in which the author played the lead female role, the chapter shows that the identity of the Bangladeshi state is constructed by invoking similar stereotypes and dichotomies to those that characterise the dichotomisation of non-‘indigenous’–‘indigenous’ people. It becomes apparent that the current trend in public discourses to divide humankind into ‘dominant’/‘dominating’ and ‘dominated’ entities, or ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’, solely based upon group identities, is one reason why the Bangladeshi state denies its so-called ‘indigenous’ people the right to officially call themselves ‘indigenous’. The construction of the identity of the Bangladeshi state as well as the global discourse on the ‘indigenous’ people draw heavily on both ‘histories of oppression’ and ongoing struggles for cultural survival. This propensity to self-victimisation makes it difficult for those classified as ‘dominated’ on a global scale to recognise that they may also be ‘dominant’ at a different level, which may contribute to the perpetuation of socioeconomic inequalities. Furthermore, by analysing the film "Bideśinī – From Bangladesh with Love", it will become apparent that members of a putatively ‘dominated’ entity, in this case exemplarily Bangladesh, try to compensate for their marginalised position on a global level by the self-ascription of specific positive characteristics that they, in general, assume members of ‘dominant’/’dominating’ entities to be lacking.

Imagining Bangladesh: Contested Narratives (SAMAJ-EASAS)

This World and the "Other": Muslim Identity and Politics on the Indo-Bangladesh Border

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2023

This article investigates the "othering" of Muslims in two Northeast Indian states: Assam and Tripura, in a region known for its ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity, and long history of militancy and civil unrest. Northeast Indian politics thrives on disagreement between "Us" and "Them" and tensions over illegal migration, drawing on overlapping or intersecting frames of "othering." This study asks why and how the political "othering" of Muslims persists, and why the religious frame, or the Hindu-Muslim divide, is more salient in some parts of the region than in others. Drawing on fieldwork on the Indian side of the Indo-Bangladesh border in Tripura and southern Assam, historical records and contemporary print media archives, this study compares the role of Hindu-Muslim contention in the politics of the two neighboring states and finds reproduction of the Hindu-Muslim divide in Assam and resistance to Muslim "othering" in Tripura. The theoretical contribution of this article is to confront the concept of "othering" with colonial and post-colonial frameworks of representation to understand how contemporary non-Western "worlds of difference" capitalize on, reproduce and resist vestiges of colonial representations.

Bengali Nationalism and Identity Construction in Fagun Haway (In Spring Breeze, 2019)

Social Science Review, 2023

The years 1948-1952 were pivotal for the history of Bangladesh. The question of what would be the state language was raised by the people of this country. Muslim leaders in Pakistan, at the time, believed that Urdu should be the state language because it had become recognized as the cultural symbol of sub-continental Muslims. However, most of Pakistan's population, the Bengalis of eastern Pakistan, to whom Urdu was a foreign language, considered it a ploy by the West Pakistanis to colonize East Pakistan. Protests erupted across East Pakistan after the then Prime Minister of Pakistan replaced Bangla as the state language with Urdu. On February 21, 1952, a student protest resulted in the deaths of some students by police. The language movement drew Bengalis' attention to their collective aspirations to create a new nation and nationalist identity, leading them to fight for an imagined sovereign state, Bangladesh. Against the backdrop of our language movement, Fagun Haway (In Spring Breeze, 2019), a film by Tauquir Ahmed, captures the anecdotes of Pakistani repression towards Bengalis by portraying the nationalist consciousness and identity approaches of this nation. Employing the concept of nationalism and the historical development of our identity approaches, this paper shows that Ahmed displays the coexistence of Bengali and Muslim identity approaches as well as the contentious relationship between these two approaches inside our nationalism at that time. Besides, Bengaliness is viewed as the dominating approach when the debate over the state language turns into a divisive political one and a fight for our very existence.

"The tears that still bind", Daily Star, Star Magazine, 25th August 2017 (original) (raw)

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