Session 6: CULTURE

Wednesday, Dec 8, 2021 | 8:00pm – 9:45pm | Bangladesh Time (GMT+6)

Professor Fakrul Alam
Professor & Director, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Research Institute for Peace and Liberty, Dhaka University

Paper Title – Shahbagh, Shapla Chottor and Bangladesh’s Meandering, Contending Mindscapes

Abstract:

My paper will look at sites of ideological affirmation as well as contestations in Bangladesh in the last fifty years. We have witnessed in these years in a thrice-partitioned country, created after a seemingly decisive parting of ways from religion-based nationalism, the desecration of Shaheed Minars and assaults on sites that are in essence raids on the secular and democratic aspects of our nationalism. The Shahbagh Andolon of February 2013 registered what was apparently the climactic secular protest movement against such assaults, but it was to be followed soon after in May that very year by the Hefajat-e-Islam’s countering attention-getting attempt meant at affirming the Islamic identity of Bangladesh as the primal one. In subsequent years, we have witnessed attacks on sculptures, demolitions of Shahid Minars and even an attempt to bring down Bangbandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s statue. My paper will review such events to focus on the fissures in our national identity formation that are problematic and recurring. Do they reflect a perennially schizophrenic national mindset and/or recurring national and international power contestations or both? I would like to see them also as problems to be pondered by all of us reflecting on the past, the present and the future paths to be taken by our now fifty-year old nation in conferences like the present one.