Bangladesh history has become a partisan battleground of narratives and counter-narratives, but this paper is too short to go into the details of those questions. The eye of the storm over historical configurations and identity imagination pitted the liberal establishments against those who, since the birth of Bangladesh, opposed the secular homogenization as their existential threats. Bangladesh is yet to find the right prism to gaze at its yore and come to terms with its inheritances, which is alarming to the country’s democratic future. The politics of history is not an isolated phenomenon in Bangladesh, but the whirlwind of the post-1971 trajectory ditched those who had a different historical and identity inspiration. Bangladesh’s yesteryears as the backwater swathe of colonial Bengal and then as East Pakistan, really survive as the institutional staying power as well as the religious and cultural heritages from the old times in the vein of an unerasable palimpsest— an old parchment that still retains the faded but feisty trails from the earlier epoch.
The current Indian challenge of rewriting history has parallels in Bangladesh, except that Bangladeshi historical vision does not, usually, cross beyond 1971. The Hindu nationalists explicate the Indian history as a substantive struggle between the “indigenous” (Hindus) and “outsiders” (Muslims and Christians) implicitly setting one “religious” community against the other. Alternative concepts of history need objective research, supporting documents and a stretch of living experiences from the time long passed. But the records of what happened in the earlier time habitually fall victims to political hijacking. Ominously, politically demarcated, or judicially arbitrated historiography suffers from grave shortcomings: (a) legitimacy, extracted through capricious historiography, and its strident decapitation of the past come with a short shelf life, (b) it survives until the next elected or unelected regime reframes what happened in the bygone and (c) the hastened stratagem of history severely undermines national unity and invites treacherous polarization. Winners take the first shot at history, yet the other side has a story to tell as well, which eventually reinvents itself intellectually and politically.
One lesson for Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and other........