The aim of this panel is to initiate a broader dialogue with regards to the Bengal region, as it evolved from the early modern era — then, a region being ruled a motley of Sultanates with periodic eruption of Mughal expeditions against the independent Sultans — to an important resource extraction zone during the colonial era. Eventually, the region evolved into a contested terrain during the anti-colonial movement in the Twentieth Century that pitted two distinct nationalist projects against one another, as the post-colonial future of the region’s heterogeneous ethnic, linguistic and religious communities were being decided. Fast forward to the Partition, Bengal’s religious fault-lines became exposed, as the Muslim majority regions became part of Pakistan, while the Hindu dominated Western regions became part of India.
However, this flared up communal fragmentation does not fully encapsulate the efforts undertaken by political forces, including the left-leaning ones, to oppose communalism’s impact on the widening gap between Hindus and Muslims. Interestingly, an echo of this anti-communal nation-building imperative can be traced in the movement leading up to the creation of Bangladesh, and, subsequently, the inscribing of the principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism in its founding constitution draw up in 1972 following its break-up from Pakistan in 1971. The country experiences coups and countercoups in the late 1970s and early 1980s that had shacked its attempt to build a new society out of the ruins of Partition.
Moreover, the wider Bengal region has experienced further tensions due to the acceleration of the climate crisis, onset of neoliberal globalization, and new forms of social divides along caste, class, ethnicity, and religious lines in the recent years. Therefore, it would be more than useful to interrogate the region from a broad historical perspective so that dialogues can be initiated to understand the wider implications of today’s crises as well as the traces of the past in the Bengal region’s turbulent present.
With an aim to investigating the various traditions of resistance, in literary writing, oral and public culture, plastic and visual arts, to dominant ideologies of nation, class, religion, and gender, the esteemed panelists seek to engage with the following questions in order to understand the complex changes in the region from a broader perspective:
- How can we address the influences of various cultural forces — Arab, Persian, Indic, and European — in a primarily agrarian region?
- How can we reconceptualize the major changes that occurred in the region as it transitioned from the colonial era to the postcolonial present? What are some of the major outcomes of this transition including the Permanent Settlement, the Bengal famine of 1943 and the creation of the successor three nation-states of British India impacted the region?
- How is the region shaped by political changes such as the solidification of Hindu nationalism in India, the India-China rivalry to extend regional influence, as well as the ethnic tensions in the bordering countries such as Myanmar?
- How can the region’s longue durée shifts be addressed from an interdisciplinary angle? What are the stakes of bringing scholars together who explore the Bengal and its neighboring region from a range of disciplinary angles including anthropology, history, literature and religion among others?
Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief bio to the organizers, Auritro Majumder, Assistant Professor of English, University of Houston, amajumder@uh.edu & Asif Iqbal, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Oberlin College, aiqbal@oberlin.edu by 30 March, 2024.
