A month on, was it really the ‘second liberation’ of Bangladesh?
Nearly a month after Bangladesh ousted an autocratic prime minister, some of its most intractable problems remain. But the dramatic display of people power in a country of 170 million was remarkable. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on what’s been called the ‘second liberation’ of Bangladesh. Was it really Gen Z’s first political success story? Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
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The Big Story:
Bangladesh is trying to press reset on history by naming the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of micro loans its temporary leader.
August 5, when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh, has been described as “the second liberation”1 by Muhammad Yunus head of the interim government…
Students led weeks of protests against Hasina, who touted the country’s development and success as the world’s second biggest clothes exporter but…
This Week, Those Books:
An anthropologist assesses crowds as a political actor in Bangladesh.
Fact disguised as fiction from the life of a child during the first liberation.
The Backstory:
Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh’s independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was the world’s longest serving female leader. On her watch, Bangladesh went from being one of the world’s poorest countries to high growth…
Muhammad Yunus is known as “banker to the poor”, the title of the eponymous book he co-authored on the concept of micro finance. He is credited with helping lift millions out of…
International media coverage of Bangladesh is usually limited to reports on collapsed buildings, factory fires…
This Week’s Books:
Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh
By: Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury
Year: 2019
Publisher: Stanford University Press
My rating: Insightful
Considering that it was mass protests that led to the downfall of Sheikh Hasina’s government, this anthropological analysis of the size, shape and sound of crowds in Bangladesh is apt.
Nusrat Chowdhury4 starts her assessment by reminding us how crowded Bangladesh is, its roads constantly clogged with traffic jams. But “protesting crowds have been the media of meaningful change in the democratic culture of Bangladesh,” she says, and popular politics has long relied on the power of the crowd. The country’s literature has taken note. In some significant novels, written within a few years of Bangladesh’s 1971 independence, the marching crowds are depicted as “a force of nature”, “a political actor”, an entity with undeniable power, the very “motor of history”.
Interestingly, the first chapter is about Muhammed Yunus’s failed attempt to create a new and accountable politics in Bangladesh soon after his 2006 Nobel Prize win…
Choice quotes:
“…the crowd is both a solution and a scapegoat…Indeed, in Bangladesh, michhil [procession] and meetings have played formative roles in the origin story of the nation. The crowd at Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s speech…in 1971 is a significant part of national folklore. Nearly a million people had assembled…”
Scenes from Early Life: A Novel
By: Philip Hensher
Year: 2012
Publisher: Fourth Estate
My rating: Evocative
British writer Philip Hensher5 has been nominated for a Booker Prize but not for this novel, a semi-fictional account of his husband Zaved Mahmood’s childhood. But people who know the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, not least writer Amitav Ghosh, have said that this book “deserves to be garlanded with many prizes”. The novel is narrated by Saadi, the fictional name given to Dhaka-born Zaved. It is set in a tumultuous period for the South Asian region when the Bengali-speaking eastern half of Pakistan fought the 1971 war to liberate itself…
Choice quotes:
…“My grandfather had a gardener called Atish…a poor Hindu who was left behind in 1947. Grandfather and Grandmother had had to leave Calcutta in a great hurry and come to Dacca…
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
