The Liberation of Bangladesh

In 2022, Bangladesh celebrates 50 years of its birth as a nation, once again drawing the world’s attention to the tumultuous story of its genesis. This journey began in 1947, with the birth of two other nations: Pakistan and India. Even before 1947, when the Indian subcontinent was partitioned by the dep­arting British, the dreams of a free Pakistan had been a nascent but significant aspect of Indian nationalism. From the 1940s onwards, Muslim intellectuals had pondered on the lineaments of ­“Pakistan” that would encompass the rising social and political aspirations of a new middle class. This aspiration was a way to define modernity in a society perceived to be suppressed by Hindu int­ellectual traditions and hesitant to emb­race Western education.

The contours of Muslim identity formation that enunciated a Pakistan-centric political, social, and religious autonomy were expressed in a literary and linguistic renaissance thr­ough journals and newspapers in both Urdu and Bangla. However, the partition created a geographically ano­malous Paki­stan: the two halves, the East and the West, were separated by thousand miles of Indian territory.