2021 marks fifty years of Bangladeshi independence. While there were other factors, in no modern struggle has the question of language figured so prominently, so much so that the date the United Nations designates as International Mother Language Day, February 21, commemorates the irruption in 1952 of the Bhasha Andolan or the Language Movement in the city of Dhaka. Specifically, on that date the Pakistani army attacked student demonstrators protesting the denial to Bengali, despite its being the most widely spoken language in Pakistan, of the status of a national language alongside Urdu. That decision and that crackdown first mobilized the Bangladeshi nationalism that eventually led to the country’s independence in 1971, when East Pakistan fought a short but horrifically bloody war to secede from Pakistan as Bangladesh. Altogether, an estimated three million people died in the conflict, more than ten million were displaced, and some two hundred thousand women were raped in a deliberate military strategy of de-Bengalization, of racialized “Islamicization.” In this sense, the Language Movement proved a critical political flashpoint in one of the most wrenching re-configurations of international cartography in the second half of the twentieth century.

The two moments of trauma—the Language Movement and the Liberation War—accompanied Bangladesh’s foundation and both have continued to haunt the fledgling country’s national imagination. A substantial body of art emerged that, together with the Bangladeshi struggle itself, grew steadily more revolutionary, and this left a powerful legacy on later work. Yet, there has been little sustained critical engagement with this creative corpus, or with the later writing, film, etc. that retrospectively explored one of most ambiguous of postwar Third World revolutionary legacies.

This panel addresses the politics of language through art, film, as well as the Bangladeshi diasporic commitment to the preservation of the language and of linguistically mediated cultural forms. As such, it foregrounds the question of post-(British) colonial and post-Pakistani language and art as sites for the enactment, interrogation, and working through of the question of “national allegory.”

Rini Mehta examines how Bangladeshi cinema channeled and shaped the region’s linguistic nationalism from the Language Movement era to the post-independence decades. Tracing the linguistic cultural thread that runs from Abdul Jabbar Khan’s Mukh o Mukhosh (The Face and the Mask, 1956), the “first Bangladeshi film,” through Jahir Raihan’s oeuvre during the Liberation War and the early post-independence films, Mehta examines the modalities through which the East Pakistan Film Development Corporation simultaneously stifled and provoked the film production and how the political priorities of the new Bangladeshi government reframed those imperatives.

Examining the engagement with the “folk” in the art of Zainul Abedin and Quamrul Hassan, Suchismito Khatua tracks the trajectory of modernism in Bangladesh in its connections to the transition from postcolonial province to post-Pakistani nation. In the figuration of the “folk” in their art, Abedin and Hassan imagine a new and authentic identity to serve as the revolutionary basis for community and nationhood. And in so doing, they usher the new nation onto an internationalist and cosmopolitan modern art stage.

Farzana Akhter addresses representational practices in films on the Bangladeshi freedom struggle where the chief impulse has been to preserve and reinforce gendered stereotypes of the heroic male and passive female by invisibilizing women’s actual military involvement. She also examines how two exceptions to this trend, Hangor Nodi Grenade (Shark River Grenade) and Guerrilla, attempt to recover the voice of the female freedom fighter. In so doing, Akhter raises crucial questions regarding historical accuracy and the politics of representation.

Shakil Rabbi examines the centrality of the Bangla language to Bangladeshi identities and community formations within diasporic populations, more specifically, the Bangladeshi communities in the Northeast United States formed largely after Bangladeshi independence. He argues that literacy practices around language or ethnic affiliations in these communities refashion normative logics of postcolonial nationalism and neoliberal globalism. He insists on a nuanced understanding of heteroglossic identities voiced through translingual communication in the diasporic community, showing how diasporic utterances complicate modern conceptualizations of language even as they reanimate the modern “imagined community” of home.

Opening with a brief overview of the topic, followed by introduction of speakers, and four twelve-minute presentations, the session will conclude following a fifteen-minute Q&A.