Birth of Bangladesh

While a large body of political literature on why and how Bangladesh emerged as a ‘nation state’ through a liberation war against Pakistan in 1971 is available in different languages, and narratives on the process of Bangladesh’s emergence are still being produced, the Birth of Bangladesh: the Politics of History and the History of Politics by Nurul Kabir is a path breaking historiographical intervention in analyzing the genesis of the emergence of Bangladesh.

The Bangladesh war directly involved three South Asian countries—Bangladesh, Pakistan and India—and indirectly involved many other states of the Cold War era. Subsequently, many politicians, generals, journalists and researchers of all the directly involved countries, and beyond, have produced their respective narratives of the war. While some narratives appear to have been influenced by the inherent ‘nationalist’, if not jingoistic, and ‘partisan’ outlook of the authors, some other appear to have been customised deliberately to suit the authors’ respective ‘nationalist’ and ‘partisan’ interests in the post-war geo-political scenario. Besides, the linguistic limitation in accessing the Bangla language materials, particularly regarding the long political, economic and cultural processes that led to the Bangladesh war and the roles that different classes of people, political parties and their leaders belonging to both the wings of Pakistan played before and during the war, appears to have stood in the way of some otherwise honest non-Bangladeshi scholars to produce an objective  history of the birth of Bangladesh.