South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

9 | 2014 Imagining Bangladesh: Contested Narratives

Benjamin Zeitlyn, Manpreet K. Janeja and José Mapril (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3704 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.3704 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference Benjamin Zeitlyn, Manpreet K. Janeja and José Mapril (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 9 | 2014, « Imagining Bangladesh: Contested Narratives » [Online], Online since 15 July 2014, connection on 10 February 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3704 ; DOI:10.4000/ samaj.3704

This text was automatically generated on 10 February 2020.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

SAMAJ-EASAS Series Series editors: Margret Frenz and Roger Jeffery. image This thematic issue is the second in a series of issues jointly co-edited by SAMAJ and the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS). More on our partnership with EASAS here.

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 9 | 2014 2

Introduction. Imagining Bangladesh: Contested Narratives

Benjamin Zeitlyn, Manpreet K. Janeja and José Mapril

Introduction

1 This special issue emerges out of four years of conversations, meetings and discussions between scholars working on Bangladesh.1 These began at a workshop of the ‘Bangladesh Studies Network’ at the London School of Economics in June 2010. From this followed a lively Facebook group and panels at two conferences: the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) Conference in Delhi in April 2012 and the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS) Conference in Lisbon in July 2012.2 Some of the papers from those panels make up this special issue.

2 The ASA conference panel in April 2012 sought to map the variegated trajectories of art and aesthetic forms (visual, literary, material, sensory, phenomenological) vis-à-vis Bangladesh, in an attempt to decentre the orientalising tropes of ‘lack’ through which Bangladesh is predominantly imagined in South Asia and in the ‘West’. Several papers at the conference examined representations of Bangladesh through aesthetics (broadly conceived). Papers from the EASAS conference session in July 2012 focused on investigating the varying frames (developmental, aesthetic, affective, migrant, transnational) through which Bangladesh is imagined in contemporary research and popular discourses. Once again, what emerged were critical debates centred on multiple and multiplex representations and constructions of Bangladesh, debates that were generated from within Bangladesh and from Bangladeshi diaspora groups. 3 The collection of papers has evolved; it now includes a paper which looks at the relationships between art, artists and the representations of Bengali identities and Bangladesh (Selim), two papers that explore different aspects, understandings and actors of Bangladesh as a site of development (Gardner et al. and Hussain), and two papers examining the range of political positions and relations vis-à-vis Bangladesh in Bangladeshi diaspora groups in Lisbon and London (Mapril and Zeitlyn). The volume therefore describes contested narratives and debates on how Bangladesh is, has been,

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and can be imagined, drawing on visual, material, sensory, affective, and phenomenological analyses, but also includes discussions of power, development, forms of belonging/not-belonging, and connections between Bangladesh and other countries. The majority of the contributors to the special issue are anthropologists. 4 Our discussions started around the 40th anniversary of Bangladesh’s independence. Our special issue is a few years late to celebrate that milestone, but one must ask, is there a renewed interest in Bangladesh and if so, why? Lewis (2011: 4-6) suggests four reasons why there is renewed interest in Bangladesh, and celebrates this, claiming that Bangladesh is widely ignored in international media and academia,3 compared to the level of geopolitical interest in Pakistan and the towering presence of India in western registers of imagination. 5 Firstly, the new global concerns over energy scarcity have led to increasing attention on Bangladesh as a location for potentially valuable natural resources, including considerable reserves of natural gas, thereby changing its position in the on-going expansion and integration of the global capitalist economy. 6 Secondly, having long been a recipient of significant levels of development aid and having served as a testing ground for development ideas and approaches, Bangladesh’s recent and rapid progress towards some of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the international acclaim for some of the leaders of its extensive NGO sector as ‘social entrepreneurs’, has lent credence to a beleaguered development industry increasingly perceived as compromised by lack of competence and wasted aid resources. 7 Thirdly, as the third most populous Muslim majority country in the world, Bangladesh has attracted attention in the post-9/11 era of the ‘war on terror’, gaining new strategic importance within US foreign policy. This has carried with it a counter-narrative of concern that Bangladesh’s on-going governance problems could potentially encourage international terrorism and threaten its feted status as a moderate Muslim majority country. Lewis (2011: 5) notes: (…) despite moral panics, Bangladesh continues to serve as an important antidote to Samuel Huntingdon’s (1993) warning of a so-called clash of civilisations between the east and the west. It has come to be seen as an example of a moderate majority Muslim democratic country. 8 Finally, the growing global concern over the issue of climate change has positioned Bangladesh at ‘the heart of a new crisis narrative that warns of ‘a country underwater’ and the creation of what some people have begun calling ‘climate change refugees’. For the first time with climate change, Bangladesh’s problems are being felt also as part of ‘our’ problems in the west’ (Lewis 2011: 6). Bangladesh has become a key site and symbol of sea level rise and climate change adaptation. This volume of papers on contested ways of imagining Bangladesh is therefore late but still timely.

Debating imaginations and identities

9 Bangladesh’s turbulent political past and present lurk in the background of all these papers, and they reflect the politically and affectively charged nature of Bangladeshi history, society, and the various manifestations of culture and identity.

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10 In fact, a brief look at the existing literature on Bangladesh reveals the multiple, and at times conflicting, symbols, idioms of belonging and imaginations associated with the country. A striking example of this is the importance of Bengali and Islamic identities in the colonial and post-colonial constructions of Bangladesh, a theme approached from distinct disciplinary backgrounds such as history, anthropology and political science. Eaton (1993) described the Islamization of the region and how it became entangled with what he calls a ‘frontier culture’. His objective was to show how Islam went from a ‘foreign’ to a ‘local’/’indigeneized’ religiosity and to explore the subsequent transformations such a process implied. 11 Ahmed (1981), on the other hand, called our attention to the creation of ‘local/ Bengalized’ ‘traditions’ of transmission of Islamic knowledge, such as the puthis, Bengali Muslim manuscripts, crucial for the spread of religion throughout the region. These were essential for the spread of both revivalist and also what is frequently called ‘syncretistic’ interpretations of Islam. Roy (1983) coined the idea of an Islamic syncretistic tradition in Bengal, persuasively showing how Islam became so entangled in the region that it incorporated other religious elements—Hindu and Buddhist among others. A perfect example, according to Roy, is the cult of Pir (holy man) and their mazaars practised throughout the region (see also R. Ahmed 2001, Prasad De 1998, S. Ahmed 1996). The idea of ‘syncretic’ Islam in Bangladesh has been critiqued however, for its implication that there is ever, anywhere a ‘pure’ form of Islam that is not ‘mixed’ with local cultures and traditions (Gardner, 1993b). 12 This relation between Bengali and Islamic identities has also been approached as a political process that led to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, and the subsequent changes/debates in conceptualisations of nationalism and national identity up to the present day. Several authors have focused on the emergence of Bengali secular nationalism within East Pakistan (associated with the historical formation of the Awami League). Madan (1972), for instance, soon after the independence of Bangladesh, reflected upon the historical and political processes that led to the emergence of Bengali identities to the detriment of Islam, as a key symbol for the construction of an independence political project—and how this nationalism related dialectically to the emergence of a Bangladeshi nationalism (associated with the emergence of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party) and political Islam (officially recognised with the reintegration of Jamaat-e-Islami into Bangladeshi party politics) (Jahan 2000, Choudhury 2002, Lewis 2011, van Schendel 2009, inter alia). 13 The political scene in Bangladesh is deeply marked by the tensions over competing constructions of national identity, nationalism, memory and the past. The Liberation War is still a major theme in academic writings (see Ludden 2012) and political discourses, and punishment for crimes committed during the war continues to be a contentious issue in Bangladeshi politics. Widely accepted ideas about Bangladesh’s Liberation War have been challenged in recent years by scholars such as Bose (2011). Chief among these ideas is the notion that three million Bengalis died during the war, which Bose and others cast doubt upon. Bose’s analysis has been vigorously contested by scholars such as Mookerjee (2006a) and Mohaiemen (2011) who accuse her of, among other things, favouring Pakistani soldiers’ testimony over Bengali witnesses and victims of the violence. Debates over 1971 and contemporary politics reveal deeply entrenched and politicised viewpoints that get to the heart of how nationalisms are nourished by histories. It is possible to see how the past and the memory are not only

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fields of contestation and debate but also of silences and forgetting (Mookherjee 2006b). Nationalism, as Renan (1992 [1882]) explained, involves shared histories as well as shared forgetting (Eriksen 1993). 14 Engaged in the angst and the contested histories and presents of Bengali and Bangladeshi nationalism, one risks forgetting about identities within Bangladesh that are ‘non-Bengali’. There are non-Bengali minorities in several parts of the country, such as those who identify themselves as Chakma, Santal, Marma, Tripura, Rohingya, Garo and Bihari. Among other contributions, authors who work on these groups have shown how ethnic minorities engage with national debates about a pluralist Bangladesh and/or cultural pluralist interpretation of a Bangladeshi imagined community (see Van Schendel 2000, 2005, Bal 2007, Redclift, 2013, Abrar 2000). Considering the bloodshed over language in Bangladesh’s short history, it is especially tragic and ironic that the Bangladeshi state is now considered as falling short vis-à-vis the adoption of questionable language policies of its own, when it comes to dealing with the languages and cultures of ethnic minorities (Mohsin 2003). 15 Other authors have researched the diverse interpretations of Islam in the region and a striking example is the extensive survey by Banu (1992) about the many faces of Islam in contemporary Bangladesh. Recent academic research has focused on the emergence of ‘revivalist’ or ‘new’ Islam in Bangladesh. Authors such as Robinson (2008) and Rozario (2006) charted the rise of revivalist Islam through practices such as wearing the burqa among Bangladeshi women, and see this as connected to multiple forms of modernity rather than ‘traditional’ orthodoxies. Sehhabuddin (2008), among others, illustrates how religious and secular modernities co-exist in the complex life-worlds of ordinary people, describing Muslim women who are engaged in work with secular NGOs while simultaneously investing in their religious belonging and faith. 16 This special issue explores these tensions and debates over identities and belonging in Bangladesh in Selim’s paper.4 The author delineates the configurations of identity and representations that emerge through tracing the historical trajectories of visual art forms and practices in Bangladesh. The multiple readings of ‘tradition’ deployed by ‘fine’ artists who draw upon ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ arts, have fed into the enterprise of nation-building from the colonial past, and continue to do so in present-day post- colonial Bangladesh. The paper shows how visual arts, geopolitics, and identity formation intertwine, and emphasises both the structural constraints of visual arts in a post-colonial, developing country and the agency of artists and sculptors in challenging dominant narratives and creating ‘alternative’, ‘de-centred’ discourses of representation and belonging/not-belonging.

Contested notions of home and belonging in transnational contexts

17 ‘Alternative’ narratives abound in Bangladesh. For every way of presenting the ‘truth’ there is a strongly held and often convincing counter-narrative and this is also visible in several immigration and transnational contexts. The ‘Bangladeshi diaspora’ includes the descendants of nineteenth century lascars recruited in Kolkata and now resident in the UK among other places (Choudury 1993, Adams 1987). Migrants who migrate to the Middle East and Malaysia, mostly for manual labour, form the most numerically significant part of the diaspora. Due to their numbers they are also the group that

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contributes most to the nation in remittances (Siddiqui 2004). In addition there are less well-known groups, contemporary probashi (emigrant) in Ryiadh, Dubai, Rome and Lisbon (Siddiqui 2004, Knights 1996, Mapril 2011), as well as many Bengalis and Bangladeshis who have migrated, permanently or temporarily, to other parts of the world. As several authors have argued (see for instance van Schendel 2009, Lewis 2011, Guhathakurta & van Schendel 2013, inter alia), overseas migration has become integral to the very fabric of contemporary Bangladesh.

18 An overview of the literature on migration from Bangladesh allows us to roughly outline the existence of four types of migration: first, the Sylheti long-term migration to the United Kingdom, America, Canada and Australia (Gardner 1995, 2002, Siddiqui 2004, Rozario & Gow 2003, Kibria 2011). This is one of the most important emigration flows in the history of Bangladesh and until the oil crisis in 1973 it was the main migration in the country (especially linking Sylhet and London, see Adams 1987, Choudury 1993, Gardner & Shukur 1994, Gardner 1995). A second type of overseas migration is the short term, labour migration, from several regions of Bangladesh (both rural and urban), to the Middle East and Southeast Asian countries. This migration is intimately related to the oil crisis of 1973 and the development of infrastructural programmes of development in Middle Eastern countries that institutionalised labour recruitment policies, similar to the Bracero program (‘manual worker’ between US and México) and the Gastarbeiter (‘guest worker’ between Germany and Turkey), with India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Knerr 1990). In the case of Bangladesh, these trajectories have significantly changed the migration dynamics in the country. It was in this context that other countries carried out similar programmes of recruitment of Bangladeshi workers such as South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand, among others. 19 A third type of migration is the cross border land routes between Bangladesh and India, usually used by poor rural populations that either migrate for work in large Indian cities, such as Mumbai, Delhi or Kolkata, or work in industries or mining companies in Indian territory (see Gardner 2012, Hussain 2013). This migration route is considered ‘illegal’ by the Indian authorities and has stirred up several clashes between the Bangladeshi and Indian governments (see Samaddar 1999, Chatterji 1999, Rahman & van Schendel 2003, Ramachandran 2003), and generated tensions between the Indian Central and State (West Bengali) governments (Chatterji 2007). Finally, a fourth type of migration has as its destinations several Southern European countries. This is a migratory flow that began in the late 1980s and has grown significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus.5 This is a migration flow that mainly includes young middle class people, urbanised and educated (Knights 1996, Zeitlyn 2006, Mapril 2007, Mapril 2014). Thus, international migration has become an important part of the contemporary Bangladeshi landscape and this is visible in distinct areas of social life, ranging from politics and economics to culture and media. 20 These migration and diaspora phenomena have been researched from distinct perspectives and the literature can be organized into two main strands. Firstly, several authors have researched the impact of international migration on Bangladesh, either focusing on financial remittances and economic development or on social remittances, religion and gender. The second strand looks at migration as a local and transnational experience, focusing on immigrants in the receiving contexts and exploring the changing links with Bangladesh.

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21 Some examples of the first are Gardner’s work (1993a, 1995, 2002, 2008), as well as that by Siddiqui (2001) and Callan (2012). Gardner (1995) explores the impact of Londonis in Sylhet and the UK. She vividly shows how the transformation of economic and social relations in Sylhet due to the extensive migration to the UK, was manifested not only in the landscape itself (the building of pucca houses), but also in kinship and gender relations, the management of the household and conceptions of Islam. Siddiqui (2001), on the other hand, focuses on another dimension of these transformations, namely the relation between labour migration and women in contemporary Bangladesh. Her objective has been to show how the transformation of migration dynamics in Bangladesh, associated with the restructuring of the global economy, was accompanied by the feminisation of overseas migration, especially to Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian countries. More recently, Callan (2012) has shown how the integration of Sylhet in the global economy, through overseas migration, has transformed marriage patterns, which in turn, have had a deep impact on the health conditions of those involved. 22 The other strand of studies on Bangladeshi migration and diasporas focuses on the study of transnational migration per se and the relations of Bangladeshis and their children with contexts of immigration in places such as the UK, USA, Italy, Spain and Portugal, among others. One of the pioneers in these studies is John Eade, who in 1989, published The Politics of Community: The Bangladeshi Community in East London. His objective was to show how Bangladeshis were increasingly engaged in British local and national, mainstream, political activities. Eade and Garbin (2002) have also researched the emergence of ‘Banglatown’ in the East End of London in the context of the production of London as a global city. Kibria (2011) and Sultana (2009) have both explored the presence of Bangladeshis in the USA and Malaysia, respectively. Focusing on the fourth type of migration we identify, other researchers have shown the complexities of Bangladeshi contemporary immigration flows by researching lesser- known Bangladeshi communities in countries such as Italy (Knights 1996), Spain (Zeitlyn 2006) and Portugal (Mapril 2007, 2011, 2014). 23 Another avenue of research explores the intergenerational changes in the practices and perceptions of religion between parents and their children (Glynn 2002, Kibria 2008, De Hanas 2013, Rozario 2011, Zeitlyn 2012, 2013, inter alia). Glynn (2002), for instance, showed how forms of ‘revivalist’ Islam, with a transnational perspective, are increasingly appealing to young British Bengali Muslims and how these ideological choices are drawing them away from their parents’ conceptions of Islam (which are often described as being more ‘Bengali’, ‘sufi’ and ‘syncretic’). Kibria (2008) compared young British and US Bangladeshis and revealed how the growth of what some authors refer to as ‘revivalist’ Islam, and Kibria calls the ‘new Islam’, is seen as an answer to the increasing visibility and salience of Muslim identities, a sense of political and cultural alienation, and also a way of distancing themselves from Bangladeshi identities. Kibria noted that the generational aspect of adherence to forms of revivalist Islam is more marked and institutionalised in the UK than it is in the US. 24 Within these studies on immigrant Bangladeshis and their children, it is essential to mention the importance of studies that focus on the relation between transnationalism and the imaginations of home. Gardner (2002), for instance, showed how ageing among Sylheti elders in the UK revealed the complexities about the making of notions of home and belonging. Images of home and away—desh and bidesh (Gardner 1993a)—are

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continuously used by these elders to think about their place of belonging. Garbin (2004), on the other hand, explored the ways Sylheti and British Bangladeshis built transnational social spaces between the UK and Sylhet. His work focuses not only on the making of transnational kinship groups but also on the ways these translocal social fields allow the circulation of several forms of capital that are used differently according to context. Zeitlyn (2013) has shown how these transnational social spaces change and collapse notions of desh and bidesh and the discourses once associated with them, due to intensified global connections, communications and mobility. Zeitlyn (2012, 2013) explores the ways British Bangladeshi children learn notions of home and belonging between Bangladesh and the UK. He argues that the British Bangladeshi transnational social field, a transnational social space in which British Bangladeshis exchange and compete over different forms of capital and meaning, disrupts notions of desh and bidesh (Zeitlyn 2012). 25 Transnational family life, the making of kinship and the arrangement of marriages, are also areas of research by authors such as Gardner (1995, 2012), Pollen (2002) and Khanum (2000), to mention just a few examples. Marriage migration is now one of the principal flows of people between Bangladesh and the UK, contributing to about a quarter of the increase in the British Bangladeshi population between 2001 and 2011 (Zeitlyn 2013). Marriage is of course much more than a migration flow, cementing transnational relationships and exchanges for another generation. 26 Another dimension to these transnational studies of Bangladeshi immigration is the study of transnational political processes, such as homeland politics. Glynn (2006) presented a fascinating history of the role of East Pakistani Bengalis in the UK and their support for the Bangladeshi independence war. Alexander (2013) showed how British Bangladeshi secularists and Islamists, struggle for a normative representation of Bangladesh and how this relates to the racialisation of Bangladeshis in UK citizenship regimes. Eade (1996) and Eade and Garbin (2002) also focused on contemporary transnational political activism, the manipulation of Bengali cultural symbols, such as the Boishaki mela, and the making of a (urban and political) place for British- Bangladeshis in London. This literature on transnational political activism unpacks the contested nature of the ways in which Bangladesh is imagined by its expatriates and their descendants and is an area that this special issue will further contribute to, with papers by Zeitlyn and Mapril. 27 Zeitlyn draws upon discussions about the International Crimes Tribunal (set up to try alleged war criminals from the Liberation War in 1971) as well as recent associated protests at Shahbagh and by the Hefazot-e-Islami movement to identify competing discourses about Bangladesh, in accounts of events from and by British Bangladeshis in London. Through an analysis of transnational and on-line political engagement, the paper identifies ways in which dominant discourses about Bangladesh are actively contested and resisted by diaspora communities and alternative discourses created. Competing and contentious diasporic narratives of ‘critical events’ (Das 1995) also emerge in Mapril’s description of the Language Day (Ekushey / 21 February) celebrations in Lisbon. Through a contextual analysis of the celebrations, the paper broadens out to examine the fraught and fractional nature of the emergence of a Bangladeshi ‘community’ and a Bangladeshi diasporic public sphere in Lisbon, in dialogue with various local, national and transnational formations. As we have seen in

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the previous section, contested narratives of these critical events cut to the heart of Bangladeshi politics and the story of its independence in 1971.

Development and the politics machine

28 Bangladesh’s relationship with ‘the west’ is mediated not only though the diaspora, but also through Bangladesh’s status as a ‘developing’ country. The phenomenon of solid economic growth and impressive improvements in social development indicators, in an environment characterised by what is euphemistically called ‘poor governance’, is known as the ‘Bangladesh paradox’ (Hassan, 2013) or the ‘Bangladesh conundrum’ (World Bank 2007). In essence the paradox is: how does a country with such ‘poor governance’ achieve such development gains?

29 Economists have portrayed Bangladesh since 1990 as an almost unmitigated success story. Bangladesh was included by Goldman Sachs in the group of ‘next eleven’ countries that would follow Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs) into the international arena as leading global economies (O’Neill et al. 2005). Drèze & Sen (2013), Guha (2012), The Economist (2012) and World Bank (2013:197) have all praised Bangladesh’s impressive economic growth and simultaneous increases in social development indicators such as primary enrolment rates and life expectancy and decreases in infant and child mortality. These are, according to The Economist (2012), improvements as dramatic in scale and timing as any seen elsewhere, ever. The Economist cites four reasons for this success. These are: (a) effective family planning leading to more empowered women and a ‘demographic dividend’; (b) stable rural household incomes, which have fallen in many comparable countries, propped up by increasing agricultural productivity and non-agricultural income such as migrants’ remittances; (c) a political consensus across the elites in favour of pro-poor social programmes (such as conditional cash transfers); (d) and finally the presence and activities of Bangladesh’s famous NGOs. 30 Meanwhile analyses of politics in Bangladesh over the same period paint a determinedly grim, chaotic and pessimistic picture. Hassan (2013: 4) describes Bangladesh’s poor governance as: ‘characterised by systemic political (patron- clientelism) and bureaucratic corruption, an inefficient state, weak regulatory capacity, confrontational politics, political instability and politicised and corrupt judicial institutions’. 31 Such portrayals of Bangladeshi governance and politics are common. They are not inaccurate, but as Hassan points out, this is only one side of the ‘Bangladesh paradox’. It is the side of the paradox that has made Bangladesh synonymous with corruption and mismanagement. It is this side which is most often seen and commented upon by a wide range of people with vested interests in Bangladesh. Since Henry Kissinger famously called Bangladesh a ‘basket case’, in a discussion about foreign policy, just as the country became independent against his wishes in 1971, hostile foreign observers have regularly seen only one side of the Bangladesh paradox. Their vision clouded by local or global politics, they only see the side of Bangladesh that they do not like. This is the ‘Kissinger myopia’. 32 Recent examples of ‘Kissinger myopia’ include Cadman (2013), Hazra (2013) and Bhuyia (2013). Cadman, a British barrister representing members of Jamaat-e-Islami who are the accused in the ICT, described the situation in Bangladesh as ‘descending rapidly

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into civil war’. Hazra (2013), writing in the Indian press, also described Bangladesh as being in a state of civil war, placing the blame firmly on the Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir. Bhuyia (2013), writing for the Islamic news website OnIslam, also described Bangladesh as being in a civil war, but this time blamed the ‘fascist’ government and the ICT. What is interesting about these three recent examples of ‘Kissinger myopia’ is that their authors represent western, Indian and Islamist positions, ones whose interference in Bangladesh are regularly cited in competing narratives to be the source of everything that is wrong with Bangladesh. While there is a lot wrong in Bangladesh, there is also a lot to celebrate. The apparently chaotic nature of Bangladesh conceals some of the progress. ‘Kissinger myopia’ leads to what are often rather unnecessarily negative portrayals of Bangladesh, ones that can become self-fulfilling prophecies. 33 Such understandings of Bangladesh have been partly responsible for the rise of NGOs funded by foreign donors, which Hussain discusses in this volume. NGOs have been considered more effective, efficient and less corrupt by donors than the state. Their rise to prominence in Bangladesh is seen as a crucial factor in what is going right in Bangladesh by analysts such as The Economist (2012), who describe NGOs such as BRAC as the ‘magic ingredient’ in Bangladesh’s recent development success. Anthropologists such as Gardner et al. and Hussain, conducting ethnographic fieldwork among poor people in Bangladesh often have a different, emic perspective from the economists. Hussain’s paper in this volume, drawing on the notion of governmentality, unpicks the rather simplified and binary way the state and civil society are conceptualised and illustrates how they act in practice in Bangladesh. He reveals the complex layers of non-state organisations, at local, national and transnational levels that act in collaboration, competition or contradiction with the state, producing ‘state-like effects’. NGOs are manifestations of soft power interventions in Bangladesh, beholden to international as well as local agendas. The Bangladesh paradox does not only have two sides, but multiple layers, actors and scales. 34 Gardner et al.’s paper investigates the complex and messy array of discourses, dreams, actors and corporate Public Relations that the concept of development (unnoti) conjures up in Bangladesh, specifically in the context of the Bibiyana Gas Field in Sylhet. The authors explore how notions of development connect with competing ways of understanding Bangladesh, critiquing it and dreaming of what it might become. The notion of development is one where there is no common understanding about either the intended end goal or the right path. Agendas and strategies at international, national and local scales and within political, corporate and family structures intersect with ‘development’ to produce a diverse array of discourses and outcomes. Hussain and Gardner et al.’s accounts indicate that a range of development actors fill the spaces in and around the ‘poor governance’ in Bangladesh with competing interests and often wildly different ways of operating. 35 Despite widespread critiques, governance in Bangladesh is not all bad. The World Bank (2007) outlines the following five areas in which governance in Bangladesh has been relatively successful. The state has created the space for a dynamic private sector (although The Economist (2012) characterises the private sector in Bangladesh as ‘stunted’). Successive Bangladeshi governments have encouraged labour migration and encouraged remittances and investments, which the World Bank sees as a successful economic strategy. According to Lewis (2011: 152), remittances help to ‘(…) counteract

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regular deficits in other areas of the economy such as trade, services and other income’. Official figures from the Bangladesh Central Bank indicate that remittances, through formal channels, were 500,000 US dollars in 1985 while in 2007, they reached 7 billion US dollars (Lewis 2011; see also Van Schendel 2009 which with different figures, reveals a similar trend). Most of these overseas remittances come from the Middle East, and the largest single national source is Saudi Arabia, but significant flows also come from the US and the United Kingdom (Lewis 2011). According to data from the Bangladesh Bank, remittance income accounted for about 12% of Bangladesh’s GDP in most recent years. 36 Furthermore, according to the World Bank (2007), successive Bangladeshi governments have been relatively good at making pro-poor expenditure choices and keeping military spending low. The state has also formed effective partnerships with NGOs and the private sector to deliver services. Gardner et al. and Hussain subject these ‘partnerships’ to a critical examination in their papers in this volume. Finally, the state has greatly increased its capacity to manage natural disasters (World Bank 2007). However, recent industrial disasters in the garments industry in the Tazreen fire and Rana Plaza collapse suggest that although Bangladeshi governments may have increased their capacity to cope with natural disasters, further work needs to be done in the area of effective workplace safety and regulation. Bangladesh’s position as the cheapest place to make clothes relies on hazardous workplace conditions for its (mostly female) garment workers, suppression of labour movements and human rights abuses. 37 Human rights is an area where concerns about governance in Bangladesh push the country firmly back into Kissinger territory. Extrajudicial executions, torture and impunity for members of the security forces have long been problems in Bangladesh under both major democratic parties, as well as military governments (HRW 2012). These problems become politicised when the security forces and judiciary are used to suppress opposition from rival parties and the press. Of course, when the security forces and judiciary act for the benefit of the nation and when they act for politically vested interests is an intensely debated matter. Perspectives on the International Criminal Tribunal, Shahbagh and the events at Shapla Chottor on the 5th and 6th of May 2013, as discussed by Zeitlyn, illustrate this. Some regard the ICT as the last part of the unfinished revolution of 1971, important for closure of the wounds of the Liberation War. To others though, the tribunal is a sham, an act of political vengeance to destroy the political opposition to the ruling Awami League government. 38 Concerns about human rights in the country remain pertinent and contested. The government has targeted prominent figures from civil society such as Muhammad Yunus (founder of the Grameen Bank, an influential microfinance initiative which provides small loans to poor people who do not qualify for conventional bank loans due to lack of/inadequate collateral) and Adilur Rahman (secretary advocate of Odhikar, a human rights NGO) for persecution in the press, courts and by law enforcement agencies. Is Yunus a worthy Nobel Prize winner, an iconic symbol of Bangladeshi innovation in the face of poverty, or a corrupt predatory capitalist? Is Rahman a brave defender of human rights in Bangladesh, persecuted for publishing ‘inconvenient truths’, or an opposition stooge making life difficult for the government? Recent elections in Bangladesh saw tensions running high, violent demonstrations and state repression of opposition groups and attacks against the press. In the absence of a

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trusted media and judiciary, contested and competing narratives proliferate. ‘The truth’ becomes ever murkier.

Contested narratives

39 This collection of papers touches on many of the key issues in contemporary Bangladesh, often approaching them from the margins, or through an examination of seemingly mundane practices, people, places, and artefacts. As Lewis (2011) argues, Bangladesh itself is in many ways a marginal place, but it is one whose stock is rising. This is not a collection of papers that portrays Bangladesh as a poor, hopeless ‘basket case’ in need of development, or just a test case of various development initiatives. The diversity, complexity, agency, creativity and determination of Bangladeshis emerge here. The papers in this special issue contain a set of challenges, from the authors and many of the people they spoke to in the course of their research, to received wisdom on Bangladesh. These papers reveal some of the key debates within Bangladeshi society and politics, and the ways in which Bangladesh is perceived, represented and related to the rest of the world. The messages that emerge are not clear or simple: this is a complicated and contested country, one that is changing rapidly and confounding predictions from all sides.

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NOTES

1. Many people contributed to this special issue in different ways. We would like to thank the authors of articles in the issue for their hard work, as well as the participants in four forums for their critical comments and feedback. The special issue emerged from discussions at the Bangladesh Studies Network meeting at the London School of Economics in June 2010. We would like to thank David Lewis, Delwar Hussain, Hannah Jennings, and other participants for organising the meeting as well as their inspiration and encouragement. A panel on Bangladesh at the ASA conference in New Delhi in April 2012 contributed to the special issue, and we would like to thank the participants, and the panel discussant Nayanika Mookherjee for her feedback. At the EASAS conference in Lisbon in July 2012 another panel on Bangladesh fed into the special issue, and we would like to thank Fabiene Gama, Ellen Bal and others for their comments and discussions. There were further productive engagements at the Brick Lane Circle's third annual conference on Bangladesh in London in April 2013, and we would like to thank the participants, and Muhammad Ahmedullah for organising the event. Finally we would like to thank Roger

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Jeffery, the editors of SAMAJ, and anonymous peer reviewers for their thorough and patient editing and reviewing. 2. Nayanika Mookherjee also played a key role in bringing together these panels. 3. At the 2012 EASAS conference, for instance, there were only seven papers on Bangladesh, among approximately 300 papers on South Asia. 4. Two other papers—on food and subjectivities (Janeja) and contentious photographic representations of Bangladesh (Gama)—could not be included due to time constraints. For a discussion of the disputed emergent definitions of normal Bangladeshi Bengali food vis-à-vis West Bengali food, entangled in the historical biography of the region, as a register that reveals myriad contested narratives of imagining Bangladesh, see Janeja (2010). Gama’s paper was part of a comparative study on representations of Bangladesh and Brazil by photographers with a heightened sense of the ways in which the ‘majority world’ (where most of the world’s inhabitants live) is represented in western dominated media and visual arts. Photographers at the Pathshala Academy in Dhaka, determined to resist the predominantly negative portrayals of Bangladesh and other developing countries, set about explicitly creating ‘alternative’ representations and narratives about the country. 5. In spite of being understudied, it is also important to mention the presence of probashis in France, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, to mention just a few.

ABSTRACTS

Bangladesh is a country that appears only on the margins of western news and academic interest. When it does, it is usually in the context of catastrophes. In this Introduction to the special issue, we agree with Lewis (2011) that this large, complex and dynamic country merits more attention. Looking at it through the lens of ‘contested narratives’ centring on identities, notions of home and belonging in transnational Bangladeshi communities and the development, economy and politics of the country, we identify areas in which these contested narratives are particularly pertinent to current events in Bangladesh and which the papers in this special issue touch upon.

AUTHORS

BENJAMIN ZEITLYN

Lecturer in International Education and Development, Centre for International Education, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

MANPREET K. JANEJA

Assistant Professor, Centre for South Asia, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

JOSÉ MAPRIL

Research fellow, Centre for Research in Anthropology, New University of Lisbon

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Field of Dreams: Imagining Development and Un-Development at a Gas Field in Sylhet

Katy Gardner, Zahir Ahmed, Mohammad Masud Rana and Fatema Bashar

Introduction

1 Whether viewed as a ‘basket case’ for aid in the 1970s or, more recently, as the home of Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus’s pioneering projects of micro-credit and ongoing success in improving key indicators of living standards,1 it’s hard not to imagine Bangladesh in terms of development. Just as the country tends to be represented internationally in these terms, the discourse of development is also used by Bangladeshis to frame their hopes for a better life (Guhathakurta & van Schendel 2013: 411-469, Lewis 2011, White 1994). Within Bangladesh unnoyon (development) is a catch all for notions of progress, economic growth and modernisation which is neither homogenous nor fixed but which everyone aspires to. As has been noted in other contexts, such ‘development talk’ can be a way of dreaming of new and better futures (Cross 2014, Abram & Weszkalnys 2013). It can also be used to critique the existing state of affairs; if development is the dream, it is shadowed by its nightmarish antonym or lack: un-development, ‘backwardness’, poverty and corruption (see Howard Smith 2008, Jordan Smith 2007). And whilst development might be a state that is aspired to, its aetiology is not assured (Hussain 2013).

2 As this implies, development (unnoyon) is a powerful rhetorical device in Bangladesh. As an aspiration and a dream, it can be called upon and utilised in making as well as denying claims, a discursive site which is often underlain by bitter struggles over material resources. In order to illustrate this, in what follows we analyse the discourses and narratives which surrounded a Chevron operated gas field in Sylhet during its first years of operation, from 2008-2011. We draw upon ideas of development, or its absence, and reference dreams and nightmares of the future. Our observations are based on two very different and seemingly incommensurable sources. On the one hand are narratives

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arising from Chevron’s Community Engagement Programme, which conjure up an appealing picture of community development, entrepreneurship and ‘empowerment’, relying upon idioms of sustainability and ‘helping people to help themselves’. These represent Bangladesh as essentially ‘in need of change’, drawing upon globally appealing notions of gratefully empowered peasants2 which assist the corporation in marketing itself as an ethical business that extends the hand of partnership to all those lucky enough to live on or near land where resources are to be extracted. After all, Chevron’s community liaison officer told us that before they arrived in the area with their programmes ‘there was nothing here’. On the other hand are the narratives of people living in the villages surrounding the installation. Whilst for them, dreams of unnoyon involve the provision of local services, access to gas and the creation of jobs, their accounts from our research of what the gas field actually led to revolve around tropes of environmental destruction and disastrous rupture: a dystopian anti- development. 3 Our material is drawn from a research project funded by the ESRC-DFID which took place from 2008-2011. Whilst the project’s main objective was to understand the impact of the new gas field on social networks and transnational relationships in the surrounding villages, much of our work focussed upon the corporate social responsibilities programmes which Chevron was funding. The research involved fieldwork in two villages which focussed on household livelihoods and coping mechanisms and was carried out by Fatema Bashir and Masud Rana; unless otherwise specified, the interviews referred to in this paper were carried out in Bibiyana by the research team in 2008-09. Interviews with leaders in Britain and Bangladesh and with transnational communities in the U.K. were carried out by Zahir Ahmed and Katy Gardner; and interviews with Chevron officials carried out by Katy Gardner. Longitudinal perspectives were drawn from Gardner’s long-term research in one of the villages adjacent to the gas field (Gardner 1995, 2012). As we were to discover, representations of the gas field and the presence of Chevron in the area were sharply polarised between those who argued that the corporation were a benign presence who would bring a particular kind of development to the villages, and those who contested their presence.

The gas field

4 As Gardner has documented in her research on transnational migration in the area, the villages surrounding the gas field have always been connected to the global economy, first via the migration of ship workers to the docks of Calcutta in the early 20th century, and over the last two generations, by long term migration and settlement to the U.K. (Gardner 1995, 2008, 2012). The discovery of natural gas connects the area in a different way by placing it on the periphery of an industrial zone, the location of the biggest gas field in the country, which the country depends upon for its ongoing output. Indeed, when the installation temporarily shut down due to technical problems in June 2013, households in Dhaka as well as power plants and factories across the country were cut off, leading to a short lived national crisis.3

5 Natural gas was discovered in the area as long ago as 1990. In 2000 Unocal developed a small installation a few kilometres south of the current location of the main ‘pad’. By 2004-2005 a much larger development was being planned using around sixty acres of

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prime agricultural land. The land was forcibly acquired by the Bangladeshi government and rented to Unocal, who were contracted to develop the site. In 2005 Unocal merged with Chevron and in 2007 the gas field went into production, joining other gas fields operated by Chevron in Moulvi Bazaar and Jalalbaad. Today, Chevron produces nearly 50% of Bangladesh’s gas. 6 Given the forcible loss of land, it is hardly surprising that the gas field initially met with substantial local resistance. As soon as people heard of the plans ‘Demand Resistance Committees’ were set up and a series of demands put to Unocal: the rate of land compensation was high on the list, as was connection to the gas supply, which even in 2014 has still not been provided. A school, a hospital, a fertiliser factory and improved roads were also demanded. Today, people say that Unocal agreed to these stipulations. If this was the case they were making promises they could never keep: rates of compensation, the piping of gas to the communities and the development of power plants and factories were not in their power to give; these are all determined by the government. The negotiations took place in a context of passionate agitation: from the perspectives of the landowners, they were about to lose an irreplaceable resource which sustained not only their own households but also those of many people around them; for some it seemed almost like a loss of self. As one of the local men who lost the most land told us: ‘The day they grabbed my land, I lost my words. If I remember that day I have to stop myself from going mad.’ 7 In 2005 the road was blocked by protestors in an attempt to stop construction. The police were called, threats made by the District Commissioner, arrests made and writs issued. Whilst some local leaders tried to hold out against the inevitable, others started to negotiate. By this time Chevron had taken over Unocal and the compensation process was underway: this was for land and property taken in the building of the plant and the roads that surrounded it. Today Chevron say that 95% of land-owners were properly compensated at the highest rate they could negotiate with the government. Local grievances dovetailed the national resistance campaign against the extraction of Bangladesh’s natural resources by foreign companies. In 2006 protests against a proposed open cast mine in Phulbari, in north east Bangladesh, to be operated by Asia Energy, led to three people being killed and around a hundred injured (Nuremowla 2011, Faruque 2012, Gain 2006). Meanwhile, national agitation centred around the content of Production Share Contracts with foreign companies, with activists arguing that these grossly exploit the country’s natural resources, leading to large profits for the multinationals, generous backhanders for corrupt government officials and nothing for Bangladesh. In 2009, for example, a rally called to protest against the leasing of rights to extract off-shore gas resources to multinationals led to police violence and the thirty people being injured. Rumours, counter rumours, civil unrest, accusations and arrests are common in a fragile democracy marked by high levels of government corruption, secret deals and little accountability (Alam & Al Faruque 2009).

Dreaming of development: local hopes of connection to the gas field

8 It is important not to consider protest against the loss of land to the gas field or the presence of Unocal / Chevron, as synonymous with protest against development per se. The inhabitants of the villages surrounding the gas field were keen to be connected to

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the gas supply, to the jobs that they hoped Chevron would supply, and more generally to the modernity and industrialisation that the gas field represented. As Jamie Cross argues with reference to the development of Special Economic Zones in India, large scale infrastructure is ‘built upon an economy of anticipation […] (for) contemporary capitalism is built upon dreams as well as nightmares (Cross 2014: 6-7, see also Abram & Weszkalnys 2013). The accounts of local and transnational villagers from the early days of the gas field are filled with hope for the future, although tinged with apprehension. Many people were conflicted: angry at the loss of land and with a strong sense that the gas was a local resource which should benefit locals and not foreign multinationals, yet hopeful that the plant would bring substantial economic development.

9 These views were shared amongst transnational villagers. As our interviews in the U.K. revealed, alongside nostalgic images of the ‘shonar desh’ (golden land, evoking images of ripe paddy fields) is another equally desirable landscape of ‘development’: reliable infrastructure, brick houses, a dependable power supply, and industrialisation. One man, for example, said that he had no problem with industrialisation per se, but if this was to take place, he should profit from it, not a foreign multinational. A local councillor in the north of Britain emphasised that in his view, the gas plant made a ‘great visual impact’ on the area and its construction had led to better transport links. He was proud to see development taking place in his homeland; he went on to say that he hated returning home and being reminded that in Bangladesh things were not ‘up to scratch’. Similar attitudes are shared in the villages surrounding the gas field. ‘Of course it’s good if the area becomes industrialised’, the matriarch of a middle income family replied, in response to our questions; ‘then there’ll be development and the lot of the poor will improve’. 10 It was partly due to these hopes that the protestors started to negotiate with Chevron in 2005. As one of the leaders recounted: ‘They promised that gas would be provided to the houses, young men would get jobs, electricity would be available: no more darkness.’ Crucially, according to the Baseline Survey produced by consultants for Unocal, one of the main demands that were made in a focus group discussion in 2004 was that the gas field should employ local people (Centre for Women and Child Studies 2006). The early days of constructing the gas field bore out these hopes. Many hundreds were employed as labourers, helping to build the plant and surrounding infrastructure. The wages were good, but the work was much less secure than people realised. In contrast to skilled labourers who are recruited directly by Chevron at national and international levels, local labour was employed via contractors, who tendered for the work on the plant’s behalf. Once given the contracts, Chevron enlisted them as private ‘companies’. Whilst some local leaders were given contracts to supply labour to the gas field, our research showed that of fifteen enterprises contracting labour in 2009, only half were from the immediate vicinity, whilst the rest came from outside the area, some bringing in labourers from hundreds of miles away. The advantages to Chevron are easy to understand. Since the contractors recruit and pay the workers, the company does not need to have any direct dealings with them. They are therefore a reserve army par excellence, un-unionised and with no form of redress from the company; their contract offers none of the ethically irreproachable standards of employment that Chevron reserves for its own staff who, during the time of our research, came from outside the area or were foreign. As the then community liaison officer told us, these employment policies provided ‘an easy flow of labour’. After all,

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contractors explained, bringing labourers from far away meant they were less likely to cause trouble.4 11 Whilst in 2005-2007 there were around 500 construction jobs, once the installation was complete the labourers were laid off. For now there was to be no connection to the gas supply or secondary industrial development. Instead, once the process of land compensation was completed—and many of the landowners who received compensation lived in the U.K.— local people found themselves living next door to a gas field surrounded by high fences which had little to with them. It is true that there was a programme of ‘community engagement’ but this was largely run by NGOs and Village Development Organisations which were made up by members of the local elite. As we describe elsewhere (Gardner et al. 2012), Chevron was pursuing ‘partnership’ and at the same time following the corporate ethics of detachment (Cross 2011). 12 Meanwhile, the local eco system was significantly altered. The high banked roads that linked the ‘pads’ over the fields blocked the flow of water across agricultural land during the wet season, leading to the water-logging of some plots and aridity of others. Farmers noticed increased amounts of sand in the soil and complained bitterly about the culverts that Chevron had built: they were too small and had quickly been blocked with fena (waterweeds), making the passage of water impossible. The roads were also too high for the movement of cattle across fields. Other people, mostly from the landless households in the poorer villages, bemoaned the shrinking of their livelihoods. The gas field had offered work for a short amount of time, but now they were unemployed (bekar). 13 In railing against Chevron, which was accused of ‘looting our gas whilst giving nothing back to us’,5 local narratives of dispossession and impoverishment focussed on the gas field in describing wider processes of monetization and the shrinking of agricultural livelihoods in the area. Farming was ‘too expensive’; the costs of inputs and labour— partly inflated by the gas field but also moving apace with inflation across Bangladesh— made it unprofitable. Sharecropping arrangements had also changed, putting the onus on the sharecropper to buy seeds, fertiliser and the means of irrigation. Rather than relying on agriculture, most households in our study villages were following a strategy of mixed livelihoods, including driving rickshaws or vans, day labouring, small business ventures and for the women, domestic labour. Chakri (regular salaried employment in the formal sector) was profoundly desired, but during our research we found that it was only available from the gas field for a small minority who had managed to gain access to employment via local labour contractors. In sum, the transformations in agrarian livelihoods which have been reported over much of South Asia, involving a shift from fields to factories for some, and uncertain, precarious futures for the majority, was rapidly taking place (see Corbridge & Shah 2013, Ito 2002, Le Mons Walker 2008, Akram-Lodhi 2009, Feldman & Geisler 2012, Adnan 2013, Guhathakurta 2013). 14 From this brief background, let us turn to Chevron’s programme of ‘community engagement’ and its imaginary of Bangladeshi development. Carefully crafted via newsletters, power point presentations and reports, the programmes and the PR campaigns which narrated them drew from both national aspirations and imaginings of development success as well as from global imaginings of Bangladesh as a place in need of improvement. It was aimed not at local people, but at the urban middle class of Bangladesh, Chevron staff and a global audience of consumers. As the company’s CEO of

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Bangladeshi operations explained, the primary objective of community engagement programmes was the management of reputation.6

‘What we’re doing is empowering people’:7 imagining development, Chevron style

15 As anthropologists have noted, a major objective of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Programmes of mining companies is to gain a ‘moral license to operate’ which masks the often violent histories of land appropriation involved (Welker 2009, Zalik 2004, see also Rajak 2011). The aim of many programmes is to create a local population of self-reliant entrepreneurs, ideological work that lies at the heart of the neoliberal project (Ong 2006). At the Batu Hijau mine in Indonesia, for example, potentially oppositional farmers are encouraged to adopt neo-liberal subjectivities via ‘participatory’ agricultural training, even though most reject the opportunity to be ‘empowered’, instead demanding compensation (Welker 2012). Shell has pursued similar tactics in Buenos Aires, using gendered techniques to ‘refacialise’ the company via pictorial representations of brown skinned, smiling women, and offering partnerships to the local population, suggesting that together they will overcome the adverse environmental problems which they face (Shever 2010). Meanwhile Rogers has described how in the Perm area of Russia, oil companies utilise images of depth and connectivity in their CSR campaign, eliding the material qualities of oil and infrastructure with local features which they are investing in (the depth of oil and the depth of local culture, and the connections of infra structure with social networks for example) in order to naturalise their presence and stifle criticism (Rogers 2012).

16 We suggest that Chevron’s promotional literature and programmes of corporate social responsibility attempted a similar manœuvre, discursively placing the corporation at the heart of what matters in Bangladesh: not cultural depth as in the Perm region, but unnoyon: development. Created for a national and global audience rather than being aimed at the poorest sections of the local population who hoped for something different, community engagement projects in the villages surrounding the gas field attempted to fuse Chevron’s brand with that of Bangladeshi development success, as embodied in the first instance by internationally renowned NGOs and in the second by nationalist eulogies of fortitude, hard work and progress. By producing ‘communities’ with which to ‘partner’, and an array of globally fashionable techniques such as Participatory Rural Appraisal, micro-credit and training, poverty was imagined as a technical problem that could be ‘solved’ via remedies such as credit or training, rather than a political problem caused by global and local relationships. ‘Helping people to help themselves’ was the line taken, whilst the jobs, services and inclusion that people wanted did not figure. Just as Rogers notes, with reference to oil company imaginings of regional cultural development in Russia, these discursive tropes were not consciously wielded corporate strategies (Rogers 2012: 291). Instead, they arose from the widely circulating discourses of Bangladeshi development and nationalism: fertile grounds within which to build new images of Chevron as a friendly and ethically irreproachable corporation. 17 In planning their projects at the newly inaugurated gas field, Chevron’s first step was to hire development consultants to ‘map’ the area (Chevron 2008: 11). Later came the participatory rural appraisal exercises in which problems were diagnosed and the field

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of action delineated (Li 2007: 246). The knowledge gained from these exercises was written up in more reports, and the ‘problems’ (the loss of livelihoods to the gas field / poverty) transformed into ‘project goals’ (Chevron Annual Report 2006-2007). Like all development projects, the solutions offered by the reports were technical in nature; as the anthropology of development has taught us, schemes of improvement are powerful conceptual and practical devices for rendering political problems technical (see Ferguson 1990). As a result of these ‘scoping exercises’, project objectives began to materialise, all of which found the solutions in strengthening community and individual capacity via training and marketing support. Village Development Organisations (VDOs) were set up which would involve committees of ‘local leaders’ who, alongside NGO field officers, would choose beneficiaries for the credit and training. Whilst being offered supplementary training in accounting and book keeping, the VDOs were modelled on a notion of ‘natural communities’, in which leaders speak for, and know, ‘the people’ and in which the role of development is to strengthen and modernise these structures, provide training and improve access. The nature of relationships within communities, in which the elite (i.e. ‘the local leaders’) essentially dominate and exploit the labour of the poor, was conveniently ignored (see also Pattenden 2010). 18 Meanwhile slab latrines were distributed to households without hygienic sanitation and tin roofs and concrete pillars were supplied to low income housing, all sporting the Chevron logo. The company could not provide piped gas, but it distributed smoke free chulas (stoves). Two medical clinics were built, run by an NGO, and partly funded by the donations of Londonis. These provided diagnostic services but not medicine, with a further programme of outreach health workers, and an ambulance which could take patients to the nearest hospital in Sylhet, though at a cost. Whilst not actually building a school, Chevron provided support for four high schools in the area via the funding of teachers and teaching materials, the distribution of school uniforms and providing several hundred scholarships for pupils each year. The clinics and scholarships were part of Chevron’s objective of creating ‘sustainable’ development and community ‘partnership’ which in turn allowed them to make claims about their moral right to extract gas in the area (see Zilak 2004). 19 The ideal of ‘sustainable development’ seems morally unquestionable. Who, after all, wants to create dependency? As the CEO of Chevron Bangladesh told Gardner, the locals of Bibiyana ‘are a proud people’ who eschew hand-outs and want to be helped to help themselves: ‘You know […] give a man a fishing rod’.8 It is this ethos which underlay the Alternative Livelihoods Programme (ALP); indeed, the programme offices were decorated with a banner proclaiming the aim of ‘helping people to help themselves’. One of the main activities of the ALP were loans and savings programmes, made available to small scale entrepreneurs who use the credit to fund a variety of livelihood activities such as goat rearing, broiler farms, and fisheries. VDO members were trained in accountancy so that they would eventually function without support. There was also an adult literacy programme and a sewing programme for local women, in which training was given on sewing machines and a market supplied for the pieces of embroidery that the women produced. The Director of External Affairs at Chevron Bangladesh told Gardner that the goal of these programmes was ‘empowerment’ (see Batliwala 2007). In the following, taken from the company’s annual report on Bibiyana,

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a satisfied recipient of training and credit gives testimony to how the ALP has turned his life around: I just feel exhilarated when I go to my vegetable farm. I have learned how to plant and grow vegetables and I have made sure that there will be no insect or pest attacks on my vegetables as I have learned to apply appropriate insecticide at the appropriate time. The villagers who also received training along with me are also successfully applying the scientific method of farming and getting good results [...] All my efforts are being directed to the one and only goal, which is farming [...]. By fulfilling this dream I will drive away poverty from my family.9 20 In this context it is useful to recall David Mosse’s insights (2005) on development work as primarily concerned with the performance of success. These involve particular rituals and celebrations, such as ‘handing over ceremonies’, VIP visits, project literature and brochures, for as Mosse (2005: 168) puts it: ‘success is not guaranteed, but produced through processes requiring constant joint work’. Centrally, development reports can be analysed as a particular genre of stories, with common narrative arcs, plot twists and denouements (Cornwall & Eade 2010, Eyben 2005, Rottenburg 2009). Such representations can also be seen as a form of claim-making in which Chevron are staking out their moral right to operate as well as a world-view in which the market and extractive industries are celebrated for the ability to spread sustainable development, a power of good for the rural poor who require training and access to the goods of neo-liberal capitalism in order to be ‘empowered’. In the same report, written in English and distributed at the company’s Dhaka office, the largesse of Chevron is celebrated in the following: Buffie Wilson, wife of Chevron Bangladesh President Steve Wilson recently made a visit to the village of Karimpur […]. Her visit heralded a brand new beginning for the families of Champa Begum and Jotsna Dev. Both women lost their homes during the devastating flood of 2007 and in standing by the community, Chevron gave them the chance to restart their lives afresh by rebuilding their homesteads. Their homes were officially presented to the proud new owners in a simple, heart warming ceremony and Ms Wilson was accorded a rousing reception. Champa Begum and Jotsna Dev finally found a reason to smile after last year’s floods wreaked havoc, chaos and devastation in their lives.10 21 A final example shows how even land acquisition, the subject of so much ill feeling and agitation in the area, can be turned into a story of success, in which those who lost land celebrate their contribution to national interests and improvement: About fifty acres of land were acquired for the development of the […] Gas Field. Of which about eight acres [...] used to belong to my family [...]. Even though our land was acquired in the national interest, I personally think that each of us has been immensely benefitted. The standard of living in our area has risen and the value of land has gone up. People of the area are also held in high esteem because of the project [...].11

The national spirit: development writ large

22 Whilst narratives of local projects conjured up images of small scale grass roots development involving self-sufficient peasants empowered by their training in scientific methods, access to credit and strengthened community structures, Chevron’s public relations team accessed a different imagining of Bangladeshi development in other contexts. Whilst in the first instance the audience for the tales of development was predominantly global (accessed through annual CSR reports available on the

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internet), and included shareholders as well as international employees of Chevron, in the second the desired audience was predominantly national. Messages of Chevron’s solidarity with Bangladesh in its development effort, which aimed to resonate with nationalist sentiment, attempted to counter the fierce critiques of those protesting against the company’s presence in the country.12 These messages were materialised in the form of corporate gifts offered to visitors to the company’s Dhaka headquarters.

23 The packaging of the gifts proves their very point. For example, on the front of the packet of tea we read: ‘Tea, from the garden of Chevron’s neighbourhood.’ On the back, we’re told: Lackatoorah Tea Estate of National Tea co. Ltd., one of the oldest tea gardens in Sylhet, has been growing quality tea for the people both home and abroad for the past 125 years. Chevron, one of the world’s leading resources and project development companies, has been contributing significantly to the development of Bangladesh’s energy sector. 24 Here, the colonial history of the tea sector and its obvious parallel with the presence of Chevron and other foreign companies is concealed under an image of economic productivity and contribution to national development. Similar nationalist sentiments are carried on the company calendar. Again, it is Chevron’s partnership with Bangladesh the nation, rather than with ‘the community’ that takes centre stage. Each month of the calendar is illustrated by a beautifully shot photograph of people carrying the Bangladesh flag, with a poetic quotation underneath. For example, July reads: ‘You reside eternally in the spirit, / O my homeland; for you / We are adorned with new energy’. On the cover of the calendar, we read: Human energy, leading Bangladesh with energy and spirit [...] In Bangladesh, where the people are known for their resilience, Chevron seeks to identify the spirit that guides them and their actions. Bangladesh’s national spirit is best exemplified by its people’s desire to build a better tomorrow, to strive forward by attaining economic growth and to go beyond the odds with the overriding power of aspiration and hard work. All Bangladeshis play a role in this progressive thrust towards the future by bravely facing myriad adversities and by actively contributing to the realisation of collective goals. 25 Reducing these imaginings to neo-liberal governance or, in more crude terms, a way of ‘buying off’ local resistance to the gas plant, misses the more nuanced and complex ways in which business advantage, neo-liberal moralities and PR tactics are interwoven with a range of ideological stances, dreams and aspirations. When asked what motivated him, for example, a high level executive in Chevron Bangladesh told Gardner that in ‘work’ it was the wish to promote the ‘reputation’ of the company, whereas at a personal level, he, like so many of his compatriots, wished to harness the might of Chevron to ‘do good’ for the national betterment of Bangladesh, an aspiration that via the calendar and other corporate gifts, the company sought to evoke. As noted earlier, such gifts are aimed at the urban and professional Bangladeshis who visit the Dhaka offices and bear such gifts away, not the global audience accessed via the world wide web, for whom the idea of ‘partnership’ with ‘empowered’ Third World villagers is so seductive.

26 What did local people think of all this? During our fieldwork we encountered a variety of views, largely depending on whether or not our informants had connections with Chevron as contractors or employees. The majority did not hold a radically different version of the role of Chevron in national and local development, and indeed what

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global capitalism might mean. Indeed, during our research Chevron’s tales of development success were strongly contested by many of our informants. Many told us that the company ‘gave nothing’, despite the projects they were sponsoring. The small scale, community driven development of the ALP and other interventions was not part of their dream of unnoyon, far less was being ‘helped to help themselves’.

Nightmares of rupture: un- development / disconnection at the gas field

27 To summarise: whilst Chevron narrated Bangladeshi development in terms of the liberating power of the market, small scale entrepreneurship and a national spirit of resilience to which they wish to be aligned, people living in the gas field’s borderlands desired a less photogenic form of development: connection to global capitalism via employment by Chevron. What many faced in 2008-2011, however, was an ongoing process of disconnection or un-development. The gas field had also brought the threat of a ‘blow-out’, or explosion, in which the physical connection to the gas supply is violently severed and the villages that surround the plant are ripped apart by fire and destruction: industrialisation’s darkest side (see also Fortun 2009). During our research, stories and imaginings of such blow-outs were shown to be an important aspect of how people think and talk about the gas field. One woman, for example, told how her cousin had died from worry about a blow-out. This fear of an industrial accident was vividly materialised in 2008 when a standard technical procedure in which excess gas is burnt off in a controlled flare, led to widespread panic. This was described to us by almost everyone in the area as an example of the dangers of the gas field, a terrifying night when they awoke to find the sky ‘filled with fire’ and ran in terror from their homes. Chevron executives had warned ‘local leaders,’ who they had imagined would pass the message on to ‘their people’, but this did not happen, for whilst the ‘leaders’ told their close families, they were not connected to the poor in the ways that the community relations staff had imagined. The incident, and the fear it invoked, reflects the history of Bangladesh’s relationship to multinationals in the gas sector. The government is still seeking compensation for a blow-out at Magurchhara in 1997. In 2005 a series of accidents also occurred at the Tengratila gas field, operated by the Canadian company Niko in Sunamganj, Sylhet. In the second blow-out within six months flames leapt up to a height of 150 feet after a loud explosion. As these incidents show, people have a well founded fear of an industrial accident.

28 We suggest that within local narratives blow-outs can also be read as accounts of violent disconnection and rupture, whether from the transformative energy of the gas with its contradictory possibilities of enrichment and destruction, from the land on which livelihoods depend, or the richly woven web of social connections so vital for everyday survival. Indeed, stories of industrial disaster reveal the profound risks that engagement with neo-liberal capitalism has involved. Within this analysis, a blow-out is merely the most dramatic materialisation of the uncertain world in which people struggle for survival. The accounts that follow are thus narratives borne from terror, ways of making sense of the chaos, panic and speechlessness caused by Chevron’s unexpected flare:13 Because of the gas field we live under the threat of fire. Like an earthquake, everything moves and there’s a roaring sound. When the fire goes up we have to go

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to a safe place; we fear that the fire will engulf us. The flame is so bright that it illuminates everything even though it’s night. If you dropped a piece of sewing on the ground you could find it. We run around madly. Last year Harun’s wife was so scared that she fled the house, leaving her children behind. People leave their valuables. Everyone is scared for their life! Whenever Chevron ups the fire our relatives call us to see if we’ve survived and they live 15 miles away! Some villagers fled by rickshaw.14 29 A similar reading can be made of local accounts of environmental change. As with the flaring, these narratives were based upon empirical observation: there were observable changes to the environment. In the first account the trope of ‘before’ and ‘after’ is used to organise the speaker’s observations of environmental changes which, in his analysis, affect his ability to survive. The analysis is pointedly political: things were promised but not provided. The account ends with a dramatic pronouncement on the risks the speaker faces, where farming can no longer sustain him: Otherwise we will die. Because of the gas field us farmers are badly affected. Before the gas field the yields were very good. Now we have to deal with scarcity of water; without water the yields are poor […] it’s hard to graze cattle or goats because there’s less grazing land. It’s difficult to bring cattle from one side of the road to the other because they’re so high. Before the gas field we used to get straw, which we used as fuel. Now there’s nothing here and we have to buy fuel. We had fish and the land was fertile; now a whole month will go by and we don’t eat fish. Where are the fish? There is no water in the river. But for our crops water logging is a big problem. When the road was built they promised culverts but the pipes are too narrow and the water can’t pass through. We want deep tube wells in the area; it will provide water to our land. We can survive by farming. Otherwise we will die.15 30 In the next account, given by a young woman in the village directly opposite the gas field, the fertility of the soil is directly linked to the extraction of gas, which has been channelled outside. This has left ‘the ground empty’. The imagery is vivid, the analysis acute: the wealth of the fields has been pumped away, the once fertile and sustaining land left empty and denuded. How different this is from the description by Chevron’s community relations officer, who, as noted above, told us: When we first came here there was nothing. Paddy doesn’t grow like it used to; the fertility of the soil has decreased. A farmer used to get ten maund of paddy from one kiare (one third of an acre) of land, but now he only gets four. People think the soil fertility has decreased due to use of machinery. They think our hidden wealth (the gas) has been channelled outside—the riches underground have been brought to the surface, leaving the ground empty. It is this which has affected the fertility of the soil.16 31 The next narrator draws upon similar imagery: the gas is being extracted from the land, leaving an emptiness that will lead to death: The gas field has killed us. We’ve lost land […]. Trees are being destroyed by the gas. In my garden, the beans plants are all dying […]. Because the gas is being extracted from the land there’s nothing left underneath. The whole village will be drowned; we’ll turn into a river.17 32 In his moving account of the altered landscapes created by the Oki Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea, Kirsch describes how as they face their emptied out and transformed landscape, the Yonggom experience acute rupture, not only of their livelihoods, but also of their history and identity. He writes: ‘What is the meaning of these empty places? Given the relationship between place and memory, the destruction

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of these landscapes also threatens history. These are not just empty places, but also scenes of loss’ (Kirsch 2006: 190).

33 The fact that the altered environment disrupts memories and symbolic forms of connection as well as actual livelihoods is powerfully evoked by Samsun Khan, one of the people to have lost the most land. He told us about looking out from his house onto a transformed landscape: no longer the vista of family fields he had seen since childhood, but the gas field, which has caused a ‘fire to burn in my heart’. A similar sense of disconnection from the landscape and his memories of the desh as a beautiful, peaceful place was evoked by one of the British men we got to know over the course of the research. In a discussion about the environmental effects of the gas field, which is situated only a few hundred feet from his bari, Tufael told of us the shock and sense of dis-location on returning to find what had happened in the fields next door. He described the smell and noise: ‘It’s like living on top of an industrial site’.18

Conclusion

34 In this paper we have shown how different imaginings of Bangladeshi development and un-development were used by groups in claims and contestations over Chevron’s operation of a gas field in Sylhet from 2008-2011. In their Public Relations and Community Engagement work Chevron drew upon imaginings of grass-roots, small scale community development and nationalist discourses of economic growth and modernisation to assert the moral legitimacy of their activities. The hope was that after a spate of protests in Dhaka and globally, the brand would be recast with a ‘friendly face’ (Shever, 2010) and further reputational risks averted. The corporation’s presence in the area was, however, contested by locals who drew upon dystopian imagery in their accounts of environmental destruction and dispossession which they linked to the gas field. This un-development is the dark autonym of the positive development they had hoped for: jobs, economic opportunities, increased incomes and security.

35 Whilst revolving around the gas field and Chevron’s work in Bangladesh, all accounts were underlain by hopes and aspirations for a better future. Even though there was disagreement over so much, what was beyond dispute was that unnoyon (development) in whatever shape or form, was a good thing. In Chevron’s imagining, the corporation and its executives contribute to the development efforts of local communities (romantically framed as ‘proud’ and ‘resilient’); they are welcome partners, fighting poverty and ‘empowering’ at the same as turning a profit. In the accounts of those who opposed them, development in the form of modernisation and economic security was desired but Chevron failed to deliver it. To this extent, everyone concerned wanted the same thing: an end to poverty, a new dawn of modernisation and the opportunity to make money. What was disputed was how to go about achieving that end. 36 Clearly, these opposing accounts carried different political weight. Whilst Chevron’s glossy representations of community development and partnership were circulated in corporate reports and websites, the locals’ stories were dismissed by them as nothing more than unsubstantiated gossip or hearsay, and were not heard outside the area. As Chevron executives countered, when we shared our research with them in Dhaka, the accounts of environmental damage and ongoing poverty were based on rumours, not scientific, quantitative evidence. They were only too aware of the complaints, they said.

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In fact there were so many of them they could not countenance setting up formal grievance procedures (as our report suggested). 37 Finally, there is a twist, illustrating not just how fast material conditions can change but also how narratives are historically and politically shaped. On returning to the area in early 2014 we found that gas extraction in the area had significantly increased. Many hundreds of local men had found employment in the construction of new roads and pipelines, as well as within the enclosure of a new installation several miles to the north. In the villages adjacent to the South Pad where we carried out our original research, many men had now been given jobs and the story had significantly shifted. Rather than being associated with destruction and dispossession, the gas field was once again a source of hope—regular wages, security—and maybe more in the form of long term employment, modernisation and inclusion in the formal economy. In the wider area, jobs (chakri) rather than Chevron or the gas field had become the site of contestation, with conflicts taking place between villages and factions in their struggles over employment contracts. As we write, the story is fast unfolding. Once again unnoyon is placed at the centre of the population’s aspirations, dreams and struggles. Adnan, Shapan (2013) ‘Land Grabs and Primitive Accumulation in Deltaic Bangladesh: Interactions between Neoliberal Globalization, State Interventions, Power Relations and Peasant Resistance’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1), pp. 87-128.

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NOTES

1. For a summary of recent development successes of Bangladesh, see Drèze & Sen, 2013: 58-64. 2. This is clearly an oxymoron. 3. See http://archive.thedailystar.net/beta2/news/gas-shock-halts-life/ (accessed 12/2/14) 4. For a more lengthy discussion of labour hiring practices during the research period, see Gardner 2012. 5. A typical quote from a focus group discussion, 2009. 6. Research notes, 2009.

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7. This comment was made by a Chevron executive during a workshop on Corporate Social Responsibility held in Dhaka in January 2011. 8. Interview notes, 2008. 9. Matin Khan, cited in Chevron (2008: 40). 10. Chevron Bangladesh Newsletter, Year Y, Issue 2, July 2008. 11. Chevron Bangladesh Newsletter, Year Y, Issue 2, July 2008. 12. See for example http://bangladeshwatchdog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/oil-gas-and-mineral- resources-of-our.html (accessed 13/02/14) 13. For discussion of ‘giving voice’ through stories in contexts of violence, see Ross 2003, West 2003, Donnan & Simpson 2007. 14. Interview notes, 2009. 15. Interview notes, 2008. 16. Interview notes, 2008. 17. Interview notes, 2009. 18. Interview notes, 2009.

ABSTRACTS

In this article we analyse the discourses which surrounded a Chevron operated gas field and programme of ‘Community Engagement’ in Sylhet over 2008-11. All draw upon ideas of development or its absence, and reference dreams, as well as nightmares of the future. On the one hand are Chevron’s narratives, which conjure up an appealing picture of community development, entrepreneurship and ‘empowerment’, relying upon idioms of sustainability and ‘helping people to help themselves’. On the other are the narratives of people living in the villages surrounding the installation. Whilst for them, dreams of unnoyon (development) involve the provision of local services, access to gas and the creation of jobs, their accounts evolve around the tropes of environmental destruction and disastrous rupture: a dystopian anti- development.

INDEX

Keywords: development, Gas field, Corporate-Social-Responsibility, environment

AUTHORS

KATY GARDNER

Professor of Anthropology, the London School of Economics

ZAHIR AHMED

Professor of Anthropology, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka, Bangladesh

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MOHAMMAD MASUD RANA

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka, Bangladesh

FATEMA BASHAR

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Jagganath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

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The State of Relief on the Bangladesh-India Border

Delwar Hussain

Introduction

1 The NGO phenomenon in Bangladesh began soon after it was founded in 1971 when international donors felt that the government had little or no capacity to efficiently process the development aid coming into the country. Donors thought funds could be spent less wastefully through such organisations. Today NGOs also fit into donors’ new policy agenda of stressing good governance as well as the wider, long-term ideology of economic and social reforms. White (1992: 12) observes that at one extreme are the massive projects of multilateral and bilateral donors who strengthen the national infrastructure (roads, bridges or electricity) and at the other is the multitude of smaller organisations using foreign funds for the welfare or development of disadvantaged groups. Some of the latter organisations are in charge of neighbourhood development projects whilst others run massive enterprises and have (inter)national ambitions and reach. Some observers celebrate the roles NGOs play, seeing them as a crucial force for improving the quality of life of countless Bangladeshis. With the inability of consecutive governments to provide services (due to ineptitude and/or lack of resources), these endeavours, it is argued, contribute to the state’s viability and stability (White 1992: 12-13). On the other hand, critics argue that the optimism that NGOs may help to decrease poverty has not proven to be justified. They say that the industry has propelled sections of the local middle classes into prosperity by providing jobs and access to resources, whilst the majority continue to languish at the bottom. Opponents also claim that the expansion of NGOs has advanced the ‘retreat’ or ‘rolling back’ of the state (Sobhan 1997, Rahman 1999), ‘cut away ground from beneath a still- weak state’, eroded public accountability and provided the loosely connected international aid community with the opportunity to intrude upon domestic policy (Lewis 2010: 10). Wood (1997) for example believes that Bangladesh is moving towards a ‘state without citizens’ in that, as a result of patronage relationships and structural

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adjustment policies, it has ‘discarded’ its responsibilities to its citizens for service provision. More than 30 years ago, Rahman Sobhan (1982: 226), a prominent Bangladeshi academic wrote: The sovereignty of the Bangladesh nation state, in its prevailing social configuration, is therefore likely to remain a polite fiction which is perpetuated by the courtesy of the donors as long as Bangladesh does not challenge their current strategic assumptions and ideological preconceptions. 2 The pervasiveness of NGOs is part of the neoliberal state which operates by working alongside a myriad of non-state actors (e.g. aid organisations, volunteers, private companies, entrepreneurs, consultants, security companies) which together bring about and produce ‘state-like’ effects. In this way, the state, in its ‘multiple incarnations’ continues to be a powerful object of encounter even when it cannot be located as a unitary structure (Aretxaga 2003: 398). The idea of multiple governing agencies challenges the idea of the state as a single centre of power, and is an extension of ‘governmentality’. Foucault’s (2006) powerful statement goes beyond the more simplistic argument about the ‘weakening’ or ‘eroding’ of the state, and is a useful tool in analysing transformations of the state and how various, multiple forms of power are exercised. Foucault suggests that power has to be examined in a multi-dimensional form, taking into account factors such as economy, politics and history. The 18th century saw the rise of a new type of sovereign power, he says, where the practices of government became ‘multifarious and concern[ed] many kinds of people’ (both internal and external to the state). This included a multiplicity of differing techniques of domination, discipline and regulation of bodies and populations, leading him to suggest that ‘we find at once a plurality of forms of government and their immanence to the state’ (2006 [1991]: 134). Foucault (2006 [1991]: 134) questions the notion of the (European) state (the archetypal model) as ever having been a unified, supreme container of power, or ever having ‘this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly, this importance’.

3 Ferguson & Gupta (2005: 107) extend this argument and formulate the idea of ‘transnational governmentality’ to view the contemporary changes being wrought to the state system, the core feature of which places the ‘governing-practices’ of subnational, supranational and other non-state institutions and actors within a single analytical framework. This means exploring the workings of the state alongside those of deterritorialised institutions of global governance such as the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, as well as those already mentioned. Corporate, globalised media and ‘international public opinion’ are also amongst this multiplicity of governing agents, all of which work alongside existing, localised actors. Rather than describing these global entities as being ‘below’, ‘above’ or even outside the workings of the state, Ferguson & Gupta (2005: 121) say they are ‘integral parts of a transnational apparatus of government’ and components of an emerging system of transnational governmentality.1 The fusing of the local and global, they suggest, does not replace or necessarily challenge the older system of nation states, but it does transgress, disregard and ‘decentre’ previous understandings of the developmentalist state framework. 4 In this paper, I focus on a remote part of the Bangladesh-India border in order to understand how the state in its current neoliberal avatar, has been reconfigured from its older, developmental paradigm, which involved large-scale infrastructural change and resource redistribution. I describe how the state is now merely one of many other

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multiple governing agencies that participate in producing ‘state-like effects’ on a territory and its population. Sometimes these are in competition; often they work alongside one another. This understanding of ‘state-like effects’ is in keeping with Aretxaga’s powerful argument that in the era of globalisation, practices of legibility and control are carried out by a variety of organisations and take a variety of forms that together produce ‘state-like effects’. What this means is that the state has lost many of its ordering functions such as the organisation of health care, education, economic production, imprisonment and military and policing interventions, and that these functions and roles are now contracted out to private companies, aid organisations, NGOs, private entrepreneurs, security companies and warlords. As a result, the state continues to be a powerful object of encounter even when it cannot be directly located (Aretaxga 2003: 399). This paper is, then, an exploration of what ‘state like effects’ look like in a place such as the border between Bangladesh and India. 5 I begin by firstly providing an historical overview of the rise of NGOs in Bangladesh. I then draw out what the state attempted to be post independence through the example of a cross-border coal mining village called Boropani2 and its neighbour, a now defunct state-run industrial site. Known as the Khonighat Limestone Mining Project, it was built in the 1960s to furnish the country with limestone, but importantly it constituted a project of a different order: an ideal of the state in microcosm. Following this, using the example of a NGO relief programme, I show the blurred line between the state and the NGO sector. I conclude that regardless of who is performing state-like effects, vast numbers of people continue to be marginalised.

History of Development

6 The contemporary Bangladeshi state is a part of other governing agencies that produce ‘state-like effects’. However, against some of the writers cited above (both supporters and critics of NGOs) who argue that neoliberalism alone has fractured the link between nation-states, sovereignty and territoriality, I suggest that post-colonial countries such as Bangladesh have always had mediated sovereignty. This is a phenomenon that has simply continued into the present to the extent that international donor agencies and regulatory authorities have almost as much authority as states themselves. In this light, Sobhan’s forewarning above about international aid ‘eroding’ Bangladesh’s sovereignty is misconceived. Bangladeshi sovereignty has always been at the whim of many centres of power. Even before 1971, when the country was established following an armed struggle against West Pakistan (East Pakistan later became Bangladesh), the centre of power/s were located elsewhere. Kaviraj (2000: 142) argues that in ‘traditional subcontinental society,’ political power was often distributed between several layers of authority stretching from the village, through regional kingdoms, to empires. From the Mughals, through to the East India Company and the British Imperial state, power lay in Delhi, Calcutta and London respectively. During the Pakistan period, economic and political clout resided in Karachi and Islamabad. Throughout and beyond the Cold War, Washington, Beijing and Moscow were crucial sites for the realities of East Pakistan. The Middle East is also key to this argument, with the majority of the country’s population being Muslim, but also because a large amount of aid today comes from Saudi Arabia. The suggestion that Bangladeshi sovereignty is dissipated between

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different agents is not particularly new. What is, is the myth of wholeness itself and the idea of the unity of the country’s sovereignty.

7 Sheikh Mujib (head of the Awami League party and leader of the party during the revolt against the Pakistani state in 1971) inherited, as Prime Minister of the new state, economic chaos that was partly a consequence of the systematic disadvantaging of the Eastern wing by the Western wing of Pakistan.3 The struggle for independence aimed to bring this disparity to an end. But the civil war and the resultant humanitarian crisis made the difficulties of the new country worse. Over 80% of the population lived below the poverty line (van Schendel 2009: 221). Critics on the left insisted that Bangladesh implement state socialism and land reform. The right saw the solution in economic liberalisation and support for the private sector (van Schendel 2009: 193). In keeping with its declared socialist principles of state capitalism (it received aid and support from India and the Soviet Union), the Mujib government nationalised industries, banks and commercial companies (Alam 1995: 95). However, these policies failed to make the industries profitable or pull the country out of a financial quagmire. 8 Dependence upon international funding from the 1960s onwards began to rise as western aid became easily available for newly decolonised countries. Institutions such as the World Bank and IMF became closely connected to the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan, which ‘conceived and underwrote Pakistan’s development strategy’ (Alam 1995: 168). Despite concerns that foreign aid might compromise Bangladesh’s independence, the Mujib government realised that it was key to its survival and as aid revenue grew massively in the early post-independence period, the country became a celebrated ‘case of aid-propelled development’ (Alam 1996).4 Thousands of foreign consultants, volunteers and diplomats descended on Bangladesh. Jobs were created for the new indigenous bourgeoisie in emerging NGOs and myriad development projects across the country. 9 Following Mujib’s assassination in 1975, which Khan (2000: 581-582) attributes to his economic mismanagement, the country entered a long period of consecutive military dictatorships. From 1975 to 1990, foreign aid dependence went up further. This helped to prop up the dictators, but more saliently, brought about fundamental shifts in the country’s economic policies, moving it away from its founding principles. International organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF induced the regimes to liberalise the economy, accelerate privatisation and undertake structural adjustment. The development strategies pursued under the General Zia and General Ershad regimes saw the unpicking of policies laid down by Mujib. Neoliberal reformers envisaged that such steps would resolve the symptoms of the post-independence crisis. It is at this point that the growth in NGOs began; there was real optimism that they would solve many of the country’s problems. Here, a comparison with the past is illuminating. There were many international NGOs carrying out relief work in the country during the crisis of the early 1970s, but relatively few indigenous ones were established. This is because, as Hasan says, there was anticipation that the government would look after rural people (Hasan 1993: 94, Lewis 2004: 307, see also Feldman 1997). This point is crucial in appreciating what was anticipated. The state gradually became unable to deliver rural or urban development and the hopes raised first in 1947, and then in 1971, were unrealised. Consequently, as Lewis (2004: 307) observes, activists and social entrepreneurs began to search for new organisational structures with which to

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address public problems (as well as to build personal careers) and the boom in indigenous NGOs began. 10 The programme of economic liberalisation initiated under Generals Zia and Ershad’s dictatorships has accelerated since the establishment of democracy. The first democratic government in 1992 also continued the privatisation of the public sector and lifted market restrictions. Institutions that were seen to distort market outcomes, facilitate collective action and centre on a planned economy, labour relations and social policy were targeted and dismantled (Taylor 2009: 29-30). Ferguson (2006: 12), writing about African states, but applicable to Bangladesh, says that the promise of democracy was held out to the citizenry at the precise moment that crucial issues with regards to the economy were taken out of the hands of national governments. Democracy, he argues, became a way of cynically attributing blame to national governments (and by implication to voters themselves) for economic failures. At the same time, matters to do with the policies of donors were taken out of the realm of representative democracy.

Background to the Border

11 The village of Boropani was divided in two at Partition in 1947. Today it is at the centre of the cross-border coal trade between India and Bangladesh. The mines are all on the Indian side in the West Khasi Hills and the labourers are mainly from Bangladesh ‘illegally’ crossing the border to work in them. The state in Bangladeshi Boropani is represented by the Customs House at the Zero Point and the rotating contingent of Bangladesh Rifles guards who are charged with protecting the border. The concentration of these categories of employees / institutions in the area indicates the state’s concerns and interests at the border: primarily to generate profit from and maintain its authority through sanctioning cross-border activities. This feature of the margins of Bangladesh and India has not altered since the formation of the new states and, if anything, has been exacerbated since then. Vote-garnering political candidates make occasional visits. The nearest bank, police station, and health facilities are some hours away in the headquarters of the district subdivision in which Boropani is located. Sunamgonj town, the district’s main administrative centre, is around six hours away by boat during the wet season and at least two by motorbike when dry. Locals forced to take their ill family members on this arduous journey may have to go to Sylhet town, a further two hours away. It is usually the more affluent and the most desperate who carry out this expedition.

12 Yet the reasons for the lack of the state here are more complicated than Ong’s assertion (2005: 95) that there is a ‘thinning of state power at…border zones’. Across Bangladesh, the state is thinned out. In this regard, there is little difference between border and non-border areas. However, in Boropani, present realities are in contrast to what previously existed here. The developmental trajectory that newly independent, post- colonial states followed in the mid-20th century is writ small here. In the 1960s a limestone quarry was built next to Boropani as part of the newly decolonised country’s attempts at modernisation. The aim of the Khonighat Limestone Mining Project was not simply to extract limestone, though this was of course one of its core functions. During its operation, it was at the centre of a much larger, protracted utopian goal that constituted a project of a different order (see Hussain 2013 for a more detailed exploration of the workings of the Khonighat Project). Within the perimeters at least,

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the ‘corporeal presence of the state [wa]s potent’ (Roy 1994: 105). As an inciter of modernity, it was to re-write history, question old structures, banish ‘backwardness’ to a distant past and be at the forefront of the new world order for everyone and everything that came into contact with it. Project workers and their families who came to live and work in this remote part of the border were to be part of the modern industrial workforce but more importantly, contemporary and enlightened citizens of the new modern state. They had access to healthcare, housing, electricity and educational facilities. 13 Modernisation, the theory and practice, dictated that once peasants make the move from working in the field to the factory, these so-called ‘backward’ people would be propelled into ‘civilisation’ and the future. By following this process, poor countries would overcome poverty, share in the prosperity of the ‘developed’ world and take their place as equals in a worldwide family of nations (Ferguson 2006: 177). The idea was that the state was at the centre of development programmes, preoccupied as it was with national progress or, in other words, the development of the whole. Therefore, along with import substitution and backing private entrepreneurship, state-led development concentrated upon spectacular public works. Entire cities, such as Brasilia (Brazil), Islamabad (Pakistan) and Chandigarh (India) were carved out where none existed previously. More commonly, this involved building infrastructure (roads, bridges), developing large-scale power projects (hydroelectricity dams, power stations), constructing industries (manufacturing, refineries, factories) and civic institutions (courts, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, parliaments). Most of this was concentrated in urban centres, but ‘unknown’, so-called ‘peripheral’ places (such as the region where Khonighat and Boropani are located) were also targeted. 14 The Project was closed down in the 1990s largely due to corruption, but also because of neoliberal machinations at a grander scale (see Hussain 2013). It now lies in spectacular ruin, a stark contrast to what it had attempted to be, the developing state in microcosm. It is no wonder that the few remaining Project residents feel an acute sense of abandonment and rejection when recalling the past. Nonetheless, what is worth keeping in mind is that those who did not work for the Project, or lived outside of it in Boropani, were unable to access the services it provided, so for many little has changed over the years.5 Of course Bangladesh (or the Pakistani state previously) was never a welfare-heavy state as were/are the UK or the former USSR, for example. Neither was it ever in a position to provide services for the majority of its citizenry. To argue, then, that in the neoliberal era, the Bangladeshi state has retreated, as many observers have done, is inaccurate. Modernisation schemes were always exceptional. This is what made the Khonighat Project so extraordinary and its visions so powerful for all those who came to live and work there. Today the single, unitary idea of the state has become a rumour for remaining Project residents (who thought they knew better) and recent migrants to Boropani alike. Many people here have little to do with the reduced icons of the state that do exist. While these are generally people at the very bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, coal importers and depot managers also complain about the lack of facilities in the area. The argument they put forward for wanting greater state presence justifies their evasion of taxes on the coal they import. One such businessman explains: The government makes lakh lakh Taka from us [the coal industry] but would you be able to tell what they have provided in return? The answer is no, nothing. There is no school, no pucca road, nothing. I can afford to go to Sylhet when ill and send my

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children there to be educated. But, tell me, what about the poor? What are they to do? Tell me, what is the point of paying taxes?6 15 In Boropani, NGOs delivering services include BRAC: the second largest employer in the country after the government (Lewis 2010: 9), ASA (Association for Social Advancement), Sancred (a Norwegian organisation closely related to the Lutheran church) and also a smattering of very small, grassroots, locally-focused organisations that specialise in the wetland region. Sancred members are seen by a doctor for a 20 Taka fee (roughly 20 pence) for which they are examined and provided with prescriptions. The cost of medicine is extra and those requiring more complicated procedures are sent to Sunamgonj. BRAC offers loans to purchase solar power facilities as well as general business loans. One organisation brings a vet from Sunamgonj a few times a month to treat livestock belonging to members. All of them specialise in microcredit programmes, which is how they fund the services they provide. Locals do not remember precisely when NGOs began arriving in the area, but some say Sancred was the first to set up its offices outside of the perimeters of the Project. A neighbour remembers seeing a white woman whom people believed to be a Christian missionary. Apparently her presence was not welcomed by locals who would throw stones at her. The arrival of the NGOs in the area in the 1990s coincided with the closure of the Project, the opening up of Bangladesh and India’s markets and the beginning of the abdication by the state of what many in the borderlands had come to expect from it.

Relief

16 It is the monsoon season. I am invited by Tariq, a local friend who works for an NGO, to accompany him on a relief programme that is to take place in the wetlands that surround Boropani on the Bangladeshi side. Tariq works for a large European NGO, which I call Hands Together,7 based at its regional office in Sunamgonj. Hands Together runs a number of programmes throughout Bangladesh, one of twenty countries it works in. Tariq is in charge of coordinating the relief and I am joining him on the day corrugated tin is being handed out. I am keen to observe this ritual. Crucially, it is from isolated villages such as the one we are to visit that the majority of the seasonal and temporary coal labourers in Boropani that I had hitherto been working with, originally came from (see Hussain 2013). When the waters of the monsoon take over their rice fields, men, women, and children migrate to Boropani and devote themselves to coal extraction. At least some of the money earned in the cross-border coal trade between Bangladesh and India comes back to villages such as this.

17 In 2007, a flash flood destroyed large numbers of homes in a particularly isolated part of the wetlands. Today’s relief—NGO jargon for the distribution of aid materials—is a one-off event to be carried out in a village in which one of Hands Together’s local partners, a grassroots, community-based organisation which I call NAT, has been working for some years. NAT specialises in development projects in the wetland region. 8 The schemes it runs include setting up shomithis (committees) to which it provides ideas and logistics for income generation. But it is microfinance that it is principally concerned with. Affected villagers that NAT work with are to receive building materials, as well as ducks and goats. All of this is funded by Hands Together. 18 On the back of Tariq’s Indian Hero Honda motorbike, we follow the now disjointed and broken railway tracks that lead from Khonighat to Poschim Bazaar. When the state-run

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installation was still in operation, the limestone from the quarries in Khonighat was transported to Poschim Bazaar, uploaded onto barges, and sent to the headquarters where it was processed into cement. No longer with a role to play in the modernisation of cities elsewhere, today Poschim Bazaar looks as forlorn and stranded as Khonighat. With no sign of a boat that will take us to the village, Tariq confides that he is nervous about the distribution. Heated words have already been exchanged between Hands Together’s regional office in Sunamgonj, the community-based organisation NAT, and the villagers expecting relief. Apparently, the list of names that was originally drawn up—of people who are to receive the building materials and livestock, supposedly the most severely affected by the devastation in 2007—had to be re-done. According to Tariq, NAT employees had filled it with names of their own relatives, denying those who are the neediest. The Sunamgonj office learned of this and instructed NAT’s staff to re-do the list, threatening to deny them any future project work and funding if they do not comply. The second list that was drawn up has a different set of names, but, as Tariq explains ‘there is no way of checking the validity of the revised list’. 19 What adds to Tariq’s troubles is that Hands Together’s country head office in Dhaka has ordered the regional office in Sunamgonj to ensure that the distribution goes ahead without any glitches, despite the problem with the lists. This order came from Hands Together’s main donor office in Europe. The European head office is answerable to its own national government and tax payers, and the international and corporate donors it receives funding from and (to a limited extent) the Bangladeshi government, but not to those that the policies affect the most. This draws attention to the uneasy fit of the multiple governing agencies, policies dreamed up in global cities and multinational institutions and practices that are rolled out on the ground in developing countries. Tariq says this sort of muddle happens frequently. As if to underscore the nervousness he feels, as we wait for a boat, Tariq receives a phone call from his staff still expecting us at the village. They have been sworn at by people whose names have been removed from the original list and who will no longer be receiving aid. With no alternative way of getting to the village, Tariq talks about turning back and cancelling the distribution. The recipients will have to go empty handed and the barge hired for the day to transport the corrugated tin will return to Sunamgonj, its cargo intact. This will mean added costs, which officials in Dhaka will complain about and the donor will disapprove of. 20 Suddenly, a tiny rowing boat appears on the horizon, steered by two soaking wet little boys who look like they are barely more than 10 years old. Despite my reluctance, I am persuaded that the journey to the village is not far. The boys eventually row up to the village; it is situated upon raised land in the middle of the water. The only pukka (concrete) building is the school, which also serves as the flood and cyclone shelter, occasional administrative office and now, relief distribution centre. Other than this, there is no physical presence of the state here. There is no electricity, bureaucracy or health facility. The select group of sixty or so villagers that are to receive aid have been waiting for us since day-break. By now it is mid afternoon. Nearly all are women (Karim 2011). They are skinny, possibly part of the proportion of the population who only have access to one or two meals a day. The men of the village who are of working age are either in the mines in India hewing coal, or in Bangladeshi Boropani labouring in the transportation end of the trade. Some able-bodied men have been called back to the village to help mothers and wives with the sheets of tin they will receive. Nonetheless, whilst the industry has invariably benefitted some, in particular those with previous

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connections to the Project, the liberalisation of the Bangladeshi and Indian economies has not financially or materially improved the lives of the majority of its workers. 21 Tariq begins the proceedings by impressing upon the villagers that his staff should be able to work in the area without being harassed. He looks slightly anxious but also extremely authoritative as he talks. Though only in his late twenties, his university degree and the backing of the foreign NGO give him confidence. The villagers refer to Tariq as ‘officer’, addressing him as ‘sir’; terms of deference traditionally used to address government bureaucrats, illustrating how boundaries between the state and the NGO sector are blurred. Tariq is one of increasing numbers of bright and energetic young Bangladeshi graduates who, in recent years, have opted to work for the NGO sector; in an earlier period they would have hoped to work for the government. ‘Hope’ is the operative term here as public sector jobs were always limited and difficult to acquire without connections and/or leverage. There is a widespread perception that there are more opportunities and better pay and conditions working for NGOs (especially foreign ones), than within government employment. Nonetheless, public sector positions are still held in high regard despite (or perhaps because of) being associated with corruption, sloth, ineptitude and patronage. Tariq says he would prefer a stable, permanent government job, even with less pay, than a better paid NGO one. With flexible labour markets having emerged in all areas of work, he also has to re- apply every couple of years for his position and is hence unable to plan for the future in case he is made redundant. He says that he aims to make the switch to a government job once he has put in sufficient time working for Hands Together. It would be extremely difficult for him to get a government job had he not taken this route.9 22 One of Tariq’s two staff members is a woman; she it is who the irritated villagers were particularly abusive towards. Her gender made her a soft target for their frustrations and allowed for comments and insults attacking her ‘virtue’. ‘She has come all the way from dry land to this wet land to help you. She doesn’t need to do this’ Tariq chastises the villagers. ‘She is also someone’s daughter, someone’s wife. She should not have to hear bad things said about her.’ He attempts to talk to some of the Group Representatives of the shomithi to appeal to what, he believes, are common gendered aims and sympathies. These are a handful of women from the village who have been elected by the rest of the shomithi to represent them in all matters relating to NAT’s work. They have experience of labouring in the coal industry and with it, all its concomitant issues as working women. Having group representatives is not only pragmatic, but in the discourse of contemporary development they are part of an emerging social agenda which supposedly improves the public ‘visibility’ and status of women, encourages ‘participation’ and ‘democratic decision-making’ and contributes to wider ‘community development’ and ‘empowerment’.10 23 Sharma & Gupta (2006: 21) argue that initiatives such as group representatives attempt to teach people, in this case women, how to build their ‘capacities’ and become ‘self dependent, responsible citizens who can take care of their own welfare and govern themselves’. In this moment and place, the success of the group representatives seems questionable. The women simply huddle next to one another on the bench allocated to them, not saying a word. They chew on the ends of their sarees in trepidation and seem very uncomfortable at being called to speak in public by Tariq. This is in particular because they may find themselves at odds either with their own neighbours or with the authority (and prospective resources) of the NGOs. The group representatives, it seems,

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do not consider the female development worker to be one of their own, or at the very least, one worth defending. Her education, class, job and language are more effective dividers than her gender is a unifier. These women seem a world away from those Rahman (1999: 95) writes about, members of the Grameen microcredit bank, who he says are ‘more vocal and articulate compared to other women in the village who are not […] members’. In fact, here, it is women not receiving and who have nothing to do with NAT and Hands Together’s development work who are the most vocal in expressing their disapproval of the erasure of their neighbour’s names from the list. 24 At this point, a self appointed village representative, a man with traditional capital as opposed to the group representatives who are, in effect, pretenders put forward by the NGO, begins to shout about the lists. He is angry and demands to see the original, accusing Tariq and his staff of cheating the recipients. It becomes obvious that the villagers cannot or, rather, do not differentiate between the representatives of Hands Together and those of NAT whom they had, up until then, been dealing with. Tariq’s two colleagues were previously employed by NAT. Furthermore, with the majority of the funding and project work that NAT does coming from Hands Together, all taking place conveniently under the banner of ‘partnerships’, the institutional separateness between the organisations is only notional. Is NAT a grassroots organisation? Is Hands Together an international organisation? Ferguson & Gupta (2005: 117) argue that such entities not only do not fit easily within the ‘state’ versus ‘civil society’ grid, but also that they cannot easily be labelled ‘local’, ‘national’ or ‘international’. They embody a significant local dynamic and are also at the same time a product and expression of powerful national, regional and global forces. The myth that they are independent is something that both NAT and Hands Together attempt to maintain, though it is at odds with everyday experiences, leading to the evident tensions. 25 Tariq warns me that the last thing he wants is to argue with the villagers, in particular because he fears that a physical altercation over the lists may be likely. He suspects that some of the people on the original list may have paid goosh (a bribe) to NAT representatives (not the two assistants) to be on it, hence they may be particularly cross at being struck off. The fee may have been a few hundred Taka (a few pounds), but nonetheless would still have been cheaper than buying tin on the open market. The practice of charging a fee for services that should be free for users is generally morally condemned in mainstream Bangladeshi society, but it is in fact extremely common when dealing with official government bureaucracies. In the borderlands this ranges from paying the border guards to sanction illegal mining in the border zone, to ensuring paperwork is processed by the Customs Official. It is plainly a bureaucratic working practice that has seeped into the privatised realms, further collapsing the distinctions between the various governing agencies operating here and their behavioural practices. Tariq tries to take charge of the situation, telling the accuser that if he so wishes, he is welcome to go to the Hands Together office in Sunamgonj where they have copies of the first list. ‘But for today, I have been instructed by my managers to distribute tin only to people whose names are on the second list’ he says. The man responds that if he were to go to Sunamgonj, it would mean losing a second day’s wages. He works as a coal labour leader in Boropani and has already lost income from having to stay in the village that day. Tariq says that Hands Together will refund his journey, if he can provide receipts for it. This is of course an underhand trick, a receipt being a commodity that no one in the borderlands deals with. The distribution

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finally begins, Tariq’s efforts overcoming any nascent attempt at resistance against the NGO staff by aggrieved villagers. 26 Despite the villagers knowing the NGO staff, there is little trust between the givers and the receivers. The NGO staff are concerned that the villagers may simply storm the barge that contains the sheets of tin and walk off with them. The poor are inherently distrusted in this country of poor people. By this time I was accustomed to this and would experience it frequently and in a variety of ways. The poor are thought of as dishonest, dirty, carriers of disease and peddlers of social ills (perhaps not too dissimilar from how some international donors may view Bangladesh and the people of the ‘Third World’ generally, as the particular programmes directed at them show). It is not just amongst the wealthy and influential that this attitude is pervasive, but also amongst those of more modest means, as well as the ‘poor’ themselves. The ‘NGO- wallahs’ are on the whole, young, university educated men, ostensibly liberal, secular and open-minded individuals who put a high value on female education and emancipation. However, when it comes to ideas about the ghorib (the poor), their comments and ideas seem to hark back to a familiar colonial past. But rather than the topic of criticism being ‘the natives’, here it is their own countrymen. Fear and stereotypes intermingle with feelings of superiority and the burden of responsibility to ‘civilise and develop’ the unfortunate. Such attitudes among government-employed development workers were one of the things it was hoped that funding through NGOs would overcome. The fact that the shomithis they organise in the border region on the whole make a living not from agriculture and fishing (as the deserving poor do) but in the quasi-legal cross-border coal trade, intensifies this attitude. This is regardless of the fact that their organisations benefit financially from the regular micro-loan repayments made by coal labourers, with added bonuses and commissions. But instead of attempting to better the working and living conditions of their members, the development workers take a morally superior stance against those they work with. 27 Before the actual distribution can begin, Tariq makes a further announcement. Rather than receiving six sheets of tin, as previously pledged, everyone on the list will be getting five. Some complain, but these are desperate people, they are used to broken promises and disappointments. Tariq does not publically announce why this is, but he tells me later that it is because NAT, as well as having responsibility for drawing up the list of receivers, had been in charge of procurement. Senior members of the organisation embezzled funds and as a consequence fewer sheets were eventually bought. Added to this, the sheets were in fact second rate. 28 Tariq’s colleagues have already handed out chits of paper to the recipients; these have the recipients’ names and their father’s names written on them. When a name is called out, the recipient goes to the table where Tariq’s assistants match the chit to the official list. S/he then either signs or prints her/his thumb, indicating that they have received their sheets. They then show the ticket to Tariq who is standing on the barge and five sheets of tin are passed down. Older men and women are able to sign their names; not having held a pen in their hands for some time, their signatures are child- like scrawls, but nonetheless, they are able to sign. One woman, offended by the assertion that she may need the inkpad, states, ‘I want the pen. I know how to write my own name’. Some youngsters, collecting on behalf of others, cannot do what the old woman is able to and stamp their thumbs. The difference between the two is indicative of a time not so long ago when it was believed that education would help people, and

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the nation itself, out of poverty: an aspect of the modernisation theory that has lost the sway that it once held. I am not suggesting that everyone used to know how to write their name; in fact the ledgers which recorded the workings of Khonighat show that the majority of labourers put thumb prints on payment sheets and did not sign. This of course does not indicate whether they were literate or not, but what it does reaffirm is that the benefits of modernisation were only for a few and not all. Furthermore, nationally, literacy rates and the numbers of children attending state schools, in particular girls, are on the rise today and this is something that is internationally recognised and praised. 29 Chits and sheets of tin are exchanged, counted and dispensed. There are constant complaints and grumbles from villagers. This seems to be the customary way of behaving towards authority, in the same way that it is Tariq’s to look commanding and official. ‘What is the point of five sheets of tin? You can’t even build a toilet with five. You need eighteen in total to build a house’ someone says. Another retaliates, ‘when you go to a wedding, you don’t expect to eat all the food, do you? So why complain so much?’. I meet a coal labourer in the throng. He has been called back from Boropani by his aged mother to help her with her allotted tin. He earns roughly 300 Taka (£3) per day by lugging coal sacks from the depot area to the river. Each sheet of tin costs 400 Taka (£4). What will you do with the tin? ‘I will strengthen my house with them’ he replies. ‘Half of my mud house was washed away in the flood’. Tariq believes some of the recipients will go on to sell their donations. Despite NAT’s chicanery, what is abundantly clear is that those who have been struck off the first list seem as poor and needy as those whose names are on the second list. By denying aid to those on the first list, Hands Together believes it is taking an explicit moral stance against what it labels ‘corruption’. It expects to wipe clean such ingrained cultural and operational practices and exercise its own ‘organisational culture’ (Lewis 2003: 214). 30 In the classroom youngsters who have not been in one for a while although they are still the right age to be at school, commandeer the chalk and doodle on the blackboard. ‘We don’t go to school’ they say, smiling, exposing iron eroded teeth. ‘Can you read and write?’ ‘No’ they say nervously. ‘We work in Boropani as day labourers. We don’t need to know how to read and write to do that’. They laugh. ‘If you are not careful’ I say, frustrated ‘then soon, you too will be waiting in the rain for tin’. ‘What are we to do, older brother? We have to eat and feed our families. If knowing how to read and write would do that, then of course we would. We are not stupid’. I watch people tend to their freshly cut wounds while arguments over the lists as well as the rain continues unabated. 31 More accusations and counter-accusations of corruption are hurled when a Member from the Union Parishad (council) arrives. His belated appearance in the village coincides with our preparations to leave. All the tin has been distributed. The Member is furious at Tariq for not consulting him before the distribution occurred, implying that as a publicly elected state official, his authority is greater and has been called into question. According to Tariq, the Member was told about it. The man conflates Hands Together and NAT, insinuating that the staff of both organisations have been cheating villagers. He plays on the increasingly generalised views of NGOs in Bangladesh as simply being interested in the material wellbeing of their staff and not the people they are supposed to be helping. This also draws attention to the practical knowledge of the multiplicity of governing agencies that the villagers have. They are willing to accept

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the resources of the NGOs, but when they feel aggrieved, turn to others within the conglomeration that produce state-like effects, even pitting one organisation against another. The Member threatens Tariq, telling him not to set foot in his constituency ever again. One is left thinking that if he is exemplary of the quality of representative democracy in Bangladesh, there is little doubt why the country’s poor suffer so much. 32 On the deck of the barge back to Khonighat, it all seems so futile. By the end of the day, the only sign of relief is on the faces of Tariq and his staff, glad to be leaving the area. The villagers look as disgruntled and unsatisfied as when we arrived, their experience of the various governing agencies leaving them none the wiser as to what to do, or who to turn to next time an unexpected flash flood destroys their homes. Regardless of who or what the state is, and even in its multiple forms, it has abandoned these people, its citizens. The floods will return and simultaneously, a need and a tragedy for the people who live and work in the cross-border coal trade. The multiple governing agents will go through the motions, giving the impression that ‘something is being done’ to alleviate suffering (in the extreme cases) and ‘development’ is being carried forth for those who require it in the everyday sense. The system that causes poverty, alienation, exploitation or marginalisation is not tackled, the status quo remains unquestioned.

Conclusion

33 This paper has attempted to draw out how the state, in its current neoliberal avatar, has been reconfigured from its older, developmental paradigm, which involved large- scale infrastructural change and resource redistribution—aspects which many people continue to expect and associate with the primary workings of states. Using ethnographic evidence, I suggest that the state is now merely one of many other multiple governing agencies that participate in producing ‘state-like effects’ on a territory and its population. Local, national, and international NGOs, all with an assortment of agendas and loyalties, contribute to and produce ‘state-like effects’. Other than for a short time in the post-independence period when there was ideological optimism to the contrary (when state-run installations such as the Khonighat Limestone Mining project existed), the idea of the centralised, sovereign Bangladeshi state from a fabled past being eroded by neoliberalism, is not a complete story. The people of the region have always co-existed alongside local, regional, and global entities. Nonetheless, how effective is the multiple agents’ ability to bring about true and lasting transformations for the people who live and work in the coal trade on the Bangladesh-India border, remains to be seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alam, Shamsul S.M. (1995) The State, Class Formation and Development in Bangladesh, Lantham: University Press of America.

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Aretxaga, Begona (2003) ‘Maddening States’, Annual Review of Anthropology 32, pp. 393-410.

Bayly, C.A. (1983) Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770-1870, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, [2002].

Feldman, Shelly (1997) ‘NGOs and Civil Society: (Un)stated Contradictions’, ANNALS, American Association of Political and Social Science, 554, November, pp. 46-65.

Feldman, Shelly; McCarthy, Florence E. (1983) ‘Purdah and Changing Patterns of Social Control Among Rural Women in Bangladesh’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 45(4), pp. 949-59.

Ferguson, James (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham: Duke University Press.

Ferguson, James; Gupta, Akhil (2005) ‘Spatialising States: Toward an Ethnography of Neo-Liberal Governmentality’, in Jonathan Xavier Inda (ed.), Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 105-31.

Foucault, Michel (2006) ‘Governmentality’ in Aradhana Sharma & Akhil Gupta (ed.), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 131-43.

Hansen, Thomas Blom; Stepputat, Finn (eds.) (2005) Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hussain, Delwar (2013) Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh-India Border, London: Hurst & Co.

Karim, Lamia (2011) Microcredit and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Kaviraj, Sudipta (2000) ‘Modernity and Politics in India’, Daedalus 129(1), pp. 137-62.

Khan, Mushtaq H. (2000) ‘Class, Clientelism and Communal Politics in Contemporary Bangladesh’, in K.N. Panikkar, Terence J. Byres & Utsa Patnaik (eds.), The Making of History: Essays Presented to Irfan Habib, New Delhi: Tulika, pp. 572-606.

Lewis, David (2003) ‘NGOs, Organization Culture, and Institutional Sustainability’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 590, (Rethinking Sustainable Development), pp. 212-26.

Lewis, David (2004) ‘On the Difficulty of Studying ‘Civil Society’: Reflections on NGOs, State and Democracy in Bangladesh’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 38(2), pp. 299-322.

Lewis, David (2010) ‘Exchanges of Professionals between the Public and Non-Governmental Sectors: Life-work Histories from Bangladesh’, Modern Asian Studies, 45(3), pp.1-23.

Ong, Aihwa (2005) ‘Graduated Sovereignty in South East Asia’, in Jonathan Xavier Inda (ed.), Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 81-104.

Rahman, Aminur (1999) Women and Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh: Anthropological Study of the Rhetoric and Realities of Grameen Bank Lending, Colorado: Westview Press.

Roy, Beth (1994) Some Trouble with Cows: Making Sense of Social Conflict, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sharma, Aradhana; Gupta, Akhil (ed.) (2006) The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

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Sobhan, Rehman (1982) The Crisis of External Dependence: the Political Economy of Foreign Aid to Bangladesh, London: Zed Press.

Sobhan, Rehman (1997) ‘The Political Economy of Micro Credit’, in Geof Wood & Iffath Sharif (eds.), Who Needs Credit? Poverty and Finance in Bangladesh, London: Zed Books, pp. 131-41.

Taylor, Marcus (2009) ‘The Contradictions and Transformations of Neoliberalism in Latin America: From Structural Adjustment to ‘Empowering the Poor’’, in Laura Macdonald & Arne Ruckert (eds.), Post Neoliberalism in the Americas, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 21-36. van Schendel, Willem (2009) A History of Bangladesh, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

White, Sarah (1992) Arguing with the Crocodile: Gender and Class in Bangladesh, London: Zed Books.

Wood, Geof (1997) ‘States Without Citizens: The Problem of the Franchise State’, in David Hulme & David Edwards (eds.), NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort ?, London: Macmillan Press, pp. 79-92.

NOTES

1. See also Hansen & Stepputat (2005). 2. To protect informants, this and other names are all pseudonyms. 3. Other factors such as a massive cyclone, global financial meltdown due to the Oil crisis, the War of Independence and the withdrawal of Pakistani administrators contributed to this too. 4. Before 1971, foreign aid to East Pakistan amounted to $4 per person. By the mid 1970s it tripled, continuing to rise during the years of military rule until it reached an all time high of $20 per Bangladeshi in 1990 (van Schendel 2009: 220). When the first Five Year Plan of the new country was published in 1973, it was projected that 39% of the total development investment would be made by foreign aid and by 1978, dependence on foreign aid would decrease to 27%. However the Two Year Plan (1977-1979) found that 72% of total developmental investments came from foreign sources.

During the Third Five Year Plan (1985-1990), the amount increased to 80%. Foreign aid increased to $130 million during the fiscal years 1985-1986 (Alam 1996: 93). 5. For more information about the Project, see Hussain 2013. 6. Interview by author, Boropani, 29 April 2009. 7. I am using a pseudonym for both NGOs to protect the identities of people 8. The region has recently become a site for much development work. The British Department for International Development, amongst other foreign countries, is funding a number of community-based organisations who all work in the wetlands. 9. Lewis (2010) also finds that the boundaries between government, business, and civil society are extremely ambiguous but nonetheless they continue to be constructed and maintained by the agents themselves, as well as by those on the receiving end of their resources and services. 10. See Feldman and E. McCarthy (1983) for further discussion.

ABSTRACTS

By focusing on a remote part of the Bangladesh-India border, this paper seeks to understand how the state has been reconfigured from its older, developmental paradigm, involving large-scale infrastructural change and resource redistribution, to its contemporary NGO-driven avatar. The paper suggests that the state today is merely one of multiple governing agencies that participate

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in producing ‘state-like effects’ on a territory and its population. Sometimes these agencies are in competition; often they work alongside one another. NGOs are agencies of this kind and are a major focus of this paper. In light of this, the idea of a sovereign Bangladeshi state which is apparently being eroded by neoliberalism, is not a complete picture. Other than a particular moment in the post-colonial period where there was optimism that the contrary would be achieved, sovereignty has in fact always been a mediated, fragmented affair in the borderlands as well as in Bangladesh as a whole.

INDEX

Keywords: border, state, NGO, development, corruption

AUTHOR

DELWAR HUSSAIN

Chancellor’s Fellow in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh

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Art of Bangladesh: the Changing Role of Tradition, Search for Identity and Globalization

Lala Rukh Selim

Introduction

1 The art of Bangladesh embodies the social and political changes that have transformed the country/region through history. What was once a united state of Bengal is now divided into two parts, the sovereign country of Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India. The predominant religion in Bangladesh is Islam and that of West Bengal is Hinduism. Throughout history, ideas and identifications of certain elements of culture as ‘tradition’ have played an important role in the construction of notions of identity in this region, where multiple cultures continue to meet. The celebrated pedagogue, writer and artist K. G. Subramanyan (1987: 7) terms as ‘tradition’ the continuity structure into which each man is born. Geeta Kapur (2000) opines that ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in third world debates serve as symbols within the cultural disputes of decolonization. The term tradition, as used to refer to India and the third world, is not a disinterested legacy. In India (and Bangladesh) in recent years the term was brought into play in the struggle by nineteenth century nationalism and used in the process of decolonization to embody the power of resistance as an oppositional category. Thus, Kapur (2000: 267-268) suggests, tradition is empowered to transform routinely transmitted materials from the past into charged forms that can claim contemporary and radical effect. In this sense, the concept of tradition is inseparable from the idea and experience of modernity. This view is distinct from the more usual outlook in which tradition and modernity are opposed, and it also ties both concepts into a postmodern framework and places them within the political context of the modern nation-state. In other words, modernity itself promotes tradition and tradition does not exist outside of modernity (Thompson 2006: 3-4). The impact of the politics of identity formed through the selection and invention of tradition is evident in the art of

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Bangladesh. Identities have been formed mostly in the face of political, economic and cultural challenges (Gupta & Ferguson 1992: 8), and in the current postmodern state, globalization has affected a transnational public sphere where the concept of locality has changed. Identity is not bound to space as it was in the modern era. The politics of identity, solidarity and cultural difference thus have to be rethought (Gupta & Ferguson 1992: 9). This reconceptualization of space also affects the art of Bangladesh. Within this new context the resolution of identity becomes more problematic. The past practice of facile adoption of traditional signifiers no longer holds. National issues no longer figure only in the national context or for a national viewership; they are presented on a global platform. The language and concerns that dominate the global art scene and the legibility of the artwork are important considerations for artists for whom the global art world has become more accessible. International political, economic, environmental and social concerns intimately connect the globalized world and come to feature in the works of Bangladeshi artists. ‘Traditions’ are brought into use more as marks of identification than as politically charged symbols, subtly inflected for the global art world which is eager to promote pluralism and difference.

2 Historically, the society, culture and art of Bengal have been syncretic, bringing together ideas that seem irreconcilable while their aesthetic manifestations have retained identifiable local characteristics. Over the last two millennia Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity have been practised in Bengal and many different peoples have contributed to the area’s complex aesthetic heritage. The synthesis of these different influences has contributed to the hybrid culture of Bengal (Blurton 2006: 7-19, Roy 1993: 477-478, Eaton 1984: 23-36, Haque 1980: 1-14, Skelton 1979: 15-21). Artists have drawn on different aspects of traditions at different times in attempts to reflect and create new identities (Rushdie 1991: 67-68). Identity and nationalism are charged issues in the colonial and post-colonial society of Bangladesh. Currently the ‘contemporary’ in art and ‘globalization’ has come to feature in the discourse of the Bangladesh art world as it reaches out to the global sphere. This paper describes these changes through time.

Art of Bengal under British rule

3 By the time the subcontinent became part of the British Empire, traditional arts1 had lost the appreciation of the local intelligentsia (Guha-Thakurta 2007: 147-153). Western art had first made its way into the Mughal court in the sixteenth century, and by the next century painters were incorporating elements from Mannerist art. But the ambitious art policy of the British Raj had much to do with the rapid spread of academic art in colonial India (Mitter 1994: 12, Narzary 1993: 44-47). According to Mitter, ‘[…] its [European art’s] introduction to the Raj was part of a comprehensive package that sought to reproduce the cultural values of the West’ (Mitter 1994: 12). The British established art schools to train drawing masters, draftsmen, modellers, surveyors and engravers; providing new kinds of vocational training (Guha-Thakurta 2007: 143, Mitter 1994: 30-31).

4 An art school was founded in Kolkata in 1854 with this goal in view. Elite dominance was pronounced at the school, where the majority of the students belonged to the bhadralok (gentry) castes, though some students from the hereditary artist castes did initially join (Mitter 1994: 55). This and other art schools were established on the model

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of the Central School of Industrial Art at South Kensington to teach ‘applied art’ and not ‘fine art’ as imparted by the Royal Academy. There were ingrained anomalies in the syllabus due to confusion in Britain itself regarding art education, particularly in the policy for India. The enthusiasm for academic naturalism amongst teachers and pupils, and the taste for academic art, which had gradually grown in the subcontinent, transformed the art schools into academies (Mitter 1994: 29-60). Because English education flourished in Kolkata, those who most profited from the new opportunities provided by art education were the intelligentsia. Hardly any decorative artists graduated while there were many academic ones (Mitter 1994: 55). The concept of the artist as an individual, as opposed to a link in a chain of unbroken traditions, was also created during the colonial era (Mitter 1994: 13). 5 With the rise of nationalism in Bengal came an assertion of ownership and authority over Indian art in opposition to the construction of Western scholars. This authority claimed that Indian traditions could be best understood by Indians. The proponents situated themselves within a dominant Western field of practice and knowledge, of art and art history, demarcating a separate space from which the authors addressed a Bengali readership and proffered an ‘indigenous’ point of view. The first such Bengali text on Indian art history is Shyamacharan Srimani’s Suksa Shilper Utpatti o Aryajatir Shilpa-chaturi [The Rise of the Fine Arts and the Artistic Skills of the Aryans] (1874) (Guha-Thakurta 2007: 140-152). In the 1900s a new group of orientalist writers set out to re-appropriate the study of Indian art from earlier Western scholarship, ‘to recover its ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ history.’ Nationalist thought was based on the central divide between the material achievements of the West and the spiritual/transcendental wisdom of the East, a heuristic distinction most powerfully invoked in the nation’s art (Guha-Thakurta 2007: 155). This saw the growth of the Bengal School, under the guidance of Abanindranath Tagore, which produced modern ‘Indian style’ paintings, stamped with the romantic idealistic values that the orientalists recognized as the essence of ancient Indian art (Guha-Thakurta 2007: 158). Their challenge to Western mimesis would ‘exercise a very far-reaching influence on the future of Indian art’ (Mitter 1994: 309). 6 Indian art history, as formulated by Western scholars and taken up by local scholars, looked to an ancient classical past for its roots and nourishment. The art produced locally in the present seemed crude and naïve to a colonized intelligentsia steeped in ideas of India’s glorious past and their desire to match westernized models of artistic refinement. Only the Hindu period of Indian history was considered of consequence by Abanindranath, though Mughal, Pahari and provincial miniature paintings were central to the style of the Bengal School.2 The secular court painting traditions of these schools were accommodated within a hieratic pattern of art history that placed the religious over the secular. Abanindranath’s construct of the ‘idealistic’ character of Indian art was such that the secular court painting traditions of Mughal or Pahari schools could not be placed on the same level as the religious genres of Buddhist and Hindu art (Guha-Thakurta 2007: 165). A nationalist image of a ‘homogenous Hindu past’ was by implication exclusive because in India, with its diverse mix of classes, languages, religions, and regions, no community can claim an exclusive inheritance. In Bengal, the population had absorbed many Muslim social and cultural practices during long periods of Muslim rule (Mitter 1994: 236-239).3

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7 By the time of the partition of India in 1947 the spiritualism of the Bengal School had lost its grip. The social and political movements of the 1940s inspired a sense of social responsibility in artists from which, according to some art theorists, grew the first modern trends in art (Hossain 2007: 301). Artists were struggling to reconcile local context and identify and insert what they imagined as traditions within the aesthetic framework of Western ideas and a plethora of Western art movements to which they were exposed (Bhattacharya 1994: 209-226).

Partition, the Language Movement and the art establishment

8 The independence of the subcontinent from British rule in 1947 was followed by the partition of the country into two separate states, India and Pakistan, based on the Two Nation Theory (Rashid 2007: 76). Bengal was divided and its eastern part became East Pakistan which, together with West Pakistan, many hundreds of miles to the west, constituted a separate homeland for Muslims. West Bengal became a state of the Indian federation. Due to the geographical distance between the two halves of Pakistan and differences in culture, the literature and arts of East Pakistan developed independently. The discriminatory and inequitable attitude of the Pakistani rulers led to the beginning of the struggle for political and cultural rights almost simultaneously with the birth of Pakistan. Thus, the inhabitants of East Pakistan attempted to embody what was imagined as indigenous traditions in the arts in resistance to the communal cultural concept of Pakistan as a state based on religion (Mansur 2007: 39).

9 Several of the Muslim teachers of the Calcutta Art School opted to move to East Pakistan. Among them Zainul Abedin (1914-1976) and Safiuddin Ahmed (1922-2012) were already recognized artists in India. A university had already been established in Dhaka (in 1921) in the interest of the people of this region: this created an environment for education and cultural growth (Hossain 2007: 302). Quamrul Hassan (1921-1988), who had been a student of the Calcutta Art School, also moved to Dhaka in 1948. The presence of these three in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, led to the founding of an art institute in Dhaka in 1948. The excitement of a new nation again called forth the spirit of nationalism and the need for building a separate Pakistani ‘identity’ for the nation from the undivided past. Thus, the first exhibition, organized to encourage the Pakistani rulers to establish an art school in Dhaka, was a series of posters portraying the conquest of India by Muslims and the birth of Pakistan, held on 14 August 1948, Pakistan Day (Selim 1998: 7). It was an attempt to establish a Muslim identity to bridge the vast geographical and cultural divide that separated East and West Pakistan. The strategy was successful and an art institute was established in Dhaka along the lines of the Calcutta Art School, where the entire founding faculty had been teachers. Institution building was an important activity as Dhaka had no art schools, galleries or viewers (Islam 2000: 16). 10 The euphoria of independence had hardly subsided when the Language Movement began in East Pakistan. There were many dissenting ideas prior to Partition about the identity of the Bengali Muslim (Anisuzzaman 1993: 91-96). The Pakistan government pronounced in 1948 that Urdu would be the only state language of Pakistan despite the fact that the majority of the population was Bengali speaking. This shattered the vision of a unified Pakistan for the Bengalis. The Language Movement brought the language

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and cultural heritage of the Bengali people to the forefront and led to the realization that religion could not supplant culture (Umar 1967: 1-12). An inclusive, common, secular Bengali culture was imagined by Bengalis struggling for their language and cultural autonomy, ultimately leading to conceptualizing the nation state. As Abdul Huq4 notes: ‘The combination of the Muslim culture and the culture of the minorities constitute the total culture of East Pakistan...’ and ‘The culture we shall develop will be based on our nationhood; its religious characteristics may not become dominant’ (Anisuzzaman 1993: 104). 11 In 1952 people died for the Language Movement, which gradually expanded to become the movement for autonomy and finally, for liberation. West Pakistan had supplanted the British as colonial oppressors and resistance became a powerful unifying force for Bengalis and other groups that occupied the former East Pakistan. Artists were integrated into the slowly expanding group of intelligentsia of Dhaka and became vocal against the injustices of Pakistani rulers. This was perhaps the beginning of the long involvement of artists with political struggles in Bangladesh.

The growth of an art movement

12 Against this backdrop, Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed, Quamrul Hassan, and S. M. Sultan (1923-1994), became the mainstay of the art movement which began to develop in what was then East Pakistan. Their art addressed the environment and society within which they were situated. They did not merely adopt the formal language of modernism but made a contextual use of modern language. To borrow from R. Siva Kumar (2002: 9) when he speaks of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and K. G. Subramanyan: They understood modernism not as a stylistic shift but as a call for rethinking the larger issues of cultural practice, and saw cultural identity not as something complete and done with but as something that ought to be reconstructed and realized anew with each change in context. 13 Abedin, the most influential artist of ‘East Pakistan’, founder of the Institute of Fine Art, and the Folk Art Museum, was committed to creating an environment conducive for art. Though he was highly skilled in academic techniques, his work showed a synthesis of a variety of methods. The depiction of rural Bengal in the paintings of Mukul Dey and Ramendranath inspired him. The academic style had lost the enthusiasm of the critics in the thirties and forties. Abedin himself had, from his student days, favoured watercolour and brush over oil paint and canvas (Hossain 2007: 298). At the end of the thirties the academic art schools showed signs of change and influences of modern European movements were being felt. Global eclecticism was a predominant feature of these movements in their early states and many Indian artists who had gone to Europe came back with a new enthusiasm for local arts (Subramanyan 1987: 29-30).

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Figure 1: Zainul Abedin, Famine Sketch-13, brush and ink on paper, 1943.

Courtesy of Art and Artists of Bangladesh, multimedia cd published by Rakhal Balak, Dhaka, 2008.

14 The Famine series of 1943 brought Abedin unprecedented fame and this was probably why some of the characteristics of the series remained permanent features in his work (Figure 1). Lines dominated even when he used colours, and humanity and its struggle for survival became prime subjects (Hossain 2007: 301-302).5 In 1951 Abedin went to the Slade School of Fine Art in the UK and visited museums and galleries in Europe. After returning in 1952 he turned to ‘folk art’6 for inspiration. Both global eclecticism and the Language Movement with its associated ‘indigenism’ probably had a part to play in this. Abedin drew on the simplification of forms, primary colours and ornamental lines of folk art. For example, he appropriated the form of pinched terracotta figures for his paintings such as Painyar Ma (Painya’s Mother) of 1953. The tradition that was called into use had its roots in the remote past before the religions in their present forms had evolved, presenting an undivided Bengali identity. It was a subaltern identity, rooted in agrarian Bengal. In 1969 when the struggle for autonomy was at its peak he painted Nabanna (Harvest) in the form of a horizontal scroll, depicting how the life of plenty was destroyed by colonial oppression. Scroll painting, as a method of wandering minstrels narrating tales, is an ancient form in Bengal. The stories are adapted for Hindu and Muslim audiences as they are performed for both. The painters have both Hindu and Muslim names, which they use according to circumstances (Blurton 2006: 21). Abedin thus referred to the religious tolerance of rural Bengal.

15 Indeginism is also observable in the work of Quamrul Hassan who was a disciple of Gurusaday Dutt7 and called himself ‘patua’ (an artist-minstrel who painted narrative scrolls) to identify himself personally with tradition. He was tremendously inspired by the Bratachari movement, established in 1932 by Gurusaday Dutt with a view to consolidating the richness of Bengali heritage against colonialism (Bhattacharya &

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Ghosh 2004: 467, Huq 2007: 313). Jamini Roy and to some extent Nandalal’s painting series done for the Haripura Congress (1937) inspired Quamrul Hassan. Both were based on folk art. This is why when in the fifties Abedin suggested that he turn to folk art as a source, Jamini Roy and pata (painted scroll) painting were his ideals. His famous Tin Kanya (Three Women) (Figure 2) of 1955 is an example of this ideal (Huq 2007: 313-314). He also borrowed elements of drawing from Picasso’s Cubism and the colour perspective of Matisse, thus synthesizing folk and modern artistic languages (Huq 2007: 314-315). Jamini Roy’s influence on the Indian art scene is discussed by Subramanyan (1987). ‘Primitivism’ which found acceptance and became fashionable in Europe, the influence of artefacts from Africa on Picasso and other influential artists drawing influence from folk art forms of Europe and South Asia drew Indian artists to Jamini Roy’s stylistic features. This was widespread in the forties in combination with the linear mannerism of post-Cubist Picasso (1987: 34-37). However, the prolific and extremely diverse oeuvre of Hassan branched out in many different directions, defying restrictions of conventions or styles. The adoption of ‘primitivism’ via folk art may be explained with its acceptance in Europe, and as a solution to the problem of integrating modern language into a national, political context.

Figure 2: Quamrul Hassan, Three Women - 1, oil on masonite board, 1955.

Courtesy of Art and Artists of Bangladesh, multimedia cd published by Rakhal Balak, Dhaka, 2008.

16 Safiuddin Ahmed adopted simplified abstract formal language after his early representative phase. His work was also transformed after the Language Movement. The people of Bangladesh, boats, water and water borne life appear in his work (Figure 3). Brought up in his ancestral home in Kolkata, his first experience of flood in Bangladesh moved him profoundly. From the mid-fifties the people of Bangladesh appear in Safiuddin’s drawings showing distinctively Bengali characteristics in contrast

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to his earlier work which focused on the Santals, an indigenous group of Bengal (Som 2007: 329). His subject included the political struggle of Bengalis and rural life without the stylistic accompaniment characteristic of folk art, but he also focused on rural life and working people in the nationalizing discourse.

Figure 3: Safiuddin Ahmed, Sound of Water, aquatint, soft ground, mezzotint and deep etch, 1985.

Courtesy of Art and Artists of Bangladesh, multimedia cd published by Rakhal Balak, Dhaka, 2008.

The impact of modernism

17 The works of the four pioneers of modern art in former East Pakistan preserved links to undivided India and a continuity with it through the turmoil of the emergence of shifting ideas of new national and cultural identities, particularly manifest after the Language Movement.8 A break appears with the generation of artists who were the early students of the art institution in Dhaka, quite a number of whom went to Europe, and the USA to study. The newly independent nation made connections with the world and a window to the West suddenly opened for them. They wanted to be part of the international scene of modern art which had been closed to them by the training in the art institute in Dhaka which followed the methods of the Calcutta Art School. Most of them returned to East Pakistan in the second half of the fifties. They ingested Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and a host of other movements of modern Western art; these influences are observable in their work. Semi-abstraction and non- representational abstraction reigned. Concerns about indigenism were washed away in the powerful tide of internationalism (Mansur 2007: 40-41). Most of these artists’ works did not reflect an interest in the wider issues of society or analysis of art language. They were individuals, the elitism of their art separating them from societal concerns.

18 Mohammad Kibria (1929-2011), Aminul Islam (1931-2011), Abdur Razzaque (1932-2005), Debdas Chakraborty (1933-2008), Abdul Baset (1935-2002) and many other painters settled for complete abstraction (Figure 4). Hamidur Rahman (1928-1988) and Murtaja Baseer’s (b. 1932) paintings veered between the abstract and the figurative. The painter and tapestry artist Rashid Choudhury (1932-1986), the painter and famed book designer Qayyum Chowdhury (b. 1934), and the sculptor Novera Ahmed (b. c1930) tried to unite modernism and folk art formally (Mansur 2007: 41, Selim 2007: 134). For many viewers, abstract compositions were synonymous with modern art (Islam 1999: 19). Jahangir

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states that ‘It is a movement by the artists and for the artists. As a movement it does touch the fringe of society, not cuts down deep into it.’ Defending modernism, he goes on to say that training in viewing art in society was still rooted to English conventions of visual realism which is why ‘conventional spectators’ are unable to appreciate modern painting (Jahangir 1974: 2-3).

Figure 4: Mohammad Kibria, Untitled-32, oil on canvas, 2001.

Courtesy of Art and Artists of Bangladesh, multimedia cd published by Rakhal Balak, Dhaka, 2008.

19 According to Islam (1999: 20-21), these painters took to abstraction because it most clearly represented their artistic, emotional, and intellectual understanding of their art. Social compulsion was an added incentive as abstraction seemed consistent with the Islamic aversion to figuration. Azim notes that the rapid spread of Western art movements was part of the colonial legacy where colonial education led to the ‘feeling of inferiority’ in the colonized nation and it accepted everything the colonizer offered as the best. Its weakness was that it gave precedence to the product over its socio- economic context and completely ignored its philosophical underpinnings. Thus the movement was limited to an external practice of a new form (Azim 2000: 100-101).

20 These analyses of writers on modernism/abstraction in Bangladesh, and the almost compulsive need to contextualise and explain it, is a continuing discourse. The ‘public’ and its distance from the work enter the discourse. Modernism/abstraction is a problematic but unavoidable issue and remains unresolved and contested. The notion of the ‘universal’ language of modernism is seen by some artists of the younger generation as an imported category, not relevant to the context, as Bangladesh itself is not economically ‘modern’. The somewhat noncommittal remarks of Mansur (2007: 51) hint at this anomaly as he writes:

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In the sixties, all leading artists of the fifties, apart from a few, turned to pure abstract style and the practice of art became merely creating an abstract composition on the pictorial surface. Instead of subject and message, proficiency in the medium and cleverness of composition became more of a consideration for the artist. 21 By implication, abstraction is devoid of conviction and involvement, and accused of mere cleverness of composition. The popular grounding of taste in academic art is almost an apology for its distance from the ‘public’.

22 However, it is notable that in the 1950s many of the intelligentsia and youth gravitated towards progressive, secular politics, and leading artists were active in socio-political movements. As a result, the first stage of many of these artists’ productions evinced political commitment, opinion against social inequity and injustice, and compassion for the poor (Mansur 2007: 40). Many artists of this period went on to become important figures in the art world (Mansur 2007: 50). The fifties saw the beginning of art criticism, a sympathetic media, the growth of an art viewing public and professionalism in artists (Islam 1999: 19-20). The importance of this second generation of artists was significant; they brought about new readings of modernism, which altered the art world and its values.

The Liberation War and after

23 The birth of Bangladesh brought with it the hope for a secular, democratic, socialist country where Bengali culture would flourish. Art education institutions were established in Chittagong, Rajshahi and Khulna. State patronage of the arts was introduced through the establishment of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Artists got the opportunity to travel and see art in foreign countries and participate in international exhibitions; the new country built relations with the world in art and education. Contacts grew not only with Western art capitals but with India, Japan and China, bringing further changes in the art world. The Liberation War provided artists with a fitting subject and imbued figurative representation with new vigour. Visual arts during the autocratic rule of the Pakistan army from the late fifties were generally confined to the non-figurative. The war renewed in artists the search for inspiration from Bengali cultural heritage, a new urge to communicate with the people and efforts to incorporate social and political comments in their work. Vitality surged through the art world with a larger number of artists and a greater variety of media. However, abstraction remained a steadfast form although representation did make a revival (Mansur 1999: 31-32, 2007: 53-54).

24 S. M. Sultan and Shahabuddin are two artists who dealt with the problem of contextualizing Bangladesh in their art, although they did so in different ways. Though Sultan was roughly contemporary with the other pioneers of Bangladeshi modernism, he came to feature on the art scene much later. He travelled widely after Partition in Pakistan, Europe and the USA, finally returning to Narail, his village in Jessore, to live a bohemian life. Sultan selected the people of rural Bengal as his subject but rendered them in a powerfully exaggerated and idealized manner to symbolize the vitality of peasant life (Figure 5). His paintings never include anything produced by modern technology, which, according to him are imported elements. Sultan asserted that the themes of his paintings symbolize the energy and labour of Bangladeshi peasants’

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battle with the soil. He was eloquent about the labour of the peasants on which the region had depended for thousands of years (Akand 2007: 342).

Figure 5: S. M. Sultan, First Plantation, oil on canvas, 1975.

Courtesy of Art and Artists of Bangladesh, multimedia cd published by Rakhal Balak, Dhaka, 2008.

25 According to Mansur, Sultan’s lines and application of colour contain ‘folk’ coarseness and an apparent amateurishness. Recurrent subject matter in the manner of folk art, his compositions and handling of materials give his paintings a proximity to self-taught proficiency which conflicts with the discipline and grammar of art education. He also refers to Sultan’s incomplete art education at the Calcutta Art School (2007: 38). Mansur remarks on the lines in Sultan’s paintings as being closer to something like urban ‘naïve’ art as seen in Rickshaw paintings (Akand 2007: 345).

26 But Sultan was a knowledgeable, well-travelled man and it is difficult to believe that the formal character of his work was anything but dictated by his own choice, not due to a deficiency in art training. This may be another way that Sultan denied importing ‘modern technology’ into his art, by using a local popular idiom. It is significant that Sultan began to paint in the seventies, after Bangladesh was born. After his return to his village in Narail in 1953, he appeared as an artist in the upper echelons of society of Dhaka in 1975 and in 1976 the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy organized a solo exhibition of his work. He refuted modernism and ‘universal’ values in his work as in his life. 27 Shahabuddin Ahmed (b. 1950) has carved an influential place for himself in the art world of Bangladesh. According to Mitter, he is a remarkable artist produced by the War of Liberation. He joined the armed struggle for independence and the experience deeply affected his work. In 1979 he began to explore the potential of the human form as recalled from his war experience (Figure 6). His male figures in motion effectively

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capture the drama of the war (2001: 219). Shahabuddin’s reality is built on Western concerns of anatomy and light and shade, his drawing and colours are realistic and his subject is handled with forceful brushwork. Thus Shahabuddin became ‘modern’ without denying reality (Mansur 2007: 60). The dramatic, intense and blurred brushwork of his paintings recalls Bacon’s style but his work has none of Bacon’s horrific connotations. He used the techniques of ‘Western’ art for a ‘national’ subject.

Figure 6: Shahabuddin Ahmed, Bangladesh, oil on canvas, 1997.

Courtesy of Art and Artists of Bangladesh, multimedia cd published by Rakhal Balak, Dhaka, 2008.

The eighties and after

28 The enthusiasm of the early 1970s was dispelled with the political and economic crises that racked the new nation. The killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975 and the prolonged military dictatorship that followed shattered the dreams of liberation; religion again came to feature strongly in politics. In 1975 Major-General Ziaur Rahman, the founder of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), assumed power through a coup and made constitutional amendments that facilitated the political rehabilitation of elements that had collaborated with the Pakistani forces and committed crimes against humanity during the War of Liberation, namely the Jama’at- e-Islami, the largest Islamist party in Bangladesh. In 1988 Ershad’s pseudo-military government declared Islam the state religion of Bangladesh amidst protests from the intelligentsia, further promoting ‘communal politics’. Ershad was forced from power in a massive movement for democracy. The movement, raging through the eighties, had artists actively participating as they had in all political movements.

29 In the elections of 1991, the BNP came to power. Jama’at leaders became ministers in the two BNP led governments in 1991 and 2001. The current government, led by the Bangladesh Awami League, set up the International Crimes Tribunal to try suspected criminals from the War of Liberation in 1971.9 Jama’at leaders have been convicted of crimes by the tribunal. Online activists initiated a movement demanding capital punishment of the offenders in February 2013, to which a large number of artists and art students gave their full support. ‘Democracy’ did not do away with corruption and

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violence in society, however. The optimism born of struggle, victory and freedom was destroyed. Cynicism and mistrust in institutions began to emerge. NGOs began to flourish, promoting the agenda of foreign donor agencies. Both major political parties influenced by donors such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, pursued neo-liberal policies. 30 Seen against this backdrop, abstraction, always present, regained prominence in art. Dictatorship, repression, corruption and violence also provoked direct political statements as well as satire and innuendoes (Mansur 2007: 61-62). Anti-imperialist and leftist concerns were manifested by some. A larger number of women artists established themselves in the art world showing feminist concerns and new representations of women (Figure 7). But the clear connection that could be discerned between art, politics and tradition through the contestation of ‘cultural autonomy’ and nation building dispersed after the nation was realized.

Figure 7: Tyeba Begum Lipi, I Wed Myself, video art, double channel projection, 2010.

Courtesy of Tyeba Begum Lipi

31 While after partition, artists had appropriated formal elements from folk art, some artists now made a subtler attempt to contextualize tradition. Kapur (2000: 279) writes about modernism in the third world: Rather than distancing alternative civilizations into objects to be processed by western subjectivity, the nationalist intelligentsia makes some genuinely anxious and responsible appropriations within their own societies. If, then, in the postcolonial ethos all third-world texts appear to be national allegories, all national allegories attempt to restore conceptual wholeness to lost communities through the process of decodifying precisely the canonical images of an inherited tradition. 32 She goes on to note that appropriated tradition may resemble the eclecticism that the contemporary Western imagination encourages, but it is without the extremity of otherness that produces forms alienated from function and meaning, thus presenting a tradition in use in third-world societies as an effective way of politicizing culture

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(Kapur 2000: 279-280). In Bangladesh it has always been a question of which traditions to identify with and appropriate.

33 In 1981 the Asian Art Biennale was organized in Dhaka, connecting it to the international art world. Japanese artists introduced trends that transformed the art world of the seventies. With the growth of information technology, the expansion of public media and international trade, artists began to express themselves in a variety of media. The visual influence of conceptual art such as installations, performances, videos and photography, was evident. Globalization and the rapid exchange made possible by the internet made the flow of information instantaneous. Both young and well established artists ventured into this new ‘space’. Scattered efforts are seen in the nineties but in the 21st century they become more concerted. In the early years of the 21st century the Asian Art Biennale permitted local artists to participate with projects not limited to two and three-dimensional artworks. Foreign travel and networks with foreign organizations fed into this globalizing trend, leading to workshops and residencies with foreign and local artists working together. 34 Harris (2011: § 1) notes that the term ‘globalization’ has entered the art world. Though the term denotes forces that have shaped societies and civilizations across the globe, it originated in the ‘West’ and has achieved dominance beyond Europe and the USA partly through Western colonial and imperial conquest. Has ‘globalization’ produced some radical homogenization in life that reduces human experiences and values and could this be a common judgement on global art? One of the questions posed is, whether there has developed: [...] a formulaic style of painting or video-installation produced by artists endlessly crossing continents to exhibit at art biennales, attempting to please the same group of jet-setting ... international curators or New York based dealers now operating out of Beijing or Shanghai? (Harris 2011: § 4). 35 Kapur (2000: 281) holds that though postmodernism seems to accommodate otherness more than ever in the history of capitalist culture, it goes through a process of such differentiation, by which questions of identity are discarded along with the normative function of culture, and the necessity of choice. Does this ‘free’ global space make artists conscious of certain entry requirements? According to Thornton (2009: xi), although the global art space of the contemporary world is perhaps more polycentric than ever before, it is still dominated by the art clusters in London, New York, Los Angeles and Berlin.

36 The way to try and connect to this art world for artists from developing nations like Bangladesh is often dictated by what is in demand in the ‘contemporary’ art world.10 We have seen several overtures to reach this global art space in the recent past, such as the participation in the Venice Biennales in 2011 and 2013 and the visit of curators from Tate Modern in London in 2011. In 2012 an Art Summit was held in Dhaka where curators from important international institutions were present. The next Dhaka Art Summit is to be held in 2014 with artists participating from across South Asia.11 This has as much to do with the Western and global art world’s attempt to be polycentric and pluralistic as it is the desire of the Bangladeshi art world to turn global. At its heart is a contradiction between the Western art world’s simultaneous economic power and its loss of cultural primacy due to post-modernism (Owens 1994: 591-592). Owens (1994: 592) states: ‘[...] the more dispiriting effects of our culture’s recent loss of mastery anticipates both the melancholia and the eclecticism that pervade current cultural production-

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not to mention its much touted pluralism. Pluralism, however, reduces us to being an other among others; it is not a recognition, but a reduction to difference to absolute indifference, equivalence, interchangeability [...]. What is at stake, then, is not only the hegemony of Western Culture, but also (our sense of) our identity as a culture.’ 37 Does a similar contradiction apply to the culture and art of ‘developing’ nations like Bangladesh, where gaining access to a plural world often means reduction to equivalence, interchangeability, becoming part of a homogenous global culture? Kapur suggests that as international art exhibitions become overworked ground for identity made easy, ‘primitivism’ may be a definitional core of a new internationalism, adopted by third world artists to enter the international art arena. ‘Primitivism’ is a kind of masquerade, a simulation which may serve to surmount the difficulty of entering the citadels of white culture, and simulation is likely to become a simulacrum, ‘[...] a copy of that which is non-existent—what orientalism or primitivism are about: copies of models of that which does not exist’ (Kapur 2000: 328). In the context of present Bangladeshi art, ‘primitivism’ or ‘identity’ is appropriated more extensively from urban folk or popular art such as rickshaw painting, cinema banners, cheap prints of religious pictures (Figure 8), or even the ‘exotic’ forms of objects in daily use (Figure 9).

Figure 8: Masum Chisty, Shiva Sitting with My Head, digitally manipulated photograph, 2011.

Courtesy of Masum Chisty

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Figure 9: Dhali Al Mamoon, Biography of Leaves, installation, 2003.

Courtesy of Dhali Al Mamoon

38 Since the 1990s Dhaka has developed an art market and galleries with the associated circuit of curators, critics, collectors and artists. The state-run Shilpakala Academy for the promotion of arts has steadily lost steam as the free market economy has gained ground. Private entrepreneurs, owners of industries, and multinational companies have come to figure strongly in the local art world, a miniature version of the global one. Art and culture are tools of power and control. The powerful in the world of culture gain access and protection. Akash (2005: 2-4) notes that within the local context of predatory capitalism this access and control is essential to the big loan defaulters who are the largest predatory capitalists of Bangladesh, depending on the patronage of the government and political parties. The art world is spun into the web of these patrons. They spend a pittance of their vast resources to ensure social and political acceptance and voices in the intelligentsia who will raise an outcry if any government dares to challenge them. Their patronage ensures the homage of artists. They hold the strings of power as patrons of the organizations and those who regulate them manipulate the window into the global art world.

Conclusion

39 The above discussion is an attempt to look at the art of Bangladesh within the larger context of its history of transformation and fragmentation. It follows historical events, which have created traditions, brought changes to imagined ones, or denied them as well as re-evaluating what they signify. The notion of tradition has played an important role in art; sometimes it has been the catalyst that has brought about a reversal of ideas of identity. Traditions, their making, unmaking, and re-making, have been constantly

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debated throughout the history of the region/nation. The fundamental principles of state policy of Bangladesh have also been revised to a point where they almost seem to backtrack. The fragmentation of identities at different junctures of history has led to the formulation and assumption of new identities and the intelligentsia, of which artists are a part, have played a significant role in this activity. Art has reflected major political changes: the quest for a ‘lost’ past by the Bengal School; the assumption of Muslim identity after the birth of Pakistan; the reclamation of Bengali heritage in the face of Pakistani hegemony engendered by the Language Movement, with the parallel introduction and assimilation of ‘modern’ art with its ‘universal’ values and the encounter with the ‘West’; the War of Liberation and the time of optimism when the nation renewed its faith in ‘Bengali heritage’ and the confusion and disappointments that followed which led to newer engagements with heritage. The developing characteristics of the Bangladeshi art world are studied as it expands towards the global, and signifiers of ‘tradition’ are hybridized to give Bangladeshi art a distinctive identity in a plural world. This paper explores how and why ‘traditions’ continue to play an active role in Bangladeshi art, rejuvenating and nourishing the practice of contemporary ‘fine’ artists trying to make a mark in a globalized world.

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Rashid, Harun-or- (2007) ‘Stages of State Formulation: c. Colonial Period’, in Emajuddin Ahmed & Harun-or-Rashid (eds.), Cultural Survey of Bangladesh Series-3: State and Culture, Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, pp. 65-80.

Roy, Niharranjan (1993) Bangalir Itihas: Adiparba [A History of the Bengali People: Early Period], Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, [1959].

Rushdie, Salman (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, New Delhi: Penguin Books India in association with Granta Books, [1981].

Selim, Lala Rukh (1998) ‘50 Years of the Fine Art Institute’, Art: A Quarterly Journal, 4(2), pp. 6-13.

Selim, Lala Rukh (2007) ‘Sculpture: c. Colonial to Contemporary’, in Lala Rukh Selim (ed.), Cultural Survey of Bangladesh Series-8: Art and Crafts, Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, pp. 120-40.

Som, Sovon (2007) ‘Safiuddin Ahmed’, in Lala Rukh Selim (ed.), Cultural Survey of Bangladesh Series-8 Art and Crafts, Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, pp. 324-37.

Subramanyan, K. G. (1987) The Living Tradition: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art, Calcutta: Seagull Books.

Thompson, Tok (2006) ‘Tradition through Modernity: Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship’, Cultural Analysis, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/ Tradition+through+Modernity%3A+Postmodernism+and+the+Nation-State+in...-a0171539690, accessed 15 June 2013.

Thornton, Sarah (2009) Seven Days in the Art World, London: Granta Books, [2008].

Topsfield, Andrew (1979) ‘Painting’, in Robert Skelton & Mark Francis (eds.), Arts of Bengal: The Heritage of Bangladesh and Eastern India, London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, pp. 34-8.

Umar, Badruddin (1967) Sanskritir Sankat [Crisis of Culture], Dhaka: Abu Nahid.

NOTES

1. Here traditional art is used to denote old cultural art forms that persist in a changing society (Subramanyan 1987: Introduction § 9) 2. The emperors of the Mughal Empire (1526-1757), Akbar (1556-1605) and Jahangir (1605-1627) were patrons of painting and developed a refined style of miniature painting blending Persian, Indian and European elements. The provincial style of miniatures was developed in the seventeenth century outside the Mughal court but within the sphere of its political control, as in Murshidabad of Bengal. Pahari painting emerged in the eighteenth century with the dismemberment of the Mughal Empire. The Hill States termed pahari (of the hills) were separate regional kingdoms ruled by Rajputs lying north of Rajasthan in the foothills of the Himalayas, including Kangra, Chamba, Basohli, Guler, Kulu and Jammu, developed identifiable styles of painting (Barret & Gray 1978: 11-16, Mitter 2001: 143-154, Topsfield 1979: 35, Dehejia 2008: 299-351). 3. The independent sultans of Bengal (1342) broke away from the Muslim rulers in far off Delhi and continued to rule until the Mughal conquest of eastern India by Akbar (1576). This period saw the consolidation of Islam in the region, the development of distinctive brick architecture, and Bengali literature began to be established patronized by sultanate rulers, as opposed to Sanskrit which was patronized by the last Hindu dynasties of Bengal (Blurton 2006: 16). According to Eaton (1984: 27-28): It was during this period [...] that a uniquely Bengali Muslim culture flourished. Put more precisely, the independent sultans of this period permitted Bengali culture

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[…] to flourish and combine with styles and influences drawn from north India, Central Asia, or the Middle East. The Muslim court also encouraged Vaishnavism which was opposed by the caste of Shakta Brahmans who emphasized Sanskrit over Bengali and high-caste exclusiveness over non- Brahmin inclusiveness. It patronized Vaishnava literature and also employed Vaishnavas in positions of trust in the administration (Eaton 1984: 29). 4. Abdul Huq (1918-1997), journalist and writer, wrote essays on society and politics and analyses of the language issue. 5. The Famine had a profound influence on the art of Bengal. It created a rich stream of art practice based on social commitment. Abedin, Chittaprasad Bhattacharya, Debabrata Mukhopadhyaya and Somnath Hore made immense contributions to this trend. 6. The contentious term ‘folk art’ in this context denotes forms of art that developed in pre- industrial times and were (and are) still actively practised in the subcontinent, some non- professionally by women in their households, or ritual arts practised by priests and medicine men. Others are professional forms produced for the needs of people by craftsmen such as potters, weavers and metal smiths (Subramanyan 1987: 57). 7. Gurusaday Dutt was a Bengali official in the imperial bureaucracy whose campaigns created an intense interest in the village arts among the urban elite (Mitter 2001: 163). 8. They shared common educational backgrounds, history, resistance to British colonial rule and a general cultural milieu with their contemporaries in West Bengal. Calcutta Art School, of which they were all students, provided them with basic training and ideas of art. By then, with Mukul Chandra Dey as Principal from 1928 to 1943 the school had been transformed. He was in close contact with Rabindranath Tagore and was a student of Abanindranath. He travelled and studied in the USA and UK and was acquainted with western art movements. He did not believe in compartmentalizing art into Western and Eastern. Ramendranath Chakravorty, a student of Nandalal at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati infused new life into the Indian painting department. He encouraged students to depict original themes from everyday life. This reflected a changing national outlook. The earlier themes in Havell and Abanindranath’s times were from ancient history, myth and literature followed by copying Rajput and Mughal miniatures in the twenties. Mukul Dey also organized painting exhibitions of Jamini Roy’s work celebrating pata painting, Rabindranath and noted foreign painters of the East and West (Bagal 1966: 44-50). 9. See Zeitlyn’s contributions in this volume. 10. The author’s observations are drawn from attending/observing Biennales and other art events. 11. Author’s discussion with one of the organizers of the Summit, Dhaka, 19 August 2013.

ABSTRACTS

This paper addresses the issue of configurations of Bangladeshi cultural identity as manifested in the art of Bangladesh. It reviews the politics of identity and the concomitant changes in artistic forms during the struggle for independence from Britain and the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. It focuses on artistic practices in post-liberation Bangladesh and the evolving current scene, influenced by currents of globalization, holding new challenges for artists. The emergence of Bangladesh as a nation state, and the process of its emergence, has been instrumental in the direction of art in Bangladesh. Configurations of identity and their changing perceptions, vis-à-

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vis the intelligentsia, have played a major role in fashioning its form. This paper analyzes the multiple readings and roles of ‘tradition’ in the construction of identity and how ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ arts of Bengal have continued to provide a rich source for ‘fine’ artists to draw upon.

INDEX

Keywords: Bangladesh, art, politics, identity, globalisation.

AUTHOR

LALA RUKH SELIM

Professor of Sculpture, Department of Sculpture, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

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Watching the International Crimes Tribunal from London

Benjamin Zeitlyn

Introduction

1 In early 2013 the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) in Bangladesh began sentencing alleged war criminals from the country’s 1971 Liberation War.1 The trials, ensuing protests and counter protests dominated the news and conversations in Bangladesh and among British Bangladeshis in London. In London the debate was polarised and revealed newly energised political fault lines. Suddenly everyone was talking about Bangladeshi politics, new websites sprang up and social media was full of debate and comment on Bangladesh. Discourses emanating from London were a direct challenge to dominant discourses on current affairs in Bangladesh and the events of 1971. A lot of these subjectivities were also associated with particular forms of Islamist political activity that have emerged in London in recent years.

2 Through an examination of responses to the ICT, and the associated protests in Shahbagh and Shapla Chottor, this article describes the ways that politics in Bangladesh is regarded in London. By highlighting responses of people in London and connecting these with socio-economic and political events, the paper makes two connected arguments. The first is that the influence of Islamist movements can be seen in many responses of British Bangladeshis. This involves positionality towards events formed through the application of Islamist ideas to developing events, what DeHanas (2013b) refers to as ‘elastic orthodoxy’, and tools and approaches for engaging with dominant discourses. Experiences of British Muslims during the ‘War on Terror’, pervasive Islamophobia and representations of Muslims in mainstream media, have encouraged a critical approach to dominant discourses and narratives among British Bangladeshis. This has influenced the methods used to challenge dominant discourses about 1971 and recent events in Bangladesh. The second argument is that events in Bangladesh have led to a surge of interest in Bangladesh and in 1971 as a historical event among British Bangladeshis. Although it is difficult to quantify either the relative

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popularity of different discourses among a large and diverse group of people, or change over time, the recent emergence in London of on-line activism supporting a particular political position, is easier to evidence. 3 Transnational activities have long been identified as a site of diasporas politically engaging in the politics of their homeland. Technology has played a key role in facilitating diaspora engagement in politics (Vertovec 1999). Vertovec (1999) notes that diaspora political engagement takes many forms and positions, such as cosmopolitan, nationalist, anti-nationalist and reactionary ethno-nationalism. Østergaard-Nielsen (2003) reviews approaches to understanding transnational political activity, and distinctions made by authors between ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’, ‘core’ and ‘expanded’ modes. The narrow/core modes of activity indicate serious, regular activity, whereas the broad and expanded modes indicate occasional engagement. Østergaard-Nielsen argues that transnational political orientation is linked to the type of migration, the length of stay and migrants’ structural position in the destination country. However, these patterns shift over time as transnational orientations replace migrant subjectivities and the receiving country’s political influences exert their influence. 4 Østergaard-Nielsen explains how, when opposing a state that is allied to the destination country, transnational political actors appeal to international organisations such as the UN or NGOs. Transnational political networks seek to co-opt NGOs at national and international levels. These strategies not only adapt to the local political environment, but also adopt and deploy Western liberal norms of democracy and human rights. Transnational political activists can often act with freedom that would not be tolerated in their countries of origin, and consider themselves as having access to objective sources of information unavailable in the country of origin. However, it is not always clear to what extent these transnational networks represent groups in the country of origin (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003). Many of these patterns of political activity are observable in the responses of British Bangladeshis to recent events in Bangladesh. 5 This article is based on a series of interviews, participation in public meetings about Bangladesh and data drawn from websites and social media. Focusing on website and social media activity illustrates the way in which transnational engagement by British Bangladeshis has emerged and taken shape. Perhaps moving from occasional, broad interest to regular, narrow engagement, the analysis focuses on five websites and their associated social media accounts. These are summarised in the table below. All the sites were set up in spring 2013, several using easy-to-use Wordpress software. The websites are either registered in London or use popular website hosting services such as GoDaddy and Identity Protect to hide the website creator’s identity. The websites provide no identifying names, organisations or addresses, and articles published on them are usually anonymous. 6 Table 1. British Bangladeshi Political Websites

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7 Interviews were conducted with twelve London-based British Bangladeshis to identify and understand discourses. Seven of these interviews were conducted in person and five by e-mail. To reflect a range of experiences and perspectives, the sample was selected purposely to include people thought to epitomise each of the main political positions in Bangladeshi politics, which are described below (Lewis 2011, Ali 2010, BX 2013). Eight members of the sample were born in the UK and four in Bangladesh. However, of those born in Bangladesh, two came to the UK in early childhood. The sample contained both men (7) and women (5), and ages ranged from in their twenties to fifties. 8 The paper is the result of discussion and debate, rather than a funded research project. As a small qualitative study, the sample and discussion used here are not intended to be representative. The interviews are used to identify discourses rather than comment upon the prevalence of one set of beliefs over another. The paper reports on English language blogs and press, and responses of British Bangladeshis to Bangla material. The focus is upon contemporary British Bangladeshi subjectivities in London, so it focuses on trends in social media and debate rather than trying to capture everything that is happening. Due to the fast moving nature of events in Bangladesh, the research also represents a moment in time which may be eclipsed by further developments.

Background

9 Bangladesh and British Bangladeshis are what Anderson (2006) characterises as ‘imagined communities’. Gupta (2007) describes how Bengali intelligentsia, such as Rabindranath Tagore, deployed the notion of ‘desh’ (country, land or homeland) in the nineteenth century to unify Bengalis and connect them with a particular geography, in resistance to the colonial division of Bengal. Influenced by European ideas of nationhood but combining these with an emerging Bengali tradition, desh was used as a way of transcending geographical and social boundaries to create a nation (Gupta 2007: 182). Bangladesh was imagined based on these cultural roots and a shared language, which became a symbol of resistance to the Pakistani government in Bangladesh’s independence struggle.

10 The ‘International Crimes Tribunal’ in Bangladesh refers to the trial of a group of men alleged to have committed war crimes during Bangladesh’s independence struggle in 1971. Bengalis in East Pakistan fought against a Pakistani military regime that sought to prevent the implementation of the 1970 election results. During the nine month long war, according to one estimate, half a million people died (Curlin et al. 1976). Millions of people fled across the border to India, and many thousands of women were raped. The Pakistani military and their local allies specifically targeted Bengali intellectuals and Hindus and rape was used as a weapon of war (Linton 2010, Ali 2010: 51). Histories of horrors of the war and the eventual victory of the Mukti Bahini (freedom fighters) have become an integral part of nationalism in Bangladesh. 11 The Pakistani military formed auxiliary units of collaborators whose members have become known as Razakars. They are associated with many of the worst atrocities committed in the war (Linton 2010: 198, Lewis 2011:71). Members of these groups and the political party Jamaat-e-Islami are alleged to have participated in the murder of intellectuals (Linton 2010: 199). This is the dominant discourse on Bangladesh and 1971, one that is central to the construction of nationalism in Bangladesh and particularly to

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the Awami League party, which led the liberation movement. A number of studies, such as Bose’s work on the war (2011a, 2011b), have challenged these discourses and accounts of the scale and nature of atrocities in 1971. Debates centre around issues such as the use of the word ‘genocide’ to describe Pakistani military atrocities and on the number of people killed in the war. 12 The legacy of this struggle is an Awami League party that sees itself as the party of the independence struggle, as a secular Bengali nationalist party. The main opposition to the Awami League is the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) who stress a Bangladeshi nationalism that combines Bengali and Islamic identities and Islamist political groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami who believe in a greater role for Islam and Shariah (religious law) in politics and society (BX 2013). Jamaat-e-Islami are the largest Islamist party in Bangladesh and have in the past been in government in coalitions with both other major parties. The party was banned from participating in the recent elections in Bangladesh on the grounds that it opposed both secularism and the formation of Bangladesh. 13 Nationalism in Bangladesh draws on the Liberation War as a powerful and traumatic mythology of the nation’s birth. The shared cultural roots, language and history are important components of nationalisms everywhere and of the way Bangladesh is imagined today (Anderson 2006: 44). Nationalism, as Renan (1992 [1882]) says, involves both shared histories and shared forgetting (Hylland Eriksen 1993). The Liberation War, Mukti Bahini, and the role of Jamaat-e-Islami are part of the national mythology, and much eulogised in books, print media and film in Bangladesh. However, the shared history and shared forgetting about the events of 1971 are contested and so too, as a result, is nationalism in Bangladesh. To use Anderson’s terms, the community that is imagined by competing groups does not extend the ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ to all who now count themselves as Bangladeshi (Anderson 2006: 7). As we will see, this turbulent history and partisan political scene has an enduring impact upon current events in Bangladesh and the way these are regarded in London. New communities, new media and new mythologies challenge dominant discourses.

British Bangladeshi politics and the Umma

14 There were 447,201 British citizens of Bangladeshi origin recorded in the British Census in 2011, 50% of them lived in London and 18% in Tower Hamlets (ONS 2012). The proportion of British Bangladeshis who do not live in Tower Hamlets or inner London appears to be increasing. British Bangladeshis are a relatively deprived group in the UK. More than one in three live in a deprived area (Jivraj & Khan 2013). Over half of British Bangladeshi children live in poverty (Platt 2009). 68% of British Bangladeshis live in low-income, often overcrowded households and rely more on benefits than any other community (Ofsted 2004: 5). One manifestation of this disadvantage, until recently, was relatively low average scores in examination results. This, however, is changing. By 2012/13 British Bangladeshi performance at GCSE was higher than the national average. This is part of a trend which has seen the proportion of British Bangladeshi pupils achieving five A-Cs in GCSEs rise from below 20% in 1992 to 85% in 2013 (The Economist 2007, Department for Education 2014).

15 Many analyses of British Bangladeshis in London comment upon the divisions between secular groups and Islamists, between Sufi or Barelvi Muslims linked to the Brick Lane

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Mosque and what some observers call ‘revivalist Islam’ or ‘new Islam’ associated with a range of Islamist ideas, including those of Jamaat-e-Islami in the nearby East London Mosque. Accounts illustrate the extent to which various Islamist groups have grown in popularity and influence among young British Bangladeshis. These divisions take on generational aspects (with British born generations embracing Islamist movements) and influence political positionality (Gardner & Shukur 1994, DeHanas 2013a, 2013b, Alexander 2013, Glynn 2002, Eade & Garbin 2002, Hussain 2007, Kibria 2008, Rozario 2011, The Economist 2013c). While ‘revivalist’ or ‘new’ Islam are widely used in academic literature to describe these movements, they are not terms that British Bangladeshis use regularly, so this paper uses the term ‘Islamist’ to refer to groups that seek a central role for Islam in politics. 16 Sayyid (2000) connects rising Islamic identification with two processes of ‘decentring’, the decentring of the west and the decentring of the peripheral nation state. This describes British Bangladeshis, in whom attachment to the idea of Bangladesh and the contested histories that have built up around 1971 is not as strong as it is among many who have grown up in Bangladesh. British Bangladeshis have not been so involved in the shared histories and processes of imagining through the media and education in Bangladesh that have created Bangladesh as a nation. Accounts of young British Bangladeshi views of Bangladeshi politics and 1971 from the years immediately after 9/11 report it being seen as ‘irrelevant’ and a ‘joke’, rejected for being so corrupt (Glynn 2002, 2006). This group has also become ambivalent about Britain due to experiences of Islamophobia and racism and opposition to British foreign policy in the ‘War on Terror’. These rejections of/by nations and nationalisms emerged in a mutually reinforcing way with Islamist groups. 17 Eade and Garbin (2002) describe how younger British Born Bangladeshis have a greater tendency to reject Bengali nationalism and orient their interest towards the notion of an Islamic Umma (community) (Eade & Garbin 2002: 139, Begum & Eade 2005). New media on the internet and television channels help to create this transnational community and sense of belonging to a global Islamic community (Kibria 2008). The popularity of Islamist subjectivities in London has been set within a social and political context of fevered interest in and prejudice against Muslims in the years after 9/11. Negative portrayals of Muslims in the British media contributed to this and turned many British Muslims away from mainstream media, encouraging a search for alternative sources of information to challenge dominant discourses (Ahmad 2006). 18 DeHanas (2013a) describes revivalist Islam as ‘deculturated’, so that it is seen as ‘pure’ and timeless, without the syncretic influences of ‘Bengali culture’. The strength and popularity of these ideas represent a victory for the East London Mosque’s Islamist influenced interpretation of Islam among British Bangladeshis (DeHanas 2013b). The idea of ‘elastic orthodoxy’ DeHanas (2013b) describes how, influenced by the East London Mosque and other institutions, young British Bangladeshis employ local interpretations of Islam strategically in new contexts. It is this elastic orthodoxy that characterises many British Bangladeshi responses to recent events in Bangladesh. The next three sections examine reactions to the ICT, Shahbagh and Hefazot-e-Islam2 to illustrate these issues.

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The International Crimes Tribunal

19 The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) was set up by the Bangladeshi government in March 2010, based on an amended version of the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act of 1973 to try those accused of crimes from the 1971 war (Linton 2010). The ICT has been dogged by controversy since The Economist Magazine revealed that senior judges had been corresponding with advisors abroad and members of the government about the cases (The Economist 2012, 2013a).

20 Critics of the ICT question its motives, its existence, those who it is prosecuting and the processes of the tribunal. They accuse the government of using it to settle political scores (Jalil & Rahman 2011, Islam 2011). Other critiques centre on the debate over whether the accused are ‘small fish’ and the perpetrators of the worst crimes are either dead or in Pakistan (The Economist 2012, Islam 2011). Information about the ICT on the ‘ SaveBangladesh’ website exemplifies these critiques: The current Awami League government established the ‘International Crimes Tribunal’ to try people they accused of committing crimes during 1971. No Pakistanis have come before the court, nor have any ruling Awami League leaders who supported the Pakistan-side during the war, or even those who publicly committed war crimes after the war. The only people in the dock are those belonging to the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladesh National Party (Save Bangladesh 2013a). 21 Another critique does not question the motives or targeting of the ICT but is concerned about due process in the way the tribunal has operated. This trend criticises the standards of evidence and restrictions on the defence in the tribunal (The Economist 2012, Bergman 2012). Websites such as Feb28 host detailed critiques of the ICT by defence barristers: Abdul Quader Mollah was convicted following a highly controversial trial in which the Presiding Judge was removed following the resignation of the disgraced Chairman as a consequence of the ‘Skypegate’ scandal. The defence were prevented from calling witnesses and the case was promptly closed by the Tribunal and rushed to judgment. Both the Tribunal and the Supreme Court have failed to apply the law as it stood in 1971 and took judicial notice of contentious facts that were not in evidence. The defence were also prevented on numerous occasions from having privileged communications with the accused. The countless defects in the trial process and the numerous errors in law were so severe that they invalidate the entire judgment and any conviction amounts to a miscarriage of justice (Feb28 2013a). 22 Supporters of the ICT argue that it is necessary to continue the work that Mujib started but could not complete—to seek justice for the collaboration and war crimes committed during the war (Alam 2013)—and that it provides an opportunity for closure (Murshid 2013). However, the ICT is perceived by its critics not as a national process for justice and closure but as a political process to destroy and discredit Jamaat-e-Islami and even Islam itself (Islam 2011, Jalil & Rahman 2011). What was supposed to be a national process has become a party political issue. Political divisions are represented in London. Some interviewees perceived the ICT as having been a success so far, free from political interference, but perhaps poorly publicised: So far the trial has gone without any kind of political involvement, but the process has not been managed well politically. The government should have given the PR side more thought (male, 33, migrated to London as a child).

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23 Others highlighted the ‘indoctrination’ that had added to the problems of establishing the ‘truth’ of historical events. By this they referred to the dominant narratives on 1971 that are so integral to nationalism in Bangladesh. This respondent felt that the ICT was necessary but had been poorly run: What do you think about the Bangladesh War Crimes Trial and the issues involved? The trial should have taken place a long time ago, should have happened 40 years ago. Now indoctrination for 40 years has made things worse. Bangladeshis need to have closure on the issue but what has happened so far will not bring the matter to a close. How do you think the trial has gone so far? The trial so far has been terrible. We don’t know how to undertake a fair trial, how to conduct a fair trial. Gulam Azam and Sayedee3 are becoming shahids (martyrs) (female, 28, born in London). 24 Others felt that the ICT itself was a grave injustice, used for political reasons and violated existing legislation: It is politically motivated and is a witch-hunt. This is a travesty of justice. There are three issues involved. 1. Oppress the political opponent 2. Try to gather mass support by using freedom fighting sentiment. 3. No intention to try actual war criminal because tri-country Delhi treaty4 will not allow it (male, 29, born in Bangladesh). 25 The ICT has become a contentious political issue, which has led to three main types of violence in Bangladesh. Islamist activists associated with Jamaat-e-Islami and their student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, have been accused of attacks against religious and ethnic minorities (The Economist 2013b, Ethirajan 2013), although they have denied any involvement. In addition, the same groups or allies have been accused of attacking activists, bloggers and online activists who they label ‘atheists’. Several so-called ‘atheist bloggers’ and journalists have been murdered or imprisoned and newspapers and television channels have been shut down by the government (HRW 2013, Tripathi 2014). In addition, Islamist groups including Jamaat-e-Islami, Islami Chatra Shibir and Hefazot-e-Islam have been in conflict with members of the security forces, most notably in late February and early May 2013, and there have been numerous deaths of activists and some members of the security forces (The Economist 2013b).

26 The next two sections analyse discourses about the Shahbagh protests and the events of Shapla Chottor.

Shahbagh

27 On 5 February 2013, the secretary general of Jamaat-e-Islami, Abdul Quader Mollah, was found guilty of participating in and aiding the murder and rape of unarmed civilians by the ICT. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, to the surprise of many who had expected a death sentence. As he left the tribunal, Mollah flashed a triumphant ‘V- sign’, which was seen by some as a celebration of having avoided the death penalty. The verdict led activists and bloggers to call for protests demanding the death sentence for Mollah and people began to gather at Shahbagh, a road junction in Dhaka (Murshid 2013: 13). Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing threatened to attack the protest and were then blamed for the murder of a prominent blogger and activist (Murshid 2013: 14). Subsequently, the protesters, who were named after the place, ‘Shahbagh’, adopted

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a wider set of demands linked to the trial, but also explicitly in opposition to Jamaat-e- Islami (Ahmed 2013).

28 The protest at Shahbagh was peaceful and law enforcement agencies allowed the protest to continue, although some protesters were hostile to Awami League politicians who came to speak to the crowds (Hassan 2013, Quayum 2013, Anam 2013). Shahbagh seems to represent a contradictory secular progressive movement that seeks to usher in a new form of popular secular politics, and at the same time, make reference to the ‘spirit of 1971’, a nostalgic attachment to the Liberation War. For some, the war is still not over and the impunity of criminals from 1971 have to be tackled once and for all. The demand for the death penalty among Bangladesh’s liberals is an example of this contradiction (Zeitlin 2013). 29 Like the tribunal, Shahbagh elicits a range of views among British Bangladeshis. Protests in solidarity with Shahbagh were held around the world. When protests sympathetic to Shahbagh were held at Altab Ali Park in east London, counter protests led to ugly scenes (Cohen 2013). Attitudes about the role of religion in politics and nationalism and Bangladeshi party politics divide Bangladeshis in London as they do elsewhere. What is different in London is the relative influence of Jamaat-e-Islami and other Islamist groups. 30 Among supporters of Shahbagh, the protests are considered politically neutral and a good example of peaceful protest: Shahbagh started with Qader Mollah’s V-sign. This was an important movement, aimed to sort out corruption. It was a neutral and non-political movement, which was for creating an open society and they wanted an independent country. They wanted trial, justice and carried out a peaceful protest. Bangladesh can undertake peaceful protest, an example to the rest of the countries (male, 33, migrated to London as a child). 31 Some British Bangladeshis, although they were inclined to support the Shahbagh protests, found the protests and counter protests rather confusing, and felt that the demands for hanging by Shahbagh protesters were disturbing. I went to Altab Ali Park when there were two different demonstrations. The Shahbagh supporters on one side and the Jamaat on the other side. I got confused at people coming together demanding hanging. I also found some of the images coming from the Shahbagh movement very disturbing—kids saying we want hanging—this was indoctrination. There were both positive and negative images. I would feel more comfortable if they were calling for justice and not hanging (female, 38, born in Bangladesh). 32 Others utterly rejected the reasoning, methods, politics and ethics of Shahbagh, calling it the ‘most stupid movement in Bengali history, ever’ (male, 32, born in London). These views are echoed on the websites established in London shortly after the emergence of Shahbagh, seemingly to directly challenge it. This is the ‘SaveBangladesh’ website’s explanation about Shahbagh: The ‘Shahbag’ movement has been compared to Egypt’s Tahrir Square. In Tahrir, they called for freedom and democracy, in Shahbag, an area in Dhaka, ‘protestors’ are demanding the death penalty and banning of political parties. They began their protest because one of the accused, Abdul Qader Mollah, was not given the death sentence. As a result of the protest, the government rushed through legislation to overturn the sentence to a death penalty. This ‘movement’ has the backing of the government. This is a Maoist, Cultural Revolution. You only need to look at the fact that Shahbag ‘protestors’ are allowed to protest by the police, while the very same

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police have killed and prevented those protesting against what is there for all to see: grave injustice (Save Bangladesh 2013b). 33 Positions on the ICT and Shahbagh were largely consistent among the research participants. One group was positive about the tribunal and Shahbagh, seeing them as the necessary completion of the liberation war. Another group saw the need for tribunals and was moved by the outpouring of patriotism and emotion in Shahbagh, but found both the tribunal and Shahbagh morally and politically flawed. A third group, reflected in the British Bangladeshi web activism, rejected the tribunal and Shahbagh as secular ‘fanaticism’ or ‘fascism’, Awami League politics and an attack against Islam.

34 These three discourses inform the positions of the three political positions in Bangladesh. The discourses correspond with different iterations of the imagined community of Bangladesh. The Awami League and participants in the Shahbagh protests imagine a Bangladesh that does not include Islamists and forces that did not support the liberation struggle. Shahbagh enjoyed widespread support in Bangladesh in early 2013, while in London Islamist narratives were relatively more influential (The Economist 2013c). Analysis of social media use during the Shahbagh protests illustrates the extent to which British-based users of Twitter opposed the Shahbagh movement while Bangladesh and US-based users were generally more supportive of the movement (Analysing Social Network Blog 2013). Interpretations of events in ‘Shapla Chottor’ on 6 May illustrate this powerfully.

Shapla Chottor

35 In April 2013 a conservative Islamic group called Hefazot-e-Islam gave Sheikh Hasina’s government a list of 13 ‘demands’ (Mustafa 2013). They gave the government an ultimatum of three weeks to implement the demands, threatening to lay siege to Dhaka and overthrow the government if the demands were not met. The theme of many of the demands is for a more central role for Islam in the country’s constitution, education system, media, society and law. There are also appeals for protection for Islamic scholars and madrassa students and a demand to declare the Ahmadiyya minority as non-Muslims. Several of the demands directly or indirectly referenced Shahbagh, demanding: an end to ‘candle lit vigils’, the punishment of atheists and ‘anti-Islam bloggers’.

36 The Hefazot-e-Islam movement’s demands fall into four categories. The first is for a greater prominence of a particular conservative interpretation of Islam in society and politics, including specific reference to punishing ‘atheists’, blasphemers, and people involved in Shahbagh. This also includes specific reference to gender relations, the education system, NGOs, the media, public sculptures, and Christian missionaries. The second makes reference to the perceived persecution of Islamic scholars and madrassa students. The movement is said to originate in Quomi madrassas, religious schools that are independent from the state. The third category of demand distinguishes the interpretation of Islam of the Hefazot-e-Islam movement from that of the persecuted Ahmadiyya minority in Bangladesh who they demand be officially declared non- Muslims by the government. The fourth category makes specific reference to Shahbagh, which they are clearly opposed to. The categories range from the desire for a greater role for religion in the state, to the protection of religious scholars from

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attack, and finally to identifying two particular groups of people as enemies of the Hefazot-e-Islam movement: Ahmadiyyas and protesters at Shahbagh (Daily Star 2013a). The Hefazot-e-Islam movement is therefore seen as a counter reaction to the Shahbagh protests. The imagined community of Bangladesh promoted by this movement is one without Ahmadiyyas, and without secular political groups. 37 The government did not meet the 13 demands before the ultimatum, and so the ‘siege of Dhaka’ happened. Hefazot-e-Islam’s hundreds of thousands of followers came to Dhaka and ignored several requests and warnings from the government to leave Dhaka. During the day there was widespread violence in many parts of Dhaka, with vehicles, buildings, and the offices of the Awami League and Communist party of Bangladesh being burned down or attacked (Daily Star 2013b). At night many of the protesters gathered in Shapla Chottor to pray, sleep and defiantly stay their until their demands were met, despite government and security forces’ orders to leave. 38 What followed was a well co-ordinated attack on the protesters by thousands of police and paramilitary forces as they slept in the early hours of 6 May. Accounts of the event are strongly contested along political lines. Here I make no claim to have any access or privileged insights into the ‘truth’ of events. The focus is on the ways in which these narratives and discourses are analysed and deployed in London. By morning many thousands of protesters had been cleared, by force, from the area. Press reports and human rights organisations allege that between 24 and 61 people died (Odhikar 2013, Bergman & Foyez 2013). 39 The five websites discussed here have accompanying social media accounts with Facebook, Twitter and sometimes YouTube accounts that were set up in spring 2013. Immediately, the events were labelled a ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ by British-based internet activists using websites and social media. Indeed, some of these websites and social media accounts appear to have been set up specifically to publicise and cover the events of 5 and 6 May. Many of them contain specific references to Islam, construct political events in Bangladesh as an attack on Muslims and appeal to all Muslims to join their campaign. There is an explicit attempt to create an alternative narrative of events from the mainstream media. The Feb28 website includes the following description: 28 February 2013 marked the day on which the people of Bangladesh rose up against the Awami League regime in an effort to challenge its brutality and viciousness towards Muslim citizens of Bangladesh and in particular Muslims and Islamic scholars. The Feb28 Justice for Bangladesh movement came about in response to this escalating crisis that has engulfed Bangladesh. It aims to expose the tyranny and anti-Islamic hatred of the oppressive Awami League regime and is dedicated to bringing you fresh and unbiased news on the struggle of the Bangladeshi people (Feb28 2013b). 40 These are good examples of the elastic orthodoxy of Islamists. Using the local orthodoxy, these accounts construct the Awami League government as an ‘atheist’ movement attacking Muslims in general. A Twitter account called ‘@Shapla_Chottor’ was set up on 5 May and calls for revolution in Bangladesh, attacks Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League, and has the descriptor ‘Raise your voice against the atheist’. Hasina is described in tweets from @Shapla_Chottor as a ‘non-Muslim’ and Sheikh Mujib as a ‘Hindu’. Responses to these accounts included tweets such as: "This is a time for Muslims no matter who they are to unite" #opbangladesh #feb28info” specifically referencing the Feb28 website. Immediately before the events of 5 and 6 May, social media accounts from London were calling for revolution, predicting trouble and

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launching a denial of service attacks on Bangladeshi government and press websites. On 4 May, publicising this, OpBangladesh tweeted: ‘Govt of Hasina, be afraid... Be VERY afraid, We give you a chance to take your wealth & run a way. #OpBangladesh’ along with the following picture:

Figure 1: ‘International Wake-up call’5

41 In the days after 5 and 6 May, social media was used extensively, with hundreds of videos and photos uploaded; there were further calls for revolution in Bangladesh and appeals to activists and media to either join their campaign or publicise the violence occurring in Bangladesh. The Feb28 website calls Sheikh Hasina ‘lady Hitler’, in part of what appears to be a coordinated campaign to label Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League as ‘fascists’. 42 The British websites and social media accounts draw on a similar set of discourses to challenge the dominant narratives about Bangladesh. They promote an Islamist or Jamaat-e-Islami interpretation of events, are very hostile towards the Awami League, and reject dominant narratives about current events in Bangladesh and 1971. Using the hashtags #Blacknight, #BanglaSpring, #SaveBangladesh and #LadyHitler, a chorus of mainly British voices waged a cyber campaign to challenge secular and Awami League narratives. They have a particular discourse in common, one in which the Hefazot-e- Islam protesters were peaceful, religious victims of a ‘fascist’ ‘secular fundamentalist’ Awami League who had murdered them in their thousands (the numbers 2,000-3,000 are regularly cited on these websites) and tried to destroy the evidence (Brethren of the Black Lotus 2013). Dominant discourses are attached and new mythologies are created through this work. 43 Hefazot-e-Islam clearly have support among British Bangladeshis, and this was reflected in the interviews:

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Hefazot movement is the sentiment of peace loving Islamic sentiment but the western world will not accept it’ (male, 29, born in Bangladesh). 44 The narrative of events promoted in social media and by the groups mentioned above was repeated by interviewees: What do you think about the Hefazot-e-Islam movement? They have the right to protest, I agree with about 11 of their 13 points. They were massacred terribly. They captured the public imagination. We lack sophisticated Islamic leaders able to guide our people through issues of social justice in a way that brings everyone together. I wish Hefazot safety and improvement (male, 32, born in London). 45 Another respondent reported on their family in Bangladesh’s support for Hefazot-e- Islam (despite not ‘practicing Islam very well’). She also reported the claim that 2,000-3,000 people died at Shapla Chottor. This respondent believed that there was Indian involvement in the events and explicitly juxtaposed Hefazot-e-Islam with Shahbagh : I had reports that when Hefazot movement started many villages in Bangladesh were so happy that people bought up watermelons to celebrate by eating together and this caused a shortage of watermelons. When Hefazot started I started to feel hopeful. They started to take on the government. Hefazot is not against women’s leaderships as such as they have voted in elections for the two women in the past. My family in Bangladesh is supportive of Hefazot and they hate Shahbagh. Even if they do not practise Islam very well they love and support the Hefazot for the way they stood up against the psychopath Hasina. 3,000 murdered—I know people who were personally there. When government say 11 people died I know people who were there, definitely, 2,000-3,000 people died. Some of the Bangladeshi police were given instructions in Hindi—Indians were there. The Indian Army was brought in as a back up. Hasina is a razakar to India (female, 28, born in London). 46 A few respondents indicated opposition to the demands of Hefazot-e-Islam, and described them as rather politically naïve. Some press reports describe the movement as being a front for, or having been manipulated by, Jamaat-e-Islami: What do you think about the Hefazot-e-Islam movement? It is laced with some unfortunate demands, and sweeping accusations about its position has meant that it’s become complicated, and perhaps the movement is not really ready for the political arena (male, 28, came to UK as a child). 47 There was no hostility or anger towards Hefazot-e-Islam expressed by the interviewees. The sample is not representative, but it illustrates a difference from the feelings of many ‘Western’ and Bangladeshi journalists and analysts and it is different from mainstream opinion in Bangladesh, which still largely subscribes to the dominant discourse described earlier. Press reports in ‘Western’ and Bangladeshi English language press present Hefazot-e-Islam as a dangerous, atavistic movement that will send Bangladesh back to the ‘dark ages’, mainly due to their stance on women (Mustafa 2013, Daily Star 2013b).

48 In the interviews and in blog postings, the Hefazot-e-Islam movement was juxtaposed with Shahbagh, the two being seen as representing rural and urban constituencies and different socio-economic groups and as being exemplary of the divide in Bangladeshi politics and society. In an article on the Kichuri blog, the author ‘Londoni’ (British Bangladeshi) writes about the contested narratives about Hefazot-e-Islam and their 13 point demands. The author specifically critiques mainstream media coverage of events

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but offers a more nuanced interpretation than the simple divide between ‘secular’ Shahbagh and ‘conservative’ Hefazot-e-Islam: Such demands have already been seized upon by people like the Guardian’s Jason Burke. His recent report on the Long March describes the Shahbag protestors as ‘young moderates’, moderates who call for death penalties and banning of political parties, contrasting them favourably to the Long Marchers. Mr Burke, who has covered Afghanistan and Pakistan with some nuance in the past, also fails to mention the controversy and scandal that Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal is embroiled in (Londoni 2013). 49 One of the interviewees explained how recent events in Bangladesh had affected relationships between British Bangladeshis and Bangladesh. The campaigns on social media were aimed mainly at an English speaking, educated audience and encouraged people to apply their London-learned Islamist subjectivity to current events in Bangladesh. Constructing events in Bangladesh as an attack on Muslims presents events as a conflict between atheists and Muslims. It also invoked the mentality of the ‘War on Terror’ years when British Bangladeshis felt that they were a suspect community because they were Muslims. Perhaps this was an element that re-engaged some British Bangladeshis with Bangladeshi politics through a certain lens, as the following interviewee explains, speaking about the violence of 6 May: Those of us who care were heartbroken at the massacre. I think it puts a lot of people off caring about the people there. But it also provides a point of access for people losing their roots (male, 32, born in London). 50 Just as 9/11 led to a surge of interest in the meaning and role of Islam in a soul searching British Bangladeshi population (Glynn 2002), the ICT and events in Bangladesh have led to a renewed interest in 1971, the birth of Bangladesh and Bengal's history in general. The sudden emergence of new websites, social media accounts and political activity is evidence of this. Both surges in interest led to conscious attempts to construct alternative narratives to those of the mainstream media and government (Ahmad 2006). This is explicitly mentioned in several of the websites and it is an interesting example of transnational political activity, what Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001) call ‘long distance nationalism’, the feeling of belonging and involvement in the nation, for people who do not live or have citizenship in that nation, through transnational connections.

Conclusion

51 Recent events in Bangladesh have captured the imaginations of British Bangladeshis. Interpretations of events differ amongst political and religious groups that have contrasting views of who is the victim and who is the aggressor. Bengali nationalists, Awami League supporters, secular and left wing groups see the ICT as the legitimate conclusion of the Liberation War. Bangladeshi nationalists, represented by the BNP hold views about the ICT, Shahbagh and Hefazot-e-Islam that are similar to Islamist interpretations, such as those of Jamaat-e-Islami. These may be influenced by ideology, different histories and also the political position they hold in opposition to the governing party. These interpretations of events, that are influential in London and appear to be influenced by Islamists, see the Awami League and mainstream media as persecuting Islamists in Bangladesh and attacking Islam itself.

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52 The extent of the influence of Islamist groups among British Bangladeshis in London and the reasons behind the phenomenon are unclear. One view is that this is a legacy of the emergence in the last twenty-five years of Islam as an important source of identity among British Bangladeshis. Islamist approaches represent an ‘alternative modernity’, offering progress from the traditions of the village that is explicitly critical of ‘Western modernity’ (Zeitlyn 2014). Some of the subjectivities and methods of resisting Islamophobia during the ‘War on Terror’ years have been brought to bear in response to events in Bangladesh. The distrust of and critique of mainstream media and government discourses bears striking similarities with those of the ‘War on Terror’ years and draws upon some of the same discourses challenging the misrepresentation of Muslims and Islam in the media. This is a good example of the elastic orthodoxy that DeHanas (2013b) describes, where local orthodoxies are used to interpret developing events in other places. Many British Bangladeshis challenged the UK and US governments’ ‘War on Terror’ in the years after 9/11 and some have used the same methods to challenge dominant discourses about recent events in Bangladesh (Begum & Eade 2005). 53 Another type of interpretation is that the deployment of ‘Western’ notions of due process, human rights and international law by Human Rights Watch (2013b), Bergman (2012), The Economist (2012) and lawyers hired by the defendants in the ICT, have successfully critiqued the ICT. In addition, Sarmila Bose’s (2011a, 2011b) work on 1971 has challenged the dominant narratives about the war. These critiques have gained credibility among British Bangladeshis. Certainly a wider range of media and comment on events in Bangladesh, often with transnational reach, has complicated narratives on/in Bangladesh. The British Bangladeshis behind the transnational internet activism have drawn upon these sources to bolster their critiques of dominant discourses and challenge the shared mythology of nationalism(s) in Bangladesh. 54 Transnational political activity plays a key role in critiquing nationalism(s) in Bangladesh. Broad, occasional interest piqued by key events is turned, perhaps temporarily, into narrow, focused and regular activism through these campaigns. These efforts and recent events have seen a renewed interest in 1971 and contemporary Bangladeshi politics among British Bangladeshis.

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NOTES

1. I wish to acknowledge the role of Dr. Muhammad Ahmedullah in this paper. He contributed significantly to this research by conducting the interviews and developing the analysis presented here. 2. The name Hefazot-e-Islam (protector of Islam) is also transliterated as Hifazat, Hefazat, Hefajat, Hefajote, and in numerous other ways. 3. Gulam Azam and Delwar Hussain Sayedee are defendants in the ICT. Both are leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami and both have been found guilty of crimes against humanity by the ICT. 4. A post Liberation War agreement between India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. 5. Source: https://twitter.com/OpBangladesh/status/330690945404260352 (accessed 20/06/2014).

ABSTRACTS

This paper analyses responses in London to the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh and protests associated with it in 2013. Based on analysis of websites, social media and interview material, it examines interpretations of contemporary events in Bangladesh. The article makes no claims to any privileged information or ‘truth’ about these events. Instead, it argues that interpretations of events in Bangladesh by Bangladeshis in London differ from those in Bangladesh. Recent events in Bangladesh have led to an increase in transnational political activism among some British Bangladeshis. In London there have been concerted attempts to challenge dominant discourses about Bangladesh’s Liberation War and contemporary politics. In many cases these are related to or inspired by Islamic political movements that have become influential among British Bangladeshis.

INDEX

Keywords: Bangladesh, International Crimes Tribunal, 1971, Shahbagh, transnationalism

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AUTHOR

BENJAMIN ZEITLYN

Lecturer in International Education and Development, Centre for International Education, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

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A Shahid Minar in Lisbon: Long Distance Nationalism, Politics of Memory and Community among Luso-Bangladeshis

José Mapril

Introduction

1 On 21 February 2011, the Shahid Dibosh, the Bengali language day (also known as the UNESCO maternal language day), was celebrated in Martim Moniz Square in central Lisbon, Portugal.1 The celebration was organized by an informal Bangladeshi association called Friends of friends, with the support of the Lisbon City Hall and Renovar a Mouraria (a non-governmental organization that aims to renovate this area of Lisbon). A replica of the Shahid Minar—the monument located on the campus of Dhaka University commemorating the Bengali students killed in 1952 by Pakistani forces while protesting against the process of Urduization in East Pakistan—was temporarily built on the south side of Martim Moniz square. This square is located in Mouraria, in what is frequently described by media and political discourses as an 'immigrant neighbourhood', and the name of the square—Martim Moniz—is evocative of a nationalist historical narrative about the conquest of Lisbon from the Moors and the foundation of Portugal in the 12th century.

2 The area was decorated with a green and red carpet, the colours of the Bangladeshi flag (coincidently partially the same colours as the Portuguese flag), and a large poster, in Bengali and Portuguese, announcing the event—‘the international day of maternal language: 21 February’. The decoration of the panel also included the Bangladeshi and Portuguese flags and a picture of a decorated Shahid Minar in Dhaka. Portuguese and Bangladeshi national flags were flying all along the south side of the square. 3 A small Ekushey2 book fair (ekushey boi mela), selling Bengali novels, children's books, teaching materials and DVDs, also took place. The programme for Pohela Boishak—the

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celebration of the Bengali New Year on 14 April, which included a day trip to Algarve— was also announced. 4 Throughout the day, and in different ritualized processions, the three main organized Bangladeshi political groups in Portugal—Awami League Portugal, Bangladesh Nationalist Party Portugal and the Islamic Forum—laid flowers on the replica of the Shahid Minar in homage to the martyrs of the language movement. 5 Several cultural events took place, including the singing of nationalist songs by groups of women accompanied by men playing the tabla and harmonium. The audience included not only Bangladeshis—women, children and men—but also a representative of Lisbon City Council: a prominent councilman and commissioner for Public Space and Urban Environment. The main figures of the two more significant factions took pictures alongside this politician. In spite of being an area with distinct immigrant and non-immigrant populations, most of the audience was Bangladeshi. 6 After nightfall, the Shahid Minar replica was removed and the celebrations, composed of concerts and poetry recitals, moved to the hall of a Portuguese regional association nearby.3 In the days that followed, photographs of the celebrations were posted on Facebook pages and extensively commented on. It was the first time that Bangladeshis in Portugal had organized a public celebration on 21 February and the first time that Bengali/Bangladeshi cultural symbols had such public visibility.4 7 Claire Alexander (2013: 591) argued: The Shahid Minar monument, and the annual Ekushe ritual surrounding it, has become a primary site for a version of nationalist/cultural identity work and politics within the Bangladeshi community in East London, as well as in Bangladesh itself and across its diaspora. 8 This article will focus on the importance of the Shahid Minar and the Ekushe ritual in a specific part of what could be called a Bangladeshi transnational public space.5 The existing literature on Bangladeshi transnationalism has grown significantly in the last few years and mainly focuses on the political activities of Bangladeshi immigrants and their descendants in the United Kingdom and in the USA (Eade 1989, Eade & Garbin 2006, Glynn 2006, Alexander 2013, Kibria 2011, inter alia). The UK and the USA are two of the most important long-term migration destinations for Bangladeshis (see Visram 1986, Gardner 1994, Kibria 2011) and it is in these countries that their transnational political activism has become increasingly visible and researched.

9 The themes researched are diverse and include the struggles between Bangladeshi secular and Islamist segments for incorporation in British mainstream political parties and local politics (Eade 1989), contemporary transnational political activism, the manipulation of Bengali cultural symbols, such as the Boishaki mela, and the making of a (urban and political) place for British-Bangladeshis in London (Eade & Garbin 2006), the role of Bangladeshis in the UK and the support for Sheik Mujibur Rahman and the Independence War in 1971 (Lynn 2006), and the relation between (contested) memories of the Bangladeshi War of Independence, Bengali identity and contemporary racial politics in the UK (Alexander 2013). In this special issue, Benjamin Zeitlyn reveals the transnationalization of debates over the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), namely how British Bangladeshis have engaged differently with this recent polemic. Some have campaigned in support of the leaders of the Jama’at-e-Islami who were accused of crimes in 1971, while others have supported secularist claims and arguments such as

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those emerging from the Shahbagh movement. In several of these approaches, the importance of transnational politics is frequently revealed. 10 With the diversification of Bangladeshi migration, this diasporic public sphere (Appadurai 1996) has expanded to include other locations, actors and dynamics that have so far been left out of the picture. For instance, Bangladeshi migration to Southern Europe—Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece—began in the late 1980s and has grown steadily, as labour migration and family reunification, in the past decades (Knights 1996, Zeitlyn 2006, Mapril 2011, 2014). These new destinations were not transit locations for the more affluent and desirable destinations. Many probashis (migrants) settled in Lisbon, Madrid and Rome, invested in properties, in their children's education, businesses, and in some cases, in the creation of religious spaces, such as mosques and prayer rooms. 11 In spite of this settlement process in Portugal, there is a continuous investment in transnational ways of being—practices—and transnational ways of belonging— consciousness and imagination (Schiller 2004)—with Bangladesh and other countries where kinship and friendship networks are located.6 Some of the examples that reveal such transnational engagements happen at the level of the household and include participation in the management of household resources, sponsorship of household rituals and ceremonies, entrepreneurial investments and the buying of land, social and cultural remittances and caring for the elderly and children (in this last case, this is especially visible during the holiday breaks when the children spend some time with their grandparents in Bangladesh). In this sense, most of the Bangladeshi households that are now in Portugal are part of transnational domestic units that link this Southern European country to Bangladesh and other third spaces in Europe or elsewhere. 12 Two other important dimensions of such transnational ways of belonging are participation in the politics of representation (Hall 1997) and in homeland politics (Vertovec 2009). The first concept implies the creation of representative institutions to participate and make claims in the public domain of the receiving societies; these are organized according to existing regimes of citizenship. Homeland politics, on the other hand, implies a continuous participation in a Bangladeshi political space— either through lobbying, informal political activities, campaigning, or different forms of what is known as long distance nationalism (Anderson 1998, Schiller & Fouron 2001).7 13 Based on the Shahid Dibosh celebrations described in the initial vignette, the objective of this article is to ethnographically explore the political dimensions of recently developed transnational social fields (Schiller et al. 1992) 8 between Portugal and Bangladesh. These political dimensions include not only homeland politics, but also the making of a Bangladeshi ‘community’ in the Portuguese public space. The paper argues, firstly, that this Bangladeshi transnational public space connects Bangladeshis in the UK, in Bangladesh and in other locations through symbols, long distance nationalism and especially through the politics of memory. As Ian Hacking (1995) argues, the politics of memory, or memoro-politics, manifests itself in ‘communal’ forms, such as the celebration of founding events, but also in personal accounts that individually trace the past.9 14 Secondly the paper argues that these discourses and projects are localized and thus transformed according to the contexts in which Bangladeshis are living. In this case, they are ‘used’ to produce a ‘community’ in the context of Portuguese immigration

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politics and regime of citizenship.10 Community here is used not in the organicist sense of gemeinschaft but as a discourse and a symbolic construction (see Cohen 1985, Baumann 1996, Amit 2002, inter alia) transmitted by certain sectors of society, not only in quotidian practices and ritual contexts (see Fog Olwig 2009), but also through claims making and the governmentality of the public sphere (see Baumann 1996). In spite of this, not all of these discursive formations have the same visibility and impact. For instance, as Baumann (1996) reveals in his Southall research, discourses and symbolic constructions about community are frequently produced by state actors themselves (or NGOs with the same role) in the context of certain citizenship policies and their related efforts to ‘conduct people’s conduct’. Such dominant discourses imply the production of sectors of society, among which migrants, as homogeneous communities and cultures, without having in mind the complexities of the demotic versions (discursive formations produced in everyday contexts, see Baumann 1996). In this sense, community is not an interpretive analytical tool but instead a political project. 15 Thus, if it is true that several of the arguments and debates in Lisbon have elements in common with the positions and arguments described by Alexander (2013) and Eade & Garbin (2006) in the British case, it is also essential to recognize that the Portuguese case has produced new interpretations about Bangladeshi/Bengali cultural identities, interpretations that are intimately related to the politics of immigrant representation in contemporary Portugal. 16 Inspired by the extended case method (Gluckman 1940), also known as situational analysis,11 this argument will be presented through the analysis of an event and its dynamics and how it reveals transnational social processes in the making. In order to do this, I will firstly present some of the histories of migration between Bangladesh and Portugal. Secondly, I will show how the celebration described above reveals the existence of three competing long distance nationalisms in Portugal and their relation with the past. Thirdly, I will show how this same event is a clear reminder of the participation of Bangladeshis in the Portuguese public sphere, where they are expected to participate as a ‘community’. Finally, I offer some concluding notes.12

Modernities, deportability and transnationalism: Bangladeshis in Portugal

17 The histories of migration between Bangladesh and Portugal date back to the late 1980s; today, according to official registrations from the Bangladesh consular office in Oporto, there are 4500 Bangladeshis living in the country (this includes naturalized Portuguese and those that requested Portuguese nationality after being born in the country or residing legally for 5 or more years).

18 The majority of these Bangladeshis come from intermediate social groups, those that in Bangladesh are commonly classified as the ‘new’ and ‘affluent middle classes’, urbanized and with high levels of educational capital (Mapril 2011, 2014; for a comparative analysis with Spain and Italy see Zeitlyn 2006 and Knights 1996, respectively). For these social strata, bidesh in general and Continental Europe in particular is associated with ‘modern’ ways of life, access to educational capital and adulthood (Mapril 2014) and a way of escaping an uncertain future (Bal 2012).13

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19 To access bidesh, my interlocutors followed several routes. Some migrated directly from Bangladesh to Continental Europe while others migrated in steps. For those who moved in steps, many first went to the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries and some time later remigrated to Continental Europe. Once in Europe, they travelled between countries searching for employment and legalization opportunities, following previously established networks of relatives and friends. Thus, most of my research associates were already in continental Europe—Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy and France, to mention just a few—and arrived in Portugal during the regularization programs in the 1990s and the 2000s.14 20 Substantial economic and social change in Southern European countries in terms of European integration not only improved standards of living but also changed their position regarding the international division of labour and global migrations (King et al. 2000). In the early 1960s, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal experienced high economic growth rates. The opening up of their economies (EEC membership), together with changes in the means of production, including rising investment in modernization, an expanding service sector and the growing mobility of capital, meant that these countries saw a change in their position in relation to global migration flows (King et al. 2000). 21 These structural changes slowed down intra-European migrations and, in the short run, led to an increase in the arrival of immigrants from Portuguese colonial spaces and from locations with no previous historical links with Portugal. Facing increasing immigration flows, Portugal, like other Mediterranean countries, developed legislation and special regularization programs in the 1990s and 2000s. 22 For many Bangladeshis, the decision to move to Portugal was partially a way to escape deportability through a search for citizenship rights within the European Union; what Arendt (1951) has called the ‘right to have rights’. In several European countries, and as de Genova (2002) and Calavita (2005) theorized, they were produced as ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented’ third country nationals, vulnerable to processes of deportation and economic exploitation. Migrating to Portugal, as well as to other Southern European countries, such as Italy and Spain, even if initially seen as a temporary move, was perceived as a way of accessing rights and thus protection from deportation (see also Knights 1996 and Zeitlyn 2006 for similar cases). 23 Deportation was seen as a major risk, especially because most of these migratory projects were part of family investments (and not just individual endeavours) that often involved selling properties or borrowing money. As a result, being deported to Bangladesh without reciprocating some of these investments was not only seen as a failure and shameful for the migrant himself, but also to his family (in certain cases, failure in Bidesh might mean downward social mobility for the household). 24 After regularization, many decided to settle in Portugal, working in the lower ranks of the economy: in construction, street peddling and cleaning services. Soon though, personal savings and loans from relatives (in some cases, this also included the selling of plots of land in Bangladesh) and friends were invested in small commercial activities mainly in and around Martim Moniz Square and Mouraria neighbourhood, next to the city centre. This is an area of Lisbon where it is possible to find new lisboetas (Lisboners) coming from China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Senegal, among others. This presence, which began in the late 1970s and has transformed itself in the past 20 years, is not only commercial but also residential and

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is intimately related with the postcolonial migrations from former Portuguese colonial spaces and the changing position of Portugal in terms of global migration flows. The presence of migrants from several countries led to the emergence of discourses, produced by mainstream media and politicians, that associate this area of Lisbon with ‘immigration’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘interculturalism’ and a ‘modern’ Portugal. At the same time numerous initiatives developed by the city hall and non-governmental institutions, such as the festival Todos (all together) or the Fusion Market, aestheticize difference in order to be consumed by certain Lisbon residents. 25 Today, in central Lisbon alone, there are more than 200 Bangladeshi businesses, including neighbourhood groceries, convenience stores, ready-to-wear shops, handicraft shops, Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants, Bangladeshi sweet shops, travel agencies, internet cafés, döner kebab sellers, and newspaper kiosks. These cater to a very diverse market that ranges from Bangladeshi consumers of gastronomic nostalgia (Mankekar 2005) to peddlers who buy cheap clothes to resell in the open-air markets all around the country. 26 Initially this was a migration flow of single young male adults, but today most have married in Bangladesh and their wives and children are now in Portugal. This has led not only to the formation a new direct migration flow between Bangladesh and Portugal, this time centred on processes of family reunification, but has also created a significant change in the characteristics of this population. Several hundred Bangladeshi families have reunited in Lisbon, the majority of which are nuclear families along with another family member, typically either the husband's or wife's brother (usually, who comes to Europe depends their assumed capacity to deal with this new context, so for instance, according to some of my research associates ‘you would not bring someone who has lived all their lives in the village (gram) and does not know how to speak English’). Members of this community have also invested significantly in their children's education in both the private and public schooling systems. 27 Those that set up businesses, reunited their families, invested in their children’s education and accumulated economic capital (a large number are now Portuguese nationals) are seen as the successful probashis—frequently called ‘patrão’ (the Portuguese word for boss). Besides their family and economic success, they also occupy political roles in certain Bangladeshi arenas; in the Bangladeshi Mosque, named after Dhaka central mosque—Baitul Mukarram, and the Luso-Bangladeshi Association. The Bangladeshi mosque is entirely financed by Bangladeshis themselves—the pioneers are the most important investors and see investing as a waqf (good deed) and a redistribution of their wealth for the ‘community’—and caters to a congregation of 500-600 Muslims, the majority of whom are Bangladeshis and their children. 28 Another significant characteristic of this migration is the diversity of regional origins in Bangladesh. In Portugal it is possible to find Bangladeshis from at least twelve different districts: Dhaka, Faridpur, Noakhali, Sylhet, Chittagong, Comilla, Rangpur, Chandpur, Khulna, Shatkira, Tangail and Gopalgong (similar to Bangladeshis in Italy and Spain: see Knights 1996 and Zeitlyn 2006). Dhaka is the most strongly represented region and Chandpur the least. With the formation of migration chains and family reunification processes, regional diversity led to the emergence of several informal regional associations which provide services to their members, such as loans and

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repatriation of bodies, and organizing developmental initiatives in their region of origin. 29 Thus, in spite of the significant investments in Portugal, these Bangladeshis forge continuous transnational ties with Bangladesh. Whether buying properties, sending money to their kin, sending their children to spend time with their grandparents, sponsoring rituals—such as Qurbani (the sacrificial ceremony performed on the Id-ul- Ad’ha at the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca), marriages in Bangladesh or burying the deceased in family plots, among others—Luso-Bangladeshis continue to sustain transnational ways of being and transnational ways of belonging (Schiller 2004). Even the households in Portugal are perceived as part of extended or joint households (jouthko poribar) that are continuously morally responsible for each other, even though they are spread between Bangladesh and Portugal.15

Long distance nationalism and the politics of memory

30 Another example of transnational ways of belonging is the engagement in homeland politics and the political imagination of Bangladesh. Besides migration, generation and regional background, the Language Day celebrations in Lisbon described above reveal other lines of fragmentation centred on transnational political activism. There are three organized political factions in Portugal: the Awami League Portugal, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party Portugal and the Islamic Forum which includes supporters of the political party Jama’at-i-Islami alongside followers of other groups.16

31 This factionalism is intimately associated with the pioneers and the most successful probashis and it frequently hides deep personal animosities between its leaders and factional supporters. The leaders and some members of each faction were already engaged in the student and youth wings of each party in Bangladesh before migration. The Islamic Forum, however, includes not only supporters of the Jama’at-i-Islami already in Bangladesh, but also younger generations that are only now beginning to participate politically. Most children of Bangladeshi immigrants,17 either born in Portugal or living in the country from an early age, are generally disinterested in this political scenario and engagement (in both Bangladesh and Portugal). Those that are interested are only now beginning to participate politically and on a regular basis in Islamic parties such as the Forum, which, similar to other cases in Europe (see Zeitlyn this issue; Alexander 2013), appeal more to young European Muslims. Thus, political engagement continues to be an arena dominated by the pioneers and the immigrants themselves, for whom the personal and collective memory of the independence war is vivid and emotionally charged. 32 Each faction usually organizes separate celebrations of the main dates of the Bangladeshi civil calendar—Language Day, Independence Day, Victory Day and the Bengali New Year’s Day—and in some cases it includes the organization of special events commemorating the history of each political party (e.g. the Jail Killing Day by Awami supporters).18 In the case of the Islamic Forum, the only date in the Bangladeshi calendar celebrated so far is Language Day, although some of its members are quite critical about the celebration of Bangladeshi secular holidays because these are seen as celebrating ‘artificial’ divisions of Muslims. 33 Faruk19 was born in 1990 in Dhaka and arrived in Portugal in 2002, together with his mother and three brothers; they were joining his father, Anwar, who had migrated to

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Portugal in 1996. Faruk studied until the 11th grade, but due to a complex family situation, he then began working in a pizza restaurant in downtown Lisbon. In spite of coming from a household of supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, in recent years he has become closer to the Islamic Forum in Portugal. This political position is clearly visible in his criticism of the celebrations of Language Day in Lisbon (described at the beginning of this paper): […] we Muslims are all one and the same community but some of us think that there are imaginary lines that divides us’.20 34 For Faruk, as well as other members of the Islamic Forum, Bengali and Bangladeshi nationalisms are perceived as a way of dividing Muslims. According to such discourses, those that organize the celebrations of 21 February and other occasions intimately related with the independence of Bangladesh are accused of thinking too much about the past while being reckless about the future. 35 Among those that celebrate occasions such as the Sahid Dibosh, these events are announced in the Bangladeshi shops, usually indicating the political support of the owners. For instance, if a shop announces the celebration of the Language Day organized by the BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party), it is not usual to announce the same celebration organized by the Awami League. 36 These ceremonies are frequently held in rented halls of hotels, in prayer rooms or restaurants and are organized as political rallies with guests who are from the same political faction and live in other countries being invited. For instance, during the Language Day celebrations in 2005, organized by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party Portugal and held in the conference room of hotel Mundial in downtown Lisbon, a representative of the BNP in Belgium was the special guest and the main speaker of the event. Thus, political factions in Portugal are intimately connected with the same factions in other European countries, frequently organizing and participating in the same events throughout Europe. 37 All these activities are part of a transnational political arena, a transnational desh, which includes not only similar movements in other parts of Europe but also the political parties in Bangladesh and the representatives of the Bangladesh government. As several authors have shown (Eade & Garbin 2006, Kabeer 2000, Siddiqui 2004), the UK is a frequent place for political activities by Bangladeshi politicians due to the economic and political importance of Bangladeshi migration and British-Bangladeshis. But in the past years, other European contexts have also gained prominence and visibility. For instance, in 2003, the Awami League Portugal organized a meeting of all the representatives of the League in European countries, including the main representatives of the party in the European Union. On 5 August 2003, Delwar Hussain Saydee visited Lisbon as an MP and member of the BNP/Jama’at-e-Islami coalition (the Four Party Alliance)21 government and was received by Jama’at-e-Islami supporters at a function held in a Lisbon mosque. On 10 October 2010, Dipu Moni, Minister of Foreign Affairs, visited Portugal on an official visit and was received by the members of the Awami League Portugal at a public event. 38 All these events are not simply occasions to celebrate Bangladesh and its important historical dates, but they can also be interpreted as spaces for competing versions of long distance nationalism (Anderson 1998, Schiller & Fouron 2001) that include Bengali secularism, Bangladeshi nationalism and political Islam. The debate in Portugal, so far, is not only about the ideological underpinnings of each project, but also its legitimacy. Through a dispute about the role of several political actors in the political history of

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Bangladesh, each faction questions the legitimacy of the respective projects. In order to do so the past is continuously reinterpreted to support the ideological position of each faction. 39 This is illustrated by two events, one that occurred in 2003 and the other in early 2013. The first was the visit of Delwar Hussain Saydee to Lisbon in the summer of 2003; Delwar Hussain Saydee was a member of the national assembly of Bangladesh (Jatyio Sangshad) elected by the Four Party Alliance.22 The initial idea was for the Member of Parliament (MP) to visit the Bangladeshi mosque and the Bangladeshi businesses in Martim Moniz, but this had to be cancelled due to protests by secular groups. The main arguments against this visit were related with of his and his party’s alleged role during the independence war of 1971: […] we were talking about the visit of the MP when Mutiur argued that as a member of an Islamic party he frequently says some right things but politically, namely in relation to Bangladesh and Pakistan, he is completely wrong. The truth is that in Bangladesh people speak a totally different language, eat different food and dress in different ways, so why should they be together? Simply because they share the same religion? But even in this they are different. Thus the argument that the Jama’at-e-Islami sustains—that Muslims should not be separated—is absolutely false.23 40 Another revealing example is the following excerpt of a conversation with Amin, one of my interlocutors from Dhaka district, who arrived in Portugal in 2002: Many Bangladeshis don’t want this MP in Portugal. According to what they say, namely the Awami League supporters, Saydee is a traitor because during the independence war he defended that Bangladesh shouldn’t be independent from Pakistan. Furthermore, he argued: although they are an Islamic Party they never do what they say.24 41 Later on the same day: Osman criticises Delwar because he helped kill thousands of Bengalis while participating in the Razakars during the independence war. For Osman, it is very difficult to accept Delwars’ visit to Lisbon since he remembers his younger paternal uncle and how he fought alongside the Mukhti Bahini in Keraniganj. He clearly remembers the secret visit of his uncle to the house of Osman’s grandmother. No one could know of his presence. Osman distinctly remembers that day and the way he was dressed, with some old rags, and a riffle. He will never forget that day!25 42 Osman arrived in Portugal in 2002 after spending several years in Japan and Saudi Arabia; he had previously participated in the Awami League youth section (the Jubo League) in Keraniganj. He considered the presence of Delwar intolerable due to the alleged role this politician had played in the anti-independence militia (razakar) that fought alongside the Pakistani army against the freedom fighters (mukti bahini or mukti judda) who are said to be responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Bengalis. Furthermore, his presence evoked personal traces of the past, especially concerning the role some of his relatives—in this case his uncle—had played in the struggle for independence and all the suffering the war caused not only to thousands of Bengalis, but to his own family.

43 The second event that reveals this politics of memory was the trial of this former MP, Delwar Hussain Saydee, by the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) and the repercussions of this trial in Lisbon.26 Faruk, mentioned above, argued that during the process:

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[…] many witnesses that are being heard by the court (over the implication of the Jama’at-e-islami and Saydee in the Razakars) have been bought. After testifying, many recognized publicly that they were offered houses in exchange for a testimony against the Jamaat and Saydee. Just the other day, Amin (the leader of the BNP faction in Portugal and one of the oldest Bangladeshis in the country) held a public meeting (in Lisbon) in order to explain that Jama’at-i-Islami never took an official position about the war. According to him, among jamaat supporters certainly, there were some who supported a united Muslim country but there were others that fought side by side with the mukthi judda. Furthermore, Amin continued, Delwar could not have participated in the Razakars simply because he was 16 years (old) then.2728 44 In the following days, a protest against the International Crimes Tribunal and in support of Delwar Hussain Saydee was held in front of the recently opened Bangladeshi Embassy in Lisbon.

45 What is at stake, in both cases, are disputed notions of the past and the role actors played in what could be called, in Hackings' terms (1995), the politics of memory. In fact, and as we have seen so far, both of the sources of the politics of memory described above, are in this case intimately connected with each other in the form of embodiments of the past. The concept of embodied past was developed by Didier Fassin in order to explore the ‘corporeal presence of memory’ (Fassin 2008: 316), that is, ‘[...] the way in which individual trajectories and collective histories are transcribed into individual and collective bodies, in terms of affects and emotions, disease and comfort, mourning and pleasure’. Emotional, affective and visceral are some of the keywords that could be used to describe the ways my interlocutors mobilize memory in order to continuously (re)interpret the present. In a way, history still hurts and the debates in Lisbon reveal such tensions. 46 But why are there such debates? What is at stake in these arguments? The concept of long distance nationalism is frequently used to describe the formal political impact of immigrants in their homeland or the potential lobbying of immigrants in the receiving state in favour of a particular party or movement in the home country (see for instance Schiller et al. 1994, Vertovec 2009, inter alia). In this paper, on the other hand, I show how long distance nationalism is also associated with politics of memory in the general context of struggles between different political imaginaries. That is, bidesh, as a land of plenty, is a place of accumulation of wealth and prestige and thus, according to my interlocutors, allows migrants to have a significant impact on their relatives back home (see Gardner 1993 for a similar argument). In such contexts, the argument continues, migrants can be instrumental in changing the political support of their relatives in Bangladesh. Thus, Europe is another political arena to gather new support and reinforce ones position. This is quite explicit in a conversation with Jalal, one of my interlocutors from Dhaka, who has been in Portugal since 2002: […] Jamaatis are doing in Portugal what they do in Bangladesh. They try to convince the migrants to vote for them and thus change their political affiliations. Afterwards, when these migrants go back home, either permanently or on holidays, and since they are respected and influential because they live abroad, they try to convince their relatives to change their votes.29 47 Although Jalal was not formally linked to any political party, he had sympathies with the Awami league and, for him, Portugal was part of a transnational Bangladeshi political space where different political movements make multiple efforts to mobilize migrants.

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48 Reaching out to Bangladeshi migrants, even in a peripheral (demographically or economically) context such as Portugal, as compared to the UK, is a potential space for the creation of new political influences and thus a way of transmitting certain visions of what Bangladesh should be, that is, certain nationalist imaginaries and projects. One way of doing this is via the control of certain institutions, namely mosques and representative associations.30 Through these arenas it is possible to transmit normativities and thus produce versions of what is considered ‘normal’, ‘tolerated’, ‘forbidden’ and ‘accepted’, not only in religion and ceremonial practices (defining haram and halal or what one should or should not do), but also regarding issues related to long distance nationalism, the politicization of memory and Bangladeshi contemporary public debates.

Creating ‘community’

49 A revealing example is the creation of the Luso-Bangladeshi Association or the Probashir community Lisbon and the efforts to control such an arena. The celebration described in the initial vignette can be seen as part of the making of a Bangladeshi ‘community’ in the Portuguese public domain in which Bengali/Bangladeshi cultural identities and symbols are mobilized in the general context of the politics of immigrant representation. The history of the creation of a Bangladeshi association in Lisbon is a revealing case. According to Manosh, a pioneer who arrived in the late 1980s, and one the leaders of the Awami League in Portugal, the efforts to build a representative association of Bangladeshis began in 1993: Thirteen of us had a dinner in Lisbon to discuss the creation of an association. Everything was going just fine until a decision had to be made about its president. Then everything turned into a mess. One of them argued that just because he was older and a doctor he had more capacities/rights to the leadership! But that’s not all that counts.31 50 It was after this first meeting that the Portugal-Bangladesh Cultural Union (União Cultural de Portugal-Bangladesh) was created. In spite of being close to the Awami League in Portugal, its main objective was to represent Bangladeshis to Portuguese institutions, such as the High Commissioner for Immigration and Ethnic Minorities (Alto Comissariado para a Imigração e Minorias Étnicas - ACIME),32 the Borders Police (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras or S.E.F.), the Bangladesh Consular Office, in Oporto, and the Bangladeshi Embassy in Paris. Furthermore, their aim was to provide support for probashis in bureaucratic procedures in relation to Portuguese and Bangladeshi institutions (e.g. translation of documents or sending forms for the renewal of passports).

51 It was also in charge of organizing several events celebrating Bengali cultural heritage, namely Language Day and Bengali New Year’s Day, and important national dates. For instance in 2003, Language Day was celebrated in a hotel in Lisbon in the presence of the Bangladeshi Consul, the Bangladeshi Ambassador in Paris and a representative of the Borders Police (S.E.F.). The programme included the singing of Bengali songs, poetry recitals and speeches by its main representatives. 52 According to its president and the executive committee, the aim was to represent all Bangladeshis in the Portuguese public domain, an objective that was clearly visible in

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the opening speech of the celebration of 26 March—a national holiday in Bangladesh that celebrates the declaration of independence from Pakistan—in 2007 in Lisbon: I’m personally very grateful for the friendship between our two countries. We come from very far away but I could not overemphasise the importance of exchanging our cultures, our languages and our traditions. Once I had the opportunity to speak to the president of the republic and said: ‘500 years ago Vasco da Gama came to my homeland and we received him cordially. 500 years later the Bangladeshi people came here and we also hope you receive us cordially’. The president greeted all Bangladeshis. Currently we are almost four thousand and we contribute with our work, we pay social security, we pay taxes, in sum we are part of Portugal. Our children are born here and they study here. […] We respect the rules and thus someday we too will be Portuguese. […] Dear friends, we don’t ask for food, clothing or money. We only ask for work so that we can make ends meet. I want to exchange ideas and cultures between our two countries. Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of our independence and we emphatically say: long live independence and let us live with liberty.33 53 Due to its association with the Awami League, the Portugal-Bangladesh Cultural Union was frequently criticised by the supporters of the BNP and the Jama’at-e-Islami. The argument was that in spite of its objective—the representation of all Bangladeshis, as expressed in the above speech—the União was first and foremost associated with the Awami League and thus the legitimacy of its claim to represent all Bangladeshis was questionable. Consequently, the other two factions frequently organized their own celebrations. This was in turn criticised by several members of the Union to whom such institutional fragmentation was incomprehensible. According to Mahmud (one of the older Bangladeshis in Portugal), its vice president: ‘we are one, we are Bangladesh. How many are we in Portugal? 3000 or 3500 and we have three parties and groups!’34

54 In spite of such polemics and contestations, the União was for several years the only interlocutor between Bangladeshis and the Portuguese institutions that dealt with immigration issues. 55 In 2010, though, after several years of uncertainty, all the factions met to prepare a common ground for the creation of a new representative association. The idea came from a member of the Bangladeshi parliament; some of my interlocutors had a meeting with this member during a visit to Bangladesh. The objective was the creation of a new institution of representation of probashis that could liaise with the Portuguese authorities and the new and upcoming Bangladeshi embassy, a promise made by the Minister of Foreign Affairs during her visit to Portugal in 2010. 56 After several meetings, it was decided to elect the new executive committee for the Luso-Bangladeshi Association (Associação Luso-Bangladeshi or Probashir Community Portugal), which would be formally registered and created only after the elections. The preparation of the electoral process, including the voting process itself, the registration of all Bangladeshis over eighteen years old (each voter has an electoral card, with a number and a photograph) and the registration of the lists of candidates, should be guaranteed by a fourth independent and informal group composed of Bangladeshis in Lisbon with no political connections whatsoever. This fourth party, called Friends of Friends, was created in January 2011 and besides overseeing the creation of the new association, it was also responsible for the organization of several cultural events (until the new association was created). 57 The organization of the celebrations for Language Day 2011, described at the beginning of this article, was already part of this arrangement and was organized by this same

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fourth party. As if to distinguish themselves from the public and all other factions, on Language Day, 21 February 2011, the members of Friends of Friends were all wearing similar green and red t-shirts. 58 All the contending factions saw this as an important moment for the upcoming electoral process. For all of them it was important to be present and the way to do this was through processions and presentation of flowers at the Shahid Minar replica, paying homage to the martyrs of the Language movement. 59 Three lists were formed for the elections. Several members of the former executive committee of the União Cultural de Bangladesh-Portugal composed the ‘blue list’ and built an electoral programme that, in clear continuity with the past, aspired to be for all Bangladeshis and independent of factional belongings. As Manosh argued while drinking a cup of afternoon cha during the campaign: This list is for all Bangladeshis and not only for Awami supporters. Otherwise we will run the risk of losing the elections!35 60 In spite of this, for critics and non-critics alike this was informally called the ‘Awami League list’ and the group were never able to separate themselves from such an image. Yet Manosh continued to be regarded as the favourite candidate and the one who would surely garner the most votes. Everyone recognised that he was the most appropriate candidate for the position of president of the association—with social capital, knowledge of Portuguese language and institutions and connections with the Portuguese political establishment (he was part of the Socialist party).

61 The second list included members of both the BNP and the Islamic Forum and it was seen as the main competition for the blue list. It was known as the ‘green list’ and included the son-in-law of the main representative of the BNP Portugal, some very important Luso-Bangladeshi entrepreneurs, and some supporters of the Jama’at-e- Islami. 62 Lastly, there was a shorter list of independent candidates, who were all members of the same patrilineage and former members of the Awami League faction that had separated from the initial faction after personal and family grievances. 63 The elections took place on 10 April in a Lisbon hotel owned by a Portuguese Muslim from Mozambique. For hours after the ballots closed, members of each faction and other Bangladeshis waited for the announcement of results that took until after three o’clock in the morning. Against all expectation, the green list won and by the time the results were publicized Manosh and several of the Awami League supporters had already left, as if they had been forewarned about the results. After months of preparation, the Luso-Bangladeshi association was finally created. 64 But what is the link between this recently created association and the Shahid Dibosh described at the beginning of this paper? And what does this tells us about the link between local and transnational political activism? The celebration in Lisbon of the 21 February in 2011 was an event specially created to prepare the electoral process that would lead to a new and overarching association—the probashir community Portugal. In this context Bengali/Bangladeshi cultural symbols were essential to participate in the Portuguese immigrant politics—based on an intercultural model of citizenship (for a distinction between Intercultural and Multicultural models of citizenship see Modood 2011)—in which migrants are expected to participate as members of ‘communities’ organized in accordance with ‘national’ belonging, their ‘national’ cultural heritages

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and their representative associations. These must be recognized by the High Commissioner for Immigration and Intercultural Dialogue (ACIDI), a consultative body of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in order to participate in several consultative bodies that influence government decisions and programmes about ‘integration’ and ‘immigration’ issues. Without this recognition, an association is virtually invisible, at least when it comes to the definition of policies and making claims. The celebration of Language Day in 2011, which later led to the creation of the probashir community Portugal, was intimately linked to claims on the part of Bangladeshis, namely the pioneers, to participate in the Portuguese institutions that deal with immigration issues. 65 At the same time, however, Bengali/Bangladeshi cultural identities and symbols are highly contested and debated among Bangladeshis themselves, not only in Bangladesh but also across bidesh and this is clearly visible in the politics of memory and competing nationalist imaginaries revealed in the previous section. Thus, who controls this new arena—secularists, nationalist or Islamists—controls the political message the new association will transmit and thus could possibly influence other Bangladeshis living in Portugal. And due to the economic importance and successful image of the bidesh, they in turn have the potential to ultimately influence relatives and friends back in the desh, therefore helping shape and transform political imaginaries and ideologies in Bangladesh itself.

Some concluding notes

66 Using an extended case method (Gluckman 1958) of the Shahid Dibosh celebrations in downtown Lisbon in 2011, this article has revealed the political dimensions of the transnational social fields between Portugal and Bangladesh.

67 On one hand, the Bangladeshi transnational public space connects Bangladeshis in the UK, in Bangladesh and in other locations through cultural identities and symbols such as the Sahid Minar and the Ekushey. On the other hand, though, these identities and symbols are transformed according to where Bangladeshis are located. It is true that the arguments and debates in Lisbon have elements in common with those described, for instance, by Alexander (2013) and Eade & Garbin (2006) in the British case. But it is essential to recognize that these symbols are differently appropriated according to the different historical and political contexts. For instance, as Alexander shows in her research (2013), the creation of Bangladeshi representative institutions in the UK, including the construction of a replica of the Shahid Minar in London, was part of the anti-racist struggle. In Portugal, though, Bengali and Bangladeshi symbols were ‘used’ to participate in the intercultural politics of immigrant representation in which immigrants are supposed to participate as ‘national communities’, with their own cultural symbols and heritages. Paradoxically though, these same symbols are highly contested, debated and emotionally charged among Bangladeshis themselves, especially in the context of Bangladeshi transnational politics. These debates over the importance of certain symbols reveal precisely the existence of competing long distance nationalisms 68 Thus, the celebration of the language day in 2011 in Lisbon was linked, on one hand, with the participation of Bangladeshis in the Portuguese immigration regime, in which migrants are expected to participate as members of specific national communities and,

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on the other, with the continuous engagement of these same actors in a Bangladeshi transnational political space.

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NOTES

1. I want to thank the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT), without which the research that led to this article would not have been possible. A previous version of this article was presented in the panel, Imagining Bangladesh in the 22nd European Conference of South Asian Studies, 25-28 July 2012 in Lisbon and in the 3rd Annual Conference of the Brick Lane Circle, 27 April 2013, London. I want to thank all those who made comments/suggestions. 2. Ekushe is the name given to the month of February (also known as Ekushe February) and is intimately associated with the celebrations of the mother language day celebrated on 21. It is also the name given to a book fair organized in Dhaka, also in February, which celebrates Bengali language, literature and culture. 3. In this area of Lisbon it is possible to find several Portuguese regional associations and their clubhouses. These are not only used for the associations’ activities but are also rented for private celebrations. 4. As we will see later, there have been other celebrations of Language Day and the Bengali New Year in Lisbon in the past but none had such public visibility as the one celebrated in 2011. 5. The concept of transnational public sphere or space draws on the works of John Bowen (2004) and Nancy Fraser (2007). 6. See Zeitlyn (2013) for the relation between British Bangladeshis, transnational habitus and third spaces of migration. 7. Long distance nationalism is a concept initially proposed by Benedict Anderson in 1998 and was further theorized by Nina Glick Schiller and George Fouron (2001) in their research about Haitian Americans and transnational political activism. According to Schiller and Fouron (2001: 4), long distance nationalism is ‘[...] a claim to membership in a political community that stretches beyond the territorial borders of a homeland. It generates an emotional attachment that is strong enough to compel people to political action that ranges from displaying a home country flag to deciding to ‘return’ to fight and die in a land they may never have seen’. This kind of nationalism has five main characteristics: (i) it assumes that national borders do not exclusively delimit belonging; (ii) it is not only an imaginary and emotive but also a set of concrete actions and politics; (iii) the aim of long distance nationalists is the creation of a transnational nation-state; (iv) its emergence and manifestations depend on the conditions in

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receiving and sending contexts; and finally (v) long distance nationalism and diasporic phenomena frequently go together but nonetheless remain distinct. This theoretical proposal implies a notion of nationalism as a discursive formation, that is, a set of symbols with multiple and frequently conflicting meanings. 8. Transnational social fields or spaces is a concept first proposed by Glick Schiller et al., in 1992, to describe the way transnationalism changes peoples' relations with space by creating ‘[...] social spaces that connect and position some actors in more than one country’ (Vertovec 2009: 12). 9. According to Ian Hacking (Hacking 1995: 211) ‘the politics of personal memory is a politics of a certain type. It is a power struggle built around knowledge, or claims to knowledge. It takes for granted that a certain sort of knowledge is possible. Individual factual claims are batted back and forth (…). Underlying these competing claims to surface knowledge there is depth knowledge; that is, a knowledge that there are facts out there about memory, truth-or-falsehoods to get a fix on. [...] Power struggles are fought out on the basis of surface knowledge, where opponents take the depth knowledge as common ground. Each side opposes the other, claiming it has better, more exact, surface knowledge, drawing on superior evidence and methodology. That is exactly the form of the confrontations between those who recover memory of trauma and those who question it.’ 10. The Portuguese regime of citizenship or the legitimate forms of representation in the case of immigrant populations is based on intercultural policies in which immigrants are expected to participate as members of ‘communities’ organized in accordance with ‘national’ belonging, with their ‘national’ cultural heritages and their representative associations, see last section for a more detailed discussion. 11. The extended case method was proposed in 1940 by Max Gluckman in his The Social Situation in Modern Zululand, a study of the inauguration of a bridge in South Africa (also informally known as 'the Bridge'). The main objective was to describe in great detail an event—a social situation— from which it would be possible to analyse the sociological patterns of the wider society. The same method was used years later by J. C. Mitchell (1956), a student and later a colleague of Max Gluckman, in his famous analysis of the Kalela Dance, in Northern Rhodesia. For an analysis of the importance of the extended case method within Anthropology see Evens and Edelman (2006). 12. This article is based on three periods of ethnographic fieldwork. The first began in 2003 and finished in 2006 and led up to a PhD in social and cultural Anthropology at the University of Lisbon. In this first case, the ethnography included Portugal and Bangladesh and a total of 70 interviews (including the life and family histories of important interlocutors). The second and third periods were: from February to late May 2011 and from February to April 2012. These two latest periods of fieldwork were updates on previous data about transnational political activities of Bangladeshis in Portugal and included 20 in depth interviews (most of which applied to previously known contacts in order to collect longitudinal data). 13. This sense of bidesh (the Bengali word for foreign lands) as spaces of well-being, fortune and success (although morally menacing) as opposed to desh (the Bengali word for homeland) as a land of failure, corruption and poverty (although morally and religiously upright) are tropes long associated with the migratory experience (Gardner 1993). From the experience of Sylhetis in the UK, to the massive migrations to Middle Eastern countries, including the long-term migrations to North America, it is possible to find a ‘culture of migration’, as Massey et al. (1993) have defined it, where those that do not migrate are perceived as lazy and bad marriage deals while those that live in bidesh are perceived as rich, successful and prosperous. 14. In total, three regularization programs took place between 1993 and 2004 and were linked to Portuguese geostrategic interests (namely the relations with Portuguese Speaking African Countries) and as an answer to pressures from several sectors of the labour market (e.g. construction).

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15. This predicament has also brought some tensions between kin in Portugal and in Bangladesh, especially when there are conflicting claims about channelling resources to the children's education or to support relatives in the desh. This becomes increasingly visible during the divisions of family properties. In such tense moments, the redistribution of wealth by probashis to other relatives in the desh is carefully considered in the general redistribution and frequently ends in bitter conflicts between siblings and parents. 16. For a history of the Islamic Forum see Eade & Garbin 2006. 17. In this paper, categories such as ‘second generation’ are explicitly avoided because of its problematic assumptions regarding the place (or lack thereof) of children of immigrants in the so called host society. For a critical appraisal of the concept see Ali et al. 2006. 18. The day is commemorated on 3 November and is a reminder of the killing of four leaders of Awami League in 1975 in Dhaka central jail. 19. The names of my research associates have been changed in order to maintain anonymity and protection of identities. 20. Fieldnotes, 2 March 2012. 21. The Four Party Alliance, formed in 1999, was led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and included the Jama'at-e-Islami, the Jatyo Party and the Islami Oikyajote. 22. This Member of Parliament originally came from the ranks of the Jama'at-i-Islami. 23. Fieldnotes, 5 August 2003. 24. Fieldnotes, 6 August 2003. 25. Fieldnotes, 6 August 2003. 26. For a contextualization of the ICT see Zeitlyn in this special issue. 27. The following day Faruk shared a video in Facebook about Saydee. 28. Fieldnotes, 20 December 2012 29. Fieldnotes, 4 August 2003. 30. For a comparative case see Werbner (2002). 31. Fieldnotes, 21 October 2006. 32. In 2007, ACIME changed its designation to High Commissioner for Immigration and Intercultural Dialogue—ACIDI. It is a state institution that consults on migration issues. It manages Local Centres for Immigrants (Centros Locais de Apoio ao Imigrante—CLAI) and organizes several commissions from NGOs, migrant associations and other institutions of the third sector in order to produce policy orientations to the government. 33. Fieldnotes, 26 March 2007. 34. Fieldnotes, 12 March 2007. 35. Fieldnotes, 11 April 2011.

ABSTRACTS

The literature on what could be called a Bangladeshi transnational public sphere has grown significantly in the last few years and has focused mainly on translocal political activities and ways of belonging for British Bangladeshis and Bangladeshi immigrants in the UK. However, this public sphere includes other locations and actors that have so far been left out of the picture. Based on a situational analysis of the celebrations of Sahid Dibosh (Language Day) in a square in Lisbon in 2011, this article explores the political dimensions of the transnational social fields that

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exist between Portugal and Bangladesh. The main arguments are firstly that this Bangladeshi transnational public space connects Bangladeshis in the UK, Bangladesh and other locations, such as Portugal, through symbols, long distance nationalism and politics of memory. Secondly, the paper argues that these are interpreted according to the contexts where Bangladeshis live and thus assume new meanings.

INDEX

Keywords: transnational public domain, shahid dibosh, politics of memory, Luso-Bangladeshis

AUTHOR

JOSÉ MAPRIL

Research fellow, Centre for Research in Anthropology, New University of Lisbon

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