Holding water:

an introduction to are we rich yet?

A pair of cyclones brackets the half century span of modern Bangladesh, a whole nation’s history in a devastating nutshell. The Bhola cyclone of 1970 killed up to half a million East Pakistanis and triggered the Bangladesh liberation war, remaking the region and its geopolitics. Super Cyclonic Storm Amphan struck fifty years later, and at the height of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic killed 26 Bangladeshis.

The differences in these grisly statistics capture the transformation in becoming Bangladesh: from a neglectful unaccounting that signaled lives that did not matter in 1970, to a careful listing of the deaths of those who could not be protected from the storm in 2020, after millions had already been evacuated.

The Black Lives Matter movement taught us that an accounting for human death is the bare minimum for lives to matter. Does the distance between Bhola and Amphan mean that Bangladeshi lives matter now, in a way they did not - or could not - before? How should we read the surprising story of ‘the international basket case’ that became a place of, if not riches exactly, then of relative prosperity?

These questions animate Are We Rich Yet?, a collection of writing about the tragedies as well as the comedies of a country fast rising into its place in the world.

THe canary in the coalmine

Bangladesh rises even while it sinks into the warming sea, but its buoyancy rarely enjoys salutary international attention. The slight is odd on two counts. The first is yet more people-counting: by population size (and what counts more than people?) Bangladesh is the world’s eighth largest country. This statistic tends for some reason to surprise people to whom I subject it.

The second is that Bangladesh is the canary in the coalmine of the global system: what happens here, the direct effects of ecology, empire, and global economy, is both warning and lesson for the rest of the world. And so while these pieces are all about Bangladesh, they touch on matters that press upon us from beyond the flimsy fiction of national borders. I hope to provoke us to think beyond the bald accounting of economic growth, to have a richer conception of what it means to be ‘rich’. As the world is fast learning what life is like at the sharp end of climate change and a volatile global system, how Bangladesh has changed, it turns out, is a matter of concern beyond its borders.

In the essays in Are We Rich Yet? I reflect on pivotal moments and enduring puzzles – matters that stay in my mind. These include memory and past trauma, and the imaginaries of a country and its people, within and beyond its borders. I look at the niceties and vulgarities at play in the reformulation of class and status, and at novel yet never wholly new mobilities and connections beyond Desh.

It is not all grisly statistics: I write about the bling of the self-styled Prince Moosa, wondering about the appetite for grandeur fed by this gilded icon of business success. We revisit the Beatle George Harrison’s subversive act of brotherly love, the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, an icon of my own 1970s childhood; here I try to reconcile to its mixed consequences, not least the enduring image of rock music as the saviour of the starving Third World.

Airports feature more than could reasonably be found interesting. I cannot explain this fascination, except that those liminal spaces concretize nationality in such a hard way, and so are sites of a most concentrated Bangladeshi-ness. It might equally be because I am (or was, before Covid-19) often in airports en route to or from Bangladesh. It in airports that you encounter that class of aerotropolitans that moves so modernly through the skies on their way to work. Such movement remains to me a thing of wonder, if not always a wonderful thing.

These pieces offer selective and sideways answers to the question posed by the title. This distance is one of time in the more historical pieces. The adventure of exploring digital archives, old films, photography and testimony has opened up to me an online world of memory-making, a richness of pixelated nationhood. This world is available as much to the diasporic me as to anyone with an internet connection and an interest in beholding Bangladesh in its digital life-form. Online imaginaries cast a creative and nostalgic filter on the mundane to imagine a more beautiful and freer future. I am enchanted by digital Dhaka, but it is the enchantment of one who does not live in a city so regularly ranked among the world’s least appealing.

I see Bangladesh’s changes as an insider-outsider, a half-Bangladeshi mostly located elsewhere. Are We Rich Yet? is not an ‘authentic’ account of what social transformation has meant for a Bangladeshi, but my awkward position licenses me to uncover truths unavailable to either the total outsider or the perfect insider. Here I retell stories in the hope that future generations remember what launched this little-known country on its difficult, remarkable journey a half century ago.