On becoming Bangladesh

This collection of short pieces is my small contribution to a larger conversation about Bangladesh’s 50th year of independence.

Bangladesh fascinates me, which is just as well given the quarter-century I’ve spent studying it. I am struck by its stormy history, and by the transformation of this vast society between the Bhola cyclone of 1970 that triggered the becoming of Bangladesh, and the storm Amphan that struck at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic fifty years later. So much has happened in between, much of it unexpected or paradoxical. It amazes me that this transformation has gone largely unseen by the outside world, and is even barely perceived at home in Bangladesh.

The essays here hope to introduce the uninitiated to a place to which the tourists never came, and to invite the insider to revisit what we know about becoming Bangladesh.

Are we rich yet?

Bangladesh is fast rising into its place in the world, even while it sinks into warming seas. I have described it (and perhaps this is not original?) as the canary in the global system’s coalmine, also as the international system’s aid lab. But among its warnings and lessons there are comedy and drama, beauty and violence, and unexpected stories worth hearing, which I wanted to tell.

I examine some great and tragic moments like the nation-breaking cyclone, and a Beatle’s musical act of subversive solidarity, not to dwell on past trauma but to mark the distance between then and now. I also travel with contemporary Bangladeshi-ness, through the perfumed portals of international travel and the palaces of the filthy rich, for alternative ways of seeing this remarkable transformation.

Digital media has done a lot to our ways of seeing - it broadens yet skews what we can and do see. We see ourselves refracted through the virtual lens, and the moments where we encounter our appearance to the outside world feel rich with possibility: what do others see when they see Bangladesh or Bangladeshis? What does this tell us about the difference between being Bangladeshi and the story we tell to the world?

I’m not interested in comparing GDP or bank balances or development targets. But I do wonder what it means to Bangladeshi society to have moved beyond mass conditions of barest survival, to be able to make real choices, even if it makes those against the precarious hot mess that is late capitalism. There are no real answers to the question ‘are we rich yet?’ here. But I hope you’ll agree it is a good question to think with.