A burning house on Road 32

As the flames spread, our caretaker Mizan ran from our home in Dhanmondi to Road 32. Intuitively remembering that my academic research was in the history archives, he went inside, rescued a few scraps of paper and called me to say he had Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s handwritten letters. After he sent me images over WhatsApp, I had to let him know that he had risked his safety for a mirage. The dates on these letters, under cursive Bengali, were 1992–in that chaotic scene of arson, Mizan had actually wandered into the caretaker's office. The actual museum inside the house had already been burnt to embers, and every piece of historical ephemera was destroyed.

Attacks on state buildings after the dramatic collapse of the Awami League government are understood as the expression of people’s fury at an oppressive state and its endless circumnavigation around one-name history. Given the very recent insensitive expressions of government mourning for infrastructure but not student lives, it is challenging to now explore empathy for state structures facing the wrath of those mourning their dead. But I wonder if any of the arsonists at Road 32 paused to think that they may be burning down their own history as well.

When future generations want to hear the story of the birth of Bangladesh, how will we navigate all those moments that centered around this house in the late 1960s and 1970s? A history that involved all people of this geography, not only members of a single political party. Contemporary historians propose that architecture and objects are the second draft of history, and we are a fragile nation with always vanishing archives. Now that the physical house had been destroyed, how will young researchers explore, for example, Beg Art Institute’s iconic photograph of Sheikh Mujib on 25 March 1971, after negotiations with General Yahya Khan had failed, raising an early flag of Bangladesh (the red circle had a map inside in that first draft?

In the foreword to my book Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel: Switzerland, 2014), I wrote about the power-pleasing mania for enforcing “shothik itihash” (correct history). I was thinking about the corrosive state-enforced obedient and hagiographic history being churned out of our universities and publishing houses. This is a history that insists there is only one narrative at every bend of our journey since the partition of British India. Those of us who form part of the “second generation of Bangladeshi historians” (a phrase coined by first-generation historian Afsan Chowdhury) have been working quietly over the years on building up an alternative, multi-layered history of Bangladesh. This includes the complex, contradictory, and unresolved history of a liberation war that had multiple claimants.

The singular obstacle to writing these histories is that each time we have a change in government, a different swath of our collective archive is destroyed through neglect or erasure. This is, however, the first time a publicly viewed spectacular fire has destroyed a history archive.

In a 2016 editorial for the Daily Star about the “Bangladesh Liberation War (Denial, Distortion, Opposition) Crime Law,” I ended with Ahmed Sofa’s phrase: our Muktijuddho was a “polyphony of the ocean.” The occasion was clause 4(2) of this proposed law that prohibited “denying events that were for the preparation of the liberation war between 14 August 1947 to 28 Feb 1971.” This meant a historian was prohibited from exploring any genealogy that posited that citizens of East Pakistan were invested in the Pakistan project at any moment prior to 1971. The events of the last few days now make me wonder if there will be in our future new laws (or the freelance equivalent, mob justice) that insist that any version of our history that includes the Awami League will also not be allowed.

The story of Bangladesh has so far been a twinning of triumph and failure–a binary that has touched each of our national leaders and their challengers. Sheikh Mujib is part of that lineage, as is Tajuddin Ahmed, Ziaur Rahman, Maulana Bhashani, Colonel Taher, and others. As the first national leader, Sheikh Mujib combined many elements of Shakespearean tragedy, reaching heights of achievement and dramatic failures. On August 15th, he walked down the steps of that house to meet the soldiers instead of escaping through the back wall– because he considered this his army, surely they would not harm him.

Sheikh Mujib’s assassination immediately reminds me of Ziaur Rahman’s equally tragic end at the hands of former allies. Zia was at the Chittagong Circuit House to work out a dispute between factions of the BNP, and the attack was led by a once-trusted aide who had been transferred to the port city. In a pattern repeated throughout the 1970s, one freedom fighter killed another that day–although Mohiuddin Ahmed’s Parbotto Chottogram: Shantibahini, Zia Hotya, Manzur Khoon (Prothoma: Dhaka, 2022) suggests submerged narratives. The fratricidal conflict between freedom fighter officers was also the story of the 7th November Sipahi Biplob (the third coup of 1975), the execution of Colonel Taher, and the 1977 airport coup (featured in my documentary United Red Army, 2011). Will we now enter a new dispensation where one set of narratives is allowed, and a different story arc is off-limits?

Growing up in Dhanmondi, my strongest memory of the house on Road 32 was when the Awami League was out of power. In 2006, the house was neglected, unguarded, and forgotten, but also intact. You could still see blood stains on the stairs, encased in glass– I am unsure how they survived evaporation for three decades. Ten years later, everything in that building had been renovated, but the spirit of the actual history had been rendered inert by too much state pageantry and official visitors. The hagiography that loyalist historians produced over the last fifteen years flattened Sheikh Mujib’s political life into one shorn of all complexity, hesitation, and error–fundamentally human qualities.

To understand Bangladesh, we need to continue to explore why the 1971 war was and remains what Salimullah Khan called Behat Biplob (Agami: Dhaka, 2007), or revolution snatched from our hands. Bangladesh encompasses a multilayered, ambiguous, unresolved history that has produced a complex, evolving national psyche and journey. Every part of the records is essential for writing that history, and now we have lost one part of that archive: a historic building and all the ephemera inside.

For the last fifteen years, we have lived within a state that often insisted that only one political party could claim all of Bangladesh's history. In fact, it was the insistence on universalizing “rajakar” as an insult for all political opponents that accelerated a student protest into a national uprising. But we cannot now make a pendulum swing where other historical terms are newly abused to to silence dissent.

The work of Bangladeshi historiography has already been dramatically warped by pressure, intimidation, and censure; a boomerang or u-turn regarding what is “allowed” history will do even more damage to the project of national reconciliation. Let us not start this era by erecting a new hagiography that insists that every part of liberation war history that involves the Awami League should now be erased. That would be the type of “shuddhikoron” (purification) and “kharij” (cancellation) that we have suffered from enough already since 1972 until now, under every government. It is only the first days of a complex transition after a historic student-led uprising, but we must already guard against repeating the errors of the past.

* Dr. Naeem Mohaiemen (naeem.mohaiemen@columbia.edu) is a historian and Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University, New York, and the author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta: Dhaka, 2023)