‘Art, Politics and the Environment in Bangladesh’ provides a guide to explore how shifting social and political realities of Bangladesh act as the bases of historical events and cultural processes that are neither self-evident nor complete. The essays trace these unfoldings from varied disciplinary perspectives. Consider, for instance, two case studies featured in the volume: the massive enthusiasm for staging local elections for villages that have disappeared owing to the movement of rivers or the resistance to the shrimping industry in areas disastrously poldered by previous Dutch development interventions. They help visualize the impact of the continuous rewriting and remaking – and at times erasure – of the spaces and histories of a region variously known as East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The quandaries that colonial bureaucratic classifications pose for staging the boundaries of indigenous peoples in contemporary Bangladesh, or the politics of reception of the representations – both off and on stage – of the 1971 war, are examples of such ground-making.
On an analytical level, the book privileges the particular fecundity of staging as a political process. How do collective social imaginations act as the staging ground for collective movements and cultural forms? Answering this demands tracking the emergence, rather than the taken-for-grantedness, of experiences and categories. This is particularly relevant for a place like Bangladesh at once described in terms of a lack (no state, no infrastructure, no law and order, no money, no art and so on) and of debilitating excess (too much emotion, too much water, too much corruption, too much faith and so on). Such ideas have had concrete implications for national and foreign development interventions, state policies and religious exchanges that have created the political and geographical entity known as Bangladesh. This paradox demands that we rethink some of the central analytical categories of South Asian scholarship in light of what we know of Bangladesh and its conditions of possibility. In so doing, the book makes a case for studying Bangladesh for its ability to contribute to a larger intellectual field than South Asian studies.
