As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of South Asian literatures, this project traces the fracturing of the subcontinent in 1947, and the subsequent emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. I analyze Global Anglophone, diasporic and Bengali novels from 1956-2014 as a prism through which I interrogate Bangladesh’s birth through specific historic transformations: the 1947 Partition, the entity East Pakistan (1947-1970) and the 1971 War. My analysis methodologically deploys historiographical concepts and postcolonial theory to illuminate Bangladesh in its multiplicity, including the nation’s peasant identities, religious minorities and their insecurity, gendered hypermasculinist nationalism and related diasporic perspectives. My readings at the intersections of literary works and historical documents recasts the 1947 Partition and its legacy in South Asia, pointing to interconnections between East Pakistan’s proto-national character leading up to the 1971 war and the postwar formation of Bangladesh, responsible for the country’s ongoing religious and ethnic fragmentations. In Chapter 1, “Counter-Imaginations of Partition: East Bengal and Peasant Identities in Adwaita Mallabarman’s A River Called Titash (1956) and Shaukat Osman’s Janani (1961),” I invoke the short-lived idea of a United Bengal just before the 1947 Partition to interrogate Partition-era nationalism’s adverse influence on the Hindu and Muslim peasantry in Bengal’s countryside. Chapter 2, “‘Looking-glass Border’ Novels: Reading East Pakistan’s Hindu Minority in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) and the Unified Bengali Identity During the 1971 War in Dilruba Z. Ara’s Blame (2015),” analyzes the antagonizing of the Hindu minority during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan and the subsequent policy of Hindu extermination during the 1971 war. The third chapter, “Fracturing Pakistan, Forming Bangladesh: Class and Gender Insurgencies in the Time of ‘Passive Revolution’ in Akhteruzzaman Elias’ The Sepoy in the Attic (Chilekothar Sepai 1987) and the Many ‘Birangona’ Stories in Shaheen Akhtar’s The Search (2004),” simultaneously considers the Mass Revolution of 1969 and the 1971 war to trace the patriarchal underside of Bengali nationalism, which was an ideological force against the repressive Pakistan state. In the final chapter, “‘Us’ Beside ‘Them,’ Not ‘Us’ Versus ‘Them’: Cosmopolitan Imagination and Familial Reckoning of 1971 in Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014) and Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002),” I problematize the nationalized war narratives in present day Bangladesh and Pakistan. The chapter argues that the intricate network of South Asian kinships and diasporic belongings can create a cosmopolitan understanding of the 1971 war. Two Partitions, therefore, argues that Bangladesh’s historic emergence is intertwined with the Bengali Muslim adoption of two-nation theory during their participation in the Pakistan Movement before 1947, and their subsequent jettisoning of the idea of Pakistan in support of Bengali ethno-linguistic nationalism in postcolonial East Pakistan (1947-1970). Subsequently, the two visions continue to inform the complex postcolonial identity of the citizens of Bangladesh, this project contends.
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