Routledge Partition as Border-Making: East Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh

This book critically analyzes the Partition experiences from East Bengal in 1947 and its prolonged aftermath leading to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. It looks at how newly emerged borderlands at the time of Partition affected lives and triggered prolonged consequences for the people living in East Bengal/Bangladesh. The author brings to the fore unheard voices and unexplored narratives, especially those relating the experience of different groups of Muslims in the midst of the falling apart of the unified Muslim identity. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research and archival resources, the volume analyzes various themes such as partition literature, local narratives of border-making, smuggling, border violence, refugees, identity conflicts, border crossing, and experiences of the Bihari Muslims and the Hindus of East Pakistan, among others. A unique study in border-making, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, South Asian history, Partition studies, oral history, anthropology, political history, refugee studies, minority studies, political science, and borderland studies. About the Author Sayeed Ferdous has been teaching Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, since 1995 after he graduated from there. Later, he completed a second master’s from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands, followed by a Ph.D. in History from Lancaster University, UK. Sayeed loves to work in the blurred zone of the disciplines of History and Anthropology. His areas of interest include historiography, memory/forgetting, subaltern, postcolonial nation, nation-state, and nationalism. Sayeed’s Ph.D. research is focused on the East Bengal/Pakistan episode of the 1947 Partition and its prolonged aftermath in Bangladesh. Write-ups from his research will appear as book chapters in two forthcoming anthologies, along with the published ones in local and international journals. Recently, Sayeed has jointly completed a research project on the Partition migrants to Dhaka, in partnership with Goethe Institute, Bangladesh, titled ‘Longing and Belonging: 1947 Partition Narratives.’