Post July uprising, Bangladesh has rediscovered 1947 – but forgotten those uprooted by Partition

For years, August 15 in Bangladesh commemorated one event above all others: the assassination of the country’s founding president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and most of his family in 1975. It was observed as a day of state mourning.

It rarely evoked the day British rule over the subcontinent ended in 1947 and Bengal was bifurcated. That older date was treated as an event belonging only to India and Pakistan (which attained independence one day earlier).

Bangladesh, after all, was a nation born only in 1971, the “east wing” of Pakistan that achieved its independence after a bloody Liberation War.

But now, two years after the July uprising that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s government and turned her father Sheikh Mujib into a taboo subject, that quiet estrangement from 1947 shows signs of ending.

However, the reasons for this deserve as much scrutiny as the shift itself.

An awkward question

Bangladesh’s reluctance to dwell on Partition was never simply a matter of forgetting. It reflected a deeper discomfort about where 1947 belonged in a national story built overwhelmingly around 1971.

To examine the creation of Pakistan honestly is to ask whether the Two-Nation Theory – the idea that the subcontinent’s Hindus and Muslims constituted separate nations – was sound in the first place.

That question sits awkwardly in a country whose independence was...

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