Utopias Eroded and Recalled: Intellectual Legacies of East Pakistan

Abstract

The short-lived geopolitical entity, East Pakistan (1947–71), left a deep impact on its successor state, Bangladesh, through the networks of intellectual kinship it enabled for its young elites who subsequently became Bangladesh’s nation-builders. Drawing on memory studies and literary critical reading methods, I examine the testimonies of nine such elites interviewed by the ‘Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project’ (BIOHP), alongside their writings published before and after the creation of Bangladesh. This first sustained account of East Pakistan’s intellectual legacy thus also illustrates how a post-colonial intellectual history may be extracted from oral histories as the private and inchoate domain of memory.