Pathways
Cultural History of Women in Bangladesh
2009 - 2011
Lead Researcher: Firdous Azim
The project explored the identity formation of Bengali Muslim women by investigating the cultural and political history of Bangladesh spanning the 20th Century. Researchers investigated how women placed themselves in the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the early twentieth century; the import of language, culture and national identity for Bengali Muslims during the middle decades; and the contestations between nation, culture, progress, modernity and women's sexuality in a globalised world towards the end of the millennium.
Resources For This Project
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Performing The Nation. Cultural History Of Bengali Muslim Women: Part II (1940-1979)
This presentation to the Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference held in Dhaka from 26-28 July 2011 outlines Pathways South Asia research which explores Bengali women's ability to become cultural markers and their place in shaping an emerging nationalist discourse. By using a focus on music, the research looks at the binary between the secular and the religious and questions how the Bangladeshi nation can be understood through this through history. …
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Shomokaler ‘Kottho-Promito’ Bhasha Bitorker Pori Prekkhitey ‘Khun’ Bitorko
This report in Bangla comes from research that focused on exploring the identity formation of Bengali Muslim women by investigating the cultural and political history of Bangladesh spanning the 20th Century. …
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The New Woman Of The Twenty-First Century In Bangladesh
The author presents the findings of her research to look at two dominant factors – religion and popular culture – that have affected women’s lives in Bangladesh in their search to give it meaning and form. This research stemmed from an exploratory paper five years ago, and sought to answer the questions: How are we to understand these ‘new’ women? What are the policy and programmatic interventions that are now required? How are they being articulated by women themselves? In short, what’s new in new women’s lives? In this paper presented to Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference, 26-28 July 2011, first Azim provides a background on nation- and identity-building in post-colonial South Asia and then examines the position of women a hundred years on to see if there has been a ‘resolution’ of the nation- and identity- building issues, or what shape and form they have acquired since. The research found that religion, however it figured into women’s lives, was always empowering and was not seen as anti-modern or conservative. With regard to popular culture, they found that women viewers of TV were aware of social messages on TV and were critical of TV programming’s lack of diversity. …
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Women Writing The Nation. Cultural History Of Bengali Muslim Women: Part I (1890-1939)
This presentation to the Pathways South Asia Hub Final Conference held in Dhaka from 26-28 July 2011 outlines research which, in the light of a seemingly contentious relationship between state, religion and modernity in Bangladesh attempts to understand the historical antecedents of tensions in the modern Bengali Muslim woman and how she negotiates religion. The historical research begins from the early twentieth century to trace the formation of the idea of a Bengali nation to its source. Its focus is through literature and journals which expressed the thoughts and desires of Bengalis, and became the site where language, nationhood and the place of woman in the nation were debated. …
