‘May you live with us forever Father!’ Rethinking state and kinship among Bangladeshi long-distance nationalists in London

I Introduction

The 26th of March is commemorated in Bangladesh and its diaspora as Independence Day, marking the declaration of independence from Pakistan and the start of the Bangladesh War on that day in 1971. In 2017, the Bangladesh High Commission in London organised an ‘Independence and National Day’ commemoration and celebration at Kensington Town Hall for several hundred invited guests. The booklet published for the event combined with ethnographic observations serve as a fruitful point of departure for a discussion on how the idioms of kinship are employed by state actors to narrate the beginning of the nation Bangladesh in its London diaspora.

In the booklet, the press secretary of the High Commission in London, Nadeem Qadir, explains the relevance of Independence Day in an article called ‘Memories with Bangabandhu’. Bangabandhu is the Bengali term for ‘Friend of Bengal’, an honorary title for independence hero Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Sheikh Mujib), who was also the father of the current prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina. In the article, Mr Qadir narrates his own family history alongside the creation of Bangladesh. He starts with explaining his own father’s role in the war, his father passing away, and his mother’s visit to Sheikh Mujib in 1974. He uses the term ‘father’ interchangeably for his biological father and Sheikh Mujib as ‘Father of the Nation’ while also jumping back and forth between the passing away of his biological father in the war in 1971 and Sheikh Mujib’s assassination in 1975. He starts with narrating his biological father’s devotion to Sheikh Mujib:

My father’s respect and love for him, my father’s secret meeting with him and my father’s decision to join the war of independence on his call has made me and my brother Naweed his followers. My mother’s teachings added that emotional effect on us. She cried when the radio announced on the morning of 15 August 1975 that Bangabandhu has been killed, and said “what will happen to Bangladesh?” We were suffering because my father was martyred and every minute we felt his absence. And now the “father supreme” too is martyred for the cause of the same country. (Bangladesh High Commission 2017: 10).

The beginning of Mr Qadir’s story illustrates the intermediary function of family between personal experiences and the nation. It also provides insight into the ways in which individuals referred to by kinship terms come to stand for the nation and how this is tied to the nation’s political communities and state apparatus. In what follows, I look at the national past of Bangladesh as it crystallises through observations of commemorative days around the Bangladesh War in London organised by people part of either a transnational state administration or seeking to impact state decisions in Bangladesh. In addition, in studying Bangladeshi state commemorations and civil society initiatives in London around the Bangladesh War, I make visible the ways in which kinship, and gendered invocations in relation to the nation, are entangled with hegemonic projects of modern state building in which the family is a vehicle for symbolising and organising its contents (see also Verdery 1996).

In line with the conceptualisation of the state in the introduction to this special issue, I interpret the state not as a universalistic, bureaucratic and impersonal structure separated from society but investigate the practices that make it seem to exist as such (see also Gupta 1995; Mitchell 1999). Following Stoler, I investigate ‘the state’ in light of ‘discursive density around issues of sentiments and their subversive tendencies, around “private” feelings, “public moods,” and their political consequences’ (Stoler 2004: 5). I take seriously the role of the state in distributing sentiments (ibid.: 9) while acknowledging that this distribution is not unidirectional. Such a point of departure deconstructs the binary between nations as invoking passions and states as ‘institutional machines’ separated from sentiments (ibid.). From this conceptualisation, it follows that the power of states does not reside in the government institutions themselves but in the everyday practices that create and legitimate social order and discipline (Abrams 1988).

The Bangladesh War is an issue that remains at the core of Bangladesh’s political system because different political groups legitimise themselves in reference to it (Van Schendel 2009: 215). The war was influenced by international developments (Raghavan 2013) and transnational networks, those connected to London in particular playing a pivotal role in mobilisation around the war (Fazakarley 2016). The commemoration of the war in London illustrates how nation-state building becomes a transborder process and how national histories are themselves transnational, despite the ways in which the writing of national histories has sought to make invisible the transnational aspects of its histories by placing them within the territorial borders of the nation-state (Glick Schiller 2004: 452).

I argue that attention to ‘long-distance nationalists’, that is people living in disparate locations who ‘share a common identification with an ancestral territory and its government’ (Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001: 20), and their activities in relation to the national past helps illustrate how sentiments work. Such analysis reveals that the use of sentiments enlarges state apparatuses beyond the geographical borders of nation-states. It confirms that a novel form of state has emerged in recent decades that extends across borders, claiming emigrants and their descendants as part of their ancestral homeland, even though they are citizens of another state (Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001). Investigating this transnational nation-state, I illustrate how long-distance nationalists draw on sentiments invoked through the entanglements of personal and national memories as a justification for their involvement in a range of state practices, including contesting elections, infrastructure projects, building schools and organising access to health care.

The article contributes to rethinking the disciplinary and methodological divisions separating the study of state and kinship that continue to shape academic engagements with states (see Thelen and Alber 2018). Formerly, anthropology was seen as well suited to study ‘small-societies’ ordered by kinship ties, tending to treat families as small and private units. Sociology and political science, on the other hand, were seen as well equipped to study ‘large-scale societies’ and nation-states. This separation largely prevented accounting for family and kinship in issues of state formation (ibid.: 2). Although this disciplinary separation has been addressed from the late 20th century onwards in fruitful ways in studies on nationalism and gender (see, e.g., Yuval-Davis 1997), the implications of the trajectories of these disciplines continue to shape studies on kinship and state today. Commemorations such as Victory Day allow us to trace and question the conceptual separation between family and state which resonates with other binary distinctions that continue to impact academic work on states and the past, such as the binaries public-private and individual-social. The bringing together of these issues that are often treated as separate from each other, allows for a deconstruction of the conceptual division of family, kinship and state that can be traced genealogically to pervasive dichotomies that characterise modernist thought and continue to affect the study of states.

This discussion is relevant for understanding the contemporary Bangladeshi state, and complicates our grasp of the pervasive model of dynastic politics in Bangladesh (Ruud and Islam 2016), while providing new insights for scholarly debates on the state and its entanglements with notions of kinship and family relations. By drawing on a case study of the Bangladesh War in London, I explore how transnational memory practices bridge the intimate space of the family and that of the state (see also Herzfeld 2015; Tschuggnall and Welzer 2002). While it is useful to separate the categories of family and state for analytical purposes, I explore narrations of state, kinship and family together and how they are shaped by one another, documenting their mutual interdependence. This aligns with how in gender studies, in particular, the ways in which intimate and familial attachments are acknowledged as more than personal or private affairs and constitute the building blocks of social, economic and political worlds (Pratt and Rosner 2012: 8). I thus investigate the repercussions of taking kinship and transnational dynamics seriously for state building and explore what this may entail for understanding contemporary Bangladeshi state practices.

London is a suitable place to document the transborder dynamics of the Bangladesh state because the city has increasingly become a site of contestations in which the Bangladesh War and the International Crimes Tribunal, established in 2010 to try people accused of war crimes during the war, play a crucial role (Zeitlyn 2014). It has become a proxy battle site, a site of unfriendly contest between Bangladeshi political parties, in which groups pose a challenge to discourses around the state in Bangladesh. Further, the restricted nature of politics in Bangladesh (see Feldman 2015; Ruud 2018; Suykens 2018) has made London an increasingly pivotal site for the political opposition in Bangladesh. London remains an important site for political exiles, such as acting chairperson Tariq Rahman from the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and son of Chairperson Khaleda Zia, to contest narratives about the nation’s past and impact state practices around it. This is partly due to political networks set up in London before and during the Bangladesh War (Fazakarley 2016; Glynn 2006), which in turn are a result of London’s place as the former metropolis of the British Empire. Both need to be contextualised in light of how the territorially based nation state emerged in the context of empire (see Chatterjee 1993).

I have limited myself to the study of long-distance nationalists in this article, and have focused, in line with the broader aim of this special issue, on those practices that seek to influence the state. Bangladeshi long-distance nationalists in London, although coming from different classes and having different relations to both London and Bangladesh, share certain characteristics. First, the large majority was born in Bangladesh, while a large number have also spent a significant part of their upbringing in the country. This means that they differ from most people with Bangladeshi heritage in London, and especially younger generations who were born in the UK and tend not to engage with the Bangladeshi state to the same extent. A generational divide exists between elderly people who have come to the UK from Bangladesh at some point in their lives, and their children. Children born and raised in the UK tend to keep a greater distance from the Bangladeshi state and as a result do not figure prominently in this paper. Most participants are lower to middle class in the UK, often working as shop owners, taxi drivers and call centre employees. However, Bangladeshi long-distance nationalists in London are a diverse group also including medical doctors, lawyers and real estate agents, among others. Although often lower middle class in the UK, their status in Bangladesh is different. Many participants own land and houses and play important roles in the country, especially in local communities in Sylhet (see also Gardner 2008).

To guard against a conflation of nation and state requires a more detailed investigation into the workings of both nationalism and state administrations in diasporic contexts, while paying attention to how nationalism and state administrations transcend national borders. In the context of Bangladesh, a transnational lens has been fruitfully applied to map social and political networks. Katy Gardner (1993, 2008) for example, has primarily mapped the social and economic linkages between Britain and the desh (or homeland), while Jose Mapril (2014, 2016), has further applied the concept of long-distance nationalism to the politics of memory in the Bangladeshi diaspora in Lisbon. However, these works have not explicitly investigated these dynamics in relation to how the national past is addressed by the state, and how the writing of national stories makes invisible transnational connections by confining it to the territorial boundaries of the state.

My focus in this article is on the invocation of idioms of kinship in narrating nation-states. I do so in relation to narrations of the ‘birth’ of the nation during the Bangladesh War of 1971, exemplified by the opening to this article by Mr Qadir. A form of dynastic politics that revolves around the personality cults of the founding fathers Sheikh Mujib and Ziaur Rahman marks Bangladeshi politics (Ruud and Islam 2016), both in the country and its London diaspora. This structures the narration of nation and family histories as fundamentally entangled. What is pertinent here is that respondents for this article, who have migrated to London from Bangladesh at some point during their life, have grown up with family members who have experienced the war and the rise of the dynastic politics that has characterised Bangladeshi politics since the inception of the nation-state in 1971.

I now return to Mr. Qadir’s statements to illustrate how the naturalisation of belonging to the nation legitimises the state by drawing on the context of the Bangladesh War. Mr. Qadir narrates his mother’s visit to Sheikh Mujib in 1974, at that time the president of Bangladesh, in the booklet circulated at the Independence Day commemoration:

After about [a] 30-minute wait, a gentleman came and ushered us into the room where Bangabandhu was waiting. He greeted my mother “Come my daughter, come.” My mother broke down while telling Bangabandhu […] how she has lost her husband and how insecure she was with her children. Bangabandhu wanted to see my father’s photo, which my mother showed. I was a teenager at that time and I still cannot believe a huge, tall, suave man like him will break down on seeing my father’s photo. He told us how my father secretly met him in 1969 with the help of late General M.A.G. Osmany and pledged his support to Bangabandhu’s fight for an independent Bangladesh. “He was a brave man. You should be proud of him. Do not cry my daughter,” Bangabandhu consoled my weeping mother and touched her head in blessing […] My mother left confident, happy and more courageous to face a cruel world, we did not know then that we will also lose this great father of ours. Life for us also worsened. He may be not here physically but continues to live within us and inspires us to make Bangladesh his “Golden Bengal.” May you live with us forever Father! (Bangladesh High Commission 2017: 10)

Qadir’s retelling of a childhood memory drawing on familial tropes serve to position him in a relationship with others in such a way that mutual obligations are underscored and solidarities are forged. In line with previous work by anthropologists on the symbolic aspects of the modern nation-state, this example illustrates how symbols can be emotionally manipulated for political purposes (Gajek 1990). Although the above fragment is part of the official programme for the event organised by the High Commission that this is a political statement by Mr. Qadir, did not mean that it was not simultaneously a personal statement. Rather the personal, emotional dimension in the text made it a stronger political statement. Thus, by connecting kinship terms across the scales of family and state, the potential for political manipulation is increased. In the final sentence, again, Mr. Qadir connected the idea of the father to a political vision articulated by the Bangladeshi government as ‘Golden Bengal’, through which the kinship connection lived on in the present and was connected to the soil. The theme of a Golden Bengal is a central political imaginary for the nation, linked to Sheikh Mujib and the present day political establishment and was key in national commemorations. It connected the political and economic development of the nation to Sheikh Mujib as the Father of the Nation.

At the commemoration at Kensington Town Hall, this connection was evident in the speeches from officials and the message from the High Commissioner that spoke of contemporary policies as the initiative of the Bangladesh Prime Minister and daughter of Sheikh Mujib, Sheikh Hasina. Further, throughout the event, Sheikh Hasina was presented as both the guardian of Mujib’s vision for Bangladesh and as a mother-like figure, caring for her subjects. Not only was she referred to as benevolent and as the ‘Mother of Humanity’, her images were displayed on a large screen on the stage in the centre of the hall highlighting Bangladesh’s economic development. These included depictions of the garment industry, infrastructural projects and the tourism industry, interspersed with pictures of Sheikh Hasina in either a caring role greeting children or as a guardian, for example, while inspecting troops of the Bangladeshi navy.

Because of the presentation of these roles as natural symbols of the family that feature as part of state ideology, the sentimentality associated with the symbols implies that ‘one is in the grip of a love greater than reason, stronger than the will, a love akin to fate and destiny’ (Ignatieff 1993: 10). The role of family metaphors and family roles provides a productive angle for the understanding of aspects of the construction of individuality while belonging to collectivities and particularly the role of the family as an intermediary category between the two. While individual experiences provide the idioms and metaphors for understanding the uses of family in relation to the state, what is at work here is ‘a kind of mutual validation, a reciprocal rendering real, that serves to naturalise what has been imagined’ (Antze and Lambek 1996: xxii). Before returning to the importance of kinship and family stories in the latter part of this paper, I provide a brief background to the creation of the nation-state of Bangladesh, the long-distance nationalist networks spanning Bangladesh and London, and some of the key contestations that shape Bangladeshi political practices in London.

II The Bangladesh War from London

In order to understand the relevance of London as a place steeped in the politics of memory of the Bangladesh War and as a site of contemporary Bangladeshi state practices, one needs to go back to the 1960s. Whereas East and West Pakistan were barely distinguishable in public debates in the UK prior to the 1970s, the campaign in Britain for the greater autonomy of East Pakistan in the late 1960s changed this scenario. In addition, visits of nationalist leaders, such as Maulana Bhashani, the founder of the Awami League, in 1954, and Sheikh Mujib in 1969 (Eade and Garbin 2002: 184; Glynn 2006: 58), point to the ways in which the independence movement and the Awami League in Bangladesh had been connected to London over a long period.

The significance of the city in mobilising support and influencing public opinion in the UK is further illustrated by petitions offered to MPs and demonstrations at Trafalgar square in London in support of the Bangladesh movement before and during the war of independence. These developments took place in the context of increased migration from East Pakistan to the UK, particularly to London. The city quickly became a significant place for political refugees participating in the Bengali independence movement in East Pakistan. As a result, the political party leading the independence movement, the Awami League, set up a London branch in the 1960s (Fazakarley 2016: 56). The outbreak of the war in March 1971, further led support structures for the war to be set up while galvanising the community and structuring political engagements in the United Kingdom, especially with the Labour Party (Fazakarley 2016; Glynn 2006).

Further, as Eade and Garbin (2002: 184) have illustrated, the groups aligned with political parties in London, particularly the Awami League and its rival the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), have critical social and political functions. These include the protection of business interests in Bangladesh, facilitating election campaigns in Bangladesh, and even assisting those living in London to contest local and national elections in the UK and Bangladesh. These activities follow the ‘politics of patronage’ (Van Schendel 2009: 178) which are based less on ideological differences than on how they operate as vehicles for systems of political patronage (Suykens 2017).

Since the 2014 national elections, the state of Bangladesh has become increasingly authoritarian and access to state institutions has become largely dependent on the membership of the Awami League, which has increased the influence of the party over social, political and economic domains. This ‘party-state’ (Suykens 2017) also ensures the maintenance of personal, patrimonial leadership structures (Kochanek 2000), which makes the employment of familial and kinship idioms resonate even more strongly in political practices both in Bangladesh and London. In the following section, I first clarify how these patrimonial leadership structures function and are contested at a commemoration in London. Afterwards, I outline the importance of Bangladeshi transnational civil society initiatives, revealing how at the Shahbagh solidarity protests in London, organised to contest proceedings at the International Crimes Tribunal, family stories play a key role in articulating demands vis-à-vis the Bangladeshi state.

III Collaborators on victory day

In contestations over the Bangladesh War, the denunciation of collaborators, or razakars in Bengali, who were active during the war of independence is recognised and forefronted as a lingering threat to the nation and state in the present (Mookherjee 2015). Although these contestations go back to the era before the subcontinent’s partition in 1947, I provide a brief background to the formation of the nation-state since 1947, with a focus on the role of collaborators, which serves to clarify contemporary contestations. With the partition of 1947, the subcontinent was divided into two states, India and Pakistan. The latter was formed on the idea of a ‘homeland for Muslims’ in the subcontinent and consisted of two territories—West Pakistan, what is now Pakistan, and East Pakistan, what is now Bangladesh. The dominance of West Pakistan in state institutions as well as the skewed allocation of resources that favoured economic growth in the West was partly justified by western elites who claimed that the Bengalis living in the Eastern territory were inferior and adhered to a form of Islam that was shaped by Indian and Hindu influences (van Schendel 2009: 111). This increasingly led to unrest and resistance against the West Pakistani establishment in the East. In March 1971, war broke out between the Pakistani Army and Bengali nationalists, supported by India. The Pakistani army received support in Bangladesh as well, among others from people associated with political parties that remained in favour of the idea of a united Pakistan during the war, such as the Jamaat-e-Islami (JMI), an Islamic political and social organisation founded in British India in 1941. Many of the worst atrocities that took place during the war are associated with local militias, some of them affiliated with the JMI. The militias further participated in the murder of intellectuals that propagated the notion of Bengali cultural nationalism and who had significant ties to the Awami League (Linton 2010: 198–99). Many of those accused of collaboration during the war remained in Bangladesh after the war and managed to take up prominent public roles in the country, particularly from 1975 onwards, when the JMI and its political allies were politically reinstated (Mookherjee 2015: 7), while others migrated to Pakistan, the UK and elsewhere.

In memorialising the war, the role of razakars is a particularly contentious issue. Although tensions between the AL and BNP have been common since the mid-1970s, things took a turn for worse after the announcement of an election promise by the AL to set up an International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) in 2010 in order to bring to court people accused of war crimes in 1971. Many of those on trial had links to the BNP and the JMI. The early convictions of the tribunal in 2013 led to the outbreak of mass protests, the so-called Shahbagh protests, named after the intersection in Dhaka where they took place. These protests erupted after the JMI politician, Quader Mollah, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment, hoped that it would lead to an early release when the government changed hands. Mollah’s reaction to the verdict needs to be understood in light of how official interpretations of the nation’s past have shifted in Bangladesh when the government changed hands and legal decisions have also been overturned. Protestors were particularly provoked by the image of Quader Mollah making a ‘victory sign’ after his conviction that was broadcast on national television. Shahbagh protestors demanded the death penalty for Quader Mollah, a delinking of religion from politics and a ban on the JMI’s the role in Bangladeshi politics.

Further, since Pakistan does not acknowledge the ICT, the tribunal exclusively focuses on local razakars. However, as Mookherjee (2015) illustrated, the figure of the razakar circulates across national borders. Due to the increasing migration from what was then East Pakistan to London, the city became a destination for razakars who fled to the city after the war where they were able to live a relatively unbothered life. In London, contestations persist over different interpretations of Bangladesh’s past, present and future. Since the early 1990s, there has been increasing tension between those who support a secular nationalist line, particularly those loosely aligned with the Awami League, and those who are in London and associated with more Islamist interpretations, particularly the JMI. The BNP occupies somewhat of a middle ground here, and though it is often associated with razakars, it does participate in commemorations of the war. However, the association (and in certain cases, proven involvement with the Pakistani army and war crimes) of BNP members, both in Bangladesh and London, leads to a highly charged atmosphere at commemorative events. I demonstrate this aspect with observations registered during a commemoration of Victory Day in London. This recapitulation also illustrates the workings of long-distance nationalists and how they both reinforce and contest Bangladeshi state practices.

Every year on 16 December, Bangladesh Victory Day is observed in Altab Ali Park in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, marking the surrender of the Pakistani forces to the Indian army and Bengali nationalists on that day in 1971. The event commemorates the end of the war and the creation of the nation-state of Bangladesh. This happens around a replica of the Shaheed Minar monument in Dhaka, which serves to commemorate students from Dhaka University who were shot by the Pakistani military in 1952, and is narrated at commemorations as the start of the Bengali Independence Movement. In London, the monument is a central site of memory for people of Bangladeshi heritage, and especially associated with secular-nationalist interpretations of Bangladeshi nationalism (see Alexander 2013). The monument consist of five half circular columns, symbolising a mother, standing in for the nation, and her four sons, referring to the students killed by the Pakistani army in 1952.

When I arrived for Victory Day, a little before the starting time of 11 pm, the only people in the park were two elderly Bengali men sitting on a bench. I somewhat hesitantly approached them and asked whether they were also in the park for the Victory Day gathering, which they confirmed. While waiting more men, most of them above 30 years old, entered the park. They all knew each other from their involvement in the Awami League Greater London, and began to take pictures with each other in front of the Shaheed Minar Monument. I struck up a conversation with Masum ¹ who came to Bradford in the late 1960s when he was 12 years old. He was proud to tell me that he protested against the Pakistani military in Hyde Park when he was a teenager. We chatted a little about Bangladesh and he narrated the beauty of the Bangladeshi countryside and told me how glad he was that his daughter finally visited his ancestral village. He also made it clear that Bangladesh was not a good place to retire, reaffirming earlier studies that demonstrate at once the investment of elders both in London and in Bangladesh, often linked to family ties, while being highly ambivalent to it in other ways (see for example Gardner 2002). The relevance of what is described as ‘community transnationalism’ (Kibria 2011: 79), referring to the ongoing connections of Londoners with their villages in Sylhet in Bangladesh through kinship connections was confirmed here as well.

While we were chatting, the park filled up with around 100 people. Whereas the first attendees were largely associated with the AL, the majority later seemed to belong to the BNP, which they made clear by shouting the name of the party’s chairperson, Khaleda Zia. Both groups positioned themselves on and around the monument with the aim of dominating it physically. During the commemoration, midnight served as a temporal marker of the coming into being of the nation-state of Bangladesh. At that time, a chaotic scene unfolded when the monument was roughly divided between AL and BNP supporters. Both groups sought to control the central column of the monument, which itself stands for the mother-nation, in order to be able to lay flowers on the four half-circular columns that symbolised the nations’ sons. This is a commemorative act to show respect for those who passed away during the Bangladesh War even while it positions the actors as heirs to the nation’s legacy. However, several times people fell off the monument because of the pushing.

In the chaos, fights broke out between members of the AL and BNP while standing on the monument. At a certain point, I saw Masum being pushed off the monument. Moments later, he was in an intense argument at the bottom of the Shaheed Minar. The elderly man he was having an argument with was wearing an Islamic cap and had been standing with the BNP. I heard Masum yelling ‘Razakar, tui Razakar!’ (Collaborator, you are a collaborator!), after which he took two quick steps towards him and punched him several times. This led to several small fights breaking out along party lines. One of the men leading the Awami League ordered their members to step back, after which the BNP members dominated the monument, something they celebrated by shouting their leaders’ name.

The above instance illustrates how London has become a proxy battle site for politics about Bangladesh’s pasts in ways unimaginable in contemporary Bangladesh. In London, political contestations among Bangladeshi long-distance nationalists are visibly fraught at public commemorations. These constitute both a way to demonstrate loyalty to respective parties, and an outlet where personal grievances and conflicts are settled. The Victory Day commemoration further illustrates the sensitivities, violence and politics around the Bangladesh War in London, which have complex discursive trajectories. Further, the use of the insult ‘tui razakar’ needs to be understood in light of how it gained popular currency in a popular television series, titled Bohubrihi, produced by Humayun Ahmed, first aired in 1988 in Bangladesh. Ahmed’s father was killed in the Bangladesh War, while the man accused of his murder, Delwar Hossain Sayedee, was sentenced to death by the International Crimes Tribunal in 2013, a sentence later commuted by the Supreme Court in Bangladesh to a life sentence. Sayedee also regularly travelled to London, especially in the mid-2000s.

The line further became an important rallying cry for social movements from the early 1990s onwards. As such, Masum’s use of the slogan tui razakar ties into intertextual discourses around the Bangladesh War and ‘intertwined, circulatory traces of discourses, symbols, and images that cross-reference each other in different texts, contexts, and times’ (Mookherjee 2015: 9). These play out in present day contestations in London and form the background for recent initiatives from the city to influence the state in Bangladesh, particularly in relation to the ICT and the role of razakars in society. In conclusion, the term razakar gains meaning in contestations between AL and BNP supporters in London over the Bangladesh War, which is directly tied to claims to state institutions. While attempting to influence the state, AL supporters claim to uphold the ‘spirit of the war’ while shielding the state from razakars’ perceived erosive influence over its institutions. In London, participation in these initiatives was further explained through family histories during the Bangladesh War. I elaborate this point further in the following section.

IV The Shahbagh solidarity protests in London

The Shahbagh solidarity protests organised in Altab Ali Park in London took place in 2013 after the ICT announced the Quader Mollah verdict in Bangladesh. For those participating in the protests, family histories are entangled in national histories and together provide the impetus for political mobilisation. As Schultz and Kuttig illustrate in the introduction to this special issue, what is perceived as the state is relevant for the study of social movements in Bangladesh, because the lines between state institutions and the Awami League are increasingly blurred. Further, in the Bangladeshi context, state building remains a work in progress leaving considerable room for non-state actors, including civil society (Lewis 2011: 109). These initiatives are not confined to geographic borders of the nation-state, rather civil society has long worked as a locus for mobilising social change in and beyond nation-states. The Shahbag solidarity protests in London for example, were held simultaneously with the Shahbag protests in Bangladesh. These moves were directed to the Bangladeshi government in the country, officials from the Bangladesh government in London, as well as local and national representatives and media in the UK, to add to the pressure on the Bangladeshi government.

The Shahbag protests need to be understood in light of earlier civil society initiatives, particularly the protests in the early 1990s. The direct cause of mass protests against razakars in Bangladesh in the early 1990s was the decision to allow JMI politician Golam Azam to return to Bangladesh and head the party (Lewis 2011: 92). This led to the establishment of the Nirmul Committee in 1992 by prominent public figures more or less associated with the Awami League with the goal of identifying and bringing to court collaborators during the Bangladesh War and to reduce the role of collaborators in state institutions. To achieve their objectives, the Nirmul Committee organised public mock courts of the People’s Court (Gono Adalat) in Bangladesh. As leading figures of the organisation admitted, the broader aim of the mock courts was to politically mobilise a younger generation while opening up space for ‘private pain to move into the public realm’ (Mookherjee 2010: 58). Nirmul Committee’s local chapter in London, together with Bangladeshi students, was central in organising the protests in London.

Next, I provide an example of how family histories play a role in making claims to the state in Bangladesh by turning to one of the London activists. Mala is in her mid-30s and grew up in the Bangladeshi province of Sylhet in the North East of Bangladesh. Before she came to the UK to study human rights at a London university, she studied in Bangladesh and India. Her choice of study is informed by her activism and involvement with transnational organisations involved in publicising atrocities that took place during the Bangladesh War such as the Nirmul Committee and bringing to court the perpetrators of the conflict. Despite not being employed by the state nor being a member of a political party unlike those discussed earlier in this article, Mala is a long-distance nationalist in that she seeks to impact the Bangladesh state over the International Crimes Tribunal and the role of razakars in Bangladeshi institutions. To promote her goals, Mala regularly travels to international human rights conferences in Europe and North America where she promotes the value of human rights. When I asked her about her involvement in the Shahbag Solidarity protests in London, she first narrated what happened to her relatives during the Bangladesh War:

I was never involved in any mainstream political activities when I was back home. But I am from a religious minority background. I think you must know that in 1971 when the war started at the beginning it was targeted towards religious minorities, mainly the Hindus. Both my families, maternal side and paternal, were badly affected by the war. My maternal family had to take refuge in India leaving everything behind. My grandfather was a teacher in a high school. So he thought that nothing would happen to him and it was really difficult for him to leave. But because he was a teacher and a very prominent figure in the community, he was targeted by the local collaborators. We also had a massive amount of property in the villages, so obviously, he was a preferred target. [When] they came to take him, they could not find him so they took his best friend instead and my grandma was taken away from the house and later rescued by somebody. (Interview, Mala, 24 September 2017)

Mala narrates her grandfather’s traumatic experiences, recounting of stories told to her by her parents and grandparents and connecting them to contemporary political developments. Paul Connerton describes such narrations as ‘acts of transfer’ (2006), transmitting social knowledge and memory through a retelling or performance that positions one vis-à-vis the narratives. The story of Mala’s maternal family fleeing and her paternal grandmother being taken away by ‘local collaborators’, reactivates registers of loss and injustice at the time of the war and invests more distant memorial structures of the war and the nation with personalised, familial forms of mediation (Hirsch 2012). Further, it reaffirms how the Shahbag protests highlighted the significant emotional investment of the younger generation in the Bangladesh War (Mookherjee 2015: 275).

The background to Mala’s political activism deconstructs the idea of a state as an entity separate entity from society (see Gupta 1995). Mala’s story helps map the ongoing contestations over the Bangladeshi nation and particularly over the role of Bengali culture and Islam, while also highlighting family memory’s intermediary function between personal and public remembrance and national official images and narrativisations of the past (Erll 2011; Winter 1995). Growing up in a certain period affects the ways in which the memory of the war shapes one’s positionality at a generational remove. Mala’s earlier description of the collaborator in taking away her families’ land, and why she took an active role in organising protests in London, was followed by an explanation of what happened during the war and why this was significant in organising the London protests:

So I grew up with those stories very much. I think they shaped the way I used to think. I was very culturally aware, politically aware, concerned. I was never involved in politics or anything. I rather hated our politics. Politics in Bangladesh is a difficult thing; it is very difficult and I never thought it was my cup of tea. But then the Quader Mollah verdict came. I woke up one morning and I saw it on the news. […] So I saw that victory sign and the reaction made me so angry, you know, so compelled to do something. I saw that people are gathering at Shahbag, so I tried to, I was like, we have to do something here. (Interview, Mala, 24 September 2017)

For Mala, family stories were crucial to reinvest more distant memories of the Bangladesh war with meaning. How she related to the war was shaped by a combination of personal experiences, family histories and public discourses around the war. The relevance of the moment during which Quader Mollah made a victory sign that Mala mentioned was experienced simultaneously with others of her generation as a media moment which had to be understood in light of images previously used by the Nirmul Committee in the 1990s and the television series and documentaries mentioned earlier. Furthermore, the Shahbagh movement provides a point of departure to discuss the meaning of Bangladesh both within and beyond the nation state’s’ borders. The collaborator is seen as still active and undermining the ‘spirit of the war’, a spirit shaped by competing claims to the nation-state and its institutions.

As Mookherjee has illustrated, the public denunciation of collaborators, particularly by left-liberal activists, is presented as a duty to the state, while the remaining presence of collaborations in Bangladeshi institutions is presented as ‘an attack on the sovereignty of the Bangladeshi nation-state’ (2015: 50), while denunciators deny any personal interests in the practice. Mala’s emotional appeal illustrates the entanglement of the personal and public, family and state, and how the latter can only be understood in relation to the former. The significance of the family in narrating the existential categories of nation and religion provides a useful angle to deconstruct this separation of family and state and how people participate in it and seek to impact the state’s institutions.

V Concluding remarks

This paper has sought to connect scholarship on state and kinship to understand transnational Bangladeshi state practices. I have illustrated how, in memorialising national pasts, metaphors of kinship and family stories are crucial to invest abstract categories with meaning. Further, these meanings and contestations allow claims to be made upon the Bangladeshi state from London by long-distance nationalists, those seeking to influence the state from afar. Due to the limited space for political dissent and the entanglement of the state and the Awami League in Bangladesh, London has become an increasingly important site to affirm and contest the state from afar. In addition, by the Awami League and government officials, as well as by long-distance nationalists in London, kinship is employed in projects of state building, while family and family metaphors are employed to symbolise the state’s contents.