With more than 178,000
entries on ‘Bangladesh’ in the WorldCat, the idea that the country has remained
understudied may not be apt anymore.1 Research and publications in the
postcolonial period reflect on a continuously productive interest in the
country and its place in the region. However, there has been little critical
assessment of the scope, quantity and quality of the field of Bangladesh
studies. This article explores the evolving trends in Bangladesh studies,
giving a chronological overview with a particular focus on the modern period.
The use of the term ‘Bangladesh’ in this article is informed by its present day
political boundary, but occasional, especially pre-1947, references are also
made to neighbouring regions of western Bengal and the north-eastern region of
India, which formed its essential political, economic, social, cultural and
environmental parts. This is by no means an exhaustive essay on the field,
neither in terms of thematic coverage, nor in terms of authors and scholars. As
an introduction to this volume’s FOKUS on Bangladesh, it intends to throw light
on major turns and tendencies in the existing historical literature.
Prehistoric and Ancient
Period Reconstruction of the ancient
period of Bengal had a clear political agenda for historians writing in
colonial times. One of the foremost historians of Bengal from the late colonial
period, R. C. Majumdar, a Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dhaka, made a
plea for the historical existence of indigenous political agencies and
establishments, something that was closer to the need of the national movement
(cf. Majumdar 1925; Majumdar 1943). Bangladesh’s claims to earliest antiquity
have been traditionally supported by the example of the urban settlements in
Mohasthangarh in the northern region of the country, which date back to the
third century BCE. In the last few decades the long-lasting interest on
Mohasthangarh has been slightly overshadowed by the example of an older urban
settlement in central Bangladesh, dating back to about 600 BCE with indications
of pit dwelling from a much earlier date.
Archaeologists and historians working on Bangladesh have also been
asking questions regarding the development of trade networks. Evidence from the
archaeological sites of Wari-Bateshwar, excavated under the supervision of S.
S. Mostafizur Rahman since 2000, suggests that the apparently river-centric
territorial dissection did not prevent more elaborate intra-regional economic
relations that targeted international trade through the Bay of Bengal via the
river Meghna. In some of his publications, Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti, an
archaeologist at Cambridge University, presents a synthesis of earlier
scholarship and new perspectives on the prehistoric and ancient period
(Chakrabarti 1992). With the birth of Pakistan, the political context changed
and the quest for legitimacy of the new postcolonial state was sought through
closer scrutiny of political establishments, particularly in the territory that
became East Pakistan. R. C. Majumdar’s Indian nationalist reconstruction was
replaced by a new kind of orientation under the new political circumstances.
Abdul Momin Chowdhury, in his Dynastic History of Bengal, based on a doctoral
dissertation in the University of London in the 1960s, sought to reconstruct
the history of more local, regional Eastern Bengal rulers, who established
political roots distinct from the Pala Empire, despite the fact that both
followed Buddhism. To Chowdhury, it was not only the highly fluid ecological
regime that had given this region a distinct strategic and political edge, but
also its trade and commerce that, due to its vast coastal area, acted as an
expansive gateway to the Indian Ocean (Chowdhury 1967). Chowdhury also
highlighted Dharmapala’s military expeditions into northern India, which
although short-lived, present a case of Bengal’s transformation from a
provincial power to an imperial one. Perhaps due to the paucity of sources,
historical research on ancient period lacks diversity beyond the political
domain, but a significant exception is Husain’s study which sheds unprecedented
light on everyday life, including that of women, in a major episode in ancient
Bengal (Husain 1968). In recent times, however, original research on ancient
Bengal has declined in Bangladesh, excepting a few that have continued to seek
geographically informed formative elements of the regions that form today’s
Bangladesh (for example, Islam 2014).
Medieval Period
Medieval Period For the medieval period, a recurrent theme
has been the origin of the Muslims in Bengal. Early British writers’ arguments
of ‘Islamisation’ of the region by force were replaced by the arguments that
Islam migrated to Bengal with Arab and Persian Muslim merchants. Some have
argued about mass conversions to Islam by the eastern Indian Buddhists who
allegedly suffered persecution by the Brahmin rulers of the Sena dynasty.
Another argument revolved around the role of the Sufis whose simplicity and
performance of miracles contributed to the mass conversion of rural people. A
synthetic argument, put forward by Richard M. Eaton, suggests that the
reclamation of frontier lands along the Sundarbans forests and swamps at the
shores of the Bay of Bengal led to the peasants’ economic mobility around the
personalities of religious leaders. This eventually resulted in the
concentration of a majority Muslim population in this eastern flank of South
Asia (Eaton 1993). Recently, Willem van Schendel has considered this region
more as a crossroad than a closed frontier, implying a pluralistic process of
space-making alongside ‘Islamisation’ (van Schendel 2009). Political history
remains a strong area for medieval Bengal. After 1947, most of the political
histories written in what became East Pakistan have sought to fill the existing
gap in the historiography that was perceived to have underappreciated Muslim
historical legacies in Bengal and India in general. Most of Mohar Ali’s works
seem to be driven by this perception (Ali 1985). Ali used many Arabic and
Persian inscriptions and textual sources to reconstruct the political and
cultural history of medieval Bengal. Despite his relative bias towards Muslim
polity, his works remain examples of a combination of empirical details and a
quest for recovering the political self of the Bengali Muslim in the
environment of the state of Pakistan. More earthbound and socially oriented
studies have been conducted by Abdul Karim focusing on the Sufis and using many
Bengali sources (Karim 1985). Historians of nationalist orientation have seen
in the unification of three major regions of northern (Gauda), eastern (Sonargaon)
and western (Satgaon) Bengal under Sultan ShamshuddinIlyas Shah (1342-58 CE),
who took up the title of Shah-i-Bangalah (The King of Bengal), the earliest
evidence of some form of territorial ‘nationalism’ in the region. He is
regarded as the first ruler who was able to exert sovereignty over all of Bengal. It was on
this strong political-regional basis that Bengal was able to secure two-hundred
years of independence (1352-1576 AD) from north Indian imperial powers. This
long spell of independence from Delhi is also seen as the time for the
flourishing of Bengal literature and language, despite the fact that the rulers
were of Middle Eastern origin. The nationalist historical literature holds the
Mughals responsible for the end of an independent era of Bengal and highlights
the resistance against the Mughals by local landlords including the Bara
Bhuiyans of Eastern Bengal. Beside the
mainstream political and social history of medieval times, works of new genres
are emerging, including those on technology (Tarafdar 1995), urbanisation
(Akhtaruzzaman 2009), and architectural history (Hasan 2007). Methodologically
significant works on medieval times relating to the use of coins to reconstruct
political and economic history have engaged historian for some time, with
NaliniKantaBhattasali showing the way. Some recent works attempt new synthesis
while taking a broader view of the society. Based on such sources, Hussain
(2003) reasserts earlier arguments that “acute poverty and starvation of a
larger section of the society is unbelievable” in medieval Bengal (Hussain
2003). The study of medieval Bengal still mostly revolves around the normative
argument for a prosperous society, which was discontinued with the arrival of
colonial governments. The period is also temporally segmented from the ancient
or pre-Muslim period, without the aspects of continuity in social or economic
trajectories being looked into. What also remains understudied for this period
is the predominant formative social agencies, whether or not we term those as
‘civil society’. A great deal of focus on political, economic and social
history of the period has left room for an intellectual history that can shed
light on aspects of social autonomy, being relatively independent of the state
– a development that predates European experiences of the same. A spatially
broader attempt at locating medieval Bengal in the global cross-currents
enabled by the Indian Ocean came more recently in the interesting works of Rila
Mukherjee (2006). Her research arrives in the context of the dominant
literature on the Indian Ocean as a globalhistorical space. Mukherjee’s work,
which had a Braudelian approach, examined the northern Bay of Bengal as a
commercial confluence where Bengal forged its transregional connections.
Richard Eaton, on the other hand, focused on agriculture as a vehicle for
social formation and mobility, when the mutually engaging activities of the
post-1200
Turko-Afghan princes
and preachers spurred agriculture, economy and Islamisation (Mukherjee 2011).
If for Mukherjee Bengal was a frontier of the Indian Ocean, for Eaton the
region was a frontier of the South Asian landmass. The idea that Bengal was a frontier of the
sea conjures up a vision of mobility of capital and commodities across numerous
coastal trading ports, with limited insight on the inland social dynamics that
such motilities could generate – lacunae particularly marked in the first
generation of Indian Ocean Studies. The idea of Bengal as a frontier of the
South Asian landmass could, therefore, be appreciated by the example of deeper
social formation taking place through reclamation of frontier wilderness – an
angle that has long influenced the historiography of United States. This
approach, which implies that Eastern Bengal as South Asia’s last frontier ended
in the wilderness of the Sundarbans forests, affirms a particular form and
process of post-Cold War regionalism. In the light of more recent scholarship
on transregional mobilities across various religious, political and economic networks,
such a spatially inflexible trajectory of identity must expect a revisit with
respect to modern times. There are scopes to locate Bengal both as the frontier
of the Indian Ocean and of the South Asian landmass and engage the question of
Bengali identity in that dualfrontier complex.
Colonial period
The strength of the
field of colonial Bengal lies in the vast colonial archives, statistical data
as well as multiple political and ideological moorings. An important set of
work emerging since the 1960s focused on the perceived ‘transition’ in Bengal
during and following the British take-over, K. M. Mohsin and Sushil Chaudhury’s
work being a representative study of this genre (Mohsin 1973). In terms of
closer structural analysis of the colonial period, there was the question of
the Permanent Settlement, the land revenue system introduced in 1793, which
created a class of zamindars (landlords) bestowed with almost absolute power
over land and the responsibility of collecting revenue on behalf of the colonial
state. Issues relating to the Permanent Settlement’s ideological origin,
complex tenure systems, agrarian institutional arrangements, and the
relationship between the landlord and the peasants that it helped to define –
all have been examined for clues to the stagnation of rural economy and society
in the colonial period (Gopal 1949; cf. Guha 1982; cf. Islam 1979). If the
Permanent
Settlement is seen from
the vantage point of colonial governance, Jon Wilson’s book has put forward a
strong case against a fixed ideological or policy imperative, arguing that the
abstract nature of the codification of laws in the form of the Permanent
Settlement had its origin in the anxious search for stability by the British
rulers, who found themselves complete strangers to the local conditions (Wilson
2008). Criticism of the Permanent Settlement grew in the course of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the first major attempt to break with
this element of the colonial legacy was made with the abolition of the system
by the governments of East Bengal (Pakistan) and West Bengal (India) in the
1950s. An intriguing question arises here: if the structural mechanisms of
revenue generation were held to be the key to the ills of agrarian society and
rural economy, why did the abolition of the settlement fail to bring about the
anticipated mobility and ‘development’ in the six decades following
decolonisation? Such questioning of the formal, elitist and ‘structural’
analysis of colonial agrarian society necessitated a shift of focus towards the
‘return of the peasant’ in South Asian historiography, yielding a vast range of
literature (Bose 1986; cf. Chatterjee 1997; cf. Ray 1979). In the particular
case of East Bengal, the restoration of ‘agency’ to the largely Muslim peasantry
can be examined in three broad perspectives: ‘patron-client’,
‘world-capitalist’ and ‘subalternist’. A version of the ‘patron-client’
analysis of peasant society was elucidated in the 1970s by Ratnalekha Ray, who
argued that a section of the richer peasants or village oligarchy, identified
by her as ‘jotedars’, had been powerful catalysts in agrarian relations as
early as the Mughal period. They sustained patron-client relationships and
socially reproduced and exercised power over the vast majority of subordinate
peasantry by extending credit and market facilities. These groups remained key
social and political forces even after the creation of the loyal landlords
through the Permanent Settlement. More recent versions of the patron-client
thesis suggest that richer peasants, instead of investing in capitalist
farming, perpetuated the system’s grip on the vast rural mass as creditors,
traders and rentiers, which resulted in rural stagnation. The
‘world-capitalist’ analysis of Bengali agrarian society is comprehensively
employed in the works of Sugata Bose. Examining links between the globally
connected capitalist system and conditions in local agrarian production, Bose
sought the source of the peasant’s dominant role within the context of the
world economic depression of
the 1930s. Although
Bose believes that the power of the zamindars declined as a result of a series
of tenancy acts legislated since the 1880s, he argues that during the economic
depression of the 1930s richer peasants were able to fully assert their
influence by extending credit to the vast number of poor peasants, creating a
situation of extreme dependency and vulnerability that culminated in the latter
becoming the main victims of the great Bengal famine of 1943. Thus, the rich
peasants became the ‘chief beneficiaries’ of the system, followed by zamindars
and grain-dealers in the wake of the famine.
In other words, the emergence of the rich peasant in agrarian Bangladesh
coincided with soaring poverty that culminated in the great Bengal famine of
1943, leaving the rich peasants well-placed to further expand their base of
domination by buying up the holdings of the famine victims. Within the
Subaltern Studies project, the case of East Bengal peasant society was taken up
by Partha Chatterjee. Chatterjee does not disagree with Bose’s conclusion about
the emergence of rich peasants as ‘surplus appropriators’ in the course of the
first half of the twentieth century, but he has strong reservations about
Bose’s methodological approaches. He criticises Bose for analysing the
dominance of the peasant from an angle that results “entirely from a reified
structural dynamic” of demography, market and credit relations and not from the
“conflict among conscious human agents” (Iqbal, 2010: 6-10). This position did
not help the ordinary peasant to escape the suffering of material deprivation.
Communal, rather than class, consciousness not only perpetuated the hegemony of
the richer peasants but lent support for the Muslim communitarian idea of
Pakistan which promised a ‘utopia’ that would free its inhabitants from the
domination of ‘outsiders’ such as the Hindu zamindars or bhadralok and
mahajans. The twentieth-century East Bengal peasant therefore ended up
supporting a communally inspired nation-state rather than organising a more
materialistic ‘peasant revolution’. Thus, on the wreckage of an older
historiography that dealt with the zamindars and bhadraloks as the catalysts
for agrarian relations, the peasant has been revived, albeit what started as
the ‘return of the peasant’ ended as a spectre of the same. The thrust of this
peasantcentric approach is that the peasant has become more influential than
the zamindar in the analysis of complex agrarian relations. After a
slight earlier twirl
over whether these domineering peasants should be called ‘jotedars’ or ‘rich
peasants’, the latter prevailed and the only difference between the historians
endorsing the category of the peasantry centred on their chronology of peasant
dominance. Ray believed that influential richer peasants had been present in
both pre-colonial and colonial times, Bose found them active and powerful since
the 1930s and Chatterjee found the rich peasant’s dominance in an immeasurable
realm of consciousness which seemed to transcend time. The emphasis on the economic emergence of the
dominant peasant, alongside the decline of agrarian society and the gradual
detachment of the previously predominant zamindar-bhadralok and mahajans from
the agrarian landscape, lends a strangely romantic attitude to the patriarchy
of the good old days, but fails to answer some of the questions that this
historiography itself raises. If sections of the peasantry were potentially
capable of exerting their influence over the poorer peasants from the late
nineteenth century, why did they wait until the depression of the 1930s to take
the upper hand? How was it possible for the richer peasants to strengthen their
exploitative actions as creditors and buyers of the lands of poorer peasants at
a time when relatively wealthier zamindars or bhadralok failed to do so in the
context of the economic depression of the 1930s which affected all –
particularly all strata of the peasants – who must have suffered from the
drastic fall of prices? Why didn’t communalism become more intense in the
nineteenth century when the Hindu zamindari bhadralok were supposedly more
assertive? Why did communalism become so fervent at a time when the Hindu
bhadralok’s authority and power had supposedly declined in the countryside? It
seems that the peasant in these major historiographical studies has been given
a berth with only cultural and emotional windows. On the other hand, there have
been a few statistically informed works focusing on the material conditions and
capitalist context for the peasants and their vulnerability (cf. Islam 1978;
Sen 1981). More recently, David Ludden has focused on Bengal, in a comparative
and long-term context, as an agrarian region with its multiple temporal and
material contexts (Ludden 2011). As far as the study of industrial contexts and
the place of the worker in it goes, relatively little literature was produced
on the subject despite the fact that Bengal saw some industrial development.
The initial early twentieth century nationalist debates on drainage of capital
to Britain from India gave way to a critique of backwardness of Indian economy
as a result of the colonial rule. Questioning the dominance of this literature,
a group of historians emphasised the need to examine the conditions and rights
of labourers and working class, especially after the Russian Revolution. A
pioneering Marxist work on the Indian working class movement was published in
1923 by a Bengali economist teaching at New York University and published from
Berlin (cf. Das 1923). Labour movement studies got diversified in the late
twentieth century into studies on subsectors of industries as well as agencies
like women workers in the mine fields (Awwal 1985). More literature on the
industrial labour came in the domain of Subaltern Studies, focusing on
industrial workers in the jute and other sectors, one most cited one is by
DipeshChakrabarty, whose work took a departure from the classical Marxist
analysis of production relations to the use of caste and consciousness and an
array of intra-labour networks (Chakrabarty 1989). Beyond agrarian and industrial history of
colonial Bengal, the political history is characterised by the study of forms
of resistance against the British and the landlords. This resistance has been
studied as a crude and sporadic political form against colonial rulers and
their local zamindar agents. These included the Fakir-Sanyasi movement, the
Wahhabi-inspired Titu Meer, the Faraizi peasant movement and many other such
movements. A majority of these peasant movements have been perceived as
influenced by the Wahhabi movement and Islamist resistance to colonialism. A
relatively smaller number of studies have interpreted these movements from a
Marxist perspective (cf. Kaviraj 1981). A recent study has examined the Faraizi
movement in particular and the rise and decline of an agrarian polity in
general from an ecological perspective (cf. Iqbal 2010). Further, the study of
the identity issue that emerged as a quest for understanding Islamisation in
the Middle Ages transformed into the question of identity of Bengali Muslim in
the political and social environment of Bengal. This question was located at
the disciplinary crossroads of reformist Islam, syncretistic traditions and
colonial modernity (cf. Ahmed 1981; Roy 1983; Sofa 1976). In the past decade,
political, social and economic histories have seen fresher studies in the
medical history particularly in the works of David Arnold and Deepak Kumar,
although covering broader India, but referring to Bengal. KaziIhtehsham’s study
of Bengal public health was followed by another recent one by Kabita Ray (cf.
Ihtesham 1986; Ray 1998). More recently the focus on Western medical
experiences has given way to the study of local and indigenous medical
traditions (Mukharji 2009). The field of
history of medicine or of public health has remained underdeveloped, a trend
that has continued in today’s Bangladesh. Institutional history, too, has been
left behind; Sharif Ahmed’s work on Mitford hospital is one of the few in the
field of medical history (cf. Ahmed 2008). The history of Dhaka University by
Abdur Rahim is an authoritative work, although it could have been more
expansive and critical if the Hartog Papers, preserved in the British Library,
could have been used. At the elementary level of education, there has been
little works, excepting a few lone examples (cf. Shahidullah 1987). Compared to
the literature on environmental history in other parts of India, Bengal has
remained relatively less focused on, despite the fact that the region has much
to offer to an environmental historical quest. This is not to propose that an
environmental perspective has not been taken up at all. Looking through the
rich array of research on the history of Bengal, we can identify a number of
substantial works that have engaged ecological factors to examine some forms of
economic activities. In the 1930s, RadhakamalMukerjee charted the changes in
the river systems and their impact on different types of geophysical regions
within the Bengal Delta. In doing so, Mukerjee also traced the demographic
movement and performance of agricultural sectors. About the same time,
BirendranathGanguli threw significant light on our understanding of nature’s
inherent capacity to influence the pattern of human fertility behaviour in a given
ecological circumstance. In the 1970s, Panandikar linked deltaic ecological
properties with economic well-being or woes, while BinayBhuhsan Chaudhuri
identified the fertile deltaic region of Bengal with the successful
commercialisation of agriculture in the nineteenth century. Recently, Sugata
Bose has highlighted the works of Radhakamal Mukherjee and BirandranathGanguli
by reminding us of the important link between the rivers of eastern Bengal and
demographic pattern. These works, often imbued with a Tagorian sense of
appreciation of nature as a pristine provider, are remarkable attempts to
document the role of nature, particularly the river, on economic activities.
Some remarkable works have dealt with the chars and forest, with specific focus
on the reclamation process, tenure pattern and environmental resource
management. Notwithstanding their importance in the history of the colonial
revenue system and policy formulations, these works have not examined the
questions of social, economic and political relations over a longer period of
time, keeping broader ecological issues at the centre. These works are,
however, important for our purpose and once placed in perspective their merit
could be fully appreciated in the light of the new developments in the field of
environmental history. Recently, Iftehkar Iqbal has taken a broader view of the
colonial economy, society and politics from a perspective that provides greater
and evolving agency to ecology (cf. Iqbal 2010). The intellectual history of
colonial times has been largely dominated by the discourse on the so- called
Bengal Renaissance as a mark of the Bengali nation’s cultural prowess. There
has been some criticism of the Bengali Renaissance for not being inclusive
enough to accommodate the Muslim and other cultural and literary traditions.
The search for a cosmopolitan intellectual tradition in times of colonial
modernity has remained a less trodden ground (cf. Ahmed 1965). The study of
Dhaka as an urban space began in earnest in the 1980s, with Sharif Uddin
Ahmed’s publication, followed by a number of interesting works by
MuntassirMamoon, Nazrul Islam, Golam Rabbani and a cluster of publications
under the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh’s project celebrating four hundred
years of the city (cf. Ahmed 1986; Mamoon 2009; Rabbani 1997; Siddiqui 2010).
Earlier well researched works include Ahmad Hasan Dani, Dacca: A Record of its
Changing Fortunes (1962). It is surprising that Chittagong which had been a
global crossroad for centuries has received little attention (cf. Ali 1964).2
In terms of Partition studies, Joya Chatterji has sought to correct some of the
mainstream political historical trajectory that has taken Bengali Muslims as
the sole separatist element in the breaking up of India (Chatterji 1994). More
recent works have looked at the felt memories at individual, family and
community levels (cf. Kabir 2014). Within a methodologically new approach,
partition histories are being studied via digital humanities using oral
interviews.3 But new books are yet to be written on the basis of such oral
resources. Another area that has
received attention more recently is the study of Bangladeshi diaspora. Vivek
Bald has made significant recovery of the history of Bangladeshi diaspora in
the USA that had much wider ranging social interactions in the USA than
imagined earlier. Other works includes useful team research on Bengali Muslim
diaspora in different regional and global locations (cf. Bald 2013; Alexander
et al. 2014). Gender history in the last few decades has focused mainly on
colonial Bengal, surprisingly neglecting the pre-colonial and Pakistan periods.
In the dominant literature on colonial Bengali bhadralok (gentlemen), Sonia
Amin’s study of ‘bhadramohila’ (ladies) shed important new light (cf. Amin 1996).
Mohua Sarkar focused on the social construction of Bengali Muslim womanhood
amidst the numerous works on their Hindu counterparts (cf. Sarkar 2008). In the
majority of writings on Bengali Muslim women, Begum Rokeya and to some extent
Begum Faizunnesa feature prominently as harbingers of modernity and progress.
Some recent works, on the other hand, contest the dominant idea that some of
the Muslim women writers broke out of tradition and ushered in revolutionary
modern and secular worldview. Such concepttuallisation excludes the many
fraught and uncertain ways in which nation and modernity were imagined by the
Bengali Muslim women intellectuals and writers. These writers had to place
themselves unsteadily between tradition and religion on the one hand and questions
of women’s empowerment in the condition of late colonial modernity on the other
(cf. Azim & Hasan 2014).
Bangladesh Studies in
Textbooks
Bangladesh has become a
subject of much pedagogic interest since the early 1990s, when private
universities started operating in this country. Such interests are fuelled by
government encouragement, need for balancing the syllabi by accommodating
subjects of humanities and social sciences, guardians' expectations and so on.
Some of the early textbooks focused on contemporary issues (Chowdhury &Alam
2002), while others focused on history and tradition (Ahmed & Chowdhury
2004). The national encyclopedia, Banglapedia, is a huge, commendable work by
the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (Islam ed. 2003). These are useful works, but
most of them are edited and encyclopaedic in nature. Although these volumes
accommodate useful articles and chapters they do not offer a coherent narrative
of the dynamics of long-term transformation.
A History of Bangladesh by Willem van Schendel (2009) is perhaps the
first book that brings such a long span of time within a single cover and
offers a refreshingly broader account of the country’s historical developments.
The strength of the book lies in the author’s insightful discovery, by wading
through both long and short-term historical steams, of the brighter sides of a
nation that looks in many ways doomed, while clearly showing the hollowness of
the rhetoric of nationalism (cf. Iqbal 2009).
An impressive sequel to
van Schendel’s book is David Lewis’s Bangladesh (2011), which makes a
significant contribution to the fast developing field of Bangladesh studies.
While Schendel’s is a narrative of historical dynamics, continuity and
discontinuity in a long term perspective, Lewis aims at describing current
political and social processes in Bangladesh.
For the most part, the book deals with historical narratives with
blended insight on the current political economy of development and politics.
He has shown through this historical process the emergence of a ‘weak state’ in
a strong society, while also suggesting that most of today’s malfunctioning of
governance have turned into a structural problem from a regulatory
problem.