The ‘we-brought-you-freedom’ story has an expiry date
Through the broken glass Of a library window The burning books Can’t be read. So new ones Will have to be written. —Ian McMillan (@IMcMillan) Over a decade ago, I walked into a small two-storeyed white house in Dhaka. It felt familiar. I’d grown up around houses like that in Kolkata with red oxide floors, black-and-white photographs on the wall, the rooms cool even on a warm afternoon.
But this house was now a museum to the liberation war that birthed Bangladesh. Instead of family pictures, there were photographs of murdered journalists, display cabinets with old bandages, war helmets, and the cracked spectacles recovered from dead freedom fighters. I loved the intimacy of this house-turned-museum.
It felt personal in a way most museums do not. It was my first trip to Dhaka. When I returned home, I told my family I had never been to a country that seemed so close to its history.
In India, history had receded into text books, parades and statues. But in that museum in Dhaka, I could almost feel the warm breath of history upon myself. That is why it felt bewildering to see protesters demolishing the statue of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman after his daughter Sheikh Hasina was ousted from power.
Whatever the anger against her increasingly autocratic ways, it felt baffling, as if the country, in a paroxysm of anger, was eating its own history. Since then other images have surfaced, like one shared by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on X of broken statues in the 1971 Shaheed Memorial Complex in Mujibnagar, statues that once depicted key moments in the war of liberation. At a time when the homes, temples and lives of the Hindu minority have come under attack, it seems strange to mourn fallen statues.
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