Sensing the ‘60s: Oral Historical Approach to the World of Bengali Intellectuals

The 1960s brought new temporal trajectories to intellectual life in East Pakistan (Bangladesh since 1971). The high optimism about Pakistan as a liberating nation-state was making way for reconfigured expectation about another nation-state, in the form of Bangladesh. Along the way, approaches to and engagements with institutions, politics and intellectual itineraries got shaped and de-shaped. While these changes reflected experiences which were way too different to that of the partition and early Pakistan era, the 1960s nevertheless offered more ambiguities than clarity about identity, religion, ideologies and nationalism. The birth of Bangladesh added more nuances to these dynamics. Scholars are only beginning to examine these questions, yet none of such works use oral sources. My paper will use some of the 64 oral interviews of Bengali intellectuals (recorded as part of Bengali Intellectuals in the Age of Decolonization project), now residing in Dhaka, Kolkata and London, to reflect on how spatial dislocations and succession of past feelings about the 1960s have informed an individual’s stories and how these could be mapped onto the intellectual history of postcolonial Bengal/Bangladesh.