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THE history of Bangladesh has become a partisan battleground of narratives and counter-narratives, but this paper is too short to go into the details of those questions. The eye of the storm over historical configurations and identity imagination pitted the liberal establishments against those who, since the birth of Bangladesh, opposed the secular homogenization as their existential threats. Bangladesh is yet to find the right prism to gaze at its past and come to terms with its inheritances, which is alarming for the country’s democratic future. The politics of history is not an isolated phenomenon in Bangladesh, but the whirlwind of the post-1971 trajectory ditched those who had a different historical and identity inspiration. Bangladesh’s yesteryears as the backwater swathe of colonial Bengal and then as East Pakistan really survive as the institutional staying power as well as the religious and cultural heritages from the old times in the vein of an unerasable palimpsest — an old parchment that still retains the faded but feisty trails from the earlier epoch.

The current Indian challenge of rewriting history has parallels in Bangladesh, except that Bangladeshi historical vision does not usually cross beyond 1971. The Hindu nationalists explicate the Indian history as a substantive struggle between the ‘indigenous’ (Hindus) and ‘outsiders’ (Muslims and Christians), implicitly setting one ‘religious’ community against the other. Alternative concepts of history need objective research, supporting documents and a stretch of living experiences from the time long passed. But the records of what happened in earlier times habitually fall victim to political hijacking. Ominously, politically demarcated, or judicially arbitrated historiography suffers from grave shortcomings: (a) legitimacy, extracted through capricious historiography, and its strident decapitation of the past come with a short shelf life; (b) it survives until the next elected or unelected regime reframes what happened in the bygone; and (c) the hastened stratagem of history severely undermines national unity and invites treacherous polarisation. Winners take the first shot at history, yet the other side has a story to tell as well, which eventually reinvents itself intellectually and politically.

One lesson for Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and other countries too — they need a flexible posture towards their history. No group, religious, linguistic, or populist leader should have the key to unlock history! Those countries need more of a hybrid history laden with diversity, which cuts through the labyrinth of claims and counterclaims over the past. Are there any other lenses through which to look at history? The multi-layered vision of history brings equilibrium to a nation. Beyond an exclusionary call for history, academic researchers are still searching for a ‘palimpsest methodology’ for comprehending history, but also to resolve the ongoing political deadlock, identity rancour, and democratic institution-building encounters. The shared inheritances include legislatures, elections, and bureaucracies; they are among the best-known colonial bequests that augmented democratic aspirations in post-colonial South Asia and elsewhere.

The palimpsest envisioning has a clear message: we cannot turn the mosaic of the past into a straight line from a distant telescope, as Prasanjit Duara, an acclaimed historiographer, warned long ago. Palimpsest plays like a logbook! Both an individual and a nation bear a resemblance to a ship that needs both a rudder and a logbook, as Jamal Mahjoub, a British-Sudanese writer, echoed in his The Drift of Latitudes (London, 2006). A nation must go ahead, but corresponding to a ship, it should likewise keep a record of its earlier ports of call! If the preeminent narrative of a nation compares to the uppermost text of national imagining, could we equate the other historical rhythms as the unerasable subtexts of a palimpsest — an old parchment where the multiple streams are hazy but not extinct?

Patriotic fervour, existential compulsions and external pressure forced the Bangladeshi leaders of the exiled government in India to establish a new ideological road map — different from Pakistan’s two-nation theory despised by India, the foremost host for the Bangladeshi ‘freedom fighters’ and the refugees fleeing from across the border. The historiography and identity imagination offered by the interim leadership, stranded in the neighbouring country, were obviously not a product of open deliberation. It was a formidable exhortation in 1971, but neither historiography nor identity comprehension are neatly stitched tapestries. What the exiled government offered was more like a ‘summary verdict’ delivered in a hurry! Still in post-independent Bangladesh, the new chetona became a convenient political asset for the ruling party to neutralise its competitors by dumping the identity legacies and their sponsors from the immediate past. The hastily envisaged sequence of 1971 became the ruling national script in post-independent Bangladesh, but it fell short of a pluralistic confluence for a multilateral democracy, which primed the ground for future single-party hegemony on multiple occasions since the birth of the nation. However, the old historical fervours of identity and politics still popped up like the surviving subtexts in the timeworn parchment. Identity conceptions die hard! To Leo Tolstoy, identity history — proven by the century-long Chechnyan resistance — bore a closeness to a ‘trampled thistle’ that defies annihilation. (Hadji Murad).

Today’s politics is tomorrow’s history, which brings me to the doorstep of historiography. Political science, with its structural-functional paradigm, is the upper storyline that habitually marginalises the bottom line of political conflicts. Symbolically, multi-layered history comes close to a palimpsest — ‘woven together, written over and grappling with each other’ (MJ Alexander, 2005). Notably, a palimpsest carries the resonance of what was real in the past. Often, leaders go back to the lost footprints to give a boost in the present, or previously maligned characters from history return to their lost pedestal. To the dismay of the earlier historical and populist rhetoric, there is a growing awareness that MA Jinnah does not deserve the snide portrayal as the sole perpetrator of the 1947 partition! In present-day China, President Xi Jinping revived the once-discarded Confucianism by blending it now with Marxism. During my stint in Kazakhstan in 1995, I noticed that Abay Kunanbayev (Abbay/Abai), once a popular Kazakh poet trashed by the Communists, found a new life through dedicated statues at the country’s public squares when the old Soviet control ended in Central Asia. Those sketches prove the power of the historical contents lost in a politically-induced public amnesia!

My palimpsest visualisation still has its own constraints! At the heart of this portrayal is the struggle between the dominant text and the sub-texts of historical inscriptions. But in Bangladesh, the swaggering secular narrative has failed to banish the ubiquitous Islam and Muslim identity; the majority of Bangladeshis would surely refuse to regret for being Muslims! This is a reverberation of Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq’s call (Do not Apologize for being a Muslim!) that originated in his diary from the 1940s, which came to me through his son (now late) Faizul Huq, a former student of mine at Dhaka University.

The demographic weight of Bangladeshi Muslims gives them unquestionable empowerment, which most political and intellectual establishments are aware of. Even the Bangladesh constitution acknowledges that imperative by retaining a provision for Islam as the state religion. Muslim identity, not religious fanatism, could work as a strategic resource for Bangladesh’s future unity and integrity. Hence, Muslim identity has a parallel existence with the secular linguistic nationalism, conveniently manipulated by politicians to their advantage. Does it fit into a palimpsestic vision? Repeated complaints of marginalising the Muslim identity and hurting the Islamic sensibilities of a Muslim majority country are more durable voices than the waning messages in a palimpsest’s lower echelon. In a free and fair election, the so-called ‘Muslim vote’ may, in the future, decide who are the winners and losers in Bangladeshi politics.

The reality is that Bangladeshi secularism has yet to create a secular civil society or become an unchallenged political template in the larger political terrain beyond the incumbents and their cohorts. The array of religious and other minorities is likewise buoyant in their articulation of grievances. I wonder which narratives deserve a higher transcription — the secular nationalism or the Muslim identity configurations permeating across the spectrum? Or those nuances are the comparable imprints that deserve exploration, recognition, and space! Nevertheless, the palimpsest envisioning of Bangladesh history begets relevance: since independence, Bangladeshi leaders have steered towards an exclusionary historical account, but unlike a chiselled stone, the past appears more like an old parchment where the deep-rooted marks of Bangladeshi chronicle never erased their presence in the ‘collective mind’ of the nation!

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M Rashiduzzaman, a retired academic, periodically writes on Bangladesh, South Asian political history, and identity questions. Slices of this essay came from his articles previously published in scholarly journals, newspapers, and a couple of online outlets.