Through the Prism of Community Development: Decolonization and Cold War Politics of Agrarian Modernization in East Pakistan

Ph.D. Exit Seminar in the Graduate Field of Development Studies 

Abstract

Mushahid’s historical sociology study of decolonization addresses enduring questions of how and why the reproduction of colonial hierarchies of power and privilege in the postcolonial transition also contained the conditions of their transformation. Examining the so-called prehistory of Bangladesh between 1947 and 1971, the study explores questions of decolonization by foregrounding the interrelated processes of middle-class formation, democratic populist mobilizations, postcolonial state-making, and the constituting of a national economy. While the demands shaping movements for ethno-linguistic recognition and regional autonomy in East Pakistan were resolved by the establishing of a Bangladeshi state in 1971, the ‘Pakistan years’ reentered the political imagination through the telos of a national biography, legitimating new forms of belonging and exclusion within the body politic. A consequence has been a widening gap between what happened during the Pakistan years and its collective recollection, sustaining a persistent tension between overcoming the antinomies of a historical past, and reclaiming its legacies in the political present. 

Conceptualizing this disjuncture through the time of decolonization, Mushahid’s intervention mobilizes fragments of a conjunctural totality that oppose the totalizing imperatives of this national biography. Drawing on memoirs, published accounts, and primary sources including state records in Bangladesh and early Cold War archives of the Ford Foundation in the US, it contributes to interdisciplinary debates across the fields of historical sociology, social history, and historiographies of Cold War diplomacy and development politics. Pace existing narratives informed by methodological nationalisms and the dominant vantage point of (neo)imperial formations, such an account foregrounds the ongoing resonance of decolonization in the present as history from the perspectives of those who enacted the postcolonial transition ‘from below’, and for whom the egalitarian promise of anti-colonial struggles remain elusive. In this seminar, Mushahid will discuss a chapter examining the transnational processes and contentions of postcolonial state-making through the prism of rural community development projects in Cold War East Pakistan. 

About the candidate

Mushahid Hussain is a recent PhD graduate in Development Sociology, and currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Indiana State University. Hussain works within global and comparative-historical frameworks in exploring the past and contemporary politics of social change in Bangladesh and South Asia more broadly. His current book project builds on his dissertation research on the socio-historical dynamics of decolonization and Cold War development politics in Bangladesh. His writings on development theory and history, labor and urban politics, and higher education have appeared in several academic journals and edited volumes.