Storming Heaven With Memories

This dissertation follows the historians of left politics in Bangladesh, a country that went through a century of independence and reversal under three signs–British India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. While the country kept reimagining itself under new identities, the idea of communism was underground and persecuted in all three periods, although the forms of struggle and the shape of ideas kept changing. This research is an ethnography of forms of writing history, the purchase of the celebration or censure of the work, and new socialities and rearranged hierarchies that emerge from this process. For a small but significant group of journalists, publishers, activists, and survivors, the project of arguing, understanding, documenting, writing down, and reenacting particular moments of Bangladesh history is a vital and presentist task.