by IFTEKHAR IQBAL
Historians have studied the interregnum between the birth of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh as that of a clear-and-simple exploitation of the Bengalis in East Pakistan by the West Pakistani ruling elite. This discourse of exploitation is built along a number of convenient and visible statecentric arguments: economic, political, cultural and sometimes racial. In this archaic, almost abstract form of nationalist debates, one misses the pictures of everyday, localised and spatially contingent politics of exploitation and resistance – a phenomenon common in both colonial and post-colonial south Asia. Ahmed Kamal’s State against the Nation is an attempt to capture a slice of this historical continuum and the author does this with style.
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