About the events

In early November 2021, we first approached Moushumi Bhowmik to give a talk at the institute to mark 50 years since the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh. We wanted to use the opportunity to learn about her research and other contributions towards documenting and preserving the diverse traditions and shared cultural legacies of Bangladesh and India. For various reasons, we have had to wait until April 2022 for her visit to materialize. In the meantime, the scope of her visit has expanded, and we will now have events that can be roughly classified under the following strands.

Lectures and workshop: In this strand, Moushumi will share, through her talks at Colaba and HBCSE, her experiences and research as an artiste and a woman. She will also conduct a workshop, where she will be joined by her fellow artiste Tajdar Junaid.

Bangladesh@51: The centre-piece of this strand will be the panel discussion, from a diverse set of viewpoints, on the movement for Bangladesh, the war, and the developments since then. In addition, two movies, Muktir Gaan and Muktir Kotha, both in Bangla with English subtitles, will be screened.

Mother language recordings: At some point we had hoped that we could have these events around 21 February (the International Mother Language Day, Ekushe February, a day that has a special significance for Bangladesh). We looked for languages that are often not heard or exist in the shadow of other languages. Three members of our community graciously agreed to record stories and songs in their mother tongue: BS Acharya will record for us a story in Tulu, Vijay Dhar will record a story in Kashmiri, and Rajesh Upadhyay will sing a song in Bhojpuri.

Concert: The final event of the programme will be a unique concert where Moushumi Bhowmik with Tajdar Junaid will sing and play. Their music will be woven with a presentation by Pushan Ayyub based on his personal archives of documents related to the language movement and the struggle for Bangladesh.