The Travelling Archive is a shared space of listening to songs and sounds from Bengal and other places. Moushumi Bhowmik, a singer and writer, will talk about how she came to build this space, alone and with others, over the past two decades. She will talk about what moved her and how, as she moved following sounds and traces of sounds, an amorphous map of a broken and imagined land unfurled before her eyes.

Few things tie people together as closely as their mother tongue. Literature, poetry, and especially songs, embody the mother tongue and give people an identity that anchors them across time and space. Sometimes this sense of identity fuels a revolution and the birth of a nation state, as in the case of Bangladesh in 1971. The panelists will talk about their personal memories of the Bangladesh war of independence, and how the idea of Bangladesh developed over the next five decades. Moushumi will talk about her understanding of present-day Bangladesh, where the identity resulting from religion and politics competes with the identity that emerges from a shared language. Pushan will talk about the underground support network for Bangladeshi intellectuals in 1971 that ran through his own home, and how things look at present. Salil will take a journalist’s view of how far Bangladesh has come, and discuss what an imagined conversation between a Bangladeshi freedom fighter and someone of today's generation might look like. This dichotomy between what was intended and what ultimately came to pass is a universal question pertinent to all movements. The events that led to the founding of Bangladesh fifty-one years ago are recent enough for us to find amongst us many who witnessed the birth of the nation first-hand; yet they are distant enough to allow for a dispassionate evaluation of the extent to which the initial promise has been met. Sudipta will keep the various strands of this discussion together.