Traumatic History and Transcultural Memory: A Reading of Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh in the context of Nation formation

Abstract

In the age of interdisciplinary studies Literary and Memory Studies is an emerging field of interest to young scholars and researchers. The manner in which Memory Studies interlink across various disciplines as history, geography, literature, psychology is worthy of exploring. Cultural memory entails convergence of fields such as cultural history, social psychology, media archaeology, political philosophy, comparative literature and relate past to the present. It is bifocal in nature since it leads to both remembering and forgetting. There are diverse ways in which Memory studies can be located in literary and media studies. My focus is to highlight how an exploration of memory studies further leads to a study of psychological trauma buried deep in the memory of an individual as well as its culture. The experience of undergoing the two World Wars, Holocaust, 9/11 episode, 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, political strife in Afghanistan are major areas that can be studied with the aid of memory studies. I shall highlight on this specific area of memory studies by contextualizing how memory operates by its twin process of remembering and forgetting to bring out the trauma of the civilians of East Pakistan who had witnessed the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. For this purpose Numair Atif Choudhary’s Babu Bangladesh (2019) is chosen to elucidate how the process of nation building is intrinsically connected to the present and past lives of its citizens. The narrative of formation of a new nation is continually questioned and reframed by the oral narratives of the generations of people who have witnessed its creation.