Papers by Nusrat S Chowdhury
Journal of Bangladesh Studies, 2024
In a well-known poem, Bhalo re bhalo, Sukumar Ray, the master of modern Bengali nonsense rhyme, p... more In a well-known poem, Bhalo re bhalo, Sukumar Ray, the master of modern Bengali nonsense rhyme, ponders a curious array of delightful objects and experiences, gustatory and beyond. The regime of taste that underpins a voracious appetite for all that is bhalo or good is, ultimately, disarmingly modest. A paean to taste as uncomplicated enjoyment, the poem settles on the no-frills Bengali fare, pauruti aar jhola gur (sliced bread and jaggery) as sobar chaite bhalo-the very best. When it comes to defining taste, however, little is as simple, a fact that the Bangla equivalent "ruchi" makes evident. The term is expansive and includes both appetite and distinction. Similar to its English counterpart, ruchi stands not simply for taste but good taste. It is also the analytical focus of the set of essays in the section, Taste: Aesthetics and Politics in Bengal.
Journal of Democracy, 2024
In July 2024, Bangladesh witnessed a historic uprising that led to the ouster of Prime Minister S... more In July 2024, Bangladesh witnessed a historic uprising that led to the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after 15 years of increasingly authoritarian rule. What began as student protests against discriminatory government job quotas transformed into a nationwide movement demanding regime change. The protests, marked by unprecedented violence and state repression, resulted in nearly a thousand deaths. The student coalition “Students Against Discrimination” emerged as a powerful political force, successfully mobilizing the masses and ultimately forcing Hasina to flee. The uprising highlighted the enduring role of student activism in Bangladesh’s politics and reignited hope for democratic reform under an interim government led by Muhammad Yunus.
PODCAST: The Crowd Never Left the Scene… – Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury on Crowd Politics in Bangladesh
Review of Democracy, 2024
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury – author of the recent b... more In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury – author of the recent book Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford UP, 2019) – discusses the various layers of democracy in Bangladesh. Analyzing the differences between the English word “crowd” and the Bengali term “jonata,” Professor Chowdhury deliberates upon the recent events in Bangladesh through the lens of the country’s long history of popular dissent and street mobilization. She describes how the Western category of “the people” fails to capture the tenuous, fleeting, and ephemeral materiality of the crowd in the context of Bangladesh and beyond.
The Conversation, 2024
Nigel Farage, a U.K. politician known for his populist anti-European Union rhetoric, endless medi... more Nigel Farage, a U.K. politician known for his populist anti-European Union rhetoric, endless media appearances and close friendship with Donald Trump's MAGA Republicans, received an unwelcome treat while out on the U.K. election trail on June 4, 2024: a milkshake, directed at his face. He isn't the first to suffer such a fate. Angry citizens have been throwing everything from stones, eggs, pies and more recently milkshakes to register their complaints with authority for centuries. I am an anthropologist who studies popular democracy and has written on how pelting as a show of collective grievance has lost neither its significance nor its frequency. Throwing things and pelting as a form of popular politics is an ancient and enduring way for the masses to express their dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo. Egg on their face Right-wing British politician Nigel Farage is hit in the face with a milkshake during his general election campaign launch in Clacton-on-Sea, eastern England, on June 4, 2024. Photo by BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images 6/19/24, 6:43 PM All shook up? UK's Nigel Farage is the latest to bear the brunt of pelting as popular politics https://theconversation.com/all-shook-up-uks-nigel-farage-is-the-latest-to-bear-the-brunt-of-pelting-as-popular-politics-222652 1/4
Social Research: An International Quarterly , 2023
bram stoker, the irish author of the 1897 novel dracula, shared the following anecdote to highlig... more bram stoker, the irish author of the 1897 novel dracula, shared the following anecdote to highlight his politician friend's unquenchable thirst for popular recognition: "I am growing popular!" "Popular!" said his friend. "Why, last night I saw them pelt you with rotten eggs!" "Yes!" he replied with gratification, "that is right! But they used to throw bricks!" (Marsden 2015) Rotten eggs, an age-old ammo in the hands of the crowd, fetidness notwithstanding, was still an improvement on the potentially injurious insult of bricks and stones. As the owner of Lyceum Theatre in Dublin, Stoker probably saw rotten foods, ranging from eggs to vegetables, being pelted at performers on stage by unruly crowds, a veritable presence in Victorian and late Victorian theater (Dunnum 2019). Oscar Wilde was famously subject to some edible missiles at the opening of his play The Importance of Being Earnest: "So the story goes, a malodorous cabbage landed at Oscar Wilde's feet as he addressed his London audience. 'Thank you, my friend,' said the celebrated wit, raconteur, and playwright as he picked it up. 'Every time I smell it, I shall be reminded of you.'" 1
Asian Survey, 2024
Following the semicentennial celebrations and a global pandemic, Bangladesh seemed well on track ... more Following the semicentennial celebrations and a global pandemic, Bangladesh seemed well on track to achieve the promises of furthering both democracy and development. But while development was visible in the completion of spectacular infrastructural projects, democracy continued to suffer, as the government plans to host the 12th parliamentary elections without the participation of the main opposition party. The war in Ukraine and a depleting foreign exchange reserve severely affected the country's economic profile, while a dengue outbreak once more revealed the inadequacies of its public health system.
সময়ের কুয়াশায়ঃ দীপেশ চক্রবতীর সম্মানে প্রবন্ধগুচ্ছ , 2023
Neoliberal Development in Bangladesh: People on the Margins
The Journal of Bangladesh Studies , 2022
Economic and Political Weekly, 2021
A reading of 1969, the momentous year of protests against Ayub Khan's dictatorship in East Pakist... more A reading of 1969, the momentous year of protests against Ayub Khan's dictatorship in East Pakistan is offered, going beyond the popular tropes of inevitability and loss. The moments when Bengali nationalism exceeded its own expectations by making michhil or procession its main focus are identified. A rumination on Dhaka, which found its present cultural and political identity through the upheaval of the 1960s is presented.
Südasien-Chronik/South Asia Chronicle, 2021
The clocks were ticking away, the countdown had begun. Digital clocks high and bright enough for ... more The clocks were ticking away, the countdown had begun. Digital clocks high and bright enough for maximum visibility hung from office buildings, schools, and shops. Dhaka was one of twelve city corporations spread over fifty districts where they had been installed since early 2020. The clocks would go on until 17 March, the birth centennial of jatir pita, "The Father of the Nation", Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. They stopped at the precise moment when all values-day, hour, minute, and second-turned zero. There it was, the moment of origin; of Mujib, for sure, but also of Bangladesh. A birth foretold, as it were.
American Ethnologist website, 2020
Post Covid Fantasies
Cultural Anthropology - Editors' Forum, 2020
openDemocracy.org, 2018
A student at a protest in Dhaka demanding road safety and justice for the killing of two students... more A student at a protest in Dhaka demanding road safety and justice for the killing of two students in a road accident. Image: Md Rafayat Haque Khan/Zuma Press/PA Images In early August, the prime minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina found herself in the unusual position of having to publicly urge thousands of protesting children to return to school. A fatal but common traffic accident, in which two teenagers were killed by a speeding bus near Dhaka's international airport on 29 July, spurred over a week of demonstrations. Hasina's appeal, which was duly ignored, belongs to a tradition of political thought that usually reserves the serious business of politics for "fully developed" adults. Pedagogical institutions like the school and the home are considered the rightful places for children -not the streets of Dhaka.
Emotions, Mobilisations and South Asian Politics., 2019
This book highlights the role of emotions in the contentious politics of modern South Asia. It br... more This book highlights the role of emotions in the contentious politics of modern South Asia. It brings new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights to the mutual constitution of emotions and mobilisations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As such, it addresses three distinct but related questions: what do emotions do to mobilisations? What do mobilisations do to emotions? Further, what does studying emotions in mobilisations reveal about the political culture of protest in South Asia?
The chapters in this volume emphasise that emotions are significant in politics because they have the power to mobilise. They explore a variety of emotions including anger, resentment, humiliation, hurt, despair, and nostalgia, and also enchantment, humour, pleasure, hope and enthusiasm. The interdisciplinary research presented here shows that integrating emotions improves our understanding of South Asian politics while, conversely, focusing on South Asia helps retool current thinking on the emotional dynamics of political mobilisations. The book offers contextual analyses of how emotions are publicly represented, expressed and felt, thus shedding light on the complex nature of protests, power relations, identity politics, and the political culture of South Asia.
This cutting-edge research volume intersects South Asian studies, emotion studies and social movement studies, and will greatly interest scholars and students of political science, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural studies, and the informed general reader interested in South Asian politics.
This chapter takes crowd politics as symptomatic rather than representative of some of the ambiva... more This chapter takes crowd politics as symptomatic rather than representative of some of the ambivalences of mass democracy. Its ethnographic site is the virtual medium, more specifically, the digital footage of two incidents of sexual and vigilante violence in Bangladesh. The scenes of violence, at times as raw footage and at other times as digitally modified journalistic expose, went viral on social media in 2015. The medicalized metaphor of contagion in the expression "viral" is also emblematic of crowds, or at least, the way it has long been discussed in canonical social theory. The visual evidence I write about caused public uproar in Bangladesh and invoked curious responses from the government. These examples help me explore the expansion and retreat of the spaces of critical dissent, what I call the double bind of digital activism in Bangladesh. The visual material brings to the fore the links between crowd behavior (public shaming of alleged molesters, calls for vigilante justice, etc.) and mechanisms of surveillance and sociality, like close-circuit television and cellular phone camera. I ultimately argue that social media activism, and surveillance technology more broadly, mimics the kind of crowd mentality it incriminates, and in so doing, reproduces certain immanence associated with crowds.
In Bangladesh in 2007-8, speculation about an energy catastrophe thrived alongside utopic visions... more In Bangladesh in 2007-8, speculation about an energy catastrophe thrived alongside utopic visions of democracy. Two events consolidated the despair and hope for collective national futures: a movement against possible coal mines in Phulbari in the northwest and a nationwide political emergency. They are the focus of this essay. By bringing resource crisis and political crisis together, I argue, at one level, that resource and democracy have become two exemplary sites of thinking towards the future, and, at another, that the gaps in their varied imaginations are potential sites of politics. Drawing on my ethnography of the anti-mining protests in Phulbari, I analyse the relationship between signification and anticipation in Bangladeshi politics. In so doing, I identify those emergent political moments that challenge the anticipatory politics of the state and the energy company.
. By "impasse," I point to the ideological loop that paternalistic authority resorts to in the na... more . By "impasse," I point to the ideological loop that paternalistic authority resorts to in the name of governance, where a repressive, corrupt, and/or un-democratic governmental apparatus is blamed for the underdeveloped political rationality of its citizens. For the very same reason, sovereignty as domination is justified in order to protect these masses from their own unruly nature, that is, from becoming members of crowds as opposed to proper citizens. Examining the humor surrounding the electronic circulation of an identification document, amidst attempts to roll out a national ID card during the Emergency, I draw attention to the limits of the non-ancestral mode of political power that attempted to interpellate a new kind of citizen. My analysis of a photograph, that was later censored, of a man kicking an official in military uniform suggests that the crowd forms the always-threatening backdrop against which a range of individual and collective identities of the citizen are articulated. On an analytical level, I develop a theory of "picture-thinking" as a key function of sovereignty. I take the formulation from William Mazzarella who, following G. W. F. Hegel and Gustave Le Bon, historicizes the purported opposition between so-called rational
This discussion of violent protests and Muslim women in Bangladesh is framed by two events. The f... more This discussion of violent protests and Muslim women in Bangladesh is framed by two events. The first concerns a movement in Phulbari in the north against open-pit coal mining. In 2006, rural women protested against the brutality of the state that sided with the energy company. The second event is a protest that began in 2013 in Shahbag, a busy crossroads in the capital city, against a verdict issued by the International War Crimes Tribunal. The primarily young crowds included many urban and middle-class women. These two events show women as agents, not victims, of violent politics. Together they challenge the conceptual framing that posits women in Muslim-majority societies as caught in a predictable quandary between modernity and Islam. This entry advocates a more culturally informed view of why and how women participate in political protests, and the potential of their co-option into various counter-revolutionary narratives.
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Papers by Nusrat S Chowdhury
The chapters in this volume emphasise that emotions are significant in politics because they have the power to mobilise. They explore a variety of emotions including anger, resentment, humiliation, hurt, despair, and nostalgia, and also enchantment, humour, pleasure, hope and enthusiasm. The interdisciplinary research presented here shows that integrating emotions improves our understanding of South Asian politics while, conversely, focusing on South Asia helps retool current thinking on the emotional dynamics of political mobilisations. The book offers contextual analyses of how emotions are publicly represented, expressed and felt, thus shedding light on the complex nature of protests, power relations, identity politics, and the political culture of South Asia.
This cutting-edge research volume intersects South Asian studies, emotion studies and social movement studies, and will greatly interest scholars and students of political science, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural studies, and the informed general reader interested in South Asian politics.