THE BIRTH OF BANGLADESH IN BOOKS
Prelude to a national disintegration
After half a century from where we began, Daily Star Books will spend all of this year the 50th year of Bangladesh revisiting, celebrating, and analyzing some of the books that played pivotal roles in documenting the Liberation War of 1971 and the birth of this nation.
When the country of Pakistan emerged at the end of British rule in the subcontinent, it did so with a purpose to unify two distinctly different regions into a single nation with a common ideology, culture, politics, and economy. It failed horribly, as we all know. Indeed, political scientist Rupert Emerson correctly pointed out, by the accepted criteria of nationhood there was in fact no such thing as a Pakistani nation. But why was this the case? Rounaq Jahan explores the issue of Pakistan s failure to achieve its purpose in her book,