I’d like to alert you to a short piece written recently on Bangladesh.
The piece was published in the Japan Times a little more than a month ago. The author Gwynn Dyer expertly runs through the last three decades in the running gag of an internecine conflict in Bangladesh between two powerful families:
As Dyer writes:
“If a Shakespeare should ever arise in Bangladesh, he would have plenty of tragedies around which to weave his history plays. The country is only 38 years old, but the vendettas among leading families have been just as tangled and bloody as the ones in 14th- and 15th- century England that gave the great playwright so much of his material.”
Of course Shakespeare-like talent has grown and died in Bangladesh– more properly, in Bengal. The poets Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam, though both born in Kolkata, considered all of Bengal their native inspiration. Neither could have foreseen the plague the Begums have blighted on our houses. The piece is too optimistic–by half–but hews close to the facts and makes the connections that are necessary to thread through to properly understand the familial politics that has long roiled policy-making in Bangladesh.