The Language Movement in Bangladesh

While translingualism is widely known for deconstructing monolithic ideologies and labeled languages, Shakil Rabbi demonstrates how fluid semiotic resources can help construct a national identity and ‘mother tongue’ for Bangladesh. This is a much-needed work on the ways translingualism can achieve rhetorical sovereignty for newly independent postcolonial communities in the Global South.

A welcome contribution to conversations around translingualism and transnationalism in the field. Shakil Rabbi presents a refreshing range of archival materials and rich sociocultural perspectives to unpack the complex politics and ideologies of language and literacy in twentieth-century Bangladesh.

Shakil Rabbi’s meticulously researched exploration of the Bengali Language Movement bridges translingual and rhetorical frameworks, archival and digital humanities methodologies, Islamic rhetorics, and multiliterate rhetorical practices. In addition to emphasizing how translingual theory can be a productive framework for historical scholarship, Rabbi suggests new ways of understanding how language itself, as topoi, can index multiple spatiotemporalities in the struggle for rhetorical sovereignty.

This book is a rare gift: a story of a language movement that succeeded, so much so that it led to UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day. By taking us inside the work of people who started, sustained, and died for the movement for the Bangla language, Shakil Rabbi shows readers that it is often some of the most precarious people—students, artists, workers—who end up changing the world.

Shakil Rabbi offers compelling insights into how translingual scholarship might be served by distant reading methods in order to limn the textual connectivities and dis-connectivities of discourse around Bangladesh’s historic Language Movement. His transverse methodology reflects a novel way of approaching rhetorical sovereignty within and between the geospaces that were formerly West and East Pakistan, through the framework of multiliteracies. More specifically, The Language Movement in Bangladesh reveals the significant semiotic, cultural, religious and political reaches of arguments for Bangla linguistic sovereignty, not only by implying how those arguments became entangled with a dozen other languages and their literatures between 1946 and 1956, but also by tracing their real-time occurrence across over a dozen genres, including generic events that have become more recently popularized throughout the Bangladeshi diaspora. In doing so, Rabbi resituates what had previously been historicized as a ‘state’ language debate within its broader global contexts.