Talk by Ahona Panda (History, Claremont McKenna College)

The talk explores the entwined political and literary lives of the Bengali politician and writer, Abul Mansur Ahmed (1898-1979), and studies him as a person who lived through the political articulations of three nationalisms: Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi. From his early involvement in the Indian National Congress, to his shift to the Muslim League and formation of Pakistan, and later his role in shaping the Awami League and modern Bangladesh, Ahmed’s life reflects the deep contradictions of his time. In this talk, I explore how, for Ahmed, “Muslim” was not merely a religious category, but a social class formation produced through colonial agrarian structures and shaped by Hindu cultural and linguistic hegemony. Language, then, became both a site of resistance and a battleground for Muslims and Hindus: who controlled Bengali? Who spoke for its future? Ahmed’s suspicion of Hindu-Muslim unity stemmed from a trenchant critique of elite Hindu appropriation of language and culture. And yet, Bengali–– and language itself–– remained a terrain of unresolved tension and closeness between the two communities.

I situate Ahmed alongside literary friends like Kazi Nazrul Islam, political figures like Chittaranjan Das, A.K. Fazlul Huq and H.S. Suhrawardy, as well as humanists like Ahmed Sharif and Anisuzzaman, who held out hope that the Bengali language could transcend nation-state divisions. As India-Bangladesh relations continue to worsen, the talk rethinks whether language is the site of irreconcilable difference, or the elusive site of what binds us beyond the injustices of class, race, and history.

Ahona Panda is a historian of South Asia and Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. In 2025-2026, she is a Visiting Scholar of South Asian History at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the intersections of language, land, and politics in Bengal from the colonial period to the postcolonial present. She is currently completing a book titled Language and its Communitas: The Life of Bengali, 1793–1971, which explores the political and emotional life of the Bengali language, and the material, national, and literary histories that shaped it. Her broader scholarly interests include philology, economic and environmental history of the Bengal delta, and the long history of Hindu–Muslim relations in South Asia.