Talk by Elora Shehabuddin

This paper analyzes the relationship between women’s rights advocates in East and West Pakistan in 1947–71, in an effort to contribute to the small but growing body of scholarship complicating Bangladesh’s linear nationalist narrative as well as recent scholarship on the history of united Pakistan in this period that pays serious attention to the country’s eastern wing. I show how, during the Pakistan amal, not only did many Bengali women engage with the central state as Pakistani citizens alongside West Pakistani women activists in order to elicit resources and favorable policies, but they also took pride in being citizens of a new nation that had overthrown its colonial rulers. I show this engagement with the state through their involvement in electoral politics, their activism for the reform of personal laws, and their pride in the nation in their willingness to serve as representatives of Pakistan in delegations overseas, even as they organized and published in opposition to state policies such as the imposition of Urdu as the state language and growing economic and political disparities between the two wings.

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Transnational Asian Studies and Core Faculty in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She received her A.B. in social studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University. She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (California, 2021), Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (Columbia, 2008), and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She has published in numerous journals and edited books and co-edited a special issue of Feminist Economics on “Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities.” Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Carnegie Corporation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the US Institute of Peace. Professor Shehabuddin currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies, as an Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Brill), and as an elected member (and current chair) of the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.