Paper short abstract:

To ethnographically explore the aesthetic manifestations through which various forms of irreconciliation (briefly meaning non-forgiveness) is expressed in the context of the liberation war of 1971 and fall of the authoritarian rule of a ‘left-liberal’ government in Bangladesh in August 2024.

Paper long abstract:

Irreconciliation (Mookherjee 2022) focuses on the less examined but frequent ethnographic instances when survivors refuse to forgive in response to persistent impunity of past injustices, particularly, in the face of absence-presence of the rule of law and staged processes of justice which serve the powerful. In this paper I want to think through the various forms of irreconciliation that has manifested/are manifesting in Bangladesh following the brutal killing (officially 1500 killed, 19,931 injured) of predominantly student protestors by the ‘left-liberal’ authoritarian (Lacy and Mookherjee 2020) Bangladeshi state in July-August 2024 leading to the fall of the government on 5th August 2024.

Most post-conflict reconciliatory exercises make it incumbent upon survivors to forgive, and seek closure as an exhibition of ‘moving on’. Exploring various aesthetic manifestations linked to the war of 1971, I have argued that Bangladesh is a test case of irreconciliation (2019, 2022), of not moving on, in the context of its liberation war of 1971. What are the various instances of not forgiving, remaining irreconciled to the unresolved injustices of 1971 and the July 'revolution' of 2024? What forms does this position of not reconciling manifest in, apart from refusing to forgive? What are the limits of irreconciliation and how does it impact on the future configurations of Bangladesh? My attempt is to show how aesthetics captures the links between irreconciliation and political consciousness and how this debate is constituted through the engagement with the arts, in Bangladesh and beyond.