Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies, Director, Global Studies Program(link is external), and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies(link is external). She was Professor of Transnational Asian Studies and Core Faculty in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University prior to moving to Berkeley in 2022. She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2008), and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She has published articles in Meridians, Signs, Journal of Women's History, History of the Present, Economic & Political Weekly, Modern Asian Studies, Südasien-Chronik [South Asia Chronicle], Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and Asian Survey, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes.

Cultivating a Revolutionary Imagination Along the Surma: Communist Women’s Mobilization in Mid-20^th-century Eastern Bengal and Assam

This talk examines the lives and political projects of young women activists in 1940s Sylhet who were drawn to join the Communist Party. Among them was Hena Das, whose decades of activism would culminate in her helping to found the Mahila Sangram Parishad (Women’s Revolutionary Council) in 1969, renamed the East Pakistan Mahila Parishad in 1970, and Bangladesh Mahila Parishad after the country’s independence in 1971. I focus on the revolutionary education and motivations that first brought Hena Das and her teenage classmates to the Communist Party; how, at times, they questioned male colleagues and official party doctrine; and how they understood and inhabited communism in their daily lives.