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This talk examines the lives and political projects of young women activists in 1930s–40s Sylhet who were drawn to join the Communist Party. Among them was Hena (Dutt) Das, who remained in (East) Pakistan after Partition, and who would be politically and socially engaged in Bangladesh until her death in 2009. In this talk, Shehabuddin will focus on the revolutionary education and experiences that first brought Hena Dutt and her teenage classmates to the Communist Party, how they understood and inhabited communism in their daily lives, and how their personal and political histories complicate ideas about religious and national belonging, about the much-described tug between communism and feminism, and about the relationship between the personal and the political.

Elora Shehabuddin is professor of gender & women's studies, director of global studies, and director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley. Her last book, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism was selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association and awarded the 2023 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. She currently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies (Brill), on the editorial board of the Cambridge University Press book series, Muslim South Asia and as president of the Association for Asian Studies.

Image Credit: Waseka Nahar/HerStories

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