Talk by Mahruba Mowtushi (English and Humanities, BRAC University, Bangladesh)

'Wireless Broadcasting in Eastern Bengal: Sound, Nation, Modernity 1939-1979’ tells the story of forty years of expanding wireless soundscape in the eastern regions of Bengal. The wireless has been instrumental in Bengal in exploring modernist ideas about nation and identity. The wireless’ remarkable reach across the airspace of Bengal was responsible for creating an ‘imagined community’ among Bengalis, especially during and after the partitions of 1947 and 1971. This project, the first of its kind in examining radio culture in eastern Bengal, brings together original archival research on wireless to bear on the expanding scholarly interest in the history of broadcasting, its connection to nationalist imaginaries, and the semiotics of sound. The project is being reworked into a book that is divided into six chapters that are somewhat chronologically arranged: each chapter surveys a particular facet of radio culture in East Bengal involving a myriad moving and moveable elements — of people, equipment, ideas, practices, and sound — that created a new kind of awareness to mediated sound and the art of listening among Bengalis.

Mahruba Mowtushi completed her BA (2007-10) and MA (2010-11) in English literature from Queen Mary, University of London, and PhD in comparative literature from King’s College, University of London (2017). She writes for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL), Research in African Literature (RAL), and South Asian Review (SAR). In recent years, Mowthushi has published articles and book chapters on Bengali cinema, street art in Dhaka, South Asian Muslim food culture, and ‘transnational’ African writers of Bengali descent. She  works in English and Bengali, and her research and writing interests cut across South Asian and African literature and cultural history. Her first monograph, Africa in the Bengali Literary Imagination: From Calcutta to Kampala, 1928-1973, is coming out in 2024 from Routledge. Dr. Mowtushi is currently working on two book-length projects on wireless broadcasting in Bengal and the rise of modern nation-states in South Asia.