National Narratives: Representations of Independence in History Textbooks

• In Event: Legacies of Authoritarian Opposition and Repression

Abstract

This paper examines how official narratives of Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War in national social studies textbooks have shifted over time. Since independence, history textbooks in Bangladesh have been sites of contestation, undergoing politically motivated revisions with each new regime that has come into power. With the goal of examining these changes and the effects they have had on the Bangladeshi population, this study uses process tracing to consider the impact of the actors and institutions who develop curricula and textbooks, textual analysis to dissect the narratives of the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladeshi social science textbooks and curricula from 1972 to the present, and in-depth interviewing, classroom visits, and focus groups to identify the ways that textbook narratives impact student and educators views of the 1971 War. The study utilizes an original data set collected over the course of a year of fieldwork — including over 30 school visits, 150 curricular documents, and 100 interviews across Bangladesh’s seven districts. Through these analyses, this work provides insight into the country’s evolving national narrative over the course of a country’s history, highlighting how official narratives are used to bolster political legitimacy and how politicized revisions impact public perceptions of what it means to have a “true history.”

Author

• Biz Herman, International Rescue Committee