"In April 2018, I was invited to the University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh, to deliver a talk at an international seminar on the Bangladesh Liberation War. While preparing for the talk, as an Indian youth born 15 years after the war in a village near India’s border with Bangladesh, I wondered what qualified me to speak on the war and that too in Bangladesh.

Much of the scholarship on Bangladesh’s founding places it within a narrative of repetition. It either repeats the partitions of 1905 or 1947 or the creation of India and Pakistan as postcolonial states. This paper argues instead for the novelty of Bangladesh’s creation against the postcolonial state, suggesting that it opened up a new history at the global level in which decolonisation was replaced by civil war as the founding narrative for new states.

Defining the relationship between displaced populations and the nation state is a fraught historical process. The Partition of India in 1947 provides a compelling example, yet markedly little attention has been paid to the refugee communities produced. Using the case of the displaced ‘Urdu-speaking minority’ in Bangladesh, this article considers what contemporary discourses of identity and integration reveal about the nature and boundaries of the nation state.