Towhidi Janata and the Vicissitudes of Embodied Politics in Bangladesh
In-person
|
March 26, 2026 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM
Location | Room 208, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7
Mobs have been a forceful presence in Bangladeshi political life following the 2024 uprising. This talk will dwell on a particular iteration of it called “towhidi janata." The term stands for far-right religious mobs or a non-secular pressure group depending on what event prompts such labeling and by whom. It fuses the Arabic word “towhid," the foundational concept in Islam of the oneness of Allah, and “janata,” the pan-South Asian term for people, crowd, or the mob. Though of a longer lineage, the phenomenon of towhidi janata has thrived following the fall of the Awami League regime whose secular-liberal image became enmeshed in its autocratic mode of governance. It is at once a claim to a membership in the Muslim ummah and a label to discredit an illiberal other. Based on textual and ethnographic research done within a year of the uprising, this talk approaches the rise of towhidi janata as a way to reckon with an emergent distinction, not between a liberal citizen and a violent crowd, but two forces of illiberal politics – the mob and towhidi janata, respectively. Towhidi janata, in this context, appears as an unstable index of Bangladesh’s so-called rightwing political turn. The ambivalence in naming it as such goes beyond the hoary project of rescuing a revolutionary people from “demos noir”; instead, it unearths the complex nature of embodied politics in the wake of a popular uprising.
About the Speake
Nusrat S Chowdhury is professor of anthropology at Amherst College. She is a political anthropologist interested in practices of popular sovereignty and communicative politics. She's currently completing a book on language, infrastructure, and populism in Bangladesh through a textual and ethnographic exploration of the country's longest river bridge. She's also the author of Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh, her first book, and a number of articles on political aesthetics and popular politics.
This event is sponsored by th Centre for South Asian Studies
Asian Institute
asian.institute@utoronto.ca
Speakers
Nusrat Chowdhury
Professor
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Amherst College
Francis Cody
Director, Dr. David Chu Program in Contemporary Asian Studies (CAS)
Director, Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS)
Professor, Asian Institute