This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

About the Lecture
Bengal had been one of the strongholds of the Communist Party of India and at the time of Partition, many Bengali Communists, Hindu and Muslim, opted for Pakistan rather than India. Among them were Hena Das and her friends who had joined the Communist Party as teenagers in Sylhet in the late 1930s. This talk will situate Das and other veteran women activists in the tug-of-war for Sylhet between Assam and Bengal; struggles by local tea plantation workers; the new state of Pakistan’s suppression of the Communist Party; and the decades of women’s feminist activism that led to the establishment of the Mahila Shongram Parishad (Women’s Revolutionary Council) in 1969, renamed the East Pakistan Mahila Parishad in 1970 and Bangladesh Mahila Parishad after the country’s independence in 1971.

About the Speaker
Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies at UC Berkeley. She is currently Director of Global Studies and of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies.

Her most recent book, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), was selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association and awarded the 2023 Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

She is Co-editor of Journal of Bangladesh Studies (Brill) and on the editorial board of a new Cambridge University Press book series titled “Muslim South Asia.”  She is Vice President (president-elect) of the Association for Asian Studies.