Aksadul Alam
AKSADUL ALAM
Short Bio
Professor of History, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Awarded a PhD in 2011 from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, specializing in the Historical Geography of Bengal up to 1300 AD. Authored and edited seven research books and published 40 scholarly articles in esteemed journals in Bangladesh and internationally. Shared his expertise and insights at numerous international conferences held in the USA, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Japan, Thailand, India, and Bangladesh, and received prestigious awards, including the Gold Medal Award 2017 from the Bangladesh University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Dean’s Award 2018 from the Arts Faculty, University of Dhaka. Dr. Aksadul Alam was awarded the ‘World Scholars Fund’ for the 34th History Conference of the World History Association (WHA) held in Louisville, USA, in 2025 and the 24th Conference in Savannah, Georgia, USA, in 2015.
University of Dhaka
Session
This proposal engages with one of the least-studied areas: the concept of ‘Bengal’, its borders, changing historical geography, connected histories, and the politics of space, identity, and the region as it has been formed and imagined. The proposed research examines these challenging issues from an interdisciplinary perspective through the lens of geographical factors and the constantly evolving political boundaries and identities. This study asks why it was essential to create a sense of identity around the term ‘Bengal’. The mainstream nationalist historians from Bangladesh envision an eternal, unchanging, territorially bounded spatial identity, ‘Bengal’, to legitimize the modern nation-state ‘Bangladesh’. They trace the process of constructing national identity over a millennium through syndicated historiography. How do conventional popular narratives promote or hinder the historical past of society, culture, and religion of Bengal in a particular form? This study challenges imagined and generalized statements about the past and the colonial and anti-colonial projections that divided ‘Bengal’ into ‘West Bengal’ and ‘East Bengal’ on the basis of majoritarian religious identities, while ignoring sectarian concepts and the idea of multidimensional borderlands. Bengal, as a ‘region’ and a ‘concept’, became an example of (dis)connected histories in the making, unmaking, and remaking of regional and national identities within the South Asian territorial space. Because the time-and-space-scaler investigation is a significant methodological tool, a critical inquiry into this issue using it can yield new insights and logical conclusions. This proposed research aims to achieve this goal without glorifying the territory or its settlers.