The birth of Pakistan, in the wake of the transfer of power in 1947, had once provided hopes to millions of East Pakistanis. Yet in economic, cultural and political terms, the vast majority of East Pakistanis had been disappointed by the gradual deepening of inequalities between the two wings of Pakistan. In the colonial era, Bengali Muslims had sought to escape from the internal colonization of the eastern part of Bengal by the Calcutta-centric, Hindu landholding and service elites. They had invested their hopes and aspirations in the Pakistan movement. To them, the Pakistan movement came to signify the possibility of emancipation from the class structure that had evolved in response to the introduction of the Permanent Settlement. Many cultural and literary personalities, as well as journalists, had wanted to make a new beginning with literary–cultural experiments. This hope was encapsulated in the East Pakistan Renaissance Society movement. The very name of this group suggested its aim – the total rebirth of culture and civilization. Yet such hopes were belied. In cultural terms, from the very inception of Pakistan, the middle classes of East Bengal had faced contests over the national language, and, more importantly, their very Muslimness had been questioned because of the shared register of their language with non-Muslims. Soon the promised land of ‘eternal Eid’ became a site of poverty and hunger. The partition confined the spatially mobile, densely populated East Bengal society to the demarcated international border. The closing of the frontier had led to border skirmishes among peasants. The devaluation of the Indian rupee soon after the transfer of power, and Pakistan’s refusal to follow suit, led towards further crisis. Smuggling, shrinkage in trade and commerce, a critical absence of infrastructure and sectarian violence along religious lines became the new reality of Pakistan. The economy of East Pakistan was characterized predominantly by subsistence peasant agriculture, with jute being the primary cash crop. In the early fifties, jute earned foreign exchanges for Pakistan, but those hard-earned foreign exchanges were spent on the building-up of the defence industry, primarily located in West Pakistan. In spatial terms, East Pakistanis were isolated from the other provinces of Pakistan by 1,400 kilometers. Thus, the historical experience of quotidian reality among the East Pakistanis did not correspond to their horizons of expectations.