The Idea of the Global Sixties and East Pakistan

The image of the sixties as a transformative, radical era has proved to be enduring. As Tor Egil Førland points out, it is only the sixties, among all the other decades of the twentieth century, that has a journal devoted to its events. This journal, in its ‘Aims and Scope’, boldly announces, as Førland asserts, that it ‘is the only academic, peer-reviewed journal to focus solely on this transformative decade of history’. The key locution here is the word ‘transformative’. The era has become associated with revolutionary and radical confrontations, between the forces of the establishment, the global insurgencies and experiments with alternative living in the advanced capitalist world. Throughout the world, successive generations of politicians and social activists have waged cultural wars defending or attacking the radical meanings of the sixties as well as their historical legacy. The decade began with the polarizing, but hugely successful, national liberation struggle in the Caribbean in Cuba. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 appears to announce the beginning of an era that would be volatile and unpredictable, for it did not follow any predetermined master narratives of revolutionary transformation. Intellectually, the global sixties began with the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara’s foco theory and Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution, alongside Mao Zedong’s On Practice and Contradiction. These texts became central to the art of making revolution and were even read in disparate locations, such as Palestine, Algeria, France, Congo and East Pakistan. Even Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist perspective on Marxism and Louis Althusser’s ruminations on the development of Marx’s thought became critical sources for the debates that raged in the dingy and overcrowded ‘Madhu’s canteen’ in Dacca University (present-day University of Dhaka). The decade was marked by the Cultural Revolution in China, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a seemingly revolutionary coup and a reactionary counter-coup in Indonesia (culminating in genocidal events), student-led revolutionary activities in Pakistan, the victory of the United Front in West Bengal, combined with the rise of the Naxalite Movement in India, followed by the conclusion of the Algerian War.