Memory, museums, and the danger of forgetting

Recently, while rereading The Museum of Innocence, I was struck again by Orhan Pamuk's insistence that memory does not disappear all at once. It fades quietly and slowly, fragment by fragment, often under the cover of necessary historical revisions. While Kundera helps us understand the weight expectations place on those in power, Pamuk, in his own poetic way, offers a gentler reminder that memory, too, demands care, or it begins to slip away. Sometimes it survives not because it is institutionally preserved, but because someone or a particular quarter insists on keeping it, object by object, story by story, even when the world around it moves on.

This thought has stayed with me, with a disquieting sense of concern and urgency as Bangladesh navigates its post-July political moment.

There is no denying that the July uprising represented a reawakening, perhaps even a rapture of sorts. It unsettled a long-standing political order and challenged a narrative monopoly that had solidified over time. For many, this felt overdue. For others, it was destabilising. Both reactions are anticipated and understandable. What deserves a closer look, however, is not the reawakening or rupture itself, but what seems to be unfolding in its aftermath: a gradual erasure of our shared public memory—our national legacy—projected as reckoning and correction.

While penning this concern, one must also admit, without nostalgia or selective amnesia, that Bangladesh's political class has long treated our national history as a political instrument that can be moulded and presented to suit its cause, often with a Kundera-esque lightness. Regime after regime has rewritten, reordered, and reframed the past to meet their political agenda. History has shifted in school textbooks with each government. National days have been declared, scrapped, and reinstituted. Heroes have been lionised, debated, or replaced altogether, depending on who held power at the time.

Each revision was justified as a correction of distortion; each, in turn, produced its own distortions. This pattern cuts across parties and decades. The danger now is not that history is being rewritten, which has happened before, but that the rewriting has become so frequent and so brazen that history itself begins to feel fragile, owned not by the nation but by whoever happens to be in power.

Yet something about the present moment feels different, not only in intent, but also in pace: in how quickly it is being carried out without pausing to contemplate the consequences.

Selectively, monuments have been dismantled. Certain national days are being observed quietly; others are being blatantly ignored, including ones that mark the milestones through which the nation was shaped with blood and sacrifice. Language around foundational milestones has turned cautious: at best conditional, more often evasive. Much of this unfolds through the absence of observance rather than any official decree. And absence, when sustained, becomes its own kind of narrative.

This is not an argument to preserve any political quarter's ownership of history. No political entity has the moral right to monopolise national memory or play with it. But there is a difference between dismantling monopoly and punishing memory. Between correcting excess and suppressing facts.

What is emerging, particularly among some political actors, is a tendency to treat history with suspicion—valuable only if it can be detached from the immediate-past regime, disposable if it cannot. In this framing, erasure passes as neutrality, and silence is justified as balance. This approach is not right.

Public memory is not merely about monuments or slogans. It is about continuity. It is about how a nation explains itself to its children. When memory becomes fragile—revised too often, handled too aggressively—people stop trusting it altogether. History then ceases to be a shared public reference point and becomes vulnerable to permanent dispute.

Pamuk's Museum of Innocence works precisely because it does not try to replace one truth with another. It preserves fragments, discomforts, and contradictions. It accepts that memory is uncomfortable and strewn with messy nostalgia; it is incomplete, and sometimes it can be very inconvenient. Bangladesh's political actors, new and old, would do well to accept that discomfort rather than rush to "fix it."

The urge to correct history after years of narrative monopoly by a specific quarter can be very tempting. But correction demands care. It requires polyphony and meaningful public discourse, agreement among historians and key stakeholders, correct documentation, a transparent procedure, and most importantly, a willingness to live with complexity. What it does not require is destruction driven by revenge, or the sidelining of milestones simply because they were previously overused.

There is also a generational cost to this mayhem that we rarely acknowledge.

Young Bangladeshis are growing up in a political environment where history seems easily negotiable. Textbooks change. Public symbols change. Heroes turn villains, and then reverse again, resembling Bakhtin's carnivalesque—only stripped of irony, and made more grotesque. The danger is not that they will forget the past, but that they will stop believing that the past matters. When everything becomes political, nothing retains credibility. And when nothing feels stable, national identity loses its moral legacy.

Such conditions do not nurture critical thinkers. More often, they raise disengaged ones. A society that loses its shared memory becomes vulnerable to simpler myths and louder narratives. They become vulnerable to versions of history that are easier to accept than to examine. Over time, the space for nuance—the very space democratic politics requires—shrinks.

This is not inevitable. But it does require restraint.

Political transitions are always characterised by an eagerness to reshape the past in their own image. The challenge is to resist that temptation long enough to ask harder questions: what do we preserve even when it is inconvenient? What do we critique without erasing? How do we create spaces for facts, which are not necessarily comfortable for all parties, to coexist?

Bangladesh does not need a new history to replace an old one. It needs political restraint to live with a complicated one. If we fail at that, the danger is not that we will forget who we were, but that we will no longer recognise who we are becoming.

Tasneem Tayeb is a columnist for The Daily Star. Her X handle is @tasneem_tayeb.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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