GRAFFITI, WALL ART, DRONE SHOWS: Lest we not remember to forget

by Shovon Das

During the 36 days of July, I was not in Dhaka. Refreshing feeds across social media platforms, sharing posts of police atrocities, occasional status updates, and sleepless nights are the extent of my engagement. I feel I don’t have the authority to comment on the July phenomenon—the drone shows, the painting on metro rail pillars, and the grand rally for the July proclamation. Yet, I am commenting on the cultural observance of July.

A year later, as I have been walking through different parts of the city, I could feel the differences in institutionalised and vernacular observance of July.

In Dhanmondi, by the bridge leading to the historic 32 Nombor, now desecrated and destroyed, house and museum of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, commercial entities painted over July graffiti to advertise for some coaching centres or marriage registry office’s number but protected the particular section on Shahid Mir Mughda, ‘pani lagbe, pani’ (do you need water)? Someone protected the memory of Mughdha. The spirit of July will be upheld by ordinary people, quietly, if we don’t turn July into a phenomenon, a site of contestation.

It has become a site of contesting claims. Metro rail pillars are repainted with stories of injustices from the fascist Awami regime, and the stories include the Shapla Chattbar carnage (2013), the BDR mutiny (2009), and the blogger killings (2013-2016). When I first came across this wall art, I thought, these images are too fine a work of art to be called graffiti. Although both wall art and graffiti make use of public areas, their purposes and characteristics are politically different. Wall art, which occasionally overlaps with graffiti, can include larger, more planned murals and creative expressions made with authorisation, whereas graffiti is typically defined as unauthorised markings on public spaces. It is historically a direct action.

I identify the paintings on the metro rail pillars as wall art rather than graffiti. Later, I got to know it is a project of the local government, the rural development and cooperatives ministry, to commemorate the July uprising. Some group, supposedly with right-wing inclination, immediately painted over the pillar that carried the image demanding justice for the blogger killing. The debate took Facebook by storm. In this debate over who deserves to seek justice, it is forgotten that before all these ceremonial drawings or wall paintings making territorial and ideological claims, there was a real July, when protesters risking bullets scribbled in shaky hands, ‘Step down, Hasina.’

Then there are a lot of reenactments. In different stages across Dhaka, slogans from July 2024 were performed. In this act of performing a slogan, a student protester from July is chanting a slogan, but no one is chanting back, because it’s not a michil or a political rally. I was a bit perplexed, particularly when the historic slogan, ‘tumi ke, ami ke, rajakar, rajakar. Ke boleche, ke boleche, shborachar, shboirachar? (Who are you? Who am I? Rajakar, Rajakar. Who said so, the doctor or the dictator?’ Slogans are time and context sensitive; taken out of context, they lose meaning and function. In the remembrance of July, we can talk about how the slogan came about and how it had reclaimed the narrative of 1971 from the control of the fallen Awami League. A stage performance of the slogan felt too decontextualised. Some might say the term ‘rajakar’ no longer has the rhetorical weight to stigmatise someone. I agree. However, do we have to chant it when the dictator has fled the country, and we are now tasked with the unprecedented opportunity of rebuilding our nation? When the meaning of the particular slogan lost direction, I wondered whether the July is also losing its tie with people in this particular invocation. 

There are questions about whether drone shows depicting iconic moments from the July mass uprising should be called reenactments. Traditionally, mostly in the west, historical reenactment is an educational or entertainment activity in which mainly amateur hobbyists and history enthusiasts dress in historical uniforms and follow a plan to recreate aspects of a historical event or period. Drone reenactment is relatively new and could even be unique to Bangladesh. In these shows came alive a conversation between two historic moments in our history — 1971 and 2024. The concept of time, as a means to control people, became very unstable during the July uprising. The July of 2024 refused to welcome August, the politically exploited month of grief. So the drone shows and their omissions were more a display of temporal unease between many historical moments of Bangladesh. 

The sky lit up with an image of a caged bird breaking free, followed by illustrations of Abu Sayed braving the bullet, Mir Mughdho distributing water in defiance, women protesters chanting slogans, and Ria Gope looking at the sky as the Rapid Action Battalion indiscriminately fired from a helicopter. The Palestinian flag was also drawn on the sky in solidarity. The final image announced the recently reinforced China-Bangladesh foreign relations. The show was financed by the Chinese Embassy. The cultural advisor presented the observance as part of cultural healing, it may be. I will never say it did not contribute to our collective cultural healing in post-uprising Bangladesh. I am saying it was doing a little more than that. In the evolving geopolitical order with hateful demagogues and genocide masterminds like Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Benjamin Netanyahu in the lead, cultural healing financed by the Chinese Embassy is cultural diplomacy as well.

Hence the title of my piece is this overused phrase, because I fear that the institutional, or better to say sarkari, hyper remembrance would contribute more to national forgetting.

Shovon Das is a PhD researcher based in Canada.