RAISING THE FATHER’S HOUSE: Uprising, memory, and the end of obedience

On August 15, 2025, the building, which housed a museum and was considered a historic site by the Awami League supporters, was torn down by protesters. — New Age/ MD Sourav

by Tara Asgar

BANGLADESH does not just remember its fathers; it cannot stop looking for them. In every national moment of rupture, transition, or hope, a paternal figure is summoned to carry the symbolic burden of care, deliverance, and restoration. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Ziaur Rahman, Muhammad Yunus, and even figures like Farhad Mazhar and now Jamaat-e-Islami have each been cast into the role of ‘pita (daddy)’ — the one who knows, the one who provides, the one who disciplines. But these roles are never just political. They are deeply emotional. Bangladesh is a country structured by longing, longing for moral clarity, safety, intimacy, and authority, and that longing is almost always projected onto singular masculine icons.

This phenomenon may be best understood not simply as a leadership pattern but as what queer and pop cultures have dubbed as a daddy complex. In romantic and erotic discourse, ‘daddy’ refers to a figure of asymmetrical intimacy: one who provides, protects, and controls. The term plays with age, gender, power, and affect. Reappropriating it in political discourse, we see how national psyches, especially in postcolonial states, can become emotionally entangled with masculine iconography. This projection has formed the architecture of authoritarianism and emotional governance in Bangladesh. It’s worth noting that while the term ‘Jatir Pita’ culturally translates to ‘Father of the Nation,’ this essay deliberately uses ‘daddy’ in its queer and critical connotation, not as a direct translation, but to unsettle the emotional authority embedded in paternal reverence and expose its affective and asymmetrical power dynamics.

Colonial paternity and the betrayal of kinship

THE origins of this longing trace back to colonial Bengal. When the British East India Company assumed control in the mid-eighteenth century, it did not merely introduce systems of trade or governance; it redefined masculinity and morality. The British administrator emerged as the ‘strict father’ figure: rational, distant, and morally superior. In contrast, the Bengali man was re-coded as emotional, erratic, and effeminate, someone unfit to govern himself.

This binary, internalised over time, shaped how power would be imagined for generations. In colonial Bengal, this logic materialised in policy, language, and law: the British punished to civilise, ruled to protect, and governed as patriarchs over an infantilised native population.

This emotional logic did not vanish with the British exit. Instead, it was replaced by the promise of Muslim kinship in the formation of Pakistan. For many Bengali Muslims in 1947, the new Islamic nation offered paternal security, a safe haven from perceived Hindu dominance. Yet, the Pakistani state quickly revealed itself as another controlling father. It imposed Urdu, concentrated power in the West, and dismissed the cultural and economic aspirations of East Bengal.

By 1971, when the Pakistani army turned on its eastern citizens with genocidal violence, the betrayal was no longer just political; it was familial. The war for independence was not only a demand for sovereignty, but it was also a rebellion against a father-state that had become abusive.

Mujib and Zia: rival fathers, divergent masculinities

IN THE aftermath, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman emerged as the new paternal figure. Declared Jatir Pita (father of the nation), Mujib embodied revolutionary charisma: his voice stirred crowds, his image invoked intimacy, and his leadership was laced with personal sacrifice. He became the archetypal ‘loving but flawed’ father. Yet, love demands accountability. His post-war governance, marked by the 1974 famine, the creation of the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (commonly known as BAKSAL), and increasing centralisation, left many disillusioned. When Mujib was assassinated in 1975, his legacy was frozen in grief. Criticism became taboo, his image sacred. And like many fathers in trauma-ridden households, he became impossible to confront.

Ziaur Rahman, who rose in Mujib’s aftermath, offered a contrasting figure. Where Mujib evoked emotional warmth, Zia stood for military discipline and pragmatic control. He did not seek love; he demanded order. His rise reflected a different archetype: the cold, functional father whose governance was defined by economic liberalisation, Islamic realignment, and bureaucratic expansion. His rule cemented the military’s role in national life, not just as enforcers but as moral actors.

In the decades that followed, Mujib and Zia became competing mythologies. The political field narrowed into a family drama, led by Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, daughters and widows reenacting their fathers’ unfinished wars. Voters were cast not as citizens but as children, loyal to bloodlines.

July Uprising and the rage against the father

IN JULY 2024, a wave of student protests against prolonged authoritarian rule culminated in the unprecedented: the six-hour-long defacement and attempted arson of Mujib’s residence at Dhanmondi 32. The house, once a national mausoleum, stood violated and scorched. And yet, no official explanation came. Rather than condemning the act outright or assigning responsibility, the Yunus government cited logistical breakdowns in law enforcement and fractured command systems left behind by the outgoing Awami League. There was no formal attribution, no prosecution, and no National Day of Mourning.

Many Awami loyalists and sympathetic citizens speculated that Jamaat-e-Islami and Shibir supporters had orchestrated the violence. But that narrative, while widely circulated, was never confirmed by the state. Instead, what unfolded was a much deeper psychic rupture. This was not simply political vandalism. It was a psychic revolt. The father’s house, long heralded as sacred, now stood for exclusion, repression, and a suffocating moral order. What was destroyed was not just a house. It was the effective architecture of unquestioned reverence.

The defacement of Mujib’s house marked a generational break, a refusal to inherit the burden of icon-worship. It was a symbolic act that said a citizen does not owe obedience to a myth. It signalled the end of a sacred compact between ruler and ruled. That citizens can take history into their own hands and no longer accept their only role to be reverent and silent.

New daddies, same desire

MUHAMMAD Yunus, now central to the government, emerged as a new moral patriarch, celebrated abroad and cautiously revered at home. Calm, ethical, soft-spoken, and a Nobel laureate, Yunus offers a different kind of fatherhood. He doesn’t seek power in the traditional sense; rather, power is projected onto him. His speeches and interviews carry the tone of a reluctant caregiver.

Young male student leaders, too, were elevated. Their popularity had less to do with ideology than with affect. They spoke like fathers or like sons preparing to become fathers. Even Farhad Mazhar, with his prophetic cadence, returned as the mystic father, the one who sees what others cannot.

Farhad Mazhar’s return to public imagination is particularly instructive. With his white beard, cryptic language, and prophetic cadence, he represents not just the mystic father but a deeper yearning for intellectual and spiritual sovereignty. His writings have long envisioned a distinctly Muslim-Bangladeshi identity, one that refuses the binaries of Bengali Hindu secularism and postcolonial Western liberalism. In this vision, Bangladesh becomes a civilisation of its own, rooted in Sufi ethics, rural collectivism, and a rejection of elite cosmopolitanism. It is a fatherhood that speaks not from a podium, but from prophecy.

But the danger lies in the exclusions it produces. In Farhad Mazhar’s imagination, as in Jamaat’s, the future of Bangladesh is religiously coded, masculinist, and often heteronormative. Trans, queer, and indigenous communities, along with feminist and secular rights movements, find themselves flattened, questioned, or omitted altogether.

The rebranding of Jamaat-e-Islami, too, is a symptom of this shift. Historically aligned with the Pakistani military during 1971 and widely reviled for its role in wartime atrocities, Jamaat has spent decades outside the nationalist fold. But the current climate, shaped by authoritarian exhaustion and liberal collapse, has given them a new platform. Clean-shaven young leaders, strategic social media campaigns, and a soft-spoken moral tone now present Jamaat as the stable alternative. Its rhetoric of Muslim unity, framed within the Muslim-Bangladeshi synthesis, is seductive in a traumatised, disoriented political field.

And herein lies the liberal failure. Terrified of Jamaat’s return, many liberal commentators have responded with panic rather than engagement. Their refusal to reckon with the widespread disillusionment with secular elites only cedes more ground to the religious right. It mirrors the American left’s paralysis in the face of Trumpism. Moral superiority is no substitute for strategic imagination.

The emergence of the National Citizens’ Party also reflects this crisis. Marketed as a youth ful alternative, the NCP has failed to articulate a distinct vision. Its fragmented leadership, mimicry of old party structures, and incoherent messaging betray an aspiration not to break from the patriarchal cycle, but to be accepted within it. Like a child longing for the approval of a violent father, the NCP seeks legitimacy in the very system that has stunted political imagination for half a century.

Toward a different kinship

WHAT would it mean for Bangladesh to grow up without needing to be fathered? For decades, the nation has operated in a cycle of abuse and dependency, relying on father-figures for safety, authority, and meaning. But that model has produced a traumatised child-state: betrayed repeatedly, emotionally neglected, and unable to articulate its own needs.

The July uprising exposed this. It was not only about governance but also about grief. Not only about jobs and freedom, but also about trust. Bangladesh has been a child wounded by paternal promises, lied to, disciplined, and extracted from. What looks like political fanaticism today — rewriting history, demanding a new republic, and glorifying new patriarchs — may be trauma responses. Fantasies of safety in a nation that has never known it.

And yet, July offered something else: a blueprint.

Students cooked meals for each other, offered shelter, and redistributed into a more organic leadership. Trans and queer folks joined hands with hijab-wearing women. Working-class communities offered shelter to protestors. These were not side stories. These were not symbolic optics. They were the foundation of a new political possibility. July’s power lies not in the overthrow of a regime, but in the glimpse it gave us: that healing is possible. That the nation is not destined to repeat the cycle.

Blueprints matter in a country like Bangladesh. Where trauma is inherited and power is centralised, we need spatial and political frameworks that can show another way. July was one such blueprint, not for immediate revolution, but for long-term care. It dared to imagine that a national identity can be built, not prescribed. That solidarity does not require sameness, and leadership can emerge from the margins.

We must now turn to those margins for the future. To trans communities who have always negotiated care outside of the state. To indigenous people who know what it means to remember without nostalgia. To women who have laboured invisibly and resisted structurally. To the working class, whose bodies carry the burden of every regime.

To raise the father’s house is not just to dismantle authority; it is to build new architecture. One that does not fear multiplicity. One that allows Bangladesh to be something other than obedient, other than ashamed, other than betrayed. This is not just about rejecting past fathers. It is about dreaming into new kinships, grounded in trust, not trauma. The July uprising was not the end. It was the first act of a nation beginning to speak in its voice.

Tara Asgar is a Brooklyn-based Bangladeshi transgender artist, educator, and activist whose transdisciplinary work explores gender, migration, and community justice across borders.