Embodied Partitions – Encountering performances of embodied memories and identities among British Bangladeshi women in Tower Hamlets

This thesis investigates the relationship between embodied processes and products of remembering and belonging among British Bangladeshi women in Tower Hamlets, London. An analysis of memories of British Bangladeshi women in professional and social dancing, as well as the spaces and encounters that enable the production, transmission, and negotiation of such memories, ultimately addresses questions about the relationship between remembering and identification in the diaspora. This thesis specifically engages with memories of the “longue durée of Partition”, including the interconnected events of the first Partitions of Bengal, the 1947 Partition of British India, the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh, and subsequent migration. Applying ethnographic methods, including participant observation, fieldnotes, interviews, focus groups, and participatory research methods in the form of eight dance workshops, this thesis is informed by the performances and perspectives of 25 research participants. The research finds that in their dance practice, British Bangladeshi women in London draw on different but intersecting mnemonic spatialities, relating to the nation, the region, and the village, and tell the stories of women through their bodies. They dance to remember and because they remember. They dance to mobilise togetherness in a reality of division, to assemble pasts with presents to compose working memory narrative for the future, and to find recognition in a world in which women’s memories are not always part of shared understandings of the past. The thesis contributes methodologically and conceptually to diaspora studies, memory studies, and Partition historiography. In doing so, this thesis proposes dance-based methods as an alternative way of knowing relating to the pasts specific to first- and second-generation Muslim and Hindu British Bangladeshi women in London, who are still underrepresented in the field of diaspora studies.