“On Such a Full Sea Are We Now Afloat”: The 7th March Speech of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

This public lecture will contextualize the historic speech delivered by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on March 7, 1971 at the Ramna Race Course, Dacca, to a people soon to embark on a nine-month long liberation struggle in the wake of a brutal genocide unleashed by a colonizing regime. In October 2017 UNESCO added this
speech to the Memory of the World Register as one of mankind’s documentary heritage. It has earned its place alongside other great speeches in history - Pericles’ Funeral Oration, Lincoln’ s Gettysburg Address, Churchill’s We Shall Fight on the Beaches parliamentary address, Martin Luther King Jr’s I have a dream speech, to mention a few. But it is the aim of this talk to locate Bangabandhu in the pantheon of South Asian leaders, MK Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose, to analyze the different strategies deployed by the three leaders, their different pathways and philosophies and the commonalities that existed. In the process one hopes to unearth the uniqueness of Bangabandhu’s response and position. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had the imagination to appreciate a cultural and historical unity running through the destinies of the inhabitants of South Asia, while celebrating the uniqueness of the entity that is Bangladesh.