Crowd potential

(This article is part of our special series 'Rethinking Bangladesh'. You can read the editorial note to the series here.)

The word 'crowd' can be particularly evocative: it suddenly forms, wreaks havoc, and then, just as suddenly, melts away. The elusive nature of crowds demands examination in a political context, particularly in Southasia, a region where political agency often evades democratic institutions. Possessing one of the most volatile political landscapes in the region, Bangladesh is a fitting starting point to examine the paradoxes of the crowd – which Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury attempts in Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh. Chowdhury's ethnographic analysis draws heavily from pictures, language, everyday articles, and other seemingly mundane elements of collective life. This "picture thinking" allows the narrator to deconstruct the complex relationship between person and state,  and most importantly, between the crowd and the general political atmosphere of the nation.

The reality that emerges from the failure of postcolonial political ambition is the core focus of this work – one of simultaneous economic development and political instability. The crowd as the source of paradox is examined through frameworks proposed by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and social psychologist Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon. The Freudian estimation of the crowd's potential destructive nature is especially apparent in the book's storytelling.