Atif Aslam, December, and erasure of historical consciousness

I made the mistake of attending Jal's concert at a posh club in Dhaka two weeks ago, because I'd heard a rumour that the band's former vocalist, Farhan Saeed, would perform. Turns out, Farhan had performed, but not at that venue. He performed at a private "gaaye holud" in the same area. I was stuck listening to the shell of a band that I had once admired.

In the same vein, music lovers were waiting ardently for Atif Aslam to perform on December 13, only to find out, after paying good money, that the organisers were selling tickets even before they had secured proper permissions.

December in Bangladesh is not just a month with which the year ends. It is a season of memories -- heavy with grief, resistance, and victory. It reminds us that our nation was not born gently, nor achieved through negotiation or consensus, but forged in unthinkable bloodshed and loss. It was shaped amid a systematic attempt to shatter the country's intellectual and cultural spine before it could rise, upright and sovereign.

It is against this backdrop that the sudden crowding of elite social calendars -- with concerts featuring Urdu songs, private performances, and carefully curated displays of cosmopolitan leisure -- during the narrow passage between Martyred Intellectuals Day and Victory Day feels less like a benign cultural preference. It signals a slow drift from historical consciousness, where timing loses its meaning.

This piece is not an argument against cross-border cultural exchange, nor against the enjoyment of art in its many forms. Culture that does not travel eventually suffocates; but culture that refuses to acknowledge context becomes careless. And when such carelessness is repeatedly normalised by those with social and cultural capital, it reshapes norms far more powerfully than overt political messaging ever could.

As social media buzzed with clips of Atif Aslam's performance, it also overflowed with defensive arguments about artistic freedom and dismissive claims that culture need not carry the weight of history. As though history were a burden rather than the very condition that makes our present freedoms possible, and as though December were just another month on the calendar.

This erasure of context matters far beyond a single Pakistani artiste's performance in Dhaka -- especially as the country moves toward an election in which a sizeable share of voters remain undecided, not out of indifference, but out of unfamiliarity, having come of age in an environment where the events of 1971 were aggressively politicised rather than meaningfully taught.

The tragedy is that 1971 is treated as the exclusive property of a single group, while 2024 is increasingly framed as its counterpoint -- when, in truth, both moments belong equally to the people of Bangladesh.

Culture, in this sense, is never innocent. It reveals what a society chooses to remember, and what it finds acceptable to forget. When December becomes a convenient backdrop for indulgence rather than a moment of pause, we are not becoming more liberal or more global, but more detached from the historical anchors that keep nations from drifting into amnesia.

A country rarely loses its identity through dramatic rupture. It erodes through small, repeated acts of neglect -- through the normalisation of indifference, the quiet acceptance that symbols no longer matter, that timing is arbitrary, and that memory is optional -- until one day it feels entirely plausible to imagine a Bangladesh where the last 54 years can be flattened, repackaged, or brushed aside without discomfort.

Much can be said in defence of artistic freedom, and for some, the expectation of observing restraint on certain dates may seem "outdated." Yet, from the perspective of a writer and a (aspiring) musician, listening to a Pakistani artist on the eve of Victory Day feels profoundly tone-deaf, and only indicates our cultural bankruptcy.