When Sheikh Mujibur Rahmans diaries came to light in 2004, it was an indisputably historic event. His daughter, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, had the notebooks their pages by then brittle and discoloured carefully transcribed and later translated from Bengali into English. Written during Sheikh Mujibur Rahmans sojourns in jail as a state prisoner between 1967 and 1969, they begin with his recollections of his days as a student activist in the run-up to the movement for Pakistan in the early 1940s. They cover the Bengali language movement, the first stirrings of the movement for Bangladesh independence and self-rule, and powerfully convey the great uncertainties as well as the great hopes that dominated the time. The last notebook ends with the events accompanying the struggle for democratic rights in 1955. These are Sheikh Mujibs own words the language has only been changed for absolute clarity when required. On 21 February 1952 the police opened fire on a peaceful student procession, killing many. That brutal action unleashed the powerful movement that culminated in the birth of the new nation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Include Facsimiles (of some page from the hand-written memoirs of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman) Illustrations, Notes, Bibliographical Notes and Index.

The book ends, rather abruptly, sometime after the first election in 1954 to the East Pakistan legislative assembly, in which the Awami League trounced the Muslim League. It turned on its head, for the first time perhaps, the League’s crude belief that nationalism could subsist on religion alone. But it does not explore in Mujibur the seed of the independent leader that later developments proved him as. On the other hand, the autobiography shows him as a rather fawning acolyte of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a shrewd politician remembered by many in West Bengal as the architect of the Great Calcutta Killings in 1946. Suhrawardy was in fact a bundle of contradictions, an avid proponent of liberal parliamentary democracy after he emerged as a top leader in Pakistan (prime minister between 1956 and 1957) but the first person to lead the country onto a path of frenzied military expansion. Educated in Oxford and a successful barrister in Calcutta, he was also a class apart from hick town politician Mujibur in his taste, chasing champagne parties and European blondes. In the book, there is only gushing praise.
What the book has in abundance are the details of a politically intense but clubby life led by the author in Calcutta and Dhaka. In Kolkata’s Maulana Azad College (known as Islamia College before Partition), he struggled to “achieve Pakistan” with millions of coreligionists. But he is at his best in chronicling Dhaka after Partition, when its politics shifted its focus to “achieve” a new Bengal which is a province of Pakistan in name but actually a nation in the making.
Sheikh Hasina has astutely enriched the book with a large collection of old photographs capturing moments that would otherwise have been water under the bridge. In a picture shot with the author standing near the door and the Mahatma in the middle, Suhrawardy by his side, much of their inner calculations find expression — Mujibur the young man insistent on “achieving” the promised land, Suhrawardy open to bargain and the Mahatma eager to let the Muslims feel that they were safe till he was around. The year: 1947.