Studies of India's Partition have been focused on the cases of Punjab and Bengal, but very few have been based on the site of partition in colonial Assam, "Sylhet". Urgent attention is required to record the historiography of partition in Sylhet as many of those who had experienced the phase of partition are more than 80 years old now.

Much of the scholarship on Bangladesh’s founding places it within a narrative of repetition. It either repeats the partitions of 1905 or 1947 or the creation of India and Pakistan as postcolonial states. This paper argues instead for the novelty of Bangladesh’s creation against the postcolonial state, suggesting that it opened up a new history at the global level in which decolonisation was replaced by civil war as the founding narrative for new states.