Syed Alif Shahed

SYED ALIF SHAHED, then a graduate student at University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, was approved funding in April 2024 to aid research on “Religion, Secularism, and the Politics of Heritage in Bangladesh: Durga Puja in the City of Dhaka,” supervised by Dr. J. Barton Scott. This project traced the transformation of Durga Puja in the city of Dhaka after the neoliberalization projects of 1991 and the global financial crisis of 2008. Shaped by urban migration and the flow of global capital, Durga Puja is now Dhaka’s largest urban festival planned by elite committees within corporate and state networks. Through archival research and ethnographic fieldwork across diverse neighborhoods, the study examines how class, politics, and migration structure the aesthetics of each installation. This study places the micro-history of Dhaka’s Durga Puja within broader histories and patterns of economic privatization and state interventions. By tracing Durga Puja as a site for the flow of social/economic capital, the study ultimately reflects on how religious stratifications shape the festival and reconfigure the meaning of “public.”