I first started researching Bangladeshi censorship cases during a micro-blasphemy controversy—a 2007 cartoon in the Alpin satire magazine. A list of post-1971 cases was meant to be the appendix to an essay about the case. Appropriately enough, the piece was rejected by the newspaper as “too sensitive a subject.” In the years since, I kept adding to this list. I was struck by the always expanding scope of the dragnet and the increasing weakness of institutions in the face of this deluge. In the three decades of market liberalisation since 1990, a record number of newspapers and television stations opened. This was driven by the profit motive, as a weapon for political ambition, and a project to accelerate consumption. Not enough of it was motivated by an ideology of expanded speech rights for the many, not the few and powerful. The timeline was first published in Daily Star in 2012. A revised version was published in 2024, just as the new post-uprising government took its first steps toward new censorships.
