The story behind the making of the July Museum

When I was first given responsibility for the July Museum, there was no blueprint. There was an office and a few of us worked from tables set up under the trees at Ganabhaban, trying to answer a few questions. 

Where should this museum begin? Where should it end? And how do you turn a political rupture into something people can walk through?

I looked at the museums we already had…the National Museum, the Liberation War Museum and others. They contained important objects and records, but I felt something was missing. The exhibits there gave me information but they did not always take me on an emotional journey.

I did not want to build another museum that functioned mainly as a repository. The July Museum had to tell a story.

I brought Tanzim Wahab from the Shilpakala Academy to the National Museum as director general, with additional responsibility for the July Museum. He had museum experience abroad and, more important for what we were attempting, understood curation and exhibition.

We then assembled a core research team composed of Hasan Robayet, Sahul Ahmed Munna, Khandaker Rakib, Ehsan Mahmud, Mushfiqur Rahman Johan and, in the early period, Sayeed Khan Sagar. Photographer and curator Shamsul Alam Helal, Hadi Uddin and Sahan joined them.

The group expanded. Rummana Jannat, Fantasir Mahmud, Maliha Namlah, Hasan Inam, Zubayer Ibn Kamal, Abu Bakar Saim and Sabiha Nahla came in as researchers. Hasan Inam, Fantasir, Akif Abdullah and Abu Bakar Saim worked on collecting and preserving memorabilia belonging to the July martyrs. Shaheed Saikat’s sister Sabonti later became important to that effort.

Manjurul Islam Nantu, Farhan Masud, Ayan and others joined toward the end. The July Revolutionary Alliance supplied much of the archival footage of the uprising, which became material for several documentaries.

Al Helal Samrat and Tanvirul Islam worked on graphic design. Young artists and students from Pathshala and the Faculty of Fine Art helped us throughout.

We met almost every day. At first, much of our time was spent arguing about the boundaries of the story. July had lasted 36 days. Should the museum do the same? I did not think it should.

July, as I understood it, had not appeared suddenly. It belonged to a longer history of struggles over political power, sovereignty, voting rights and the question of who gets to govern Bangladesh.

The slogans of July mattered to me for that reason. So did those heard after Sheikh Hasina fled. They suggested that many protesters understood the uprising as part of a struggle against political domination of a very autocratic and brutal government.

Among people involved in the movement, I could detect a political memory that stretched far beyond July: Abrar Fahad, Abu Sayeed, Maulana Bhashani, Ziaur Rahman, Khaleda Zia.

July was political but it was cultural, too and the history behind it was much longer than 36 days. So we decided to begin in 1971.

Even that was only a starting point. My hope was that future curation would eventually reach further back — to Titumir, the Faraizi movement, Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Huq, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Bhashani — and move forward through Mujib, Zia, Osmani and the sector commanders, the Liberation War, military rule, Ershad and Khaleda Zia.

The museum, in other words, was not supposed to be finished on opening day. Nor did I want it to operate only as a museum. We discussed concerts and public talks on weekends, turning the grounds into a place where political and cultural history could be argued over in public.

A museum becomes static when its story has already been settled. The history we were dealing with was anything but settled.

The beginning and the end: Long walk to democracy

After I left the office, I told Tanzim that something was still missing from the entrance. I imagined a line-drawing sculpture of Abu Sayeed on the field, almost like a doodle. Below it would be three words: “Bakidi jay na.” — “The rest won’t go.”

I wanted visitors to encounter that before anything else. Before documents or timelines they would see Abu Sayeed and those words. Underneath would be the museum’s name: July Mass Uprising Memorial Museum.

We ran out of time. It remains one of the things I think should still be done.

The hardest part of a film can be deciding where to begin and where to stop. A museum presents the same problem.

We knew what we did not want: rooms filled randomly with photographs and memorabilia. The objects needed a narrative. Eventually, I proposed that the museum begin with a section called “Long Walk to Democracy.” It would end with a poem by Hasan Robayet about the mother of a martyr touching her son’s body. 

Visitors would enter through the history of Bangladesh’s long argument over democracy and leave carrying the intimate cost of July. “Long Walk to Democracy” began in 1971. Our principle was that history should not have to erase one figure to accommodate another.

We included Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s political leadership of the independence movement and his March 7 speech. We also included Major Ziaur Rahman’s declaration of independence on March 26.

We applied the same principle to the years after independence. Mujib’s role before 1971 did not mean his government between 1972 and 1975 should be treated in the same way. We wanted to examine what happened to the democratic expectations of independence, the movement toward one-party rule and the creation of BAKSAL.

My argument was that if you wanted to understand the origins of authoritarianism in Bangladesh, you could not begin in 2009.

Then came Ziaur Rahman…as a figure under whom the country's national identity, economic direction as well as multiparty political system changed. The timeline continued through Ershad’s dictatorship, the democratic movement against him, Khaleda Zia’s emergence as a political leader and the restoration of parliamentary democracy in 1991.

It ended at One-Eleven. We also tried to show how One-Eleven happened.

One exhibit referred to former Indian President Pranab Mukherjee’s account of Bangladesh’s then army chief, Moeen U Ahmed, approaching him in India with concerns about his future after an election. Mukherjee wrote that he assured Moeen he would address the issue of his security if Sheikh Hasina came to power.

After the museum opened on August 5, I discovered that this reference had been removed. I do not know why.

We had also used the Mukherjee reference in the election section of another gallery, “Remains of Fascism,” alongside material about the unusually high turnout recorded in the 2008 election. It disappeared from there as well.

For me, these details mattered because the premise of “Long Walk to Democracy” was that July did not fall from the sky. It was another rupture in a much longer contest over who could exercise power in Bangladesh and on what terms.

Those they tried to erase came back to take possession of the house

The memorial began with a question about Ganabhaban itself. For 16 years, this had been the centre of Sheikh Hasina’s power. Then she fled, and protesters entered the compound.

The building had changed ownership in the most literal political sense. What, then, should stand in front of it?

We studied monuments from different countries, including the Washington Monument and Bangladesh’s National Martyrs’ Memorial at Savar. But I did not want another piece of monumental architecture whose primary achievement was its form. The structure had to explain the building behind it.

My proposal was to fill the field with rows of grave-like memorials bearing the names of people killed or disappeared during Hasina’s rule and those killed during July. The idea initially made some members of the team uncomfortable. Tanzim supported it from the beginning. Gradually, the others came around.

With help from the human rights organisation Odhikar, we assembled roughly 4,200 names. Architect Marina Tabassum took the concept and, without charging a fee, turned it into an architectural design.

When we showed it to Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, he told us: “Please go ahead.” Today, visitors often stand quietly among those grave-like forms. The house remains in view behind them.

That relationship — between the dead and the former seat of power — is the point. Maliha Namlah captured the idea in two lines written for the memorial, with editing help from Hasan Robayet:

“A throne that lived by drinking patriots’ blood —
Today that killer’s residence belongs to all the martyrs.”

A sculpture garden around the memorial

The sculptures surrounding the memorial were almost accidental. I had long admired the work of Tejas Haldar Jash. Tanzim knew him, so we invited him in and gave him iconic photographs from July.

The instruction was to turn these images into sculpture. Jash produced rough designs. Tanzim, Jash and I went through them, adjusting forms and details until the sculptures were completed.

But we had not decided where to put them. For a while, they sat near the memorial almost as stored objects waiting for a permanent location. I passed them every day. Gradually, the relationship became obvious. They belonged there.

I suggested arranging them around the memorial plaza in a loose circle. Tanzim immediately liked the idea. One of the architects, Salahuddin, was less convinced because the sculptures had not been part of the original design.

I insisted. One day, the team gathered with Jash and his workers. We moved the sculptures around the plaza one by one.

We would put one down, rotate it, walk around it, look at it against the memorial, move it again and repeat the process. It took the day. The result was not something we had designed on paper. The memorial and the sculptures had become a single installation.

Jash deserves much of the credit. His figures return July’s most familiar images to three dimensions. You do not simply recognise them…you have to walk around them.

Anas’s letter and July Women

After the memorial and sculptures comes the main July section. We wanted one object to stand alone before everything else. For me, the answer was Anas’s letter.

While making the documentary July Anirban, I heard the letter read in the voice of Anas’s mother. I could not forget it. A museum about a revolutionary scale uprising can easily become overwhelmed by numbers… dates, deaths, arrests, marches, orders, political statements.

A letter resists that scale. It reduces history to one person and one family. We made it the first singular object before visitors enter the main museum.

The next section is “July Women.” Women were central to the July Uprising. They were present on July 14 and throughout the weeks that followed. At moments when the movement seemed to be losing momentum, women helped push it forward.

Nusrat, Tamanna, the two sisters of martyr Rabbi, Shashi in Uttara, Umama Fatema, musician Shayan and many others were on the streets and at the front of the protests.

The point of the section is to point out the fact that women led the July Uprising. 

What should we show in each room?

Once we had established the memorial, Anas’s letter and “July Women,” we faced the museum’s main curatorial problem. We had 16 years of material about Hasina’s government and an enormous archive from July.

A museum cannot display everything. It has to decide what matters, and in what order. Researchers met continuously. Daniel Rahman and Abdul Halim Chanchal joined many of those discussions.

We even took the core research group to Cox’s Bazar for a workshop devoted to the structural core of the narrative…which room should contain what, how visitors should move and where one story should give way to another.

During that workshop, I became ill and had to be flown back to Dhaka by helicopter. Eventually, we arrived at a simple organising principle. The ground floor would tell the story of Hasina’s 16 years in power. The second floor would tell the story of July.

There would be one ‘deliberate’ exception. Sheikh Hasina’s office would belong to the July martyrs.

Text, research and the way I worked

Hasan Robayet and Rummana Jannat wrote much of the museum text, while other researchers developed individual sections. My role became more granular than I had expected.

I would often speak through an exhibit: what the argument should be and what angle to take. The researchers recorded those conversations and turned them into drafts. The drafts came back to me. I edited them line by line, adding material, cutting passages, changing language and sometimes rebuilding the structure.

Getting Ganabhaban and Dr Yunus’s role

Chief Adviser of the [erstwhile] interim government Dr Muhammad Yunus told me something straightforward...when it came to turning Ganabhaban into the July Museum, I should consider myself as “empowered" as he was.

He promised every logistical support at his disposal and was personally engaged in discussing ideas for the museum.

One of the most consequential of those discussions was about the building itself. Dr Yunus asked me to think about how Ganabhaban could become a museum without erasing the marks of public anger left on it.

I had already discussed the same instinct with Marina and Tanzim. We felt that what happened to the building on August 5 was itself part of the history the museum was supposed to preserve.

The conversation with Dr Yunus turned that instinct into a governing principle. The damage would remain. The scratches, broken surfaces and other traces of August 5 would not be repaired out of existence.

Ganabhaban would not simply house the history of that moment; the building itself would remain part of its evidence.

We also made a 3-D scan of Ganabhaban as we found it. At the entrance, visitors can navigate the scan with a joystick and examine the building as it appeared after protesters had passed through it. The condition of Ganabhaban was no longer ‘damage surrounding the exhibits.’ It was an exhibit itself.

Hasina Universe

The first room is called “Hasina Universe.”

At its centre is a large globe-like structure covered in a visual collage of Hasina and the people around her. In front stands a sculpture of her face. Tanzim had shown me the work of a sculptor named Ashiq, who made faces with an empty space through the centre.

I suggested using the same form for Hasina, with one addition. Put a chair inside the empty face. The chair represented power. Behind it, Debashis Chakraborty and Jahin Faruk Amin developed the visual collage covering the globe.

For some time, we struggled with what text should accompany Hasina herself. Eventually, I reduced it to three recurring ideas: “Me, me, me.” “Who feeds you?” “My father. My father. My father.”

The room extends beyond Hasina. It includes family members, officials, security figures and businessmen who formed the political and economic system around her. Tarique Siddique, Ziaul Ahsan and former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal are among them.

The sculptures use symbols in the hollow spaces of their faces…money, banks, skulls to indicate what each figure represented within that system. Another installation, by Sahela Akter Umama, uses Hasina’s chair to examine the elevation of political authority into something approaching personal worship. 

The next room grew directly from our decision not to restore Ganabhaban.

We collected rubble from the damaged building and left it across the floor. Glass was installed over it. Visitors walk above the debris. On the walls, footage from August 5 and from the preceding years is projected not onto clean screens but directly across the building’s scarred surfaces.

We also decided to use furniture found inside Ganabhaban as part of the exhibition itself. Tanzim pushed that idea further, turning desks, cabinets and other pieces into display structures for photographs and artefacts.

The glass floor was initially controversial. Architects worried about engineering and safety. I kept returning to the same idea: visitors needed to see the debris beneath their feet. The room was supposed to make the collapse of a political order physical.

Its name came almost by accident. Khalilur Rahman, now foreign minister, visited while we were stacking burned vehicles outside into a sculptural form. Looking at them, he said: “Remnants of Fascism.” Later, while walking with him through the still-unnamed gallery, I told him I was stealing his phrase.

We modified it slightly. The room became “Remains of Fascism.”

Around it, we built displays on enforced disappearances, killings, extrajudicial executions, elections, Pilkhana, judicial killings, the judiciary, kleptocracy and repression of the press.

Documents recovered from Ganabhaban showing how individuals were targeted were placed in the centre. The room is intended to put the machinery of the state and the wreckage of its fall in the same space.

1972 to 1975: The DNA of fascism

A corridor to the left of “Remains of Fascism” was supposed to contain another exhibition: “1972 to 1975.”

The research had been completed. I had read extensively for it, selected books for the research team and worked with them on the subjects we wanted to represent.

The premise was contentious but straightforward. After seeing what we described as Hasina’s 16 years of fascism, visitors would enter a corridor examining the authoritarian turn of Bangladesh’s first post-independence government.

My argument was that the political DNA did not begin with Hasina. To understand the later system, we had to examine the destruction of democratic institutions and the move toward one-party rule between 1972 and 1975.

After I left office, work stalled for several months before the museum opened, and the corridor was never completed.

Border Killings

A small room to the right of “Remains of Fascism” is now labelled “Campus Violence.” Originally, we designed it as the “Border Killings” room. Steel nameplates bearing the names of Bangladeshis killed along the border hung from barbed wire. Odhikar provided the names.

Outside, a documentary about Felani’s father played continuously. His complaint was not only that the BSF had killed his daughter. It was that his own government, in his view, had failed to stand up for her.

Photographs came from Parvez Ahmed Rony and were collected by Tanzim. I regarded that section as a test of the museum’s historical principle. But that section has never materialized as some people believed it would hurt our relation with India

Bangladesh can seek good relations with India without deleting the history of border killings. India maintains close relations with Britain without abandoning the history of its struggle against British rule. Bangladesh does not need to choose between diplomatic relations and historical memory either.

History should remain visible partly because forgetting it makes repetition easier.

BDR room and Shapla Chattar

After Border Killings came the BDR room. Our curatorial argument treated the 2009 Pilkhana killings as a critical point in the consolidation of Hasina’s rule. Fabliha Bushra and Zubayer Ibn Kamal worked on the room.

At its centre is the documentary “Pilkhana: Thirty-Six Hours of Tragedy.”

Recordings of BDR phone calls can also be heard, alongside photographs and memorabilia. For us, Pilkhana belonged in the same historical sequence as the events that followed.

The Shapla Chattar room followed. Mahim Mahfuz and Hasan Inam led much of its research, collecting objects, testimony and stories from families. Tanzim located relevant photographs.

In the middle of the room is a sculpture that was originally produced as a miniature for a possible outdoor installation. When I saw it, I thought it belonged here. Another part of the room dealt with media coverage.

We placed contemporary newspaper editorials on one side and an Odhikar report alleging that 100 people had been killed that night on the other. The contrast was deliberate.

We wanted visitors to examine not only what happened at Shapla Chattar but how competing versions of an event become public memory and what role journalism plays in that process.

The editorials and the list of alleged victims were later removed. I do not know whose advice. I think their removal weakened the room.

The sequence continued through campus violence, repression of opposition groups and human-rights abuses. Then came two rooms we considered central to the museum: torture and enforced disappearance.

The torture room and enforced disappearance

We began working closely with the International Crimes Tribunal. I contacted Tajul Islam, then the ICT’s chief prosecutor, and invited him and his team to meet us at the museum.

We gave the tribunal documents found at Ganabhaban that appeared potentially relevant to its investigations. In return, I asked whether the tribunal could provide historical material suitable for exhibition.

We pursued a similar relationship with the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances. I invited commission member Nabila Idris to meet Tanzim and our researchers. Much of the torture-room material came through the ICT.

The enforced-disappearance room drew heavily on the work of photographer Mushfiqur Rahman Johan.

Johan had spent years documenting families of the disappeared and had worked with Mayer Dak. His photography was particularly concerned with absence…an empty room, a missing person, a family organised around someone who was no longer there.

Rummana Jannat worked with him on the research. The commission and tribunal also held testimony from victims and witnesses. Illustrations had been produced from some of those accounts, including descriptions of bodies being dismembered and disposed of.

We incorporated those illustrations into an animation. The material is difficult to look at. It should be.

Hasina’s office now belongs to the martyrs

From the beginning, I wanted Sheikh Hasina’s former office to be occupied symbolically by the people killed in July. Their photographs now surround the room.

Then the ICT offered us another archive…recordings of Hasina’s telephone conversations during the uprising. Some of those recordings were later obtained and forensically examined by international media organisations, including Al Jazeera.

We knew the recordings mattered but we did not know how to exhibit sound.

One day, during a meeting, an idea came to me. Put them in a red telephone. The phone would sit on Hasina’s desk. Besides, it would be a catalogue. A visitor could choose a recording, dial its number and listen.

Tanzim looked at me as though I had created another production problem for him. A few days later, he returned with a solution. A team from BUET could build it.

They did. Today, visitors pick up the red phone, dial numbers from the catalogue and hear the recordings. It has become one of the museum’s most popular installations

The wall of Ekram’s daughter

Behind Hasina’s chair is another document of state violence, though it was never intended to be one. It is a wall covered with the writing and drawings of the daughter of Ekram, who was killed in a so-called crossfire.

After her father’s death, the child repeatedly wrote messages to him and drew on the wall. Among the words she wrote were: “I hate my country.”

Mushfiqur Rahman Johan and Jibon Ahmed photographed the wall. At first, one of those photographs had been placed almost randomly inside Hasina’s office.

I asked for it to be removed. Then I asked that it be enlarged to cover the entire wall directly behind Hasina’s chair, with photographs of July’s dead on either side.

The placement changed the object. A child’s private grief became the backdrop to the seat of state power. I have watched visitors stand in front of it and cry.

The final chapter

The second floor belongs mainly to July. Abu Sayeed appears as visitors climb the stairs. The first gallery is an immersive room. Eight short films are currently shown there, with plans for more.

The ambition was to document July from multiple perspectives: outside Dhaka, women, private-university students, madrasa students, doctors, expatriates, political prisoners and political parties.

Jahin Faruk Amin and Salzar Rahman worked on the films. Salzar also helped establish the visual language used in the museum’s communications.

The corridors contain photographs from July, including work by Jibon Ahmed and many others. Much of what we remember visually about those weeks comes from photographers, newsrooms and mobile journalists who were there.

Several projects upstairs were completed: Hasina’s bedroom, Agopogo’s toy room about August 5 and the 36-day timeline. We had planned separate sections on private universities, the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement, opposition parties, expatriates, women and the injured.

Some are finished. Some remain under development. To me, the second floor is still a work in progress.

Hasina’s bedroom has become one of the museum’s most visited spaces. We applied the same principle there that we had used in her office: the room would be given over to the people killed and injured.

The names of 835 people described by the museum as July martyrs are inscribed across the bedsheet. Nearby is a bloodstained piece of clothing belonging to one of the dead.

In the library is Abu Sayeed’s table, bearing the words: “Do or Die.”

Beyond the main building, near the water, is Ziaul Ahsan’s former guesthouse, where footage, photographs, sculptures and text present allegations about torture and killings.

Nearby, “Building from the Scratch” tells a different story: what students and ordinary citizens did after August 5, during the period when government and policing had largely broken down. Farther on is a replica of Aynaghar, designed by art director Shihab Noor, containing accounts from victims of enforced disappearance.

The journey ends at Monsoon Theatre.

Documentaries on Pilkhana, enforced disappearances, Abrar Fahad and the July killings are screened there. Anam Biswas, Krishnendu Chattopadhyay, Raka Noshin, Shahriar Sajib, Dipak Goswami, Nazim Palash, Nazmul Nabin, Mahathir Spandan, Yasir Haque, Sadia Islam Roza, Sukarna and many others worked on these productions, with Shanta Rahman overseeing management and compilation.

The room itself has a history. It was once used for Sheikh Hasina’s news conferences. Now audiences sit there watching films about her government. That reversal captures what we were trying to do with Ganabhaban as a whole.

We were not building a museum inside a neutral building. The building was evidence. Its rooms, furniture, walls, damage and previous uses were part of the story. And the museum should continue changing.

Research in July is far from complete. Neither is the history of the preceding 16 years. Eventually, films and exhibitions could reach further back into 150 years of Bangladesh’s political and social history. They could be shown here, distributed online and, when appropriate, released in cinemas.

From the beginning, that was the larger idea that the July Museum would preserve objects. But it would also remain a place where Bangladesh argues about its history.

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Mostofa Sarwar Farooki is a filmmaker. He was the Cultural Adviser of the Interim Government