Desh bidesh revisited

This article discusses the emergence of a ‘British Bangladeshi social field’. It makes two connected arguments about its effects. First, it argues that the emergence of the British Bangladeshi social field has rendered the discourses of desh and bidesh less important. Second, it argues that British Bangladeshis are embedded into many transnational social fields and lead multiply orientated rather than binary lives. It uses the example of the importance of the global Islamic umma (community) to British Bangladeshis to illustrate this and argues that it has also contributed to the decreasing importance of the discourse of the desh. What this shows is that the transnationalism of today is very different from that of 20 years ago, both in terms of how it is experienced and how it is analysed.