This paper explores textual or historical erasure as a process. In general, what sorts of changes are considered bowdlerization, excision, addition and transcreation, or commentarial reinterpretation? What is left unchanged, and why? What are the various reasons for such “laundering” of a text or its history? Who does the purifying or editing? What are the effects of such changes? And what are possible ways of approaching or judging the phenomenon?
I take as a case the national poet of Bangladesh, a man named Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), whose 12-volume oeuvre of poetry, songs, short stories, plays, lectures, and letters – all of which shows him to have been a Muslim with extraordinary sympathy for the Hindu tradition – has elicited both great admiration and even adoration, as well as great discomfort and critique.