The event of Bangladesh’s liberation in 1971 or Ekattor is commemorated as ‘year zero’ in the nationalist present. As it is with crisis conjunctures generally, Ekattor indeed marked a rupture, as struggles constituting ‘the people’ congealed into a revolutionary political subject. Such a subject considered the promises of reconciliation and justice as not just an inalienable aspect of postcolonial citizenship, but realizable in the conjunctural ‘now’ of a world-historical moment when calls for decolonization were gaining traction. The processes of decolonization – of middle-class formation within colonial political societies, the socio-cultural and political contours of democratic mobilization around citizenship rights, contestations over the form of postcolonial statehood, and the political-practical making of ‘national economies’ – conditioned the emergence of this subject in the (post)colonial world. These were inflected by mid-twentieth century movements for anti-colonial liberation, and reactions to them amid a globalizing Cold War. My dissertation is historical sociological study of these formative processes, offering a novel account of the so-called prehistory of Bangladesh between 1947 and 1971 when the country was a province of Pakistan. I address enduring questions of how and why the very processes of reproducing the entwined societal and geopolitical relations of power, hierarchy, and privilege in the postcolonial transition also contained the political-practical conditions of their transformation. While the specific demands shaping movements for ethnolinguistic recognition and regional autonomy in East Pakistan were resolved by the establishing of a Bangladeshi state, the ‘Pakistan years’ reentered the political imagination through the telos of a national biography, legitimating new forms of belonging and exclusion within the body politic. A consequence has been the widening gap between what actually happened during the Pakistan years and its collective recollection, sustaining a persistent tension between overcoming the antinomies of a historical past and reclaiming its legacies in the political present. Conceptualizing this disjuncture in the ‘time of decolonization’, my project’s methodological intervention mobilizes fragments of a conjunctural totality that oppose the totalizing imperatives of this national biography. It contributes to interdisciplinary discussions across the fields of historical sociology, social history, and historiographies of Cold War diplomacy and development politics. Drawing on memoirs, published accounts, and primary sources, including state records in Bangladesh and early Cold War-era archives of the Ford Foundation in the US, I reconstruct a narrative account of decolonization in East Pakistan. Beginning with the contending dynamics of middle-class formation in the context of the 1950 communal riots, such an account reconsiders the tensions of democratic mobilization around ethno-linguistic recognition, transnational projects of postcolonial state-making, and the multifaceted relationship between the regional autonomy movement, autocratization, and policies of national (economic) development. Pace existing narratives informed by methodological nationalisms and the dominant vantage points of (neo)imperial formations, such an account foregrounds the ongoing resonance of decolonization in the present as history, from the perspectives of those who enacted the postcolonial transition ‘from below’, and for whom the egalitarian promises of Bangladesh remain elusive.