Nadeem Omar Tarar

Bengali artists transformed the Franklin Book Program’s translations into powerful symbols of postcolonial visual modernity and identity.

Walk through the narrow lanes of old Dhaka in the 1950s and you’d hear it before you saw it: the rhythmic thrum of presses, the chatter of compositors, the swish of paper reams unwrapped and weighed.

The Cold War was a war of armaments and ideologies—but it was also a war of words, fought in classrooms, libraries, and on the printed page.