The Concert For Bangladesh - Background

Background

As East Pakistan struggled to become the separate state of Bangladesh during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the political and military turmoil and associated atrocities led to a massive refugee problem, with at least 7 million displaced people pouring into neighbouring India. East Pakistan had recently endured devastation as a result of the Bhola cyclone, and the Bengalis' desperate plight increased in March that year when torrential rains and floods arrived in the region, threatening a humanitarian disaster. Quoting figures available at the time, a Rolling Stone feature claimed that up to half a million Bengalis had been killed by the cyclone in November 1970 − "a figure impossible to understand" − and the Pakistani army's subsequent brutal campaign of slaughter under Operation Searchlight accounted for at least 250,000 civilians “by the most conservative estimates”.

Appalled at the situation affecting his homeland and relatives, Bengali musician Ravi Shankar first brought the issue to the attention of his friend George Harrison in the early months of 1971, over dinner at Friar Park, according to Klaus Voormann’s recollection. By April, Shankar and Harrison were in Los Angeles working on the soundtrack to the film Raga, during which Harrison documented his early thoughts on the Bangladesh crisis in his song “Miss O'Dell”. After returning to England to produce Apple band Badfinger’s new album, Straight Up, and guesting on John Lennon’s Imagine − all the while, being kept abreast of the worsening situation via Shankar’s newspaper and magazine cuttings − he was back in LA to finish the Raga album in late June. Harrison would later talk of spending “three months” on the phone, trying to organise what became the Concert for Bangladesh (implying that efforts were under way from late April onwards), but it is widely acknowledged that the project began in earnest during the last week of June, five or six weeks before 1 August.