ABSTRACT
The political landscape was intensely racialized for most of the post-war decades. The relationship between identity politics, religious faith and political participation in contemporary East London, it is important to refer to at least four different narratives of political subjectivity that may appear tangential to the East End itself. Two activists from London have returned to Bangladesh and stood successfully for parliament as Awaami League politicians, while Sheikh Hasina visits London frequently and one of her nieces has stood successfully as a local authority councillor in another London borough. The conventional forms of religious identification have over long histories fed directly into an understanding of political participation and local government provision in East London as in other British cities. Discovering faith in the East End of London may properly reveal its imprint on past political configurations or may be instrumentalized in contemporary associations, but the power of either must be set in historical and geographical context.
