A Pakistani in Bangladesh

In London last summer, a new Pakistani friend made me listen to Woh humsafar tha, a ghazal made popular as the title track of the TV serial Humsafar. Naseer Turabi had written this ghazal, first sung by Abida Parveen, on the secession of East Pakistan in 1971. This was the first time I caught a glimpse of the Pakistani perspective of "Mukkti Juddho", or the Bangladesh War for Independence, which had always been a righteous struggle in my imagination. Anam Zakaria’s deeply researched book tries to represent the Bangladeshi perspective — but it is an uncommon endeavour because the author herself is Pakistani.

Early in the book, Ms Zakaria recollects an incident at the National University in Dhaka. After student presentations, one of the professors takes the stage and declares to Ms Zakaria and her husband, the only Pakistanis in the room: “We have nothing but hatred for you.” The atrocities committed by the Pakistani army on Bangladeshis in 1971 — murder, torture, rape — is recollected till Ms Zakaria and her husband come to embody Pakistan and Punjabi hegemony. “I wanted to remind him that I was born seventeen years after the war,” she writes, “but it holds no relevance.” Her book, however, cuts through the cloud of residual emotions and state propaganda to present a fresh historical perspective.

This book is a great addition to the already rich literature on 1971 and its aftereffects. Besides official and military history and academic work, some excellent books — both fiction and non-fiction — have been published. One is immediately reminded of Salil Tripathi’s The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (2014) and Srinath Raghavan’s 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (2013). While Bengali fiction writers have consistently exploited the subject, Bangladeshi writers in English, such as Tahmima Anam, Nadeem Zaman, and Numair Atif Choudhury, have also explored it in recent years. New York-born poet Tarfia Faizullah’s work with the war rape survivors is also well-known. 

Ms Zakaria has previously published a book on Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and an oral history of the Partition. In this book, she uses a mixture of techniques — travel, interviews, archival work — to challenge the statist histories of the all three nations. Official narratives in Pakistan, which can be found in school textbooks and texts such as former deputy high commissioner to India Mian Afrasiab Mehdi Hashmi Qureshi’s 1971: Fact and Fiction, tend to blame the “Hindu culture” of Bangladesh and Indian interference for the war. Ms Zakaria challenges such narratives, but also reveals how these have infiltrated personal memories.

Title: 1971
 

Subtitle: A People’s History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India
 

Author: Anam Zakaria
 

Publisher: Vintage
 

Pages: 402
 

Price: Rs 699 (hardcover)

Recollecting her first memories of being told about Bangladesh by her mother, Ms Zakaria writes: “We fought two wars with India… We had our victory in 1965, but in 1971 we lost badly… because of that we had to give away part of our country. East Pakistan became Bangladesh.” Quoting from school textbooks, newspapers, and private interviews, she demonstrates how Pakistan copes with the loss through convenient victim-blaming: “Focussing on ‘Hindu’ influences and India’s role became convenient justifications for a complicated a bloody past.” This book challenges this convenient historiography with considerable success.

In three chapters, titled “Bangladesh’s War”, “India’s War”, and “Pakistan’s War”, she painfully reconstructs the many individual narratives that often slip through the cracks in the grand projects of nationalism. In Bangladesh, she has interviewed Meghna Guhathakurta, whose father Jyotirmoy was a professor at Dhaka University and was killed by the Pakistani army in 1971, and Ferdousi Priyabhashini, a rape survivor from the war, among others.

Interviewees in India recollect air raid sirens and sticking black paper to windows for blackouts. She has also interviewed Urdu-speaking Biharis, who were pro-Pakistan during the war and at the receiving end of violence by pro-Independence forces.

The way in which Ms Zakaria has structured her book, languages play a significant part in the history of the war. One of the early chapters, titled “When Language Becomes Dissent”, she traces the freedom movement in the erstwhile East Pakistan to the demand to recognise Bengali as a state language in Pakistan in the early 1950s. Other historians too have traced this as the source of the latter movements. Ms Zakaria has a lengthy interview with Aroma Datta, the granddaughter of Dhirendranath, one of the few Hindu politicians who chose to be in Pakistan in 1947 and led the movement for the recognition of Bengali. In 1971, he was tortured and killed by the Pakistani army.

But Ms Zakaria also ventures into the Geneva camp, the largest settlement of Biharis in Bangladesh, as well as the Bengali-speaking community in Karachi (the university in the city still has a Bengali department). The chapter is aptly titled “The Loyalty Card”. In the growing climate of homogenous nationalisms in the subcontinent, citizens are increasingly being called upon to prove their loyalties. Ms Zakaria’s book reminds its readers of the futility of such desires. 

The writer’s novel, Ritual, was published earlier this year