Status Updates From 1971: A People's History fr...

This poem, published in March 1971 in Awami Awaz, landed Punjabi poet Ahmad Salim in jail. He was tried in a military court, sentenced to six months imprisonment, flogging and a fine of Rs 2000. The publisher of the bimonthly Awami Awaz, M.R. Hassan, was also arrested for publishing a poem ‘against the military operations in East Pakistan’. Subsequently, he was forced to stop publishing the newspaper.

DNF at 104 pages...its not a bad book by any means maybe i'll pick it up again some time in future. i don't know what is it but i don't find myself reaching out for this book at moment and just feels like a huge burden on me

Many other offices have the same photographs. I wonder what happens when it is the BNP, and not the Awami League, which is in power? I am told that textbooks are revised, as are airport names and currency bills, when the party in power changes.

like so many others in the intellectual circles, didn’t really believe in Partition, but they also didn’t mind it. They thought that if Pakistan was for everyone, they were very happy to be Pakistanis. They didn’t have anything against Pakistan until Pakistan had something against them

I had heard several people assert that the fact that Bengali women often wore saris and adorned tikas, and that their language was ‘sanksritized’ and therefore ‘Hinduized’, meant that they were always closer to India than Pakistan. In these statements, I sensed an underlying defence of why Pakistan had lost the 1971 war—East Pakistan was never really Pakistan[.]

violent and emotionally charged memories often remain at the fore, while those of rescue tend to recede, not least because it is the former which the state reinforces and has institutionalized. The stories of humanity, of risking one’s life to save others, are dismissed from the public imagination, and at times from personal recollections too.

Communalism may have erupted with Partition but it certainly did not end in 1947, or in 1971 for that matter. Partition remains an ongoing process in Bangladesh with communal tensions, crystallization of religious identities and an ‘otherization’ of Hindus increasingly prevalent.