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

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.