Publish : 22 Dec 2021, 12:00 AMUpdate : 21 Dec 2021, 11:20 PM
Nonetheless, it is also true that the Bangladeshi voice is largely silent in the English literature on 1971. Indeed, there is a paucity of books in English on post-War Bangladesh in general. Tripathi is a welcome corrective.
A veteran journalist who spent years with the Far Eastern Economic Review, Tripathi interviewed many members of Dhaka’s Anglophone society for the book, though, crucially, he did not do any interviews in Bangla. Coming from the very social milieu -- what used to be called staunchly and unabashedly pro-1971 once upon a time -- of the people he talked to, I grew up listening to many of the stories he lyrically recounts. Making these available in English is, I suppose, useful. Missing though are the voices of a wider spectrum of the society, and any in depth analysis.
It is self-evidently important to narrate the lived experience of people from a wide spectrum of the society, far wider than that considered by Tripathi.
This essay is titled consciously after Jahanara Imam’s Ekattor-er dinguli. As I write this, on my desk are the following memoirs: Brave of Heart by Habibul Alam (a Bengali guerrilla), The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh by Archer K Blood (the American diplomat), Surrender at Dacca by JFR Jacob (the Indian general), and The Separation of East Pakistan by Hassan Zaheer (a Pakistani bureaucrat).
One thing that stands out from this collection of memoirs is that they reflect memories of people who may represent a wide range of political views and personal identities, but they all come from a narrow class of affluent, urban, Anglicized part of the society. It is important to explore the non-literate majority’s memory of 1971, work that Afsan Chowdhury has quietly been doing for many decades.
There is a certain imperative to do this kind of history -- people with lived experience of East Pakistan will not be around for much longer. For that to work, however, one wouldn’t necessarily begin in 1971. Instead, it might be useful to start by asking what one did or where one was when Ayub Khan resigned in 1969. Then one could be asked about the economic opportunities that opened up for their families after the 1947 partition. How did these contrast with the lack of opportunity in the 1960s? Thus could 1971 be properly put in its context.
When listened to properly, a much more messy and convoluted story might emerge than what we get from Tripathi.
As Mohaiemen wrote at the end of a family anecdote in his review essay on Bose’s book:
“Every Bangladeshi family carries many such contradictions within themselves. Contradictions of impulse, afterthought, hesitation, and bravery.”
Of course, precisely because memories vary, by themselves the narrative stories such as this can shed only so much light on their own. The operative words here are -- on their own. The 1971 memoirs, and memories, present a treasure trove material that is yet to be parsed and interpreted for thorough analysis of, for example, what compelled and constrained the blind spots within the negotiations, revolutionary stratagems and bad alliances of the left, and the motivations and protocols of the rebel officers.
Widening the set of interviewees to include the less privileged classes who might not be as fluent in English, again by itself, would not necessarily help with that analysis.
What would help?
A first step would be to move beyond reporting the memories to contextualizing them. Three recent examples, by Yasmin Saikia, Nayanika Mookherjee, and Anam Zakaria, come to mind.
Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 by Saikia, a professor of history at Arizona State University, breaks from the conventional memory of the violence in 1971 as one between an occupation army and a defiant resistance by showing that women were violated by both sides, and the violations were wilfully not remembered after the War.
Mookherjee, an anthropologist at Durham University, contextualizes the memories of the survivors of war crimes within the complex and shifting post-War Bangladeshi politics in The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Exploring what constitutes healing and closure in practice, she concludes that there is no easy answer.
Ekattor-er boiguli
Nonetheless, it is also true that the Bangladeshi voice is largely silent in the English literature on 1971. Indeed, there is a paucity of books in English on post-War Bangladesh in general. Tripathi is a welcome corrective.
A veteran journalist who spent years with the Far Eastern Economic Review, Tripathi interviewed many members of Dhaka’s Anglophone society for the book, though, crucially, he did not do any interviews in Bangla. Coming from the very social milieu -- what used to be called staunchly and unabashedly pro-1971 once upon a time -- of the people he talked to, I grew up listening to many of the stories he lyrically recounts. Making these available in English is, I suppose, useful. Missing though are the voices of a wider spectrum of the society, and any in depth analysis.
It is self-evidently important to narrate the lived experience of people from a wide spectrum of the society, far wider than that considered by Tripathi.
This essay is titled consciously after Jahanara Imam’s Ekattor-er dinguli. As I write this, on my desk are the following memoirs: Brave of Heart by Habibul Alam (a Bengali guerrilla), The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh by Archer K Blood (the American diplomat), Surrender at Dacca by JFR Jacob (the Indian general), and The Separation of East Pakistan by Hassan Zaheer (a Pakistani bureaucrat).
One thing that stands out from this collection of memoirs is that they reflect memories of people who may represent a wide range of political views and personal identities, but they all come from a narrow class of affluent, urban, Anglicized part of the society. It is important to explore the non-literate majority’s memory of 1971, work that Afsan Chowdhury has quietly been doing for many decades.
There is a certain imperative to do this kind of history -- people with lived experience of East Pakistan will not be around for much longer. For that to work, however, one wouldn’t necessarily begin in 1971. Instead, it might be useful to start by asking what one did or where one was when Ayub Khan resigned in 1969. Then one could be asked about the economic opportunities that opened up for their families after the 1947 partition. How did these contrast with the lack of opportunity in the 1960s? Thus could 1971 be properly put in its context.
When listened to properly, a much more messy and convoluted story might emerge than what we get from Tripathi.
As Mohaiemen wrote at the end of a family anecdote in his review essay on Bose’s book:
“Every Bangladeshi family carries many such contradictions within themselves. Contradictions of impulse, afterthought, hesitation, and bravery.”
Of course, precisely because memories vary, by themselves the narrative stories such as this can shed only so much light on their own. The operative words here are -- on their own. The 1971 memoirs, and memories, present a treasure trove material that is yet to be parsed and interpreted for thorough analysis of, for example, what compelled and constrained the blind spots within the negotiations, revolutionary stratagems and bad alliances of the left, and the motivations and protocols of the rebel officers.
Widening the set of interviewees to include the less privileged classes who might not be as fluent in English, again by itself, would not necessarily help with that analysis.
What would help?
A first step would be to move beyond reporting the memories to contextualizing them. Three recent examples, by Yasmin Saikia, Nayanika Mookherjee, and Anam Zakaria, come to mind.
Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 by Saikia, a professor of history at Arizona State University, breaks from the conventional memory of the violence in 1971 as one between an occupation army and a defiant resistance by showing that women were violated by both sides, and the violations were wilfully not remembered after the War.
Mookherjee, an anthropologist at Durham University, contextualizes the memories of the survivors of war crimes within the complex and shifting post-War Bangladeshi politics in The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Exploring what constitutes healing and closure in practice, she concludes that there is no easy answer.
Jyoti Rahman is a reader. He writes about what he reads at www.jrahman.substack.com.
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