Exploring public memory of the 1971 war in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India
30 April 2021
Celebrations after the end of Bangladesh’s Liberation War. For Bangladesh, which won its sovereignty on 16 December that year, it was a historic event that led to the realisation of its long-sought dreams of independence.
Jack Garofalo / Paris Match / Getty Images
Celebrations after the end of Bangladesh’s Liberation War. For Bangladesh, which won its sovereignty on 16 December that year, it was a historic event that led to the realisation of its long-sought dreams of independence.
Jack Garofalo / Paris Match / Getty Images
ON 25 MARCH THIS YEAR, at a feminist webinar to mark fifty years since Bangladesh gained independence, the Pakistani author and oral historian Anam Zakaria spoke about the “political and cultural silencing around the birth of Bangladesh” that she witnessed around her while growing up. She clarified that this was not a “complete erasure” of 1971, which “remains one of the most defining years in Pakistan’s history and the national imagination,” with a lasting effect on education, policy-making, perceptions of neighbouring countries and so on. “But what is remembered about ’71 also in many ways determines what must not be remembered,” she continued. In her research, where she draws on textbooks, museum exhibits and military memoirs, she analyses techniques of official history-making and the dissemination of “fabricated narratives” regarding the war.