Anam Zakaria - 1971: A Peoples History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India

1971: A Peoples History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India poignantly brings out how 1971 is one of the originary wounds not only for Bangladesh but also for Pakistan and India, the ramifications of which are felt particularly today. In thinking through the relation[ship] between [a] nation and the memorialization in South Asia, Anam Zakaria, in her travails [while navigating] through the myriad permitted narratives and historiographies of these three children of Partition, shows the lasting traces of 1971 on the essence of these three countries. Exploring memoirs, school textbooks, oral history accounts, history-writing processes, museums and memorials, Zakarias timely book carries a temporal and moral imperative in a context where the losses of 1971 are not forgiven by history. By decentring the role of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan beyond the stereotypes of saviours, victims and perpetrators, 1971 highlights the high stakes that scholarship and public discourse in this area must negotiate around the debates of apology while being cognizant of the shifting contexts and readings of these historical instances, so as to not reproduce the coloniality of the present global Islamophobia in which the history of 1971 is often appropriated. This is because the absence presence (in Pakistan), over presence (in Bangladesh) and ignoring (in India) of 1971 has long-term implications for the imagination or pursuit of possible futures in South Asia. Anams book is one of those few efforts to make us look at the mirror of 1971 without denying, [or] belittling the injustice perpetrated in East Pakistan by the Pakistani state. It raises questions which intertwine all our trajectoriesNayanika Mookherjee, professor at Durham University, UK, author of The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971

This is a moving, accessible and at times jolting account of the traumatic-triumphant memory of 1971 that South Asia is yet to process. In Pakistan, the continued silence and erasure have been underway for decades. Official history dominates and the generation that witnessed the cataclysmic events is fading away. In Bangladesh, the nation-state project remains a work in progress; and the way you see 1971 defines your nationalism. The year 1971 often invokes bravado and military triumph in India, thereby undermining the scale of human suffering and the lasting impact of the war, secession and violence that affected millions and changed the history of the region, perhaps forever. Zakarias work is a timely attempt to set the 1971 record straight and reaffirm the centrality of people in what constitutes historyRaza Rumi, author, director of Park Center for Independent Media, Ithaca College, USA

The events of 1971 that led to the emergence of independent Bangladesh have, for nearly five decades, been hostage to a host of three-way state-sanctioned narratives between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have all but erased the factual accounts that took place on the ground in the lives of the people irrevocably changed by them. Anam Zakaria engages with this sensitive and fraught topic in the modern history of the subcontinent and South Asia through the words of those who lived to tell what happened, how it happened, and, in their own words, why they think it happened. This is an enlightening, deeply felt, harrowing and urgently needed work on the subject for scholars and laypersons alike, and essential reading on one of the most devastating conflicts of the [twentieth] centuryNadeem Zaman, author of In the Time of the Others

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