The Baily Star Journalism Without Fear or Favour WEDNESDAY, December 28, 2022 In Focus Syed Waliullah Existentialism, Nostalgia, Nationalism Niaz Zaman Sot Aug 13, 2016 12.00 AM Last update on: Sat Aug 13,2016 12:00 AM With wife Anne Marie in Karachi: Syea Waliullah was born on 15 August 1922 at Sholashahar in Chittagong. His father, Syed Ahmadullah, was a government officer whose postings took him to different mofussil towns in Bengal: Mymensingh, Feni, Chittagong, Krishnanagar, Kurigram. Thus, the young Waliullah, who accompanied his father, was able to learn about rural life in Bengal. Apart from one unpublished piece of fiction in English, all Waliullah’s writings are set in Bengal. Hismost famous novel, Lalsalu (1948), for example, was inspired by a shrine covered with red cloth that he would often pass when he lived with his father in Mymensingh. Waliullah completed his BA from Anandamohan College in Mymensingh in 1943 and then moved to Calcutta, where he hoped to do his Masters in Economics. However, he was unable to complete his MA and joined the Statesman, where he worked till 1947, Proficient in English, he also briefly published an English journal, Contemporary. In 1947, after the Partition, Syed Waliullah left Calcutta and came to Dhaka, joining Radio Pakistan. He was transferred to Karachi in 1950. In 1951 he left Radio Pakistan and served as press attaché at the Pakistan missions in New Delhi, Sydney, Jakarta and London. It was in Sydney that Waliullah met Anne Marie Thibaud, a French woman, whom he married in 1955. In 1960, he was posted as first secretary at the Pakistan embassy in Paris. In 1967, he joined the UNESCO in Paris. During the Liberation War in 1971, Syed Waliullah worked with his friend Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury to enlist the support of a number of French intellectuals, including Pierre Emanuel and Andre Malraux, in mobilising world public opinion for Bangladesh. He passed away in Paris on 10 October that year, without having seen the liberation of the country. Syed Waliullah was not a prolific writer. He has only two volumes of short stories, Nayanchara (1951) and Dui Teer O Anyanya Galpa (1965,) and three plays, Bahipeer (1960), Suranga (1964) and Tarangabhanga (1965). Apart from Lalsalu, he wrote two other novels in Bangla, Chander Amabasya (1964; Night of No Moon) and Kando Nadi Kando (1968; Cry, River, Cry), as well as a novel in English, The Ugly Asian, which he had written under a pseudonym and which was not published until 2013 by the Bangla Academy.Despite his fairly brief output, Syed Waliullah is recognised as one of the foremost of contemporary Bengali writers. He received the Bangla Academy Award in 1961 before his two later novels @ were published, No Moon ent ta thus stressing the importance of Lalsalu. He also subsequently received the Adamijee Prize (1965) and the Ekushey Padak (1983). For twenty years - from his posting in Karachi to his subsequent postings in different cities and his sojourn in Paris - Waliullah lived away from his Bangla-speaking milieu. Nevertheless, apart from one piece of fiction set in Paris, he continued to write about his homeland. However, as Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury has suggested in "Syed Waliullah and His Lonely Heroes,” Syed Waliullah was often assailed by feelings that he was out of tune with his home country. He also perhaps felt a deep sense of nostalgia for the land that he had left behind.Perhaps this is why he translated Lalsalu into English so that his wife could translate the novel into French. In 1961, Anne-Marie's French translation was published as L'Arbre Sans Racines. An English translation appeared in 1967, as Tree Without Roots, a translation of the French title. The names of four translators were given: Anne-Marie Thibaud, Qaiser Saeed, Jeffrey Gibian, and Malik Khayy my husband as I saw him,” Anne-Marie described how she had translated the book from Waliullah’s own English translation. am. However, after her husband's death, in "Waliullah, Translated several years after Lalsalu had been written, Tree Without Roots has small but significant changes from its Bangla original. In the Bangla novel, Majeed is portrayed as a charlatan who exploits the religious beliefs of the common people to make a living for himself. At the end of Lalsalu, Majeed sternly tells the villagers bewailing their losses, "Do not be ungrateful. Have faith in God." Tree Without Roots agrees with the Bangla ori essential storyline but has a longer description of the Bengal landscape and introduces a nobility in Majeed's character towards the end, missing in the Bangla version. In Tree Without Roots, Majeed leaves his two wives with his friend and strides off alone across the flooded land. Waliullah's subsequent novels, Chander Amabasya and Kando Nadi Kando, written after he moved to Paris, reveal the influence of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. As Serajul Islam Choudhury notes, Waliullah introduced the existentialist strain into Bangla fiction. Chander Amabasya, for example, is about Aref Ali, a young teacher, who discovers the dead body of a young woman. He suspects an important villager of the murder but is caught up ina dilemma about revealing his suspicions. Finally, however, he musters up the courage to expose the murderer though he knows that by doing so he is signing his own death warrant.Kando Nadi Kando juxtaposes the story of a dying river with the story of a young magistrate, Muhammad Mustafa. Pledged by his father to his cousin, Khodija, in their childhood, he cannot keep the pledge. When Khodija drowns herself in an algae-covered pond behind her house, he wonders whether she committed suicide when she learnt about his impending marriage. How far is he responsible if she did? Above all, how far are human beings responsible for the actions of others? This existentialist question haunts Muhammad Mustafa — as it does the narrator of the story. Sometime in the late fifties/early sixties, Syed Waliullah was perhaps inspired by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick's The Ugly American to write a novel in English, and one very different from Lalsalu or his later existential novels. A political allegory, The Ugly Asian, takes place in an imaginary Asian country where there has just been a change of government. However, the new government is as corrupt and anti-people as the previous government and the novel ends with a revolution. The typescript of the novel has a pseudonym, Abu Sharya, which Waliullah also used for the unpublished "How to Cook Beans," his only piece of fiction not set in his motherland. Set during the time of the Cold War, The Ugly Asian explores the relation of the US to an Asian country, which is attempting to throw off its colonial roots and which becomes the proxy scene of America's fight against Communism. Though different in language and theme from Waliullah's other novels, this novel too has a lonely hero in Professor Ahsan. Professor Ahsan fails, much as Majeed, Aref Ali, and Muhammad Mustafa fail. Unlike them, however, he is a political person and, through him, Waliullah seems to voice his opinion of world politics. Ahsan tells the American Johnson, who has been sent to see what is happening in the country, that even a small nation must be left to itself to decide what it wants. "Go and defend your own shores but not mine. I do not want you to defend anything of mine because I know that you are not defending mebut yourself, I do not therefore accept you as my defender. If the other side comes to my country to defend itself, I will also ask him to leave my country.” If the US really wants to help Asians, it must learn what is important for Asians, what Asians want. In "An Asian Speaks," an afterword to The Ugly Asian, there is an imagined dialogue between an Asian peasant and an American, who speaks his language fluently. ‘The American tries to convince the Asian that Communism is bad but fails to do so. "The American spoke the man’s language. But the man did not understand what the American meant." Niaz Zaman, who retired from the University of Dhaka, is Advisor, Department of English, Independent University, Bangladesh, and also publisher of Tree Without Roots, Night of No Moon, translated by Afia Dil, and Cry, River, Cry, translated by Osman Jamal. The Cry of the River Who was crying? What Moslehuddin's daughter, Sakina Khatun, said was eventually heard by many. But how was that possible? How could a river cry? It seemed to be folly even to ask if it was believable. A river can, like human beings, be young, then mature, grow old and die, but it lacks the power to cry. It cannot express its pain, it cannot articulate the feeblest protest when it arrives at death's door, it cannot even release a faint sigh looking at the two banks with which it had lived in close intimacy. It is really impossible for a river to cry. But where did that cry come from, from what suffering heart did the cry originate? Why indeed did a question of the kind chill the inside of one's hea: the work of Satan, why did even God's name fail to silence it? One rt? If that cry was day a terrible idea occurred to someone. At first he could not pluck the courage to articulate it, but later, when he failed to bear it, hesaid ina faint voice, his eyes wide open, "Perhaps it is God who cries for his creatures,” But why should anybody find peace in this sort of idea? If the One who created the universe - the moon and the sun and the stars, hills, mountains, seas and oceans - if He started crying, what would happen to man, where would he find strength? Perhaps, finally, there was no alternative to believing in Sakina Khatun's strange story. The question to which they found no answer now appeared to be more frightening than the mysterious cry and, finding no escape from it, they accepted the impossible story: it was the river crying. The crying that they heard emerged from the suffering, grieving heart of the dying river. How could it be wrong to believe in such a story? Human beings believe in so many things, accept so many things as true, things for which there is no evidence. There are no limits to belief.What Moslehuddin's daughter, Sakina Khatun, said was correct. The professional tout Maniruddin, sitting on a stool outside the tea-shop under the shadow of the a to himself, "Who would cry but the river? Isn't the river dying?” Though touting for a living, he was a pious soul, prayed five times atha tree, suddenly said, as if a day, and fasted the required number of days. He said it naturally and it sounded natural. But, of course, who else would cry like that? There was no doubt that the river Bakal was dying. It was the dying river which was crying day and night. Why had they refused all this time to believe in something so obvious? At last finding an answer to the question which had created a strange fear in their minds, the people of Kumurdanga breathed a sigh of relief. Suddenly it occurred to them that there was nothing frightening behind the mysterious cry they heard. The river which they didn't even care to look at now flooded their hearts with its own tears, and the relief they felt in their hearts now moistened at the river's pain. Suddenly it occurred to them that they had now come face to face with a sorrow of such dimension that human. sorrow was trivial in comparison. In the face of the pain and suffering of a river which had flowed for ages, defying time, even the most poignant suffering of man was only a teardrop, an almost inaudible sigh. Excerpt from Cry, River, Cry, translated by Osman Jamal In Focus Home and DisplacementAhrar Ahmad ‘Mon Dec 26,2022 12:00 AM Last update on: Mon Dec 26, 2022 01:29 Akt Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937 Tie two words in the title are evocative, complex and slippery. and what does "displacement" really ‘The first word conjures up notions of romance and nostalgia, the second has more political and territorial implications. The first is based on ideas of entitlement and belongingness, the second of exile and alienation. The first suggests permanence and confidence, the second temporality and desperation. The first is based on emotional, aesthetic and psychological parameters built around notions of identity and imagination, the second on requirements defined by bureaucratic, legal and structural contingencies. The first connotes continuity, the second disjuncture; the first rests on feelings of comfort and security, the second on feelings of anxiety and threat; the first is shaped around a focal point, the second in a continuous state of dislocation; the first is warmly lyrical, the second coldly prosaic; the first carries a hint of metaphor and mythology, the second resonates with reality and existential urgency. We seek to return to the first into which we are usually born, and seek to escape from the second into which we have been rudely forced. But this litany of binaries still does not clarify what "home" means. Does this privilege "place of birth" or origin as the main signifier of home? But one can be born in an airplane, a refugee camp, or whiletravelling abroad? Does it refer to acquiring one's sense of selfhood, where one grows up, and acquires one’s individualism and autonomy? But the sheer mobility of people, increasingly more restless and unsettled in the modern world, problematizes even that formulation. So, when T. S. Eliot says (in East Coker) "home is where one starts from", the "from" is left tantalizingly ambiguous. He continues: "As we grow older the world becomes stranger, The pattern more complicated, Of the dead and the living ... Of old stones that cannot be deciphered”. Home, after all, is a state of mind, that we construct around our "memories and desires”, dull roots sometimes "stirred by spring rain’ (to continue with Eliot imagery) as we rearrange and decipher old stones and markers, partly real and evident, partly fed by myths and fantasies, of what we were, what we became, and our journey from Being to Becoming. Perhaps Pliny the Elder, Roman naturalist and commander, was more astute when he said, "home is where the heart is’, a sentiment echoed by the great philosopher Elvis Presley when he sang, "home is where the heart is baby, And anywhere you are, is home’. But, the heart itself is fickle, inconstant and vulnerable to seductions. Thus, can we have more than one home? Amartya Sen certainly thinks so. When he returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, UK in 1998, a BBC interviewer asked him, "So, where is your home?" he responded, "I feel very much at home here right now’, He went on to explain that he also feels at home when he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in Santiniketan or Dhaka, where he spent his early childhood. The interviewer persists, "So, you have no concept of home’, to which he replied, "On the contraryIhave more than one welcoming home, but I do not share your idea that a home has to be exclusive". Incidentally, his book of memoirs is titled, "Home in the World’. The idea of multiple homes expands its ambit, but deconstructs its essentialism to the point that its very meaning becomes fluid and suspect. Perhaps we could venture in exactly the opposite direction of “home’ being where one finally rests. During the relentless westward drive of White Settlers in America, Native American leaders would resist and complain that their lands and homes were being taken away. During those days of conflict and conquest, a US colonel tauntingly asked the great Lakota leader, Chief Crazy Horse, "and so, where is your land, your home?" The Chief responded by grandly gesturing towards the horizons, and saying "wherever my braves are buried is my land, my home’, thus inverting the earlier premise and suggesting that home is the place consecrated by our blood and sacrifice. This may sound rather grim. But when the same sentiment is expressed by the great British War poet Rupert Brookes who, in his famous poem "The Soldier" memorably says "And if I should die, think only this of me, That there is some corner of a foreign field, That is forever England" it sounds more patriotic and uplifting. In both formulations the idea is that the body is the land, the signpost of home. But if the idea of home is difficult to specify, the notion of displacement is more challenging. Is it possible to choose not to have a home, and live like wanderers, pastoralists and herders without any fixity or address? There are some 50-60 million such people today. The Bedouin, the Tuareg, the Mongols, the Romaniand gypsies are the most famous, but such communities are present everywhere, even in South Asia, such as Doms, Kochs and Be-des. In open societies, there may also be free spirits, rootless cosmopolitans and loners, rebelling against the crass culture of consumption, acquisition and display, and refusing to be trapped or numbed by the capitalist machine. What about the writers of the Beat generation (e.g., Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs), or Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and many others who not only dismiss, but often repudiate, the notion of having a home? Can they be considered displaced? It is absolutely true that some artists and writers were compelled by circumstances to leave their homes and settle elsewhere such as Vladimir Nabokov, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, Alexander Solzhenit n, Gabriel Marquez, or even perhaps Taslima Nasrin and others. But, many more chose to live outside their original domiciles sometimes for long periods of time, sometimes their entire lives. They include mystics like Rumi, the great romantics like Keats, Shelly and Byron, and in the 20th century, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Thomas Becket, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Gertrude Stein, Gabriel Marquez, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Wole Soyinka, Isabelle Allende, Joseph Brodsky and many more. Three prominent beat generation authors -- William S. Burroughs (left), Lucien. Carr (center), and Allen Ginsberg (right) ~ pose together in New York City. © Allen Ginsberg A host of writers of South Asian origin writing in English such as V. 8. Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhury, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Amitabh Ghose, Amit Chaudhury, Jnumpa Lahiri, Hanif Koreishi,Aravind Adiga or our very own, Tahmima Anam, Zia Haider Rahman and Monica Ali have also demonstrated that borders are porous, and can be transcended, both physically and artistically. Painters like Picasso had to flee their land (a moment that he immortalized through his Guernica) but Monet, Pissaro, or Gauguin didn't, nor did Bangladeshi artistes like Shabuddin in France, Qazi Ghyasuddin in Japan, or Manirul Islam in Spain. Their exilic experience only fueled their creative energies. Are they displaced? A similar definitional conundrum is faced when one considers some religious traditions and practices which are antithetical to the notion of home because of the attachments it provokes. Buddhist monks, some Catholic denominations (e. g, Franciscan orders), and several Sufi tariqas such as the Qadiriyah, Naqshbandia and Qalandaria, look upon "home’ as a distraction, a trap, a deviation from the monastic purity, devotion and resolve which can only be attained through detachment from such material lusts and longings. This ambivalence resonates through Lalon Shah and the baul tradition as well. A further complication derives from the difference between a migrant and a refugee. The first chooses to leave and re-settle elsewhere. This could be driven by hopes of a more comfortable life, more political or sexual freedoms, or a more supportive environment favorable to one's talents. This self-conscious decision does not imply a forsaking of one's historical baggage of family bonds, cultural tastes, or individual habits. But, while the "ties that bind" remain in effect, and while the journey of re-settlement and new identities may initially entail some struggles and discomforts, and may even carry elements of anguish, guilt and after-thought, these ties eventually face "erasure" in the context of new demands, expectations and blending imperatives. At what point should they be considered displaced?It is probably safe to say that refugees are at the very center of the displacement discourse. After all, they are compelled against their will to flee from their homes and habitats for other countries which provide an unwelcome and, usually, temporary sanctuary. Their condition is the most hauntingly and glaringly tragic. While the reality of people travelling, moving, discovering, settling and building new homes and identities is quite old, this forced dispersal of entire groups of people across borders through war, persecution, exclusion, threat, or targeted violence, is a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, the word "refugee", derived from the French word "refugie" and the Latin word "refugium", entered the English language only in 1685 when thousands of French Protestant Huguenots were expelled from southern and western France following the revocation of the Treaty of Nantes by Louis XIV. This had ended the fragile compromise between French Catholics and Protestants. The latter were compelled to seek shelter elsewhere. It must be remembered that the idea of refugees was only possible AFTER the concept of the State had come into existence initially through the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which recognized sovereignties within national boundaries, and more fully articulated through the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which underscored legal notions of citizenship. It was not till the 20th century that refugees became a full-fledged problem, when European Jews faced vicious anti-Semitism in many countries, and the brutal and systematic slaughter of millions in some. Many countries refused to accept them. These realities led to the Refugee Convention in 1951, which defined the term, and enunciated procedures for secking asylum.The UNHCR sought to bring some order, clarity and sensitivity to the whole process. By the end of 2021 this body estimated that there are more than 27m refugees, over 53m internally displaced persons, and in excess of 4.6m asylum seekers (an overall total that exceeds the population of 90% of the world's countries). These numbers are bound to increase because of the intensifying levels of hate and violence in a hyper-polarized world, and because of natural disasters and climate change disruptions that are escalating ominously. But these figures do not capture the condition of minority communities who had felt "at home" for many years in a land which they believed was their own, to be increasingly and aggressively made aware that because of their "otherness" they cannot do so anymore. This happens because whipping up hate is so much easier than mobilizing the acceptance of the "other". Cynical politicians have manipulated this weapon to cruel and effective advantage as they hide their prejudi rhetorical froth of faith, populism, or national identity. Therefore, even though some citizens may remain legal residents of a country, they become “outsiders”, strangers in their own land, who do not, and cannot, "belong", and are urged, sometimes forced, to leave (like the Rohingy: ¢, greed and hunger for power under the s in Myanmar). This is more painfully true for majority populations who face invisibility and dehumanization at the hands of settler colonists. In Israel/Palestine for example, one can legitimately ask, which community is it that is really displaced - those who had been compelled to leave their original homes elsewhere and sought to settle here, or those who had always been there and now suffer dispossession and disempowerment as they encounter walls and "laws" which forbid them from the very places where they had lived, and which they had "owned’, for centuries?home" As difficult as it may be to define or disentangle the terms and "displa are inscribed into our collective consciousness and our cultural landscape. The very centrality of the question "who am I" is inextricably bound up within a cartographic framework and the ement’, the ideas remain powerful and relevant, and assembling of various experiential fragments into a tapestry that provides meaning, hope and agency. In this regard art provides not only an avenue but also an inherent logic of creativity, since "displacement" constitutes a profound dislocation of texts and contexts that demand new understanding, deconstruction and engagement. The idea is not that displacement creates great art, but that the trauma of exile, loss and longing provides new instincts, impulses, intuitions, interrogations and intimacies, a new diasporic imaginaire, new sites of contestation and coexistence, new sets of challenges and opportunities, and a new frisson of experimental and aesthetic liveliness. The dislocated is not merely a victim and an object of history, but also an active and dynamic subject of exciting dimensions and richness. They need our support, not our pity, It is only right, indeed our moral obligation, to try to understand their struggles and sufferings, but also celebrate their spirit, their talents, and their possi ities. The courage and foresight of the organizers at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy to dedicate the 19th Asian Arts Biennale to this theme deserve our gratitude, and our congratulations. (From remarks made at the International Symposium organized under Dr. Syed Manzoorul Islam's leadership as part of the 19th Asian Arts Biennale at the Shilpakala Academy in Dhaka, Dec 8, 2022 - Jan 7, 2023.)Dr Ahrar Ahmad is Professor Emeritus at Black Hills State University in the US, and Director General of Gyantapas Abdur Razzaq Foundation in Dhaka. He can be contacted at ahrar.ahmad@bhsu.edu In Focus Guarding the silences Anam Zakaria Mon Dec 19,2022 12:00 AM Last update on: Mon Oee 19, 2022 03:46 AM Soldiers of Mukti Bahini, 1971 5. years after 1971, the birth of Bangladesh continues to evoke a range of emotions in Pakistan. There are civilians - poets, intellectuals, activists, even some former army officers - that protested the military-led violence against Bengalis and ethnic minorities five decades ago, and continue to criticize and agonize over the bloodshed and suffering caused by state policies. Some of them have been honoured in Bangladesh. There are others who lived in erstwhile East Pakistan and had Bengali friends; they remember and retell a different past than that which is registered in the national imaginary. They speak of the discrimination, the exploitation, the systemic violence they witnessed and remind those like me - born years after the war - of the importance of acknowledging the past and the way in which it shapes the present,not just in terms of internal and regional politics but especially for the countless people who continue to live with the trauma and loss encountered in 1971. However, these personal memories sit at odds with and on the periphery of official and popular discourse in Pakistan. In the case of the latter, there is little space for introspecting 51 years on. Textbooks present distorted information and skim over the complex and difficult history in a matter of a few paragraphs while mainstream discourse on 1971 remains limited if not absent, with efforts to sincerely engage with history curtailed. Nonetheless, given how recent 1971 is, it is also not easy to completely erase. The year continues to be defining for Pakistan, shaping educational and military policies, national ideological frameworks and regional relationships. Thus, rather than an absolute silencing, a selective remembering and retelling of 1971 is permitted in Pakistan, a carefully guarded evocation that reinforces national narratives while maintaining silences seen as essential to "national stability.” By setting parameters around what can be remembered, the state effectively also defines what must not be remembered. How, might one ask, does the state do this? Pakistan is of course not A promo for film Khel Khel Mein. alone in such efforts. Around the world, many states use techniques and strategies to "cope" with or deny histories that are perceived as dangerous to national ideology, in the process producing distorted, fabricated or misleading histories, partial truths or complete lies. In Pakistan's case textbooks, museums and military memoirs - among other official sites — are used to make visible those parts of the past that are deemed convenient while erasing other essential realities, thereby producing a partial amnesia. There are a few different ways in which this selective and slanted remembering and forgetting is produced.Firstly, there is a quantification of violence and in this quantification, violence against Bengalis is minimized, denied or trivialized while violence against non-Bengalis — erstwhile West Pakistanis and the Urdu-speaking community - is maximized. Numbers are used but only to neutralize the bloodshed, reduce the significance of Bengali pain, undermine claims of genocide and absolve Pakistan, Violence of 1971 is remembered but only towards select bodies. If atrocities towards Bengalis and other ethnic minorities are recalled, they are framed as an "excess." In the process, they come to be seen as something "extra" or in "excess" of the military action, as "collateral damage” of any war; therefore, even if this excess is criticized or lamented, state policies and military violence itself remains unquestionable. The language of excess enables a foreclosing of the possibilities of introspection or critique. Secondly, through this selective focus on West Pakistanis and the Urdu-speaking community, genuine pain and suffering is appropriated, instrumentalized and weaponized to legitimate state-led violence against Bengalis and other ethnic minorities from March 1971 onwards. In fact, the army museum in Lahore, inaugurated in 2016, uses the term genocide but only to refer to violence against "pro-Pakistanis’, turning the atrocities Pakistan is accused of on its head, and arguing that military action was not only warranted but necessary. In the process, false equivalencies are drawn between individual violence and large scale, state machinery backed action against citizens, Moreover, specific terminologies are employed, such as terming this state violence as "clashes", Bengali nationalism as an "infection" needing a "cure" and the struggle for liberation as Indian-state sponsored terrorism. The latter not only depolitici: people's struggles but belittles and reduces them to an Indian conspiracy. Ironically, the same strategy is used by India in Kashmir, labelling people's fight for their rights as Pakistan-statesponsored terrorism and equating people picking up arms with Indian-state violen in the process justifying violent crackdowns and torture of Kashmiris. This also has parallels to how Israel treats, equates, instrumentalizes and legitimates violence in Palestine. A promo for TV serial Jo Bichar Gaye. Thirdly, critical events of and leading up to 1971, including the grievances of the people of erstwhile East Pakistan are either ignored, decontextualized or backgrounded. The focus remains on India's involvement in the war, with the language movement, the political and economic struggle and the violence against Bengalis overshadowed if not negated altogether. India is portrayed as wanting to "break up" Pakistan, as revenge for Pakistan "breaking up" India in 1947. While India established, through this hyper focus on the eastern neighbour, Pakistan is able to deflect from its own role while reducing 1971 to another bilateral Indo-Pak war. s involvement in the war is well These are just some of the ways in which how 1971 is remembered also defines what must not be remembered; the quantification, the belittling, the backgrounding, the words used when referring to the year all ensure that only certain versions come forth, ones which end up defending state policies. If state violence ever emerges or is recalled, it can then be framed as an act of "self-preservation", a sacrifice to preserve "national integrity". While there are annual TV shows commemorating 16 December in Pakistan, more often than not, they too tend to echo the state narrative. In terms of books, literature on 1971 is dominated by military memoirs, several of which were published in or after the 1990s at a time when there were growing calls for holding perpetrators of the war responsible in Bangladesh. These memoirs attempt to not only control Pakistan's narrative in light of themovement for justice in Bangladesh but often are also used as platforms to absolve the authors of accusations levelled against them and the army. Outside of these military memories, cultural and literary works on 1971 have been minimal. As late Pakistani translator, editor and writer Asif Farrukhi has argued, compared to the 1947 Partition of British India, literature on 1971 is "limited and lacklustre" though nonetheless significant for writers have often been able to document stories, at least in fiction, that defy the forgetting and erasure at the state level. Thus, when on the SOth anniversary of the war, Pakistan saw the rare production of a series of films, TV serials and documentaries on 1971, it necessitated a reflection. I was curious if these newer takes would resist official narratives and unsilence the silences, bringing forth a nuanced reflection on the past through the use of art and storytelling. Yet I also feared the reproduction of the same distorted versions permeating widely through officially controlled and disseminated history. To explore the extent to which my reservations were accurate, I looked at two commercial media productions to explore the permitted and forbidden narratives five decades on. Cover of Anam Zakaria's book 1971: A People's History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India The first is Khel Khel Mein, a 2021 film. The premise of the film is promising, centering around a quest for truth, a desire to fight false propaganda and distortions around 1971. The main protagonist is bent upon visiting Bangladesh, about mending ties, rebuilding the relationship and coming to terms with the past. Those might be noble gestures, but one must ask how this might be possible without an acknowledgement of that very past — one that Bangladesh has been asking for. Quickly, the film reveals that the quest for truth is a quest for partial truth, one Pakistan is already comfortable remembering, accentuating, reproducing. And the desire to come to terms with the past is a desire to "fix" misconceptions that Bangladesh has about its own history, byshowing them the "truth" Pakistan has long known. This "truth" is what has always been permissible in Pakistan to speak to and runs around two common themes discussed above. The first is the violence experienced by West Pakistanis and the Urdu speaking community during 1971.The second is the role of India in "dismembering" Pakistan (common terminology used in Pakistan to refer to the year). Searching for her grandfather, referred to as an atka hoa Pakistani ~ commonly also termed as stranded Pakistanis — the film highlights the conditions of the Urdu-speaking community in Bangladesh. In 2017, I visited some of the camps that many from the community continue to dwell in. Poor sanitation, cramped settings and precarious economic, social and political conditions have left thousands vulnerable. In the interviews I have conducted with those who continue to reside in Bangladesh as well as those who were able to migrate to Pakistan, violence, trauma and loss remain palpable. However, in Pakistan, this suffering and violence is repackaged and instrumentalized. Dedicated to the "dignity and patience of stateless people who await recognition’ (it is pertinent to note that a 2008 Bangladesh Supreme Court judgement granted citizenship, although the process comes with its own limitations and hurdles), Khel Khel Mein, like official discourse, uses this selective violence to argue that mistakes were made by either side, and both therefore can apologize. The film asks both sides to seek forgiveness but Pakistan's role in the war is completely erased, as is the violence against Bengalis. An apology by Pakistan then seems almost unnecessary; like a big hearted generous and selfless act even though it has nothing to apologize for. And if Pakistan is absolved, who carries the blame? Fingers are pointed towards India which is accused of trying to destabilize and break Pakistan both in 1971 as well as today through its policies in Balochistan. In neither case is there any introspection on why citizens may rely on support fromother countries — whether in the case of Bangladesh, Balochistan or Kashmir - as their rights are crushed upon; instead, they become framed as either a-political, agency-less, too innocent for their own good, or manipulated and exploited - and at worst treacherous, unpatriotic, unnationalistic and deceitful. The film constantly asks who benefitted from spreading hatred between two brothers who shared one mother, one blood, one religion, upsetting a seemingly romanticized, idyllic and rosy pre-1971 past without any reflection on Pakistan's own actions. The serial Jo Bichar Gaye also centers around similar themes. The title evokes nostalgia which reinforces how 1971 is registered in Pakistan as loss or dismemberment (as opposed to liberation in Bangladesh). But this regret or remorse is again attributed to India breaking Pakistan by spreading hatred and misguiding Bengalis. Told partly through the lens of army officers, the serial does an excellent job at humanizing the soldiers and emphasizing the difficulties they faced against Indian betrayal. However, barring a few instances, the same humanization isn't afforded to Bengalis. Framed as villains and traitors working at the behest of India with caricature like accents, student activists are depicted as outlaws, with Bengalis hunting and butchering West Pakistanis, outnumbering Pakistani soldiers and running slaughter houses. Once again, the violence Pakistan is accused of is turned on its head, with the weaponized military shown as helpless victims. Politicians are criticized while the army is shown as having been compelled to use force in face of ruthless Bengali mobs, with their bravery championed. Statistics are flashed upon the screen, listing in thousands the number of people killed by "angry Bengalis" funded by India and sombre army officers are portrayed lamenting that though they are only there to fight and die for their country, history will only blame them.In both Khel Khel Mein and Jo Bichar Gaye there is no desire to come to terms with the past, to say what remains unsayable. Perhaps their production was only made possible because of the parameters they adhered to. 51 years on there is no space to unsilence the silenced. Remembering must remain a selective act. What we are left with then are tireless efforts to absolve the army and the state, of acts that it claims never happened, of history that it claims is fabricated, of violence that it argues it was only a victim of. Anam Zakaria is the author of three books, including 1971: A People's History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (Penguin Random House 2019). Aversion of this piece was also published in Dawn, Pakistan.