History

Rewriting Oral Histories

Concept

History is the story of the past, told from the perspective of the present. As the present changes, history changes with it, because even if the past is, in one sense, entombed beyond the possibility of alteration, the constantly changing present leads us to ask different questions about it, and to put it together in ways that seek to make sense not only of the past, but of ourselves and our present predicaments.

Sometimes this changing quest may be guided by explicitly political agendas –like the attempts of the states of India and Pakistan to rewrite the history of the region to propagate state ideologies and promote political agenda. The Partition of 1947 was a product not of ancient animosities but of modem forces among which one should mention especially colonialism, nationalism, the growth of a modem state structure, and the promise of democracy. Whatever, the case may be the Partition witnessed mass level communal genocide and human migration and displacement. The Partition resulted in the transfer of approximately eight million Muslims, and equivalent numbers of Sikhs and Hindus, across the Indo-Pakistan borders in the north-west and north-east of the subcontinent in 1947. The largest single refugee movement of the 20th century was accompanied by communal violence and atrocities committed on all sides of the religious spectrum, with a death toll calculated at approximately 1 million.

This proposed project reflects personal memories of a generation that simultaneously witnessed Indo-Pak Partition of 1947 and the separation of West Pakistan in 1971 and the trauma of the violence associated with these events. The project hopes that the recording and understanding will also be an enquiry into the cultural patterns, psychological sources, and social profile of the genocidal mentality in South Asian cultures.

Eastern wing constituted 55 percent of the population of Pakistan. However, it ws under the complete political and economic dominance of West Pakistan. Various methods were employed for exploiting the eastern wing for the benefit of the western wing. Why Pakistan could not survive as a united country? There was a long history of political, economic and cultural causes that eventually developed the demands of provincial autonomy in East Pakistan into a secessionist movement. It might have been saved in March 1971, but the power elites of West Pakistan were not prepared to let the system be transformed into one more acceptable to the East. The people of East Pakistan were pained to see their overwhelming mandate to Sheikh Mujibur Rehman brutally reversed in March 1971 by Yahya Khan. Yahya Khan took power on March 26, 1969, and on the same day after two years he began his massacre of Bengalis. The final drama of the breakdown of Pakistan's political system was unfolded in four stages; the complex electoral process leading to the Awami League's victory in December 1970, the tense political bargaining between Yahya, Mujib and Bhutto between the election and the postponement of the National Assembly session on March 1971, Mujib's de facto rule in East Pakistan from 1st March to 25th March, 1971, and the subsequent military action which led to the dismemberment of the country at the hands of Indian armed forces.

The main questions of this project are as follows. How people of India, Pakistan and present day Bangladesh underwent the massacre and migration during and after Partition 1947? In 1971, what was the role of political and external agents in the establishment, nature and stability of Bangladesh? How Bengalis had to face massacre and displacement? How the immigrants of 1947, for instance, Bihari community, had to migrate again? What was the role played by minorities in saving lives and promoting interfaith harmony?

The aims of the project are to record and develop a more comprehensive knowledge base addressing the above questions and to gain first hand understanding of the situation by depending more on oral history and ethnography. In Pakistan the emphasis will be on the Mohajir community in Sindh and Punjabi refugees in Punjab; in Bangladesh we shall concentrate on refugees from both West Bengal and Bihar who migrated from India to East Bengal in 1947, and then from Bangladesh to Pakistan after 1971.

What gives this project its urgency is that the witnesses are old, and soon their memories may not be directly available to us. Yet, these memories, decontextualised and reified, will survive as private fantasies transmitted over the generations as a particularly potent form of folk memories. This limitation on the time available and the transience of the witnesses define some of the specific questions to which we seek answers from individual respondents. How do they remember their pasts, and how have they adjusted to their present lives in relation to their memory of the past? How have they re-experienced, constructed or cauterised the trauma and how have they transmitted these to the next generation? Have the experiences of the victims given a special meaning to their ideas of nation-state, nationalism, communal and ethnic relations? What explanation do they give for their survival and what roles have the other communities played in that survival? The project will seek, through detailed interviews, to bring out the manner in which a victim or a killer constructs his or her life-history centring around these issues, and the way the victim's life style dovetails into the constructed pasts, the official and the unofficial histories of the community to which he or she belongs.

Scope

The popular memory and ethnography of the Partition violence, ignored by mainstream historiography of the Indo-Pak freedom movement, has now been linked to it in other ways. Partition is now perceived not as a historical aberration, not as something that had anything to do with Indian culture and social structure or individual psychopathology, but as something that grew exclusively out of South Asian politics. This way of remembering the violence simultaneously ensures that one can live a 'normal' life without confronting the violence within the self and sometimes by projecting it on to others; and yet give institutional and cultural expression to the anxieties associated with that violence as a part of 'rational' politics and policy choices. As a result, an elaborate, almost ornate language of political communication has grown in South Asian societies. This language appears so to be, at first sight, an expression of hardboiled real politic, but is actually a defensive shield that does not allow one a glimpse into the motivating forces that power some of the crucial political choices in the region.

The existing literature on ethnic conflict and migration in 1947 and 1971 has not systematically addressed the above questions and focus mainly on political history. Only recently have begun a trickle of studies that take the experiences of the victims and witnesses seriously. In this respect, the present study may not look dramatically different from some of the studies of the European holocaust, but it is a serious departure from existing studies of the Partition.

Communities and faiths had important roles to play in the South Asian holocaust on both sides, in the perpetrators and in the victims. We have found families in which a majority died or committed suicide when faced with the option of even symbolic conversion to another faith. Paradoxically, this also probably means that none of the communities involved saw the hated others as irretrievably different. None of the communities considered the others as ethnically and racially so different as to be unsalvageable. Often the ferocity and the venom came from closeness, not distance, from the fear of losing one's already-fluid identity rather than from frozen cultural boundaries. We hope to capture the structure of memories in the respondents against the background of not merely their individual and community experiences, but also with reference their constructions of the other communities. Secondly, the help many gave to or received from the 'enemy community' during the carnage is a remarkable feature of this genocide. Such help was, if not ubiquitous, certainly common. We have already found a large number of cases where such help was given, often at great risk to the rescuer and his or her family, and remembered by the beneficiaries. In some instances, the rescuers paid with their lives for their resistance. We want to explore the experiences and the sources of such resistance by interviewing some of the surviving rescuers. In other words, we propose to explore, as a crucial component of the study, the resistance to genocidel violence that exists in South Asian societies at grassroots level.

Our preliminary findings suggest that the strength of religious beliefs, family and community ties might indeed have had something to do with the position the rescuers take against the communal violence. Perhaps, South Asia was more fortunate in that the forces of modernisation and the consequent individuation and reification of social ties had not gone very far at the time.

Especially important in this context is the manner in which the victims have chosen to interpret their past to their children and grandchildren. Which pasts have they left behind for the next generation? When the land that the victims were forced to flee is recreated in memory, how is it revisited by different generations? Do the children and the grandchildren feel a part of the nostalgia that, preliminary studies show occupies an enormous space in the memories of the older generation? In periods of tensions between communities, are bridges between them also remembered and, in times of need, are the memories of these bridges deployed to diffuse tension?

Revisiting 1971

As mentioned earlier, Bangladesh appeared on the map followed by large scale ethnic violence and displacement. By recording the memories of people who witnessed these events in 1971, this project aims to understand the gendered nature of partition and war in the subcontinent, the multiple constructions and manifestations of postcolonial Muslim and Hindu identities, and develop a humanistic language aimed at understanding the actors, events, contexts and outcomes of the war to investigate the violence at a theoretical level as well as through autobiographical testimonials of people who experienced, perpetrated, witnessed and suffered the ravages of the war. As mentioned earlier, we will interview Bihari and other migrants who migrated from India to East Bengal in 1947 and then from Bangladesh to Pakistan after 1971. We will also interview army and civil servants and also talk to the general public including students, media persons, shopkeepers etc regarding the said issues. We will also take in account those Bengalis who, in 1971, were in West Pakistan and remained here after the formation of Bangladesh. Although, they are a tiny minority, they cannot be ignored. The current historiography on 1971 is limited to the study of conflicts between the states of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. Consequently, the narratives of hate and enmity that have emerged dominate and fuel relentless violence between people in the region. There has been no attempt to move beyond and probe into the common suffering of people in war to illuminate a human story of shared hopes, anxieties, fears, and desires to develop a possible space to come to terms with the past, violent though it may be. In this project, by recording people's histories and personal narratives of the war, the linked experience of survivors will be highlighted for developing a human language of understanding to claim the history they produced and invite South Asian scholars to consider alternate ways of rethinking the legacies of the partitions of 1947 and 1971.

Religious Minorities: Stories Of Harmony And Hope

Minorities in Pakistan have been quite proactive in their approach towards serving the society, the roots of which can be traced back even before Pakistan came into existence. Various accounts of minorities' generosity and support are available but have never been documented. In this period of bloodshed and massacre Christian priests walked in front of Muslim and Hindu clusters in order to save their lives. The services of Christian doctors, nurses and welfare workers in the refugee camps cannot be forgotten. On Quaid-e-Azam's request, Parsis opened their educational institutions for Muslims. The leaves of history books are filled with tales of mass murder of Hindu and Muslims communities which has poisoned the minds and cultivated hatred and prejudice between these communities; however, the wonderful records of harmony have never been penned down.

One objective of this research is also to provide an insight into the spirit of humanity above the boundaries of religion, sect and language. After 59 years of' independence, it is high time to acknowledge the contributions of the minorities' positive role during that dark period of time and their function in the societal development in the fields of education, medicine, and social welfare. The works of the social organizations are yet to imprint long lasting effects on a broader scale. And thus the need for thorough study of this aspect is quite compelling.

Period July 2006 – December 2007 18 Months