[Part 6 of 6 -- A short version of this series was published at DAWN - Books & Authors] That three million perished in the 1971 conflict is widely stated around the world. Salil Tripathi points out that “Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make it one [...]
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[Part 5 of 6] [...] men see the abuse of “their” women as a degradation of their masculinity. What counts is not the suffering of the women, but the effect it has on men. Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches” All facets of the 1971 conflict and the subsequent nation-making processes had a devastating [...]
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[Part 4 of 6] Marshaling colonial legacies, the post-colonial state seeks to consolidate the nation as a new form of empire, demanding hyper-masculine militarization and territorial and extra-territorial control. This requires the manufacture of internal and external enemies to constitute a national identity, constructed in opposition to the anti-national and non-native enemies of the nation. [...]
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[Part 3 of 6] I hate all armies. Yours, mine—all armies. -Muhammad Zinnatul Alam, the lone survivor of the Thanpara massacre.1 The main focus of Sarmila Bose’s much talked about book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is the civil war in East Pakistan, and not the international war between India and [...]
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[Part 2 of 6] Translation: The Ideology of Pakistan: Every nation has a specific civilization and culture. The civilizational and cultural capital of the Muslims of the Subcontinent comes from Islam. This capital, their beliefs and religious rituals, mannerisms, religious and historical literature, literary and technological research, is preserved in their literature and philosophy. On this [...]
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[Part 1 of 6] Forgetting is imposed as a strategy to hide the haunting memories that cannot be revealed without destroying our romance with nationalism. ~Yasmin Saikia During the many blackouts and power outages in the Pakistan of my childhood, my family used to sit in the veranda of our home cursing the electricity department [...]
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The biggest event on CM was the publishing of “Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination – “a curated, edited collection” of sepoy’s posts in book form, with foreword from Amitava Kumar, launched with much fanfare, and earning rave reviews (here, here). Meanwhile, commentaries and reflections on happenings in Homistan continued to grace CM: [...]
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If tear-streaked faces of broken families begged you to stop killing their sons, would you reflect and see your wrongs, or would you still load your guns? For every girl who lost a father, every wife now a widow, I hope you see that you have spilled, the blood splattered on my window * I [...]
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[You may know that CM has long had an official Archivist - a person who has helped maintain the Facebook page, and helped me cull through the huge archive for posts and materials. You know him as Salman in the comment sections, SalmaanH on twitter, and patwari as author on CM. This is a first [...]
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This 6th year of CM will go down in the annals of Chapatism, first and foremost, as a year of the renaissance sprung by Lapata’s posts – for which readers have the bureaucratic morass of academy, “the insane rants of an inflamed tea-partier”, and Sepoy’s badgering to thank – illuminating the particularities of partition or [...]
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