Abstract
In reading ‘national identities’ through the prism of the War of 1971, Cara Cilano’s work marks an interesting addition to the recent scholarship on Pakistan. On an event that has been subject to a regime of repressive silence in the country, the fact that Cilano’s preferred mode of return is through literary sources is significant. Indeed it was Intizar Husain’s novel Basti (1979) and his shorter, searching fiction in the early years after the dismemberment, for instance, that went beyond nationalist rhetoric and official versions such as the report of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission of Inquiry into the 1971 War, which was instituted to establish the causes for defeat. Until Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography arrived 2002, fiction in English about the War was practically non-existent. In Urdu writing, the tone has been more of bewilderment, loss and at times, of recrimination.
Cara Cilano’s book, therefore, sets out to map a fairly uncharted territory. She begins with an analysis of the value of the statement of ‘regret’ made by General Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan’s President on his visit to Bangladesh. The question of ‘responsibility’ (clearly moral and not legal) in the context of war crimes committed in 1971 has been obfuscated by the safe passage provided to the 192 Pakistani soldiers captured on charges of committing war crimes after the liberation, with impunity remaining a decisive blind spot in Bangladesh’s measure of its own birth and in its relations with Pakistan (The War Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh commenced its hearings last year with the arrest of Delawar Hossain Sayedee of the Jamaat-e-Islami, accused of criminal collaboration with the military regime of Yahya Khan in 1971). Cilano approaches the ‘regret’ with necessary caution as one must when a military dictatorship ventriloquises for the nation. Further examination of the response of the establishment in the form of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission yields the conclusion that the Commission’s failure lay in what Cilano calls its ‘diffusion of authority’, consequent on the ‘combined narrative ambivalence’ of the Report. From Pakistani history, soldiers’ testimonies, events of 25th March 1971, to the motivation and nature of the Army’s excesses, the Commission hastens to salvage the image of a wounded, yet valiant nation more than to establish the truth of events.
Making the War her point of departure, Cilano settles upon the figure of the ‘Muhajir’ as a potential undermining trope in any articulation of ‘pure’ Pakistani identity. Its relevance in re-constituting Muslim identity in South Asia after 1947 and again in the aftermath of the events of 1971, makes the author centre her arguments around fiction that houses such ‘eternally displaced persons’. Whether it is Umme Ummara’s Urdu short story ‘The Sin of Innocence’, Asif Farrukhi’s ‘Expelled’, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke (or Intizar Husain’s Basti, a significant work that Cilano, curiously, does not mention), the author’s contention that there are alternative narratives of belonging to the nation, is irrefutable. Sorraya Khan’s novel Noor, where Ali, a serving soldier in the Pakistani army during the War, returns home with memories of unspeakable violence, a terrible secret and a five year old Bengali orphan Sajida, cross-hatches narratives of the ‘outsider’, sexual violence in 1971, gratuitous cruelty and the possibility of healing, through a confrontation of the past/history. Noor, Sajida’s autistic daughter, in her frenzied sketching and painting, exhumes images from her mother’s and grandfather’s pasts, memories of anomie, repressed by trauma. In the ‘domestic’ space, Ali, the perpetrator, cohabits with the victim, his daughter Sajida. Cilano argues that in Noor, the author reads the creation of Bangladesh as a ‘rent in Pakistan’s intranational identity’; also the recognition of the shared humanity of a contrite Ali (he was part of a posse of soldiers digging mass human graves for East Pakistanis in 1971, and almost rapes a woman) and Sajida, the ‘outsider’, opens up the possibility of dialogue and repair. Cilano’s method of reading texts is to mark the areas where they participate in the larger (exclusionary) nationalist discourse and moments where the same texts may rupture the stability of such narratives. Clearly, the theoretical approach of Jill Didur’s perceptive work Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, where she maps literature’s intersection with the spheres of knowledge, politics and history and advocates a critical pedagogy, is an appealing one for Cilano who insists that 1971 be seen in the context of 1947 and pre-partition fashioning of Muslim identities in the subcontinent.
Narratives of belonging to Pakistan articulated from diasporic locations also feature in this book. Cilano reminds the reader that the very name ‘Pakistan’ was coined by Chaudhary Rehmat Ali in Britain, though post-independence Pakistan had little resemblance to the imagined territory. In the penultimate chapter, the plight of those Bihari migrants from India who had settled in the East after the Partition, but had to flee because of violence during the conflict, is framed as a parallel claim to the nation. In the short and tragic tale of Aamer Husain’s ‘Karima’ the casualties of monolithic nationalisms are laid bare, when the eponymous Bihari woman having fled from East Pakistan in 1971, finds no home in its western territory, is forced to emigrate to England as a maid and after the death of her elder son in Pakistan, leaves her employer’s house to wander as an illegal immigrant in an alien country. The narrator (Cilano notes) is aware that the silencing of his subject is effected at this level too, for she is unable to read or write in the language in which her story shall be told. Whether it is Bengalis in West Pakistan, Biharis/‘Muhajirs’ in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the author’s mapping of the afterlife of Pakistan’s division in fiction, through competing narratives of ‘Pakistaniness’, is commensurate with the literature that has emerged in recent times seeking to re-interpret those traumatic years of national history. With Pakistan becoming both the forge of fundamentalist faith and a strategic point in the American offensive against militant Islam, Cilano’s attempt to re-evaluate the aporias of historiography through the narrative modes of fiction is both apposite and timely.
National Identities in Pakistan would have been a well-rounded work but for a few aspects that merit attention. The third chapter on Pakistani history is a sketchy one. It fails to draw the reader into the contexts operating in 1971 and the seeds of discontent that were sown before 1952, when the Language Movement in the east culminated. Had its reading of regional variations in Muslim nationalist discourse before 1947 been more detailed, we could have seen more clearly how the Pakistani ruling classes’ response to demands for Bengali autonomy was, inter alia, a response framed by colonial experience and the Partition. In the final chapter when Cara Cilano turns to Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age, she makes short work of it, strongly noting its protagonist Rehana’s complicity in ‘patriarchal’ and ‘heteronormative’ nationalism. A deeper perusal of literature in Bangladesh about the War will reveal that the nationalist myth of the heroic, sacrificing Bengali mother (as conjured by Jahanara Imam’s Ekattorer Dinguli, Anisul Hoque’s Maa or for that matter the letters written by men fighting in the ‘War of liberation’) is quietly destabilised in the figure of Rehana, a Bengali-speaking ‘Bihari’ woman, whose children become freedom fighters. Rehana’s methods are clearly not moral in any narrow sense. She lies and dissembles to save her children, repudiating the War’s claim that women become mothers to an entire nation. In the cultural context of the Pakistan of 1971, Rehana’s figure disturbs patriarchal constructions of wartime motherhood though it may not be a neatly radical one. ‘Gender progressive’ positions, a term Cilano uses more than once, especially in conservative societies, are often not as clear as she would like them to be.