The history of 1971 is often told through three sharply different national narratives. In Bangladesh, it represents liberation and the birth of a nation; in Pakistan, it is remembered as a national defeat and dismemberment; while in India, it is often framed as a military and humanitarian victory. But for award-winning Pakistani author and oral historian Anam Zakaria, the story becomes far more complicated when the voices of ordinary people are placed at its centre.
In conversation with Raesa Fatima, Zakaria, author of 1971: A People's History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, argued that the conflict did not simply emerge in 1971. Her oral-history research revealed years of political, economic, social and linguistic grievances among Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan.
Language, she explained, was particularly significant. It was not merely a means of communication but a marker of culture and identity. For many Bengalis, the marginalisation of their language and culture formed part of a wider experience of political and economic exclusion. The 1965 war, inadequate responses to natural disasters and growing political grievances further deepened disillusionment.
Zakaria also challenged the tendency to portray Bengali political demands as an Indian conspiracy. She described this as a broader framework through which rights-based movements can be delegitimised by portraying their supporters as enemies or foreign agents. In her view, this approach obscures the genuine grievances that exist within a society.
Her research also brought attention to Urdu-speaking communities and Biharis in Bangladesh, whose experiences after 1971 are often absent from dominant narratives. Zakaria stressed that communities are not monolithic: some older members of the Urdu-speaking community continue to identify emotionally with Pakistan, while younger generations born and raised in Bangladesh may see their future there.
Perhaps most strikingly, Zakaria found stories of Pakistanis who opposed the military operation and protested against the violence. Some intellectuals, poets and military personnel spoke out despite censorship, imprisonment and social pressure. Their experiences, she argued, demonstrate that even highly dominant state narratives are never completely uniform.
Zakaria further questioned whether changing political relations between Bangladesh, India and Pakistan necessarily signal a transformation in historical memory. Symbols associated with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, she suggested, can acquire new meanings as political circumstances change, without necessarily erasing the significance of 1971 itself.
At the heart of her argument is the need for acknowledgement. Zakaria argues that denying violence can itself become another form of violence. For her, confronting 1971 requires moving beyond competing national narratives and listening to the people who lived through it.
More than five decades later, her central question remains: can South Asia remember 1971 without reducing it to victory, defeat or dismemberment, and instead confront the human experiences that continue to shape its memory?