Why did I come to write this book? Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the author of Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, reminds us that ‘we all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts’. I was born about a couple of kilometres from Qadirabad Headworks Colony (in the district of Gujranwala–Punjab), one of Pakistan's largest 1971 wartime Bengali internment camps, which a former internee described as a place in ‘hell’. This residential colony, located on the bank of the Chenab River, was established in the 1960s by the governments of Australia and New Zealand for the workforce who worked on the construction of Qadirabad Headworks under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. I grew up playing cricket on the Qadariabad Headworks Colony School field in my early teens, and I remember going to drink water from a nearby nalka (traditional water pump). There was a rusted water tank, with the inscription ‘J [Joi] Bangla’ on it. I have heard stories about ‘Bengali qaidi’ (prisoners) being imprisoned in the colony. One story is that a Bengali was shot by a camp guard while attempting to flee from the colony and was buried in a nearby graveyard. As a boy I did not have the orientation to understand most of the ‘stories’ about ‘Bengali qaidi’; however, their residing in the colony has always intrigued me.

During the research for my previous book, The Punjab Borderland: Mobility, Materiality and Militancy, I found documentation about the 1971 wartime events in West Pakistan, the opposite of what I had anticipated to seek out.

The paintings in the Bhai Mati Das Museum have descriptions written in English, Hindi and Gurmukhi. I have provided the English titles and descriptions here, and as they appear in the museum. The text has been edited slightly to improve readability. The name of the painter and the year of creating the painting have been taken from the respective canvas. The paintings are numbered here in the sequence they may appear in to a viewer at the museum; no numbering is done at the museum itself.

In the first decade of independence, the weekly magazine Bichitra (est. 1972) presented itself as the arbiter of a new Bangladesh. Benedict Anderson's ‘imagined community’ through print publication was refracted through the geographic particularism of Bangladesh, which underwent three transformations in the twentieth century – the 1905 partition of Bengal province (reversed in 1911); the 1947 partition of British India, which renamed East Bengal as East Pakistan; and, finally, the 1971 Liberation War that birthed Bangladesh. In the British Indian era, Saogat (est. 1918) had promoted a ‘Bengali Muslim’ voice, and in the lead-up to partition, the feminist magazine Begum (est. 1946) was for a ‘new woman for the new nation’ in East Bengal's new identity as East Pakistan. With the end of the Pakistan era, Bichitra was founded in 1972 by the Bangladesh government. Over the next three decades, the magazine shaped popular attitudes towards governance, gender, culture, diversity, sexuality and more.

On 28 September 1973, Bichitra published a haunting cover with a photograph by Shamsul Islam – three passengers, two women and a young boy, descending airplane stairs. The cover headline was ‘Ora Fire Elo’ (They Have Returned), while the inside story carried a second headline of ‘Ora Ashche’ (They Are Coming). In its second year of publication, Bichitra's mandate for a new imagined community of Bangladesh had belatedly extended to the Bengalis who had been stranded in Pakistan at the end of the 1971 war – the ‘Prisoners of Pakistan’ that Ilyas Ahmad Chattha has written about in this book, breaking five decades of uneasy silence and discomfort.

When the separation was announced, Patna was named as the capital of Bihar and Orissa (see Map 5.1). The new province was hailed by Biharis as a deliverance from obscurity into a “flourishing new life.” While the Bengali papers complained, The Beharee jubilantly began to call Calcutta a “Provincial town” in the “mofassil.” One advertisement exulted, “Who Says Behar is Backward? Perfumes are made in Behar.” To many, Patna was the obvious choice for a capital. For others, though, it was not too late to make a last-minute pitch on behalf of another city. The separation offered many opportunities to maneuver for power and to try to rearrange spatial politics within the new province.

Skirmishes also broke out over the details of the province's boundaries. Linguistic, historical, and ethnographic claims were made to demonstrate the natural belonging of this or that territory to one province or the other. Bihari and Bengali papers warred over the fate of various districts. The interests and opinions of the adivasi (aboriginal) inhabitants of these territories were never brought up, except when, for example, the Amrita Bazar Patrika expressed its dismay at the inclusion of Manbhum in Chota Nagpur, when “the latter is inhabited mainly by half-savage Sonthals, while a large portion of Manbhum is the abode of civilized Bengali-speaking people.”

The final chapter of this book returns to the processes of household and lineage formation discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 to explore how these continued to unfold in southern Panjab during the late nineteenth century. It suggests that rural households continued to rely upon and build their networks of relations to variously extend and defend their control of land in the region, even as the contours and composition of the household were repeatedly renegotiated. The analysis proceeds along two axes. The first of these foregrounds lineage consolidation through the sale, lease, and mortgage of land. It suggests that ra‘iyati lineages deployed and consolidated their wealth of relations to take advantage of the contingent opportunities offered by the colonial rural economy. These opportunities included improvements in irrigation infrastructure, which in certain pockets created a buffer against drought without the attendant damage of rampant saline efflorescence, allowing lineages to expand their hold of land by attracting new members to their fold. Opportunities, however, also came in the form of a rival's misfortune, such as the sale of land occasioned by a village's inability to pay its revenues. In such an eventuality, afflicted rural communities would turn to their relations for loans or to step up as malguzars, or revenue payers, even as outsiders used their relations to attempt to gain a foothold in their rivals’ ‘alaqas.

Following the 6 May 1973 rounding-up of Bengali civil servants in Pakistan, the Bhutto government issued a press release from Pakistan's New York Consulate, captioned ‘Bengalis in Pakistan are receiving Human and Generous Treatment’ (Figure 4.1):

Pakistan's internment scheme for the Bengalis underwent transformations over its three-year existence, 1971–1974. When the Pakistani army's crackdown operations commenced in March 1971, the regime did not expect to undertake protracted internment involving thousands of Bengali soldiers and civil servants. The regime had made no real plans for the challenges arising from the Bengali soldiers’ defections. In the first place, the only option available was to house them in temporary holding areas, such as different barracks and cantonments.

More than twenty months after Bangladesh's liberation in December 1971, over a million people across the subcontinent were still held as hostages and bargaining chips. At stake in this tri-partite negotiation were three groups, namely the Biharis in Bangladesh, the Bengalis in Pakistan and the Pakistani POWs in India. Their respective numbers were hotly contested, as were the competing political narratives surrounding their repatriation. Why did their entwined fates linger on for so long before their respective repatriations? An analysis of the now-available archives shows the critical component that their repatriation was in the political negotiations after the war between its three protagonists – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and Indira Gandhi. This chapter examines the details of the diplomatic negotiations, the actual mechanics underlying these exchanges, the reasons for the failure of the repatriation programme and the final agreement on this. The findings show how Bhutto was able to successfully bargain the Bengalis with the POWs while leaving behind the Biharis in Bangladesh. Conversely, Mujib sought the repatriation of Bengalis in Pakistan in exchange for the Biharis, while insisting on prosecuting Pakistani POWs for ‘war crimes’ under principles akin to the Nuremberg Trials. As for India, it intended to cash in the POWs to crack the Jammu and Kashmir dispute alongside its hope of reducing the strength of the Pakistani army for good.

‘Three Hostage Groups’

On 18 April 1972, Mujib assured the Bangladesh parliament that the government was doing everything possible to return all Bengalis held captive by Pakistan, explaining his ‘personal letters’ to world leaders in this regard.

“My dear Al-Punch! Mister Al-Punch! Brother Al-Punch! Mahatma Al-Punch!” Exuberant greetings regularly began readers’ submissions to Al-Punch, an Urdu newspaper published in Patna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The affectionate verve of these salutations reflects the efforts of the paper's contributors to harness wit and intimacy as they built a public space linking them with readers and writers throughout northern India. By forging these connections, they sought to counter the marginalization of their city, region, and language. Notwithstanding the rising dismissal of old cities like Patna as stagnant and provincial, Al-Punch's disarming wit and collaborative spirit helped it cultivate what we might call an ordinary intellectual public: a zealous community of ordinary intellectuals, in ordinary places, who strove to claim a place in the wider world of print.

One of numerous Indian papers modeled on Punch, the famous London comic weekly, Al-Punch ebulliently embodied the symbiosis between the serious and the sensuous that characterized Indian commercial publishing in this period. As Francesca Orsini has argued, “oral-literate” texts brought new participants into the print sphere and fortified readers’ taste for heterogeneity in language, content, and tone. While many of the era's best-known publications were mouthpieces for individual personalities like the reformist intellectuals Bharatendu Harishchandra, ‘Abd al-Halim Sharar, and Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Al-Punch encouraged intimacy and dialogue with a collaborative ethic centered on its imaginary embodiment, Maulana Al-Punch.