Liberation - the Colonel: Revisiting 1971 India-Pakistan War

The third India-Pakistan war of 1971 that culminated into the transformation of East Pakistan into a separate nation - Bangladesh - has left a lasting imprint on the subcontinental history and geopolitics. It has also fashioned national consciousness in the region to a great extent. When former chief of Army staff general Bikram Singh, commissioned in 1972, assumed office in 2012, Indian Army was said to have taken a generational leap. The narratives of this war have been carefully preserved in war diaries and official histories, which are yet to be declassified, and visual records - some of which have assumed iconic status like "the surrender" photograph - in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In addition to that, plural representations of the 71 war are found scattered in the literature and popular culture of the three countries.

Military conquests, or debacles, have always been intricately linked to the ebb and tide of cultural and literary productions in a country, owing to their sociological and economic ramifications. Martial rhetoric often feeds the nationalism discourse and at the same time lends itself to be appropriated by the same. In a functional democracy like India, the society's consent and dissent regarding militarism and peace do not emerge evenly. Some sections of the society see military as a glorious institution, which not only protects the nation-state in the face of external threats but also lays down rubrics of model conduct worthy of emulation by the civilian counterparts. On the other end of the spectrum are those who see military as the face of draconian "establishment" that crushes ruthlessly any dissent by its own people in the name of national security. Between these two standpoints rest a variety of attitudes towards military ranging from treating it as a necessary evil to ignoring it completely. The literature and rhetoric of our times represent both.

Recently, two books have come out on the 1971 India-Pakistan war: Bloombury India's Liberation: Bangladesh - 1971 and Aleph's The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy. While the former is an anthology of "First-hand untold, action stories from the war zone," put together by two war veterans major general Dhruv C Katoch of India and lieutenant colonel Quazi Sajjad Ali Zahir of Bangladesh, the latter is an outcome of Salil Tripathi's extensive research on the subject since 1986. The two books are markedly different in their tone and methodology and yet their purpose converges: Bringing alive a war to the consciousness of a generation that seems to have forgotten it.

Both the books invite the reader to judge them by their respective covers. The covers are storytellers in their own right. Liberation's sepia toned cover with a cartographic background is neatly blended with photographs of Mukti Bahini fighters and Indian soldiers. There is action on cover itself, while the map contextualises it. The cover image of The Colonel is a photograph by Raghu Rai, who captured the plight of East Pakistani refugees crossing over to India. Tripathi has vividly described the photograph on page 112 of the book. The despair and desolation of Bangladeshis in 1971 is crystallised in this single frame: Amidst signs of abject penury, a half-clothed woman lies on her pregnant belly. A new nation was yet to be born.

The purported intent of Liberation is to "make you see history through the eyes of the actors on the stage" as well as to "develop an abiding interest in military history and a deeper understanding of the trials and tribulations of men in war". As per one of the editors, the book is "specifically intended at motivating the youth of the country". The military was, and still is, one major state institution involved in the construction of citizenship and rendering it meaningful. Countries like the USA and Israel have been successful in bringing their respective militaries to the mainstream discourse of nation-building. However, militarisation of culture comes with its own dangers and an incessant peddling of military values often breeds anti-militaristic discourse as observed by scholars like Gal Levy and Orna Sasson-Levy of Israel. They note that "the fusion between the state's political ideology and formal education begins in pre-school settings, where Israeli children are exposed to themes of persecution, heroism, and war". As a result, "An anti-militaristic attitude has arisen, not only in academia but throughout society". Fortunately, despite its didactic editorial claim, Liberation scuttles past this propagandist tendency with its utterly readable stories that are shorn off any political agenda.

Bringing together the accounts of the Mukti Bahini fighters and Indian soldiers, the book "paradrops" the reader into the war zone where earthy humour and death coexist. The collaborative work alerts readers in India and Bangladesh to the role the "other" played in this war. Divided into five sections, the book largely follows the chronology of the war. From novice guerrilla fighters, dissenting East Pakistan soldiers to the elite India paratroopers, the memoirs and biographical accounts bring all of them together. The last memoir is titled 43 Years Later: Revisiting the War. The legacy of the liberation war lives on.

Tripathi makes this unquiet legacy the subject of his book which is remarkable for its lyricism without compromising on hard-hitting journalism. Fed by almost three decades of research that includes museum visits, close reading of existing literature and personal interviews, Tripathi's book gives a vivid account of the war. The eponymous colonel refusing to repent is lieutenant colonel Farooq Rahman who was one of the Bangladeshi officers plotting and participating in Sheikh Mujibur Rehman's assassination in 1975. The legacy of the 1971 war is as bloody as the war itself.

After narrating his meeting with Farooq Rahman and giving a detailed account of the 2010 hanging of Mujib's assassins in the Prologue, Tripathi takes a plunge in the history of Bengal to set the stage for 1971. Recounting a history of disasters and turbulence since 300 BCE, the narrative inches near the year that saw the birth of a new nation: bruised, gasping yet determined to live. The author's unremitting quest to contextualise the war and its legacy, that still sees no reconciliation, is what makes this book special.

Whether it is the controversy around the number of people annihilated by the brute Pakistani Army and their collaborators, the plight of Birangonas (violated women of 1971), or even the cultural responses to this war, the book tells it all. It does not give definitive answers, for open-endedness is a desirable curse of modern historical writing. In the absence of adequate documentation, it would only be fraudulent to make claims and Tripathi refrains from that. The book ends lamenting the fact that there is still no "closure" in Bangladesh: The country still writhes under the burden of history.

Both Liberation and The Colonel open a window to a significant spectacle in the subcontinental history and encourage scholars from different disciplines to revisit the 1971 war. There is no jingoistic celebration of the war, yet those who participated in it have been imbued with glory. While Liberation is a desirable addition to war literature from India, The Colonel will be a work to reckon with in understanding this body of literature.