About this talk

The break-up of Pakistan in 1971, following a bloody civil war and military defeat at the hands of India, remains shrouded in silence, distortion, and selective remembrance. The war ended with more than 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war captured in East Pakistan, soon to become Bangladesh, and transferred to Indian custody. In response, Pakistan interned a roughly equivalent number of Bengalis in West Pakistan, using them as leverage in negotiations over the repatriation of its POWs. Neither group returned home immediately, making this one of the largest cases of mutual mass internment in the post-1945 world. Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped sources, this book reconstructs that crisis of captivity and foregrounds the experience of Bengalis who, in the aftermath of the Bangladesh War, were rendered rightless citizens marked simultaneously as traitors and enemies. More than fifty years later, their internment remains largely absent from accounts of the most consequential political rupture in Pakistan's history. This book examines both the history of that internment and the conditions that produced its historiographical erasure. The book offers a broader account of citizenship and political belonging in the postcolonial state, contributes to scholarship on internment and encampment in situations of conflict, and engages with the conceptual vocabularies of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, particularly the ideas of "mere life" and "bare life."

→ Book tickets / register (opens in new tab)