OVER the past two decades, the study of Pakistan’s post-independence history has grown considerably richer. As previously hidden or uncovered information sources and archives become available, and as intellectual tools to make sense of discrete events evolve, our understanding of the past grows both sharper and more complex.

Within this growing repository of work, there are broadly two strands of scholarship. The first uses archives, cultural forms, and memory to reconstruct mainstream narratives of state-building, political and social change, and popular agency. This type of work is usually helpful in making sense of how the present came to be and in pushing back against homogenisation or linearity in the narration of the past.

The second type of work is the uncovering of historical occurrence: events, trends, and happenings that have never been recorded because of historical amnesia and indifference or purposeful suppression. While this distinction is never neat, it is this second type that is on vivid display in historian Ilyas Chattha’s recently released book, Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan 1971-1974.

An outcome of a historian tugging at the thread of a chance, childhood encounter in central Punjab, Chattha’s work documents how ethnic Bengalis in (West) Pakistan were subjected to confinement for periods of up to three years in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s independence. As the title of the book suggests, this action was driven by heightened, paranoiac suspicion around the loyalty of ethnic Bengalis, given the ethnonationalist currents of the secessionist movement and a central........

© Dawn