Left Behind By the Nation: ‘stranded Pakistanis’ in Bangladesh

This paper draws on the figure of the ‘stranded Pakistani’ or ‘Bihari’ to interrogate the peculiar silence around the partition of British India in 1947 in the nationalist historiography of Bangladesh. The striking inability of nationalist accounts to accommodate partition, I contend, can be traced to the (apparent) incongruity of East Bengal’s active embrace of the idea of Pakistan in 1947. As the paper makes evident, there cannot be a single narrative of the partition of 1947. Its many contentious histories continue to shape community and nation making practices in South Asia. Tracking the trajectories of ‘stranded Pakistanis’ (a category that was meaningful only after 1971) allows us to map the ways older meanings of partition, and so of Pakistan, were disrupted, displaced or reconstituted by the 1971 war. Bangladesh’s sovereignty ruptured the identity of Urdu-speaking migrants to the former East Pakistan. Those who had previously mediated belonging and citizenship through the idiom of sacrifice for Pakistan found themselves excluded by the terms through which the new nation was redefined in 1971. If the singularity of Bengali nationalism cannot but disavow the moment of partition it is also the case that the histories of 1947 and 1971 cannot be understood apart, as separate and contradictory events. Indeed, I argue that 1947 remains critically important for understanding the cultural politics of citizenship, belonging and national identity in Bangladesh today. The consul banged on the table and said: ‘If you’ve got no passport, you’re officially dead’: But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive. W.H.Auden1 ‘We never left Pakistan, Pakistan has gone and left us.’ Geneva Camp Resident SITES: New Series · Vol 10 No 2 · 2013