Final Year Project

Project Title

Hum ke Thehre Ajnabi: a Spectral Account of the Severance from East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971

Description

The history of East Pakistan in 1971, the making of Bangladesh, is documented in a way that the psychological rupture of the violence that occurred does not make its way to the collective consciousness of the third and fourth generation Pakistanis, or even the first and second generation Pakistanis who were not directly affected by what was happening across the borders. How do we talk about such histories in discontinuities across generations? My mother came to Karachi from Dhaka in March 1971 at the age of 9, and was never able to return due to the radical shifts in border and immigration policies between what was once a collectively imagined entity. This project is centered on the severance of 1971 with East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, through my witnessing of the one who witnessed the unfolding of these traumatic events that have been subjected to immense erasure in the 'archive'.