It was only as an adult long after 1971 that I learnt about the internment camps where Bengalis in then West Pakistan had been detained. My source was an essay titled ‘Crossing Borders on the Wings of Language’, by Hafiza Nilofar Khan, in Borderlines, Vol. 1 (2014), an anthology published by Voices Breaking Boundaries, my sister Sehba Sarwar’s nonprofit in Houston (now archived at the University of Houston).
The ten-year-old Hafiza whose father is in the Pakistan Air Force and proud of her prowess in Urdu suddenly finds herself and her family in the situation that Lahore-based historian Ilyas Chatta details in his recently published book Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan 1971-1974 (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Continue readingFiled under: Human rights, Progressive politics | Tagged: 1971, Arundhati Roy, Bangladesh, books, history, Pakistan | Leave a comment »
Journeys to democracy 