Thinking Beyond Nationalism in South Asia: Reading the Local as Postcolonial in Fault Lines: Stories of 1971

Abstract

Although the idea of “postcolonial literature” has been contested by scholars like Aijaz Ahmed (1992), Arif Dirlik (1994), Tabish Khair (2001), and Graham Huggan (2001), the growing geography of global Anglophone literatures continues to contribute to the discussions of literatures from non-Western spaces. While the accusation of misrepresentation against post-colonial literature exists in academic debates, the post-colonial, as Robert Young (2012) has argued, continues to complicate issues of identity, representation and in particular, misrepresentation of Islam in a post 9/11 world. Postcolonialism may still be relevant to re-read the conflict of nationalisms in South Asia. By focusing on the events of 1971, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, we can trace the local variant of the postcolonial. The silenced stories of 1971-especially stories dealing with the problematic of minority identity, genocide, and divided political allegiance-can question national narratives. By investigating the otherwise unspoken accounts of the war, which lie hidden under the Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationalist narratives, we can recast the inadequately captured local stories of national conflict. This paper engages the short story collection Fault Lines: Stories of 1971, to complicate Young’s conceptualization of the postcolonial in the essay, Postcolonial Remains. I will analyze events of 1971 as localized narratives with an aim to complicate Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationalisms and to look beyond the nationalistic propaganda literatures from Bangladesh. This strategy of postcolonial engagement with local narratives aims to inform the discussion surrounding the plight of the Bihari community in Bangladesh, the Bengali collaborator of the Pakistan Army, and Bangladesh genocide in the paper.