Introduction:
- Previous articles on 1971
- Previous articles on the general history of India
- Reading List of Primary Sources for the War
Before I can launch into the content of this article, it is important for me to mention that this article is going to be markedly different to the narrative style of articles that I have so far published on this website. Instead of using this space to tell you a story or make a historical point with the use of primary source evidence, I will be talking – at some length – about the primary sources that I have used in many of my previous articles. It is important, for anyone studying or interested in history, to understand the sources that tell that history. It is difficult to come to such an understanding by yourself, unless you have specific training in the matter. It is for this reason that I am writing this piece.
The primary sources that I will be focusing on are from the 1971 India-Pakistan War, as that is one of my two areas of expertise and is – by some margin – my most popular series of posts. It is important to understand these sources because the 1971 conflict, though now overlooked by many, shaped (and continues to shape) the lives of over 2 billion people. And to begin to understand these sources that tell this extremely important story, it must be understood that they are divided into 2 categories.
- Official: These sources have been produced by the governments and militaries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, the USSR (now Russia), the US and the UK
- These are most commonly used by academics – and have some major limitations
- They include declassified intelligence reports, briefings, after action reports, parliament papers, etc.
- Private: These sources have been written by the people who experienced the war – most commonly (though not exclusively) these sources are Indian or Bangladeshi
- They have not received widespread academic attention, yet, for reasons that will be explained
- They include published memoirs, diaries, letters, interview transcripts and material evidence
The Sources:
This article, for the sake of space and time, will focus on the second category of sources. Each category is filled with diverse documents that tell unique stories and have been used by academics and non-academics in equally diverse ways. To lump a description or analysis of both of them into one long block of writing, will either discredit their uniqueness or make the article far too unwieldy for even the staunchest of academics to read. Despite this, I believe it is important to provide a rudimentary and somewhat incomplete description of the “Official” sources and how they have been used in the creation of histories of the 1971 India-Pakistan War.
To do so, I will be using three main examples. Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram, Srinath Raghavan’s 1971: A Global History and Avinash Paliwal’s India’s Near East: A New History. They have all narrated the history of 1971 through the use of the “Official” sources. Each of them tell a very different story. Bass weaves an incredible tale of how Pakistan’s actions – i.e. genocide – in East Pakistan was known to Washington and was wilfully ignored and supported. Raghavan’s book provides, in astonishing detail, an account of how the war of 1971 – and the 2 decades of discontent that led to it – was perceived by governments in South Asia and far beyond, focusing specifically on Washington, Moscow and Beijing. Paliwal’s history is one of how the Indian government understood the developments in East Pakistan and India’s wider North East and Myanmar. What do these three authors have in common? On the face of it, nothing. They’re all talking about wildly different aspects of the conflict of 1971.
But what they have in common is that they all drew from the same library of primary sources. The Indian National Archives, the UK National Archives, the Bangladesh Genocide Archives, declassified CIA and US DOD papers, the Library of Congress, declassified Indian MOD and intelligence papers, and declassified communications with Moscow and Beijing. If one were to thumb through the bibliography of these three books, a long list of common primary sources will be found. While they have created unique histories, they have stuck to the same wider framework – a trend that can be seen in the historiography of all of India’s wars.[1] What this has meant is that even if they tell different histories, they have been able to use only one type of frame reference; the top-down oft-sanitised retellings of the war as presented to cabinet ministers by senior officers of the armed or intelligence forces. They have adopted these points of view in their work for many different reasons – the chief among them being that it is by far the easiest body of sources to access and that these academics are primarily trained as political scientists, meaning that they are most familiar with these types of sources.
But this means that modern accounts of the war have almost systematically ignored the experiences of those who lived the war.
Some of the “Private” Primary Sources of 1971:
If you were to go back through the source lists for the articles I’ve written on the 1971 war so far, you’d notice a few common names. Brigadier Siddique Salik’s A Witness to Surrender, Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo’s In Quest of Freedom: The War of 1971, Commodore Ranjit B. Rai’s A Nation and its Navy at War or Brigadier Balram Singh Mehta’s Burning Chaffees to name a few. If you were to analyse these sources, some notable things would immediately jump out at you. The first: they are almost all Indian or Bangladeshi. Very few Pakistani soldiers, be they officers or men, published their accounts of the war. Brigadier Salik’s A Witness to Surrender is one of the rare exceptions. The second thing you’d notice is that they’ve all been published or written by senior officers, with not one being below the rank of Brigadier or equivalent.
This is not to say that the other side of the story is untold; the side of the enlisted man or the affected civilian. The latter is extremely readily available, in fact. Yasmin Saikia’s interviews of civilians (mostly women) affected by the war is among the most famous of these.[2] Also important to mention is Col. Zahir’s (a retired Bangladeshi Colonel) relentless efforts to publish the memories of Bengali Muslims and Hindus that were direct victims of the Pakistani regime’s violence. These can be found all over the internet in the archives of various newspapers, but the best place to consult them is Gen. Cardozo’s In Quest of Freedom, where a long list of Col. Zahir’s work has been published.
Aside from traditional media, there has also been a concerted effort to interview veterans of the war on YouTube. This effort has been almost exclusively spear-headed by the Indian war correspondent and seasoned journalist Nitin Gokhale and his media house Bharat Shakti. Aside from these, smaller channels have also interviewed veterans of the war. However, the interviewees have been retired senior officers from the three services. This means that though the interviews are valuable, they often are identical (as regards their historical content) with the memoirs published by senior officers that commanded divisions, fleets and squadrons in the war.
Therefore, aside from the small library of interviews of civilians (Zahir and Khan), the majority of the published “Private” sources on the war have been produced – almost exclusively – by one group of people. This means that they, though they may tell the individual stories, provide the same historical context as each other. Given that the stories being narrated are from the perspectives of men who were in charge of large units or entire Army Corps’, they tend to lean towards a very to-the-point military history style of writing. This is by no means a criticism – almost all my articles on 1971 follow this trend and draw from these sources. Aside from these, there also exist the memoirs or diaries that have been published by senior officers that were, at the time of 1971, very junior. The best examples are Brigadier Mehta’s Burning Chaffees or Brigadier R. B. Singh’s Engineering the 1971 Victory March. Both these officers were junior officers in 1971; Mehta was a Captain and Singh a Major. As such, they tell a very, very different story to the ones told by Generals, Field Marshals, Commodores and Admirals.
Having noted that, I can now make another important distinction in the sources.
“Top Down” vs “Bottom Up”:
In most forms of history, the narrative that the historian is constructing adopts one of two perspectives. It will either adopt the “Top Down” or the “Bottom Up” perspective. This is not a rule of thumb, of course – far from it. Many, in fact a huge chunk of historians eschew either lens and invent a new method or adopt a niche one. But in the retellings of conflicts around the world, it is very hard to escape this dichotomy. As explored above, in the historiography of India’s wars after independence the lens adopted by nearly every historian and academic has been “Top Down”. This is due to availability of sources, as already demonstrated.
The majority of easily available primary sources, in fact, rule out any sort of “Bottom Up” narratives of India’s wars. For a few wars, specifically the 1962 Sino-Indian War or the 1965 Indo-Pak War, it is virtually impossible to locate primary sources from even General Officers, meaning the only recourse academics have is to use “Official” sources. In others, specifically the Indian Intervention in the Sri Lankan Civil War, it is difficult but not impossible to locate personal accounts but the popular attitude towards the war (both in India and Sri Lanka) has discouraged the publication of any meaningful primary sources. Of India’s wars, only 2 can be mined effectively and easily for sources that can allow historians to construct a “Bottom Up” history. These are the 1971 Indo-Pak War and the 1999 Kargil War.[3]
Col. Zahir’s publications of victims’ memories, Yasmin Zaikia’s Women, War and the Creation of Bangladesh and books such as those published by Brig. Mehta and Brig. Singh, are examples of sources that can allow for such a “Bottom Up” history. But other untapped veins of memory remain to be explored. These are personal diaries that can be found in Regimental Centres as well as Regimental Records. Though it seems like these are behind an unbreechable wall of bureaucratic red tape, it is easier than one may imagine to get access to these and use them in academic writing. Of course there are the personal documents that veterans and their families have maintained long after the war. Recently there has been some effort made to properly collate these, such as the Indian Air Force’s 2023 (and ongoing) mission to collect and store (digitally) the logbooks, flight diaries, photos and printed documents that rest within the homes of its retired pilots. An individual historian can also do the same, though much more slowly, provided they know someone in the forces that can put them in touch with older veterans.
What it boils down to is memory. These are stories that many remember vividly. And in that previous paragraph, I have only mentioned what might be done to preserve the memories of Indian veteran officers. There are so many other groups of people that experienced the war. Very notable among them is the journalists trapped in the Intercontinental Hotel in Dacca, from where they recorded 9 months of violence with unforeseen access to the fields of battle and of massacre. They maintained detailed diaries, such as Peter Kann’s Dacca Diary, which is the only one to have been published. In the Indian state of West Bengal, thousands of villages played host to over 10 million East Pakistani refugees throughout the 9 months of violence. The memories in those villages, stored within the story telling of the village elders, must also be preserved. And there is much more than can be done to record the history from the other side; the Pakistani side. But that is much easier theorised than practiced.
There is much more to the 1971 conflict than any historian, academic or writer has been able to put to paper – and this is through no fault of their own. To be able to tell a faithful story of the most important moment of violence in Asian history since the 1947 Partition of India, the library of available sources must be expanded.
[1] Example: A. Subramaniam, A Military History of India Since 1972
[2] Saikia’s Women War and the Creation of Bangladesh
[3] To explain why this is so would probably need another 2,000 words! But suffice it to say that it has to do with recency and the fact that – especially in India – they are extremely popular victories.
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