DefinePK

Abstract

The present article is a critical and reflective reading across three texts produced in the wake of the 1971 War between Pakistan (formerly East Pakistan) and India culminating in the secession and making of Bangladesh. The selected texts which include Moni Mohsin’s End of Innocence, Sorayya Khan’s Noor and Aquila Ismail’s Of Martyrs and Marigold are read as historiographic metafiction since they stay at the continuum of a real historical event and its imaginative narrativization. These texts unearth some interesting angles to view the 1971 conflict by offering how authors’ subjective voices politicize the process of historiography and, in turn, chisel out (alter)narrative perspectives to remember and re-member the otherwise forgotten aspects of national history. The subjective albeit historically-complex angle of different authors offers the possibility of viewing differing voices which are not complicit with a mystified view of nationalist history. In this way, without subscribing to an absolute historical referent, the 1971 War fiction becomes a valid historical account that problematizes the totalizing categories of victim vs. villain in the mainstream official histories from both Pakistan and Bangladesh.