10/13/2025
Check out this in person discussion by .chattha thank you for sharing this.
Qalam Pakistan Initiative and the Department of History presents a Book Talk
Title: Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971-1974
Speaker: Ilyas Chattha (LUMS University Lahore)
Dicussant: Naeem Mohaiemen (Columbia)
When: Wed, Oct 22, 2025 at 4pm
Where: Fayerweather Hall 413
Abstract: The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War is most often remembered for its human cost in East Pakistan and the international dispute over Pakistani prisoners of war held in India. Much less known, however, is the parallel story of thousands of Bengalis who were rounded up in West Pakistan and interned in some fifty internment camps between 1971 and 1974. These internees—ranging from senior officials and army officers to ordinary civilians—were suddenly recast from citizens to traitors. This talk explains how suspicion of treason reshaped the meaning of citizenship, eroding belonging and justifying extrajudicial punishment through mass internment.
Speaker Bio: Ilyas Chattha is an Associate Professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is the author of Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974 (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Discussant Bio: Naeem Mohaiemen is Associate Professor & Area Head of Photography, Visual Arts, at Columbia University School of the Arts. He combines photography, films, archives, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings)– beginning from Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and then radiating outward to unlikely, and unstable, transnational alliances and collisions. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (2024) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Drishtipat, 2010); and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (2024) and with Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007).
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