An iconic photograph from the Bangladesh independence war encapsulates a dilemma for a particular victory narrative. This is a story arc that has, inside Bangladesh, focused primarily on the role of the Bengali guerrilla army in the war of independence from Pakistan. The photograph troubles that story, while also containing many occlusions. The image is of the surrender ceremony of December 16, 1971. Signing for the Pakistan army, humiliatingly defeated after a lightning Indian offensive, is Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi. The signatory for the Indian army is Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Arora. There are no official representatives from the Bangladesh forces, although there is one officer (out of uniform) standing at the edge. We are presented with another tryst with destiny, with the key protagonist absent from the table.Footnote ¹

The photograph is a useful starting point to think through how the Bangladesh independence war has primarily been written as a regional struggle between India and Pakistan, with pivotal superpower interventions by the United States and the Soviet Union. Two recent books on the 1971 war, by Gary Bass and Srinath Raghavan, look at the conflict primarily through these optics of regional and superpower dialectic. Their research presents analyses of superpower maneuvering in the White House, and war strategy in the subcontinent. These narratives, and the archives that undergird them, are still the main ones in the academy after four decades of this nation's existence. Pivotal to Bass's book is a famous dissident telegram sent by Archer Blood from the Dhaka Embassy, in defiance of the Nixon administration's support of Pakistan during the war. Bass secured access to declassified documents from the White House tapes, which present Nixon and Kissinger en flagrante in a manner familiar from the Watergate investigations. Raghavan focused on the Indian archives, detailing the Indian state's negotiations with, and maneuvering around, the state players needed to form a coalition in the UN. This was essentially a coalition of the “mildly-willing,” offering enough diplomatic cover for a direct war between India and Pakistan on Bangladeshi territory in December 1971.

Both of these books do commendable work sifting through the American and Indian archives and synthesizing them into a coherent narrative. Bass's storyline plays out as a struggle between the Nixon-Kissinger duo on the one hand, and principled “bravehearts” such as Archer Blood in the Dhaka Embassy and Keating in the Indian Embassy on the other. We are told early on that Blood, a career diplomat, did not join the dissident group of “Foreign Service Officers Against the War,” who wore secret protest buttons inside their jackets. We are perhaps meant to understand that he is not a transformed Nixon-era “peacenik” and, therefore, his horror at the bloodshed in Dhaka is even more principled. Unlike Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, or the chastened Vietnam veteran John Kerry in Winter Soldier (dir: Winterfilm Inc., 1972), Blood still believed in the overall mission of Pax Americana even if not this particular enunciation of it. Blood's inverse is Nixon, presented here as pathologically unhinged, bristling at East Coast liberals, abhorring American adoration of Indian objects (from Hare Krishnas, to George Harrison's sitar-playing friend Ravi Shankar), and calling Indira Gandhi “bitch” and “witch” multiple times on White House transcripts. Henry Kissinger on the other hand is given to grandiose comparisons to the Second World War, and eventually locks himself into a depression when his carefully calibrated plans go awry. This particular duo dynamic is familiar to readers of numerous books that have appeared about this intensely documented period in White House history, starting with the 1974 publication of Jack Anderson's The Anderson Papers.

Raghavan's new history of 1971 has similarities with Richard Sisson and Leo Rose's 1990 book War and Secession. In both works, we gain a view into the power of “the Kashmiri mafia” within the Indian civil service, the contingency plan of transforming the Bangladesh war into a foray into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the contradictions of the Indira Gandhi government's brutal policy with the Naxalites in West Bengal as well as insurgency movements in Nagaland, and the sprawling negotiations to build up a coalition of states that would support India's efforts at the UN. We note with foreboding the Yugoslav government's refusal to support the Indian effort, heralded by Marshal Tito's comment to the Pakistani Ambassador, “Over here in Yugoslavia, we have solved these problems once and for all. There will be no Balkan question ever again in the world” (p. 179). The feelings provoked by that quote are probably similar to the bemusement readers will feel at the last anecdote in Bass's book. When discussing the final, feeble UN resolution that recognized the fait accompli of Bangladesh, Kissinger tells the UN Ambassador, one George Bush, “Don't screw it up the way you usually do.” To which Bush senior replies, “I want a transfer when this is over. I want a nice quiet place like Rwanda” (p. 324).

As with Sisson and Rose's book, Raghavan focuses on the war from the Indian perspective, and this matches archive logic because the Indian role, both from the Indian archives, and the UN proceedings, is a dense and accessible body of documents. As Bass pointed out at his book launch, and as Raghavan also notes, the Pakistan archives of 1971 have so far remained closed. The Bangladesh archives are generally open (although of inconsistent quality), but they are largely absent from both books. This is a significant omission in both – Bangladeshi history, without very many Bangladeshi voices. Some of this may also be linked to considerations of publishing “hooks” and marketing strategies. In public talks, Bass has cited UN Ambassador Samantha Power as a reference point for how he thinks American diplomacy should be conducted, and the book includes an epilogue with a reference to the “special American responsibility to make amends to the Bangladeshi people.” The book's Manichean duality between an insecure, friendless, and intellectual-hating Nixon, and the principled, educated, and selfless Archer Blood sets up a Cain and Abel origin story that fits with an idea of episodes like 1971 as an exception to more “principled” paths for American power. Bass seems to suggest that the problem is not that American overseas power is destined to make bad choices, but only that the wrong hands were at the helm.

Raghavan's book is an insider look at Indian diplomatic and military maneuvering, and its locus is around when India intervened, and whether it should have intervened sooner. What the Bengali rebel commanders wanted is given less attention, and perhaps that reflects the nature of Indian documents related to this period. The war planners inside Indira Gandhi's government were partially motivated by considerations of Kashmir, Naxalite blowback, and which forces inside the Mukti Bahini (Bengali guerrilla army) were likely to constitute a future friendly neighbor, and the book reflects that reality. What is not present in either book is sufficient insight into the motivation and actions of the Bangladeshi protagonists, whether Mukti Bahini leaders, Awami League politicians, refugees, or the peasants who were the ultimate cannon fodder.

The imbalance of sources is striking in all the books on this topic. In the 1990 book by Sisson and Rose, there were 32 interviewees from Pakistan, 49 from India, 39 from the United States, and 12 from Bangladesh. As I have noted elsewhere, Sarmila Bose's polemic Dead Reckoning contains an even more unbalanced list.Footnote ² In the Bass book, Shahudul Haque is the one Bangladeshi interviewee I was able to trace, although there may be others. In Raghavan's book, although Liberation War Museum director Akku Chowdhury is thanked, the significant Bangladeshi interviewees appear to be the senior lawyers Kamal Hossain and Amirul Islam. However, a laundry list of untapped sources does not automatically suggest a path to future research. A more comprehensive set of Bangladeshi sources, if they privilege the elite experience, will also erase the peasant- and working-class mobilization within the pre-war and war effort. Salil Tripathi's recent book on 1971, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (Aleph, 2014), goes deeper into Bangladeshi sources – but some of his key sources are titans of current civil society and therefore the same problems of top-down narrative remain.

There is a Bengali phrase “adar byapari rakhe na jahajer khobor” (“the ginger merchant knows not when the ships arrive”), which suggests that the small cogs of human society self-limit themselves into narrow spaces of interest. Since the individual merchants' load for the day is minuscule, it supposedly concerns him little whether the ship arriving is of British, Russian, or Chinese origin. Something of a similar viewpoint, with a debt to what W. R. Connor calls “commander narratives,” suffuses the scholarship around the 1971 war. This war even had, in its finale, a superpower face-off on the high seas – the US initiative of sending the Seventh Fleet from the Gulf of Tonkin was countered by the Soviet dispatching of a nuclear-armed flotilla from Vladivostok. Therefore, war scholars may feel a strong rationale to focus on the commanders, on the high seas and in oval offices.

In line with that method, and reflecting the dense archives available in the United States and India, Bass and Raghavan have done excellent scholarship on the larger-than-life figures occupying the world stage during the war. Nixon as pathological paranoiac, Kissinger as smooth mandarin, Indira as shrewd operator, Mujib as endgame negotiator, Bhutto as nervy obstructionist, and Yahya as drunken maverick – these are the portrayals that usually run through narratives of the war. What remains underexplored are the Bangladeshi players, at the granular level, in their own war. Sheikh Mujib's negotiation strategy, led by his legal advisor Kamal Hossain (later the author of the Bangladesh constitution), was documented in Sisson and Rose and resurfaces in Raghavan (though less so in Bass). However, what were the ground events to which these players were responding? To take just one example, Mujib's decision to arrive at one negotiation meeting flying a black flag was considered an insult, leading to a “breakdown.” However, what were the forces on the ground that Mujib was responding to, and perhaps even trying to corral and contain? Was he haunted by the specter of the student leaders who had already raised the flag of “independent Bangla Desh” on the Dhaka University campus? Was he responding to a radicalized Bengali left that did not think he was going far or fast enough?

The fateful negotiations, whose breakdown led to the brutal war of 1971, were always conducted with one eye on the negotiation partners (Yahya, Bhutto) and the other on a roiling urban and rural countryside. Those turbulent street forces are absent even in the Bangladeshi archive that also focuses on grand narrative and brinkmanship negotiations. Simply shifting Raghavan or Bass's focus to the Bangladesh archive would not resolve the issue of submerged narratives. As Anjali ArondekarFootnote ³ has pointed out, gaping absences in the archive can be used to look at the process of subjectification made possible by building that record. If the radical peasant fighter was left out of official records, what national aspirations and exclusionary fears among the record-keepers guided such a process? Standing in the shadow of “giants,” the “ginger merchant” was more crucial in the buildup and conduct of this war than is acknowledged; a crucial next step for researchers is to begin to read into, and against, the many absences in Bangladesh's history ledgers.