Keynote: Yasmin Saikia

Love and Hate in South Asia: Rethinking humanity after 1971
Yasmin Saikia, Arizona State University
At Critical Approaches to South Asian Studies Workshop, York University
February 26, 2015, 4:30 – 6:00 pm
Room 519 Kaneff Tower, York University, Toronto
Open to all.
Please register by emailing sargyork@yorku.ca with your first and last name

Remembered experiences of violence, humiliation, and loss suffered in the 1971 war of Bangladesh provide potent materials for rethinking a new narrative bonding victim and perpetrator communities in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Using the war as my entry point, I explore survivors oral narratives to understand how love for nation and hate toward their perceived enemies created and revealed the distances with others to violate them. More than four decades later, survivors – men and women from Bangladesh and Pakistan – search for a human identity beyond national labels for imagining history in the subcontinent that is discontinuous but interconnected. The “narrative hospitality” (Ricoeur, 1992) of victims and perpetrators exchanging memories for self-recognition and intersubjective relationship with others suggests a possibility of recognizing and coexisting with a variety of others in memory. The quest of survivors is not to find identity, but to create a common ground signaling an awareness of human connections for achieving true human freedom in the sub-continent.

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Yasmin Saikia is Professor of History and the first holder of the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies at Arizona State University. Originally from Assam in northeast India, Yasmin had her early education at Aligarh Muslim University (India) and completed her graduate and doctoral work at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of three monographs, an edited book, and numerous articles and book chapters. Her recently published book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (Duke University Press, 2011) explores the story of the war of 1971 highlighting the memories of victims and perpetrators of violence spread across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the book, she shows how individual acts and memories are woven into a collective narrative telling the story of survivors reclaiming insāniyat, humanity, which was a crucial lesson of the war. Insāniyat is at the heart of survivors’ message offering a possibility to rethink a new relationship between Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.

Yasmin is writing her fourth single authored monograph tentatively titled ‘Freedom Imagining: The uncolonizable Muslims of British India.’ Additionally, she is writing the sequel to her 2011 book on the 1971 war. In her current book she focuses on the memories of the perpetrators of the war. The book is tentatively titled ‘Perpetrators Speak: Memory at the edge of national history.’ She is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including the Harry Frank Guggenheim fellowship, Fulbright Research Fellowship for Pakistan, fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, as well as the American Institutes of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indian Studies. Her second book, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in Assam (Duke University Press, 2004) won the best book prize from the Nehru Memorial Library and Museum, New Delhi, India, in 2005. Her recent book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh won the prestigious Oral History Association Biennial award for 2013.