Collections of objects of Sikh history and Sikh art exist in the hands of both private individuals and institutions. The most famous examples of private collections include those of the maharajas of Patiala and Nabha in India, the Kapany Collection and the Khanuja Family Collection in the USA (Taylor and Dhami 2017) and the Toor Collection in the United Kingdom (UK). A selection from the Khanuja family's private collection is now displayed in a dedicated gallery in the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, USA (Taylor 2022), and, similarly, a part of the Kapany Collection is housed in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Canada. Recently, in 2022, the Lahore Museum in Pakistan inaugurated a Sikh Gallery with objects from the time of Ranjit Singh (Ahmed 2022). The items in these collections range from handwritten and illustrated manuscripts (including of the Guru Granth Sahib), miniature paintings, sculptures, clothes, weapons, jewellery, coins, pieces of furniture—mostly associated with the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the colonial period, including paintings done or commissioned by colonial officials and early photographs of the Sikhs and their shrines (c. mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries). The Sikh Gallery at Lahore Museum, for example, displays portraits of the members of the royal family (of Ranjit Singh), administrative records of the court and even personal items like prayer beads of the maharaja. Illustrated folios of a nineteenth-century Janamsakhi are among the paintings available in the Kapany Collection. Some collections also include modern art by Sikh artists such as the UK-based Singh Twins and some of the artists whose works were discussed earlier in the book (such as Sobha Singh, Jarnail Singh, R. M. Singh and Devender Singh).

The Bengalis in Pakistan are starving…. One in ten is suffering from an absolute shortage of food. Twice that have protein and vitamin deficiencies, including women and children…. Harassment and discrimination have become part of everyday life…. The great impact has been to upper-class Bengalis, who are now treated as ‘niggers,’ or lower class…. But the small amount of additional discrimination to the lower classes affects many more people already at the edge of the cliff….

These are the observations of Jack Smith's report ‘Stranded Bengalis in Pakistan: The Winter 1972’, which provides ordinary Bengalis’ post-war experiences in Pakistan, detailing the despair the community faced and its response to it, from resilience to resistance. Even though most ordinary Bengalis were not interned, they were still under strict surveillance by the Pakistani government. They were not only subjected to curfews, censorship and exclusion from sensitive areas, but were also barred from leaving the country. Their experiences remain outside mainstream historiography. This chapter examines the internment experiences of Bengalis beyond camps and their discursive efforts to establish self-support networks while maintaining connections to their motherland, Bangladesh. It examines how the Bengalis responded to their wartime adversity by building a self-sustaining support system in captivity through a proliferation of Bengali associations, particularly through the actions of the Bengali governing body of the BWRC.

This chapter shows how the Bengalis drew upon their own meagre resources for a time and organised a rich array of assistance projects, such as free kitchens, schools, loan schemes and medical facilities, for those who needed help during the long post-wartime captivity, 1971–1974.

In April 1971, twenty-two-year-old Alak Chandra was dismissed from work in the Karachi Textile Mills and his residence, along with ten other Bengali employees who were domiciles of Faridpur district of East Pakistan. His luggage and cash, totalling Rs 900 – savings of his last five years – were snatched away. In desperation, he tried twice to cross from Sindh into Barmer (Rajasthan, India) and Indian border security forces sent him back to Pakistan. The third time he refused to budge, declaring that he would rather be shot dead in India than go back to Karachi. ‘If I am shot in India, at least my body will be burnt’, he told the Indian border authorities, ‘but if I am shot in Pakistan, they will leave my body for the dogs.’

This was the start of a trickle that by the summer of 1972 saw close to 20,000 Bengalis escape from Pakistan overcoming the hurdles of passport and foreign exchange controls.2 An editorial in the Dawn on 3 December 1972 underlined the hardships facing the ‘stranded Bengalis’ in Pakistan and their ceaseless attempts to escape thus:

Organised in three sections, this chapter starts with the anticipatory flight of wealthy families from West Pakistan before moving to the different ground and maritime routes of escape. It concludes with the state response to the Bengalis’ escape.

Bhai Mati Das Museum has a large collection of paintings on display (169) and a majority of these were not prepared for the purpose of exhibition in a museum. They were made over a period of three decades, from the 1970s to early 2000s, by the Punjab & Sind Bank (PSB) for publication in their annual calendars. These canvases which lay in the bank's collection for several years were subsequently donated to the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) for display in the Bhai Mati Das Museum. This chapter addresses three main questions: Why does a prominent public sector bank commission calendars on Sikh history? How were these paintings made and who made them? What is the relationship between the bank, the museum and Sikh heritage?

The PSB was founded in the year 1908, during the rise of the Singh Sabha movement, by three prominent Sikhs: Bhai Vir Singh, Sardar Trilochan Singh and Sardar Sunder Singh Majithia.

The Singh Sabha was a highly influential reform movement among the Sikhs which began in the 1870s in Punjab. The main objectives of the movement were social, religious and educational improvement of the Sikh community. The emphasis was on returning to a pure, original form of Sikhism, away from the influences of other religious traditions, which were considered deviant or corrupt. This was done through the establishment of several institutions to guide Sikh religious and educational practices and the publication of popular tracts on Sikh history and religion.

This exploration has shown that the 1971 wartime experience of Bengalis residing in Pakistan as citizens remained rather distinct from the concepts of ‘mere life’ and ‘bare life’ theorised by Arendt and Agamben. Unlike Nazi Germany, which denationalised Jews before gassing them in concentration camps, the Pakistani government interned Bengalis as disenfranchised citizens. This distinguishes the Bengali experience of human rights alienability in the nation state system even when individuals have not ceased to be citizens of a state. The concept of human rights alienability hinges not on citizenship alone, but on a deeper sense of belonging within a political community – the right to have rights as Arendt puts it. Bengalis were still Pakistani citizens; the state did not rescind their citizenship, that is, they were not even stateless in a strictly legal sense. Nonetheless, they had devolved into rightless citizens, or mere bodies.

By labelling them as ghaddar because of their ethnolinguistic identity, the Pakistani state stripped them of their entitlement to a right-bearing political subjectivity as citizens, hence making it possible to subject them to violence. By invoking colonial-era laws for the DPRs, the state legally notified zones of exception in the form of an internment camp where the Bengalis were to be kept. In this way, the Bengali citizen was transformed into an internal other through the labelling of ghaddar, whose bodies had to be marked out both legally and socially as that of a traitor, after which they could be interned without any consequences. The legally calibrated disenfranchisement of citizens and their transformation into traitors was an act of retribution but a calculated move to secure the Pakistani POWs from India and personnel from Bangladesh. It was also tied to precluding the POWs from being tried for war crimes and to recognising Bangladesh as a sovereign state.

In the spring of 1972, the Ennals Mission, led by David Ennals, a British MP, visited Pakistan. The mission was informed by some members of the ‘stranded Bengali community’ in Pakistan that ‘a large number of senior Pakistani officers [have sought] to stop the Bengali officers for coming to the offices. They threatened action against the Bengali officials, if Government did not accept their demand.’1 Picking up from the previous chapter and offering a counterpart to the story of the capture and internment of the Bengali military personnel, this chapter explores the wartime experience of the Bengali civil servants. It traces their journey from being citizens and serving officials/officers of the Pakistani state to becoming marked collectively as a potential ‘traitor’ community, a threat to national security. Their situation highlights an important dimension of the idea of citizenship and the making of disenfranchised citizens of a nation state in a wartime-like situation. Some of the most detailed accounts of internment come from these servicemen who belonged to the privileged classes of Pakistan's Bengali community and were to be used as hostages in the international negotiations to free the captured Pakistani POWs. This chapter seeks to explain how and why.

The Bengali civil servants were interned in two stages: first, in their homes during and immediately after the Pakistan army surrendered in December 1971; second, in different camps after the Bangladeshi government announced the ‘trial of war crimes’ of the Pakistani POWs in early 1973. The chapter begins by explaining the Bengali servicemen's dismissal from government services before moving on to tracing their mass internment.

On 1 January 1972, a fortnight after the Pakistan army's surrender in Dacca (now known as Dhaka) signalling Bangladesh's liberation, some 300 civil servants in Islamabad submitted a petition, ‘The West Pakistan Class 1 Civil Servant Petition’, to President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto asking ‘to remove all Bengali officials immediately from government secretariats’ and, similarly, to recall ‘all East Pakistan officials in the Pakistan foreign missions and embassies….’ They were considered dangerous and were possibly communicating with ‘enemies’, and they were to be secluded from the rest of the public and confined to one locality in Islamabad, the petition continued, so that ‘their activities and movements could be easily checked’. Further, it carried on, ‘interning allowance admissible to East Pakistani officials working in West Pakistan should be disallowed’, and all their movable and immovable assets, including ‘gold whether in the pockets, family possessions or with the individuals should be taken … till the situation is well under control’. This remarkable petition, most of whose signatories were Punjabi bureaucrats, concluded thus:

This petition irrevocably changed the position of Bengalis residing in West Pakistan, who were no longer regarded as fellow citizens but as disenfranchised citizens or enemies of the state.

Gurdwara Sisganj in Delhi is one of the holiest Sikh shrines in India. It stands prominently on Chandni Chowk, the main street in the former Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (now popularly referred to as purani Dilli, or old Delhi). The site of Sisganj is immensely significant for its association with the martyrdom of the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur (1621–75), and also for its location, very close to the Red Fort, the seat of the Mughals. Sikh tradition2 informs us that Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (1618–1707) was forcing a group of Kashmiri brahmins to convert to Islam, and they approached Guru Tegh Bahadur for help. The Guru declared that if Aurangzeb could convert him, everyone else would convert; if not, the emperor must leave them alone. The Guru, along with three of his disciples, Bhai Mati Das, Bhai Sati Das and Bhai Dyala, was imprisoned at the Mughal kotwali (prison) in Chandni Chowk. The three Sikhs were tortured in the Guru's presence to scare him into converting to Islam. It is said that Bhai Mati Das was sawn in half, Bhai Sati Das was wrapped in cotton and burnt and Bhai Dyala was boiled alive. Even after witnessing the torture and death of his followers, the Guru refused to convert.

Long-standing racialised stereotypes of Bengalis in the eastern wing of the country fed into the narrative surrounding the community in West Pakistan. The stereotypes drew inspiration from Orientalist narratives, which were reinforced by the growing political tensions in the post-colonial state. Successive West Pakistani governments were accustomed to branding everything as seditious, treacherous or disloyal. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the future founder of Bangladesh, was the lightning rod of the labels ‘anti-Pakistan’, ‘anti-state’ and ‘disloyal’ because of his view that East Pakistan had been treated as ‘a colony’ by the ruling class and because of his demand for parity between the two wings. The Daily Situation Report (DSR) for Mujib's file, named ‘P.F. 606-48’, reveals that from 1950 to 1971, he was regularly monitored and detained on various charges ranging from sedition to treason. In July 1971, Major Nazir Baig, the commander in Faridpur district during the Pakistani army crackdown in East Pakistan, told an American journalist:

Major Baig's racial slur echoes essentialist colonial stereotypes of the Bengali population based on their ethnicity and geographical location. This chapter investigates this figure of the Bengali in Pakistan before and during the wartime while posing some critical questions. Did the West Pakistani authorities’ long-standing racialised narratives about Bengalis give Major Baig the mandate to label them as disloyal co-religionists?

This chapter takes a specific example from the museum's narrative—the story of Baghel Singh's conquest of Delhi—to show the use of history paintings and the museum's narrative in contemporary heritage politics. The choice of this episode is relevant for several reasons. Bhai Mati Das Museum has four paintings dedicated to this story, and the event it describes unfolds at a site very close to the Gurdwara Sisganj and the museum, the Red Fort. Similar paintings on Baghel Singh appear in other Sikh museums too, including the Central Sikh Museum, Amritsar. Another prominent Sikh museum in Delhi, the Baba Baghel Singh Sikh Heritage Multimedia Museum (Baba Baghel Singh Sikh Virasat Multimedia Ajaibghar) at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, not only includes this story but is also named after its main protagonist. Also, Dilli Fateh, or the Sikh conquest of Delhi, is a popularly known story and remembered with great pride in the Sikh community. And, in recent years, the story of Baghel Singh's victory over Delhi through his occupation of the Red Fort has acquired tremendous relevance in heritage politics. It is widely invoked and celebrated in prominent events (such as the Fateh Diwas celebrations at the Red Fort which began in 2014, and the historic Farmers’ Protests in Delhi in 2020–21). This claim and its symbolism are important to understand heritage politics in India today. This chapter includes a discussion of the different ways in which stories of the Sikh tradition are invoked. These ways of producing and consuming Sikh history offer insights into not only what the Sikhs think of their past but also what the Sikhs think of themselves today, of their place in contemporary India.