Reading war photographs: the 1971 India–Pakistan war in the Anglo-American press

Abstract

This article examines photographs of the 1971 India–Pakistan war published in the Anglo-American newspapers: The New York Times and The Times (London) and magazines: Life, Newsweek, Time, and The Economist. The images projected the war as a spectacle and predominantly used photographic conventions associated with non-journalistic images. The photographs showcased a rather frank representation of the 1971 war, displaying images of failed military operations, dead or injured soldiers, POWs, and revenge killings. However, some of these candid documentary war photographs offer archival value in that they challenge and complicate historical amnesia and partial accounts of the war and conflict in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Keywords

Anglo-American press archive Bangladesh history India liberation war Pakistan photojournalism war photography

Introduction

On 3 December 1971, India and Pakistan entered into a full-fledged war after a long period of conflict and strife between East and West Pakistan.¹ East Pakistan, geographically separated from West Pakistan by miles of north Indian land,² had become marginalized along economic and political lines. Additionally, long-simmering ethnic and linguistic differences led to a secessionist movement in East Pakistan, the Bengali region from where guerillas called the Mukti Bahini launched an armed struggle against the Pakistani army. The Pakistan army’s heavy-handed approach to crush the rebel movement of autonomy resulted in widespread death and destruction, which created a refugee crisis in neighboring India. That crisis provoked the escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan, leading to war in December 1971. The war ended with the signing of surrender papers on 16 December, which resulted in the secession of the eastern wing of Pakistan. East Pakistan became a separate nation state called Bangladesh.³

Bangladesh commemorates 16 December as Victory Day, India views the war as another conflict with its sworn enemy,⁴ and Pakistan does not memorialize this day in its national culture. While the Pakistani state commemorates an earlier war with India fought in September 1965 with pomp and pageantry by organizing military parades, exhibitions, seminars, and ceremonies, 16 December comes and goes every year with an eerie silence. Pakistan has erased the memory of the 1971 war altogether from its national history as well as popular culture. On the other hand, Bangladesh’s official accounts are celebratory, wiping away memories of ethnic violence before and after its formation.⁵ India remains tongue-tied about its role in cold war politics⁶ and supporting armed rebellion in East Pakistan. Official archives and histories in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan thus represent their own versions of the war (Saikia, 2004, 2011). In this context, coverage of the war in international media offers potential archival value for media historians to understand this complex event in the history of South Asia.

The 1971 war became an international event because of a ‘full-spectrum use of media technology’, making it an image-driven war covered by international documentary filmmakers, photographers, newspapers, magazines, international news agencies, and broadcast networks (Mohaiemen, 2008: 36). Mohaiemen analyzed electronic media coverage of the 1971 war and concluded that its mobilization, led by Europeans and Americans, played a key role in directing world attention to this conflict. In a study of all the front-page news stories related to the conflict for a period of about 9 months, from 26 March 1971 to 17 December 1971, in The New York Times and The Times (London), Hossain (2015) concluded that the Anglo-American press played the role of neutral observers. However, scholars have not yet explored photojournalistic images that the international coverage of the 1971 war generated. Susan Sontag (1977, 2003) argues that a photograph is ‘a privileged moment’, ‘a quotation’, ‘a maxim’, or ‘a proverb’ that freezes a moment in history for the onlooker. While news stories provide detailed accounts of an event, a photograph on the front page of a newspaper or the cover of a magazine, or a group of images associated with a news story require their own analysis.

From the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) to the Vietnam War (1955–1975), photographs generated scholarly interest from various perspectives in history, visual culture, and communication studies. The Spanish Civil War is regarded as a turning point in war photography, as it was during this war that a visual style of war photography developed with the publication of images of photographers like Robert Capa (Brothers, 1997; Sontag, 1977). During World War II (1939–1945), war photography became a propaganda tool and a focus of propaganda studies (Chouliaraki, 2013). The Vietnam War is considered another defining moment in the history of war photography in which a return to the visual style of the Spanish Civil War is traced (Brothers, 1997). Some Vietnam War images became iconic and created the perception that visuals have the power to sway public opinion. At the same time, the media were accused of staying away from images of victims – both soldiers and civilians – until late into the conflict during the Vietnam War (Schwalbe, 2013). The India–Pakistan war happened during this period, when reliance on photojournalistic images was highly valued in the international press.

The coverage of the 1971 war by international photojournalists can be considered an alternative archival site that offers potential for historians to fill lacunae in the representation of the war in the official archives of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. However, one must acknowledge that photojournalism is a ‘Western invention’, and it is deployed by Western news sources in non-Western geographies to perform the ‘ethical function of bearing witness’ (Kennedy, 2012: 306). Kennedy argues that:

photojournalism has shaped western perceptions of domestic and foreign environments, due to its key roles in delineating and cataloguing the social and political contours of modernity, in functioning as an evidential analogue of the legal and diplomatic imperatives of the nation-state, and as a visual record of imperial expansion and geopolitical conflicts concerning the interests of the nation-state.

As photojournalism is practiced to cover non-Western conflicts, it privileges the West and its interests. To find ‘potential’ meanings in an archive (Sekula, 2003), a close reading of the international coverage of the 1971 war must account for Western biases in the production and dissemination of war photographs. In this context, this article is an attempt to understand how the Anglo-American press interpreted this historic event in South Asia through war photography. What aspects of the war were represented and how were those aspects depicted photographically? Do these photographs give a detailed account or just show a glimpse of the history? What potential archival value do these photographs offer? To address these questions, this project examines war photographs of two newspapers and four magazines. It also examines captions, titles, and texts accompanying the images. Often placed below or next to images, ‘words guide audiences in the image’s interpretation’ (Zelizer, 2004: 125). War photographs published in The New York Times and The Times (London) during the period from 3 to 18 December 1971 have been chosen because they were the most widely read and respected newspapers of their time in the US and the UK, respectively (Hossain, 2015). By choosing these newspapers, this project also builds on Hossain’s scholarship on news stories. This project also surveys the news magazines Time, Newsweek, and Life from the US and The Economist from the UK published during the month of December 1971. A 16-day period is selected for the newspapers because both The New York Times and The Times gave everyday coverage during the war and published photographs regularly during this period. A longer period of a month is chosen for the magazines because they published feature stories on the war and conflict during their weekly publication cycles.

Reading War Photographs

A photograph in journalism is considered a site subjugated to the written text, relying on the story for further explanation. However, Andén-Papadopoulos (2008: 9) argues against reducing photojournalistic images of war as mere ‘markers’, ‘pegs, or cues’ to the stories and contends that ‘photographs to a certain extent speak a language of their own’. War photographs and their use in the press differ from conventional photojournalistic images. Zelizer (2004: 118, 121) argues that war images are ‘more frequently and prominently displayed compared with times of peace’ and are typically bigger, bolder, more colorful, more memorable, more dramatic, prettier, shocking, and more aesthetically pleasing. How do we read war photographs as sites of meaning compared to conventional photojournalistic images?

All photographs are complexly coded cultural artifacts and not just sources of objective disinterested facts (Lister and Wells, 2001). They use photographic conventions such as lighting, framing, and camera position. However, photographic conventions are not enough for meaning making. Meaning making happens when photographic conventions cite evidence of social conventions representing bodily and mental states, and conditions such as depression, hunger, and happiness the way we see them through our lived experiences. The way a photograph focuses on its subjects accentuates certain emotions and social conventions, which gives photographs their rhetorical qualities, inviting feelings such as compassion and horror. Photojournalistic images differ from non-journalistic ones in that they do not employ ‘elaborate arrangements and set ups’ and are ‘marked by their lack of apparent artifice or display of pictorial convention’ in order to focus on and cite evidence of an event (p. 78). Zelizer (2004: 121) contends that war images function ‘less like typical news relays and more like non-journalistic images’. However, war photographers also do not have ‘elaborate arrangements and set-ups’ at their disposal. Zelizer argues that war images rely on ‘aesthetic draw to secure a better picture’ (p. 122). To explain ‘aesthetic draw’, Zelizer uses examples such as focus on color to highlight a landscape and close-ups of soldiers. The ‘aesthetic power’ has also been employed in sculptures and paintings to depict ‘glories and horrors’ of wars (Perlmutter, 1999: 206). The aesthetic reliance in war photography thus means creative use of photographic conventions in a way that not only helps a photograph cite evidence of an event but also makes it more appealing to the eye. A war photograph may emphasize elements like color and lighting, and choose a dramatic moment to frame that may give it a choreographed quality like ‘non-journalistic images’. So, for instance, if a war photograph cites evidence of death in the battlefield, its use of photographic conventions may result in the aestheticization of horror. Conventional photojournalistic images are not particularly invested in creating ‘drama, memorability, or vividness’ (Zelizer, 2004: 116). Hence, a close reading of war photographs requires paying attention to the use of photographic conventions. While all photographs work at both denotative and connotative levels, it is because of the creative use of photographic conventions that connotation is as important, if not more, than denotation.

While the approach outlined here focuses on reading what is documented and how it is documented in an image, Azoulay (2008) argues that one also needs to examine beyond what is shown in a photograph, reinscribing dimensions of time and movement. Azoulay calls this approach ‘watching’ a photograph instead of looking at a photograph. This means that some photographs beg for more explanation, demanding answers as to why and how a certain event happened and what is the context of the image. In other words, Azoulay requires us to do excavation work in a photograph, taking us beyond the obvious. The work to unearth the conversations that an image has with its historical setting is also a way to counter the ‘subjective peril’ associated with reading an image (Hudson and Ostman, 2009: 192). Drawing from these approaches in media and cultural studies, this article attempts to understand the 1971 war by reading, looking at, and watching the photographs.

Using media and cultural studies frameworks outlined above, this project analyzed more than 100 photos associated with stories on the 1971 war in the publications chosen for this study. Some publications had their own photographers out in the field while some also used photos from international news agencies such as Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UP Int.), Gomma/PhotoReporters, and Camera Press. Official sources such as the United Nations (UN) and governments of India and Pakistan also released their own photos. All the published photographs were coded into categories for a close reading, which is presented in the following sections: Spectacle of the battlefield, Neutrality and bias, Civilian crisis, Victory and defeat, and The other war and its aftermath.

Spectacle of the Battlefield

Photography invests in portraying war as a spectacle through images of soldiers, fighting, guns, jets, and battleground. Chouliaraki (2013: 320) locates World War I and II photos with the same relations – ‘soldiers posing with or using technology in the battlefield – primarily artillery, such as guns and cannons, but also objects and vehicles, such as gas masks and tanks’. Anglo-American newspapers and magazines represented the 1971 war through similar tropes. Images of soldiers of both India and Pakistan – in Jeeps, on tanks, in bunkers, riding horses, walking with arms, walking along trenches, loading guns, helping victims, in firing positions, and getting cigarettes and alcohol – were the mainstay of the press. However, what makes these images of the battlefield and its militarism a visual spectacle is their relation with photographic conventions. Despite the fact that most war photographs are not staged, it is their reliance on photographic conventions that can make a war photograph seem inauthentic like ‘a still from a movie’ (Sontag, 2003). In this sense, ‘war photographs combine voyeurism and danger’ (p. 39). Photographs of the battlefield in the 1971 war build a similar sense of thrill and danger by particularly focusing on action and movement, and by encoding motion in images, they articulate relations of military power. This corresponds with Chouliaraki (2013), who traces the mobility of soldiers, enabled by new war machinery such as air carriers and armored vehicles, in war photographs during and after World War II.

One of the first photos (by Associated Press) of on-the-ground military action in the 1971 war appeared on the front page of The New York Times (6 December) showing Indian convoys moving in one direction and leaving behind trails of dust. The image is similar to the Associated Press photo (see Figure 1) of a group of soldiers in a vehicle, creating a haze of dust by its movement. By showcasing motion of the army convoys in the backdrop of blurred landscape, this image ruptures the stillness one associates with a photograph. Other similar photographs also captured motion in various combat situations. The New York Times (8 December) published a photograph of an Indian soldier loading a gun to shell a village near West Pakistan. A Time magazine image (see Figure 2) showed Pakistani soldiers in action, firing artillery in the picturesque backdrop of a border area. The scenery in this photograph is blurred by haze and dust. Photographers have chosen to focus on moments of thrill displayed by a combination of action and blurry backdrops. These images showcase a sense of thrill and action that one associates with motion pictures.

The display of action and thrill was not just restricted to the land warfare but was also reflected in aerial photography. Aerial photographs have become a trope of war photography representing action and power of the militaries involved. The Times on its front page (14 December) and The Economist in its feature story (18 December) published a photograph showing dozens of Indian paratroopers falling from three fighter planes hovering in the air (released by Indian official sources). In the photograph, numerous paratroopers cover the sky, their downward motion creating a spectacle for the viewer. Even though this was one of the few aerial photographs of the 1971 war, aerial action has become a quintessential element of press and media coverage of wars over the years.

The unceasing display of action as the war progressed was continued in the striking imagery. Time magazine in its end-of-the-year issue published a dramatic display of the battlefield combining elements of thrill, danger, and motion in the composition of the photograph. In an extremely well-crafted arrangement, the photographer foregrounds the leg of a dead soldier with the rest of his body buried in the sand while there are patrolling soldiers in a jeep in the backdrop. The landscape in this image is also obscured by the texture of dust and sand. The full-page strategic placement of the sepia-toned picture highlights a macabre dance of death and military might. Due to its unique framing and composition, the meaning of this photograph seems ambivalent. It is not clear whether the onlooker has to feel either awe or shock, or both at the same time. It is in these instances that it seems difficult to find ‘traces’ of reality in the materiality of war photographs that Sontag (1977) talks about. Such photographs offer a paradox to the onlooker because they evoke negative emotions but at the same time neutralize them through aestheticization and beautification. Sontag argues that the ‘aestheticizing tendency of photography’ is encoded for sensorial stimulation while cutting and distancing emotions (p. 109). She further contends, ‘Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacles’ (p. 110). The Anglo-American press also miniaturized and aestheticized the 1971 war, and showcased it as a spectacle.

Neutrality and Bias

Photographic representations of wars involving Western forces create narratives of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and at times build the case of a ‘clash of civilizations’ as a justification for war by projecting ‘the other’ as inferior (Cloud, 2004; Rosas-Moreno et al., 2013). Images of the battlefield during the 1971 war also built a narrative of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ but without necessarily putting India and Pakistan in hierarchical positions. Juxtaposition of the images of the two countries was the main pattern in the publications. For instance, the editorial page of The New York Times (5 December) visually narrated the military aspect of the war, juxtaposing close-up images of two soldiers (one from Pakistan and one from India) looking into the camera with the captions, ‘Pakistan Fighter: Our Enemy has Challenged Us!’ and ‘Indian Fighter: Enemy will be repelled!’, respectively. The New York Times also used this juxtaposition in its political coverage of the conflict, showing images of Pakistani and Indian politicians, military generals, and delegates in the UN General Assembly, side by side. This substantiates Hossain’s (2015) findings that the Anglo-American press was impartial in its coverage of the 1971 war. However, this apparent neutrality of the Anglo-American press was ruptured by biases in its photographic coverage and editorial policies.

Western photographic coverage of wars avoids images of their own dead or injured soldiers or POWs, or military operations gone wrong (Zelizer, 2004). Sontag (2003: 70) reaffirms this notion, ‘the more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.’ The dignity and discretion that are accorded to the dead and injured of the West are not given to ‘others’. The 1971 war is an example of such indiscretion. Unlike photographs of military casualties of the West that remain hidden from the public eye, the blatant display of the dead happened during the war’s coverage. The New York Times on 3 December published an image in which Pakistani soldiers were viewing an Indian soldier killed inside East Pakistan while its 10 December issue showcased a photograph of bodies of Pakistani soldiers, who had died in a clash with Indian forces, lying in a road in the city of Jessore. Various versions of the images taken by the Associated Press photographer, A Abbas, that appeared in Newsweek, Life, and Time magazines showed Pakistani soldiers carrying the dead body of an Indian soldier (see Figure 3). In the setting of an exotic location that fills the background, the uniformed bodies of Pakistani soldiers moving forward appear in the foreground. Soldiers hold each limb of the dead body of an Indian soldier, dragging it forward. The still photograph captures the motion of the soldiers dominating the motionlessness of the dead body. However, the face of the dead soldier, hanging upside down in the air, is directed toward the onlooker and so are the gazes of the soldiers carrying the dead body. In this photograph, gazes of soldiers meet the gaze of the onlooker, putting the illogical nature and inhumanity of the war in full display.

The use of the direct gaze of soldiers is a recurring trope in the 1971 war coverage. Photographs of POWs and retreating soldiers of both countries were taken in a similar manner. With the exception of one image published in both the issues of Life (31 December) and Time (27 December) that showed marching POWs from the back side, all other images were close-ups of soldiers and captured their direct gaze. Time magazine published a close-up image titled ‘Pakistani Soldiers in Retreat in East Bengal’ (see Figure 4) in which soldiers gaze directly into the camera with a defiant expression. On 18 December, The Times published a similar front-page picture with the title ‘Face of Defeat’, also printed by The New York Times, showing a medium close-up of two Pakistani soldiers, huddled together, looking solemnly into the camera. The front page of The New York Times (12 December) carried another photo of retreating Pakistani soldiers carrying artillery on their shoulders and looking directly into the camera. The cover of Newsweek (11 December), titled ‘In the trap of war’, featured a soldier looking from behind a wired fence. The gaze of the soldier is dramatically directed at the onlooker. Analyzing Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph (Portrait of Clifton, 1981) of a black man staring directly at camera, Lister and Wells (2001) argue that subjects that look into the camera appear to be looking at us and bring us in close proximity to them. Since the subjects in these war photographs are distant others, then a shot of direct gaze is perhaps meant ‘to permit close examination of the photographed subject, including scrutiny of the face and eyes, which are in common parlance the seat of soul – feeling, personality, or character’ (Lutz and Collins, 1993: 199). The photographs with direct gaze then allow close scrutiny of soldiers in rather vulnerable situations. These photographs thus make the vulnerability of these distant soldiers more accessible to Western readers.

Civilian Crisis

Civilian suffering, death, and destruction are major consequences of any war. Chouliaraki (2013) observes the aftermath of World Wars I and II in the images of destroyed landscapes, crater markers, bomb debris, and human bodies. Long-distance shots of cityscapes in flames or in ruins presented ‘the magnitude of the battlefield in a God’s eye view of hyper-destruction’ during World War II (Chouliaraki, 2013: 325). During the 1971 war, photos from the battlefield dominated its coverage and only a few images of civilian death and destruction were published here and there. However, the images showing the destruction of the landscape and infrastructure that made it to the publications were mostly long shots like World War II photos. The 9 December issues of The Times and The New York Times published a photograph of a bridge in East Pakistan destroyed by the retreating Pakistani soldiers. While The Times published a long shot of the bridge, The New York Times printed a medium long shot of the same bridge showing people inspecting its debris. Two other photographs published in The New York Times showcased the aftermath of the war on the infrastructure: one published on 12 December showed Pakistanis looking at the rubble caused by the bombings in West Pakistan’s biggest city, Karachi (released by the Pakistani mission to the UN), while the other published on 15 December showed smoke rising from a building in Dhaka after an attack by Indian jets. These images were few but offered a long-distance view of the destruction.

Images of victims became more common after World War II and have been used to delegitimize wars as is generally perceived in the case of the Vietnam War (Van Leeuwen and Jaworski, 2002). There are many heart-wrenching photographs of the 1971 war in the archives of major photo agencies but only a few were published by the publications that this project analyzed. Time magazine in one of its December issues published a photograph of a family massacred by the Pakistan army. Similarly, Newsweek published an image of slain Bengali intellectuals in its year-end review feature. Since refugee crisis In India led to the 1971 war, images of refugees were more commonly used. Photographs of refugees appeared in all publications but magazines used at least one or two images of refugee men, women, and children with other pictures of soldiers, guerillas, and the battlefield in their feature stories. Even the refugees were shown juxtaposed with military in a photograph published in The New York Times (12 December). This photograph shows refugees walking in one direction and Indian forces walking in another. Life magazine in its year-in-review edition published the photograph of a refugee family that was travelling miles to migrate to India when the wife came down with cholera and died. This Life magazine photograph documents the plight of a refugee family on the move. The man, who is visibly grief stricken and fatigued, is perched helplessly by his wife’s dead body. He is holding an infant in his lap and has his three other children by his side, who are mourning the death of their mother. Images of mourning men and women, squatted on the ground and/or holding their heads, continued to appear during the war. Taking dramatic photographs of people’s moments of grief and despair is a recurrent Eurocentric trope to depict people from Asia and Africa as economically and technologically weak and dependent victims (Lister and Wells, 2001; Mohaiemen, 2008). Mohaiemen argues that the photos of half-naked Bengali women, crippled refugees, starving children, shirtless peasants were comforting images in the West, ‘playing into the notion of pre-technology people’ (p. 39).

The Anglo-American press in its coverage of the war also deployed the trope of suffering and helpless Eastern women. A number of images of refugee women appeared in publications in which they were shown in need of liberation and protection. When the war began, The New York Times (5 December) used a front-page image, titled ‘Civilians Seeking Shelter’, showing a close-up of an Indian woman and her children taking cover in a homemade shelter near the East Pakistan border. Mohaiemen (2008) contends that all photographs that depict refugees have one thing in common: they are striking. These images appeared particularly striking in magazines published on glossy papers. For instance, Life magazine, in one of its features, chose the image of refugee women taken in the backdrop of a banyan tree (see Figure 5). The monochrome image, with its play of light and shadow and the backdrop of an old exotic tree, brings the plight of refugee women to the readers. The younger woman is standing higher on a thick aerial root of the tree looking at the camera while the older woman, caught in a moment of despair, is squatting with her gaze down. While the older woman is photographed in a typical manner, the direct gaze of the younger woman challenges the usual tropes of photographing refugees. However, the magazine defines these women as the ‘saddest victims’ of the war ‘taking shelter’. Despite images (like Figure 5) that may challenge the recurrent tropes, these publications defined women as victims, silent spectators, taking shelter, and waiting passively.

War is considered a masculine territory and hence media end up representing male perspectives of wars (Rosas-Moreno et al., 2013). News stories erase women’s viewpoints and their experiences of wars and violent conflicts, resulting in their marginalization. While Pakistan’s official history accounts eschew any discussions of the 1971 war, Bangladesh’s historical documents largely focus on sacrifices of men (Saikia, 2011). Women faced torture not only from Pakistanis but also from Bengali men, and media reports gave marginal coverage to it. There is a ‘silence’ in historical accounts surrounding the violence, trauma, torture, rape, and death that women suffered in the 1971 war. A sanitized hyper-masculine representation of the war in the media is also a testimony to such deafening silence.

In the Western media, publishing images of children is another sensitive area. The Western press is known to avoid images of their own dead or injured children, and have strict policies for such imagery with the reasoning that such images transgress the limits of taste and decency (Wells, 2007). However, images of children of other nations have been published in mainstream Western press time and again. Nick Ut’s picture of a naked girl running from napalm bombing during the Vietnam War became an iconic photo of human suffering (Brothers, 1997). Most images of children have been published in the Western press in the context that they need to be rescued (Wells, 2007). During the 1971 war, The Times and Time magazine published the photograph of a child who lost one hand in the crossfire between the Indian and Pakistani fight. This photograph is a medium close-up of the face and body of the injured child, who is crying in pain. In another photograph in The New York Times, a Pakistani soldier was shown removing the body of a child with the help of civilians in Dhaka. Like photographs of women who need protection, photographs of children who need to be rescued constitute the coverage of the civilian crisis. The coverage of the civilian crisis was thus framed around images of women, children, and refugees.

Victory and Defeat

All wars are propelled toward a goal of victory or loss, and images of celebrations and defeat represent that telos. Chouliaraki (2013: 316) considers popular representation of war through images of triumphs and conquests ‘a constitutive dimension of public morality’. Sometimes war is justified in the name of moral principles of humanity and human rights, and sometimes in the ideals of nationhood and nationalism. These justifications manifest themselves in the visuals when people hail one party as the savior and the other as the aggressor, washing away all the complications of the war. A celebratory war photo, in particular, is an oxymoron because it negates all the death, damage, and destruction of the war, reducing its complexity to cheers and applause. During the 1971 war, celebratory images appeared in the press when Pakistan started losing control of various cities in East Pakistan. When the city of Jessore fell to the advancing Indian army, The New York Times (9 December) published a front-page image titled ‘Celebrations in Jessore’, and Life and Time magazines published similar photographs of Bengalis cheering Indian soldiers as they entered their city. When Pakistan finally surrendered on 16 December, The New York Times published another festive picture titled ‘It’s All Over in Dhaka’, showing Bangladeshis welcoming Indian soldiers with joy. These images are similar to the photograph of Bengali men cheering Indian soldiers on December 16 taken by A. Abbas (see Figure 6).

Celebratory images simplified the complexity of a conflict that involved two armies, civilians, and guerillas, in covert and overt violence and aggressions. It was not only Pakistanis who committed war crimes but Bengali guerillas were also involved in the murder, rape and torture of innocent civilians (Saikia, 2004). There were also ‘conflicting political strands within the Bengali liberation movement’ (Mohaiemen, 2008: 38). Other detailed historical aspects of covert involvement of the US Nixon–Kissinger administration in supporting Pakistani military action and the Indian government backing armed guerrilla movement came to the fore when Gary J Bass (2013) went through relevant sections of the Nixon White House tapes and other declassified State Department documents and interviewed former American and Indian officials. These complicated realities remained hidden in media coverage. Media accounts created binaries of ‘perpetrators’ and ‘war heroes’, placing Pakistanis and Bengalis in these roles, respectively (Saikia, 2004: 277). ‘Complex situations, with multiple causes, linkages to colonial structures were flattened to good vs evil narratives’, argues Mohaiemen (2008: 38). Images also offered simple justifications for each party involved: the war of sovereignty for Pakistan, the moral war for India, and the liberation war for Bangladesh.

While celebratory images of the 1971 war are reductive, photographs of surrender and defeat demand that we look beyond what has been encoded. The historical amnesia of the 1971 war in Pakistan is often ruptured by one image. The image is that of the surrender ceremony on 16 December 1971, in which Pakistan conceded its defeat in the war. The photograph frames General Aurora of India and General Niazi of Pakistan in Dhaka signing the agreement files in the presence of military personnel from both sides (see Figure 7). Military men in their starched uniforms fill the frame of the image like members of a dysfunctional family who are perhaps attempting to hide an undesirable backdrop. The presence of General Niazi, looking down and signing the surrender papers, is particularly striking because he was often pictured in candid poses and demonstrated a nonchalant attitude toward the war and crisis. For instance, The Economist, in its 11 December issue, published a photograph of General Niazi sipping a cup of tea titled ‘Tiger still likes his cuppa’. Another image in Life magazine (10 December) showed him sitting ‘comfortably on his shooting stick’ in the battlefield. The magazine included his quote in the caption: ‘We can beat the Indians when they outnumber us three to one.’ The surrender image stands starkly in comparison with his other images and quotes. However, it is not just General Niazi but commanding officers and generals of both countries who appear guilty of their respective aggressions, animosities, and zero-sum politics in this image. In the absence of an archive of the memory of displacements, dispossessions, and injustices, this image is an archive. This image demands a reading ‘from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced or made invincible’ (Sekula, 2003: 451). Such a reading then provides us with a harsh reminder of the power as well as its incapacity that manifests in the winners and losers of wars. While celebratory photos elide the complexity of the past, pictures of defeat demonstrate the potential of images to unsettle official narratives. It is images like these that echo in the face of unnerving silences and elisions.

The Other War and its Aftermath

The 1971 war coverage by the Anglo-American press predominantly focused on India and Pakistan, and the role of the Mukti Bahnini did not figure as prominently. However, images appeared sporadically in publications reminding readers that a civilian aspect of the war was also at play. As the war started, Newsweek published a photograph of guerilla soldiers on its cover.⁷ The cover image focuses on two guerilla soldiers, one carrying a gun in the foreground and the other in the background. Both the soldiers are in firing positions ready to pull the trigger at the slightest provocation but the focus of the image is on the fierce gaze of the soldier in the foreground. Guns as well as the gaze of both the soldiers are obliquely directed at an imaginary enemy. The fierceness of the gaze captured in the dramatic composition of the cover is an indication of the seriousness of the armed conflict that went beyond the fight between the armies of the two countries. Thus, we not only saw pictures of soldiers in action but magazines like Newsweek, Life, and Time also published images of guerillas in action – walking, carrying guns, and training in camps. In its 14 December issue, The New York Times used a front-page photograph showing Bengali officials and guerrillas interrogating a local man, in the center of the photo, for allegedly collaborating with the Pakistani government. These photographs indicate the complexity of the war that embroiled civilians, and pitched ethnicities against each other.

When Pakistan surrendered on 16 December, a few photographers, including Horst Faas and Michel Laurent, captured revenge murders at a political rally in Dhaka on 18 December 1971 (see Figure 8).⁸ They took a few photographs of Bengali guerilla fighters publicly bayoneting, torturing, and killing four local men accused of siding with Pakistan. Journalistic accounts have given us gory details of the murder and torture of the four men while crowds cheered on the killers with the chants of ‘Joi Bangla’ (‘Victory to Bangladesh’). This documentary-like photograph captured this moment of violence that a long civil and military war left behind in its wake. It depicts the aftermath of a complicated war and its violence that lingered on in the liberated nation of Bangladesh. Sontag (2003) argues that photographs that rely less on artistry such as proper lighting and composition seem more authentic. Devoid of its unnecessary reliance on artistry and creative use of photographic conventions, we see an authenticity in this photograph that most war pictures generally lose in their standards of aestheticization. This is the photograph where the argument of aestheticization fades and there emerges a complicated ‘trace’ of raw reality.

Linfield (2010) argues that photographs do not provide details such as reasons for wars and solutions for conflicts; instead, they evoke emotions and stir visceral reactions showing us, for example, what cruelty looks like. Sontag (1977) claims that certain photographs that mobilize conscience are always linked to a given historical situation. This photograph of revenge murder not only gives us a glance into the cruelty of war but also begs for historical explanation. This picture complicates the ‘them’ versus ‘us’ categorization after soldiers of the two national armies disappeared from the canvas. It is photographs like these that become iconic in their depiction of reality. This happened during the Vietnam War when Eddie Adams took a picture of a Vietcong suspect being executed in 1968 (Brothers, 1997). The picture of revenge killing bears a stark similarity to the iconic picture of Adams. In its raw reality, photographs like these become a witness to complicated narratives of wars. Perhaps this is what war photography and photojournalism aspire to be where the indexical sign refers to the event in its complicated web of real life drama.

Conclusions

Sontag (1977: 130) argues that photographic images are ‘pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.’ Sekula (2003: 445) contends that ‘photographs, in themselves are fragmentary and incomplete utterances.’ These arguments correspond with Zelizer’s (2004) claim that photographs depict certain aspects of war but not all. This seems to be true in the coverage of the 1971 war by the Anglo-American press. Overall coverage was largely focused on the military fight of the two nation states. While these photographs documented the battlefield, they depicted it in a way that projected the war as a spectacle. A number of images used photographic conventions such as lighting, composition, and focus to make them look dramatic. Movements and actions of the militaries and the guerillas were frozen in still images predominantly depicting relations of power. However, due to its non-Western location, the press did not shy away from showing images of injury, death, and defeat of soldiers. Refugees were also depicted in Eurocentric tropes.

While these photographs show the inherent bias of the Anglo-American press in its coverage of a non-Western war, they also provide evidence of some events during the war that Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India do not want to acknowledge. The surrender photograph (Figure 7) and the revenge killing photograph (Figure 8) offer archival value in that they bring to the fore aspects of the war that official accounts elide. As complex artifacts, these photographs encourage us to ‘watch’ them as well as reading them. By instigating us to investigate and question, and by directing us to complicated pasts, these images rupture official narratives of remembering and forgetting the war in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

In this article, I have attempted to understand the photographic depiction of the 1971 war in selected Anglo-American newspapers and magazines. Further research may expand the scope of this article by including more publications with the possibility of comparison with the photographic coverage in India, Pakistan and/or other Asian countries. A longer period of the photographic coverage of the conflict before and after the war will also be useful in extending the discussions in this article.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Gretchen Soderlund at the University of Oregon and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and comments. I would also like to thank the School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC) and the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS) at the University of Oregon for their financial support with the licensing of images.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors and there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

ORCID iD

Shehram Mokhtar

Biographical Note

Shehram Mokhtar is a doctoral candidate in Media Studies at the University of Oregon. As a graduate fellow at the University of Oregon, he has been associated with the School of Journalism and Communication, the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Department and the Fembot Collective and its journal Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. His research interests lie at the intersections of critical/cultural studies, visual culture, postcolonial theory, and gender and sexuality studies.

Address: University of Oregon, Allen Hall, Eugene, Oregon, 97403-1299, USA. [e-mail: Shehramm@uoregon.edu]

References

Andén-Papadopoulos

(2008) The Abu Ghraib torture photographs: News frames, visual culture, and the power of images. Journalism 9(1): 5–30.

Azoulay

(2008) The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books.

Bass

(2013) The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan. Noida, India: Random House.

Brothers

(1997) War and Photography: A Cultural History. London: Routledge.

Chouliaraki

(2013) The humanity of war: Iconic photojournalism of the battlefield, 1914–2012. Visual Communication 12(3): 315–340.

Cloud

(2004) To veil the threat of terror: Afghan women and the clash of civilizations in the imagery of the U.S. war on terrorism. Quarterly Journal of Speech 90(3): 285–306.

Hossain

(2015) Manufacturing consent: Framing the Liberation War of Bangladesh in the US and UK media. Journalism 16(4): 521–535.

Hudson

Ostman

(2009) A desire to end these things: An analytical history of John L. Spivak’s photographic portrayal of 1930s Georgia chain gangs. Visual Communication Quarterly 16(4): 191–209.

Kennedy

(2012) Framing compassion. History of Photography 36(3): 306–314.

10.

Linfield

(2010) The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

11.

Lister

Wells

(2001) Seeing beyond belief: Cultural studies as an approach to analyzing the visual. In: Van Leeuwen

Jewitt

(eds) Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage, 61–91.

12.

Lutz

Collins

(1993) Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

13.

Mohaiemen

(2008) Accelerated media and the 1971 civil war in Bangladesh. Economic and Political Weekly 43(4): 36–40.

14.

Perlmutter

(1999) Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyber Age. New York: St Martin’s Press

15.

Rosas-Moreno

Harp

Bachmann

(2013) Framing ideology: How Time magazine represents nationalism and identities through visual reporting. Comunicación y Sociedad 26(3): 1–20.

16.

Saikia

(2004) Beyond the archive of silence: Narratives of violence of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh. History Workshop Journal 58(1): 275–287.

17.

Saikia

(2011) Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

18.

Schwalbe

(2013) Visually framing the invasion and occupation of Iraq in TIME, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. International Journal of Communication 7(1): 239–262.

19.

Sekula

(1982) On the invention of photographic meaning. In: Burgin

(ed.) Thinking Photography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 84–109.

20.

Sekula

(2003) Reading an archive: Photography between labor and capitalism. In: Wells

(ed.) The Photography Reader. New York: Routledge, 443–452.

21.

Sontag

(1977) On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

22.

Sontag

(2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

23.

Van Leeuwen

Jaworski

(2002) The discourses of war photography: Photojournalistic representations of the Palestinian–Israeli war. Journal of Language & Politics 1(2): 255–275.

24.

Wells

(2007) Narratives of liberation and narratives of innocent suffering: The rhetorical uses of images of Iraqi children in the British Press. Visual Communication 6(1): 55–71.

25.

Zelizer

(2004) When war is reduced to a photograph. In: Allen

Zelizer

(eds) Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. London: Routledge, 115–135.