In Search of Almas Ali

Growing up, on playgrounds where children compared scars or the size of their houses, I liked to offer that my grandfather, a man named Almas Ali, was assassinated. He was “assassinated,” I stressed, because he was, from what I understood, a fairly prominent Bangladeshi politician. “Killed” felt too passive for a man of that stature; “missing, presumed dead” might have been technically true but sounded both callous and overly sanguine. And “murder,” although accurate, evoked a flurry of violence and intent too ugly to confront. Assassinated was clean, bloodless.

My mother had passed down the story like a family heirloom. The particulars were murky, but I could recite the main turns: that Nana was a beloved leader who was killed by his own countrymen; that he was branded a traitor; but that his murderers were wrong—and therein lay the real tragedy. 

The stain clung, all the same. The name Almas Ali is usually either maligned in Bangladeshi history books or absent entirely, but my family continues to resist this distortion, tethering themselves to their memory of him as a revolutionary and loyal patriot. My mother refers to herself as “Almas Ali’s daughter” when haughty, having just won an argument. Her brother is “no son of Almas Ali” whenever he disappoints her. When I was accepted into my master’s course two years ago, my uncle Adil went across the footbridge to the local mosque and announced on its loudspeakers that “Almas Ali’s granddaughter is going to Oxford.”

Nana’s body was never found. There was no funeral or autopsy report or even a marked grave. My mother remembers that they’d held out hope for months: “We thought maybe he’d found refuge in a house in a nearby village. Or that he’d sustained damage to the head and couldn’t remember us. Maybe he couldn’t find his way back home. I don’t know, I don’t know how long we waited.” 

The events of my Nana’s life leading up to his assassination remain a mystery at the heart of my family’s—and Bangladesh’s—origin story. For a long time this did not trouble me; grief had turned my family incurious. “None of us talked about that chapter of our lives,” my youngest aunt says. “We didn’t know and never wanted to know.” The recent death of my grandmother, Nahar, however, made me want to broach the unspoken. What kind of man was Almas Ali? What part, if any, did he play in Bangladesh’s independence struggle? What if he had been a traitor after all? 

I had to work quickly—the generation who lived through the relevant history had increasingly faulty recall or were taking their memories to the grave. Anecdotes would morph the moment they changed hands. There were other obstacles: I speak Bangla but can’t read it. I was working, for the most part, from England. And I was skeptical, having written off my mother’s account as romantic. 

In the winter of 2022 I went back to the house where my mother and her eight siblings grew up in the river port city of Narayanganj, a short distance but lengthy, sluggish journey from Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka. Narayanganj, nicknamed the “Dundee of the East,” was known for its large textile mills—the smell of burning jute used to hover over the city like smog. Our family home, No. 1 Baburail, is a sprawling bungalow painted chalk white. It stands between lush jungle and a canal where my mother learned to swim. I knew the house well, having spent many summers there. 

No. 1 had deteriorated in the decade since my last visit; its windows were rusted shut, mold mottled the walls, something had chewed at the teak doors. But the photograph of Nana was still intact. My family have only ever had two images of him: one passport-sized and blurry, the other framed and mounted to the wall. The latter is a group photo of Almas Ali, sporting Ray-Bans and a pencil mustache, sitting next to four similarly stoic men. The garlanded man beside him is Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a Bengali barrister who was then prime minister of Pakistan. And behind them, with his signature tuft of slicked-back hair, is Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, popularly known as “Bangabandhu” (friend of Bengalis), who would become the first president of Bangladesh and be hailed as the founding father of the nation. 

Most Bengalis react to the photo of Nana, Suhrawardy, and Mujib in the same way. They stare wide-eyed at the largely unseen image of Bangabandhu. Chairs are customarily reserved for the most important people in the room. In the photo Almas Ali lounges in his seat next to an esteemed Suhrawardy. But there Bangabandhu is, standing behind them. Standing, they muse, like a hanger-on!

Almas Ali was born in Baburail around 1920, the second eldest of thirteen children, while Bengal was still under British Raj.¹ He came from what a local encyclopedia described as a “respectable business family”: his father was a restaurateur, and several of his brothers also owned their own small businesses. A restless and defiant child, he was appointed president of the Muslim Students League’s Narayanganj subdivision at the age of eleven. 

Formed in 1906, the All-India Muslim League was an elite brotherhood, and later mass political party, that represented and protected the interests of the Muslim minority in British India. By sixteen Almas had become secretary of the local chapter. As a college student, he and other activists urged the Narayanganj library to reconsider its rules: Muslims were not permitted, and the library itself, which housed thousands of Hindu texts, contained no Islamic books at all. They were turned away. In 1939 Almas had a leading part in establishing the Rahmatullah Institute—a hub for Muslim intellectuals and activists in Narayanganj, which hosted several important political events in the years to come. 

Overwhelmed with political responsibilities, he skipped the final exams of his bachelor’s degree. Sometime later Almas bought a printing press, Solar Machine Press, and a garment factory, Pioneer Hosiery Mills. For a while he was president of the Cotton Worker Union. But his interest in commerce was limited. “You are a son of our house, and one of us,” the Narayanganj Machinery Traders Association later told him in a letter congratulating him on an important political appointment: “But you are an exception.”

By the time he married Nahar, he had developed an undeniable magnetism and considerable sway over local authorities. In March 1940 he traveled to the other end of British India as a delegate in the Lahore Conference, the three-day general session that became a landmark moment in the movement for a separate Muslim state. 

In the summer of 1947 The Civil and Military Gazette published a map of how the subcontinent might be carved up into two independent nations: Hindu-majority India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan. By then Almas Ali was a member of the All-India Muslim League Council, working full-time from their head office at 150 Mogultuli, Ramna, in central Dhaka. Colleagues at neighboring desks would outlive him: Tajuddin Ahmad would go on to be prime minister of independent Bangladesh, Korban Ali would become the speaker of Parliament. But on the eve of Partition, I imagine the office coming to a halt. I imagine my grandfather hunched over The Gazette, dark ink staining his fingers where he clutched it. 

The union between Pakistan’s two distant wings was uneasy, separated as they were by 1,200 miles of hostile Indian territory. Those in the west thought of Bengalis as small and dark-skinned. They scorned the lungi, a sarong worn by Bengali men. A saying in West Pakistan went, “In the east men wear the skirts and the women the pants. In the west things are as they should be.” The regions shared very little other than their Islamic faith—and even then the east was home to more than eleven million Hindus, whom the ruling class of the western wing despised. Bengali Muslims, in turn, were held in suspicion, often denounced as “Hindu leaning” or kafirs (unbelievers).

Despite its fertile deltas, its numerous jute mills, and the fact that it held 55 percent of the country’s 78 million people, East Pakistan’s economy soon stumbled. The west, which dominated the national government, was strangling it. According to a 1972 study by the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, East Pakistan’s “jute and tea crops provided two thirds of the country’s exports,” and yet it “received less than a third” as many imports as the west, “less than half of its development funds and less than a quarter of its foreign aid.” The disparity would only deepen, with per capita income in West Pakistan increasing to as much as 61 percent higher than in the east by 1970.

Frustrations came to a head over the West Pakistani elite’s insistence on imposing a single state language, Urdu, which less than ten percent of Bengalis spoke. A “one nation, one language” policy would render most Bengalis effectively illiterate. In February 1948 a Bengali member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan proposed authorizing Bangla as a national language, but Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan swiftly threw the motion out. East Pakistan, as a result, became embroiled in protests.

On the morning of March 11, 1948, student protesters gathered outside government offices in Narayanganj. The police arrived at the scene to disperse them, but things quickly escalated and officers charged at the crowd with raised batons. Once word of the violence reached Almas Ali, he rushed over to stop the attack and picket in solidarity with the students. 

The ruling class of West Pakistan doubled down. In 1948, on his sole visit to the eastern region, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, announced that “Urdu and only Urdu” would be spoken across the country. Anyone who opposed this policy, he told a bewildered crowd, would be considered an enemy of the state. Bengali members of the Constituent Assembly were prohibited from speaking their mother tongue. 

A chant began to take hold: Rashtra Bhasha Bangla Chai (“We demand Bangla as our state language”). Khan offered a feeble justification: “Pakistan is a Muslim state and it must have as its lingua franca the language of the Muslim nation.” That language, he continued, “can only be Urdu,” suggesting that Bangla somehow had Hindu connotations. As the prominent Christian Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas wrote in his 1986 book Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood, there was “no apparent rationale for his argument, only blind prejudice.” 

On June 1 Almas Ali, then a secretary of the Narayanganj City Muslim League, attended a league commencement in Narsingdi. Under the blazing sun, he introduced the crowd to emerging political heavyweights, who at the time were still relatively unknown: Maulana Bhashani (later nicknamed “Leader of the Oppressed”) and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, or “Bangabandhu.” The original minutes of the meeting have disintegrated at the edges and some sentences hang unfinished, but the majority of his speech remains intact. I found it, in English, in a collection of declassified files the government of Bangladesh published in the early 2000s. Almas Ali, speaking for himself, says: 

We expected that after the achievement of Pakistan there will be no want of food and cloth but we have been keenly disappointed. We have no food to eat and no cloth to wear. Our mothers and sisters are going naked. We can no longer blame the British for this. Now we are a free people and have to solve our own problem.

The price of rice is soaring up day by day. 50 lacs² of people died during the famine of 1943 without any protest but this time the people will not die in the like manner. We are a free people and as such everybody has equal right to live—be he a Chief Minister or a layman. No Government has [the] right to kill us in this slow process.

People should be up against this at once. They should protest against the rise of prices of rice well in time. Pressure should be brought to bear upon the Government for lowering down the prices of rice immediately. If the Government cannot do this we have every right to remove it from power and put able men in its place.

Since its conception the Muslim League had served, in large part, as a means to protect the interests of landed gentry. At the time of the 1948 meeting, the Pakistani government was dragging its heels on abolishing the zamindari system, a feudal practice in which the zamindars owned the land and peasant farmers were their tenants, legally obligated to pay rent even during poor yields. Almas Ali was affronted by the government’s failure: “This is nothing but a plan for the complete annihilation of the peasantry. And to make the matter worse, they are contemplating giv[ing] the Zamindars Rs. 40 crores as compensation.” He warned that the Muslim League was at risk of becoming a “pocket organisation” and urged a shift toward populism instead: “We shall make the Muslim League a people’s Organisation.”

But his frustrations with the Muslim League only sank into disillusion. In 1949 Suhrawardy held a pivotal meeting at the Rahmatullah Institute, where Almas Ali presided as secretary, to discuss the failures of the Pakistani government. That same year Almas Ali became a founding member of a new populist party, led by Bhashani: the Awami (Ordinary Peoples’) Muslim League, which would go on to rule independent Bangladesh for decades. 

By 1952 tensions had deepened still further. On January 30 Bhashani, Almas Ali, and twenty-six other political leaders and activists gathered at the Dacca District Bar Library Hall to establish the All-Party Central Language Action Committee. Among their first campaigns was a widespread protest, scheduled for a few weeks later, against the government’s proposal to replace all official use of the Bangla script with Urdu. When the regional government caught onto these plans, they hurried to impose Section 144, a Raj-era ban on public demonstrations.

On February 21 students started to gather at Dacca University. The plan was to march to the Legislative Assembly to urge lawmakers, once again, to recognize Bangla as an official national language. But the police encircled them, with more officers on the way. When the protesters broke through the cordon, many were struck by truncheons and beaten down. The clusters that spilled out onto the streets shouted Rashtra Bhasha Bangla Chai! Just as the Legislative Assembly was scheduled to meet, gunshots rang out. A master’s student, a tailor, a college student, and two office clerks were the first martyrs of the Bengali Language Movement. 

Meanwhile, twenty miles from the capital, a huge demonstration was underway in Narayanganj. Students marched through the city and arrived at the assembly in front of the Rahmatullah Institute, where Almas Ali and a few other local leaders spoke to the crowd. Then people began to murmur: news of the events in Dacca trickled in. The leaders and students erupted, and their ensuing rally quaked the city. At least once that year Almas Ali was jailed for his involvement in the Language Movement. When he was appointed Chief Parliamentary Secretary of East Pakistan in 1956, his cabinet voted to memorialize February 21 as Language Martyrs’ Day. Today it is a national holiday in Bangladesh, and recognized internationally as International Mother Language Day.

My family has always maintained that Almas Ali and Mujib were dear friends, but historical texts tell a more complicated story. As active members of the Awami League, they crossed paths often; Almas Ali once visited Mujib while he was held at Narayanganj police station. If my eldest aunt is to be believed, Mujib was inconsolable after he heard of my Nana’s death. But their personalities apparently clashed. The local reporter Ahidul Khan, now in his eighties, tells a journalist I hired that my grandfather had a habit of propping his legs on the table as he talked. Such behavior would be forbidden in front of higher-ranking colleagues: “Both his feet on the table, right opposite Sheikh Mujib!” History of Narayanganj (1985), published by the Sudhijan Library, states that their relationship was “never good.” 

In his unfinished memoirs, Mujib accused my grandfather of plotting against him in 1953. He claimed that Almas Ali and other “senior leaders of the Awami League began to conspire to ensure that I would not be made General Secretary for the next term.” When provincial elections were held shortly after to choose members of the Legislative Assembly, Mujib endorsed Almas Ali’s direct opponent, though unsuccessfully. Almas Ali had considerable support from Suhrawardy, for whom he was, according to S.M. Shahidullah’s Narayanganj: A City Corporation, a “close aide.” He won in a landslide.

In the first years of their marriage, my grandmother Nahar noticed that her husband would disappear for large stretches of the day, only to return home scuffed up and bruised. It was the 1950s; East Pakistan was embroiled in Hindu–Muslim riots. When Hindu families appeared at her door with gifts, handfuls of gold jewelry, she realized that Almas Ali had been going out to protect them. She told her children he never accepted the gold, telling the strangers to use it for their new lives across the border instead. 

Most Hindus fled to India. One of the local reporters I hired found a family that returned. Rajesh,³ now seventy-seven, met Almas Ali as a child. He remembers him as a tall, “beloved” uncle who would drop by to visit his father. “He helped a lot of Hindus here,” Rajesh says. “Not with money—he’d go to the prison if he had to, or to court…. He would protect them so they wouldn’t get beaten. He would create safe passage for them to escape.”

The peak of Almas Ali’s political career came in 1956, when he was chosen as Chief Parliamentary Secretary of East Pakistan, in Suhrawardy’s cabinet. (The central government hoped that this coalition would serve as a symbol of unity between the two regions.) Almas’s family grew accustomed to their newfound wealth. They bought luxurious West Pakistani clothes and employed multiple servants and chefs. His eldest daughter, Nazma, went to school with white children, families of former colonial officials. The wider region, however, was in the throes of one of the worst harvests of the decade. East Pakistan received only 20 percent of the country’s development spending, even as it served as a captive market to which West Pakistan sold between 40 and 50 percent of what Mascarenhas calls its “shoddy, high-priced” exports. 

In 1965, the year my mother was born, an almanac of important people across different sectors of Pakistan was assembled and bound in Lahore. It was part of a series called Biographical Encyclopaedia of Pakistan, and Almas Ali was featured in the 1965–1966 edition. The book would arrive at the British Museum in late December 1965, then be kept, waiting, in a nondescript shelf of the British Library for fifty years before I requested it. Beside a short biography listing his accomplishments, there is a photo of my grandfather nobody in my family had ever seen. When I showed it to my mother, she burst into tears.

The first-ever Pakistani parliamentary elections were held in late 1970, and the Awami Muslim League secured 167 of 313 seats. A new rallying cry emerged, Joy Bangla: “Victory to Bengal.” The Awami League, under Sheikh Mujib’s leadership, demanded autonomy, not independence.⁴ The results, Mascarenhas writes, were perceived as a “personal disaster” for President Yahya Khan, who repeatedly postponed the inauguration of the National Assembly to stave off the prospect of constitutional reform. Sheikh Mujib called for a nationwide strike. In turn, the Pakistani army fired at unarmed people. Martial law and a twelve-hour curfew were imposed. Talks were deadlocked, although Mascarenhas suggests that they “were not intended to succeed.” In February 1971 President Khan is reported to have said about Bengalis, “Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands.”

On the warm spring night of March 25, 1971, heavily armed military officers stood poised at their stations across Dhaka and Chittagong as residents slept. Talks between President Khan and Mujib had ended abruptly. Once Khan touched down safely in Karachi, the signal arrived. Tanks fanned out in Dhaka and Chittagong: Operation Searchlight had begun. The far-flung, likely pre-recorded voice of Mujib came through the radio, faint under the booms of rocket launchers. “This may be my last message…. I call upon the people of Bangladesh, wherever you are and with whatever you have, to resist the army occupation.” He was arrested at his home that night, and wouldn’t be seen again until months after the war.

A telegram dated March 28 and titled “Selective Genocide” from the United States Consul General, Archer Blood, read, “Here in Dacca we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pak military.” The next day his office reported that the West Pakistani army was setting houses on fire and shooting people as they ran out of the burning buildings. It added that six girls were raped, shot, and hung from ceiling fans by their heels. Receiving no response, telegrams documenting the horrors continued to pile up. The White House stonewalled. On the phone with Henry Kissinger, President Nixon said, “I wouldn’t put out a statement praising it, but we’re not going to condemn it either.” West Pakistan was, at the time, facilitating sought-after talks between the US and China. 

By April the American consul had had enough. A young staffer wrote up a wire, and Blood endorsed it. The first-ever formal dissent cable sent in the history of the US Foreign Service, known as the “Blood Telegram,” said: “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities…. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy.”

Over the following eight months, in what one US official at the time called “the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland,” the civil war would claim between 250,000 and 3 million Bengali lives, result in 200,000–400,000 women and girls raped, and displace some 10 million refugees across the border to India. Mascarenhas wrote a two-page spread about what he saw for The Sunday Times, knowing it would result in his exile: “This is genocide, conducted with amazing casualness.”

Hindus were one of the main targets. Researchers now suspect the army murdered more than 25,000 Hindus within the first three months of Operation Searchlight. Soldiers ripped the lungi off any man they suspected to be Hindu, because only Muslims were circumcised. Many men died cowering in the nude.

My mother lived through one of the bloodiest wars in recent memory, though before I asked, she had never even mentioned it. It lasted less than a year when she was barely six years old. Any lingering scars from that time are invisible even to her. She does, however, retain one vivid memory. “The Pakistani army came and started to round up people,” she tells me. “Abba told us all to get away. We went around to the back of the house, through the jungle. They used to set houses alight so fast.” All eight siblings, with their pregnant mother, walked about an hour through the wilderness to a relative’s house.

My grandfather stayed behind, with a younger brother, Naija. When the fire started, Almas was fast asleep. It engulfed the first room, then billowed out into the hall. He awoke to a cloud of heat and Naija shaking him wildly. All their belongings—money, clothes, family photographs—went up in flames. Nana ran out just in time, barefoot and clutching his lungi to his waist. Afterward he moved his family into No.1 Baburail, a house he had built but rented out. My mother shared a bed with most of her siblings, in which they all slept like sardines. Her father had cordoned off the rest of the house as a shelter for displaced neighbors. 

Elsewhere a guerrilla force called the Mukhti Bahini (Freedom Fighters) resisted, destroying power lines and fuel depots. They were trained in camps overseen by the Indian Army, which equipped them with a mixture of sophisticated machinery and defunct Soviet weapons. The guerillas controlled the countryside. Siddiq Salik, the Pakistani army’s public relations officer, wrote, “It was impossible to move without a personal escort which, in turn, served as a provocation for the rebels. They ambushed the party or mined its path. If one reached one’s destination safely, one could look back on the journey as a positive achievement.”

Ahidul Khan’s father regularly went to visit Almas Ali at Solar Machine Press, and read The Daily Ittefaq, a Bengali-language newspaper founded by Bhashani in 1949. Nearby, Ahidul recalls, there was a sweet shop named Mishti Mukh (Sweet Tooth), now abandoned and derelict, but once owned by a Hindu family. The Pakistani Army had marked the shop, like other Hindu-owned ones, with a large, yellow “H.”  

Back then a Hindu man used to sit on the street stark naked. His skin was dark and leathered from the sun. He used to yell at invisible figures and chase off kids with a long stick. Almas Ali fondly called him “amar pagol” (my madman). Almas would sit outside and read through the paper while his pagol ate. It had gone on like this for years, nobody knows how long, until one day in 1971 Pakistani soldiers walked by. Both Ahidul and my mother, neither of whom were witnesses but heard about it afterwards—or, in my mother’s case, saw her father’s open wound—tell the same story.

They must have spotted him a mile off. Naked, overtly Hindu. They collared him, and Almas Ali cried out, “Stop! What are you doing?”

“This man is a Hindu,” one of the soldiers said. The man prattled on as they grabbed at him.

“For God’s sake,” Almas Ali pleaded. “What does it matter? Look at him. He’s just a madman.”

They ignored him and hacked the man to death with bayonets. Nana tried to stop them, catching a wayward knife to the bicep. By the time the soldiers moved on, his shirt was soaked—both with his own blood and with his pagol’s, from when he kneeled on the ground and held his friend’s limp body to his chest. 

As a Time correspondent reported in August 1971,

The evidence of the bloodbath is all over East Pakistan. Whole sections of cities lie in ruins from shelling and aerial attacks…. Kushtia, a city of 40,000, now looks, as a World Bank team reported, “like the morning after a nuclear attack.” 

Shelling had turned even Dacca into a ghost town. General Tikka Khan, dubbed “the Butcher of Bengal,” announced the formation of groups of civilian pro-Pakistan conspirators called Shanti Committees, after the word for “peace.” Their job was to thwart the Mukhti Bahini’s efforts, most notoriously by deploying Razakars, a paramilitary force armed by the Pakistani government. The word Razakar translates to “volunteer” in Urdu—though I have always known it to mean something else. In Bangla it is a word for “traitor.”

That is when my Nana made a decision as inexplicable as it was ruinous. He joined a local Shanti Committee. This is not up for debate; all sources agree that it happened. But the reasoning behind it is where history forks and two competing Almas Alis emerge. 

The first is straightforward. Perhaps Almas wanted a unified Pakistan after all. He had greatly admired Jinnah, and was briefly part of the upper echelons of the Pakistani government. But this hardly aligns with what else is known of him. He became critical of the central government within a year of its inception. He had opposed the heavy-handedness of its military, and played a crucial part in the Language Movement. And how could a man who risked his life to protect Hindus now support the forces that were slaughtering them? 

The alternative explanation is that he was being strategic. This is the stance his children have always taken: that their father used the power he was given as a member of the Shanti Committee to protect his community, especially Mukhti Bahini, from the army. Before I began my research, I had thought this was an attempt to absolve him. Perhaps they simply couldn’t stomach the possibility that their father was a traitor. But now I am convinced I was wrong. 

Abdul,⁵ now in his seventies, is one of the few living veterans of the Mukhti Bahini in Narayanganj. He says that my Nana set up a covert network of catchment. Pakistani troops “burned our house during the war,” he recalls. “Almas Ali enlisted my father to go over there and keep watch with others all night for the Pakistani army, and give a signal when they were nearby…. He saved a lot of people. A lot of households survived because of him.” 

My mother tells me about flashes she has of her father handing out small white cards to men during the war. She couldn’t read them, but she has always believed that they held some kind of protective power. Ahidul Khan’s father, it turns out, was one of these men. “My father went and got one for me,” Ahidul explains. “He gave a lot of freedom fighters a ‘sacha Pakistani’ (true Pakistani) identity card, so that when they were caught by the military they would be spared.” Another son of a late Mukhti Bahini, Mahbubur Rahman Masum, explained that Almas Ali joined the Shanti Committee as a “tactic to save his area and the freedom fighters.”

Shanti Committee members were instructed to identify “miscreants” and report back. Around May or June of 1971, fifteen-year-old Nasir Uddin Ahmed visited home after a month at a Mukhti Bahini training camp. On his way back he was intercepted by an army Jeep containing Razakars and some Pakistani soldiers. As his son, Sharif Uddin Subuj, explained to one of the journalists I hired, this happened outside the mosque by the Baburail canal, right by Almas Ali’s house. Sharif tells this story in great detail, having heard it recounted many times. “From his house, Almas shaheb saw that they were taking my father. Immediately he came out, shirtless, only wearing his lungi.” 

The conversation, he says, happened in Urdu. The officers told Almas they’d received intelligence that the boy was a Mukhti. But Almas claimed that Nasir worked for him tending to his land. When they asked for proof, Almas—thinking quickly—pointed to the boy’s feet, which were bare and covered in cow dung. The Razakars and soldiers were convinced. “He was such a big Muslim League politician…. They listened to him.” 

“They would have killed him,” Sharif says. “Whatever people might say about Almas shaheb, he saved my father’s life. I heard he saved a lot of people’s lives, too. Whenever they caught anyone local, he’d turn up and lie. Say, ‘No, he’s this or that’ instead. He’d lie to save people’s lives.”

Bangladesh was born on December 16, 1971. Dhaka fell after Indian troops were sent to reinforce the Mukhti Bahini. Approximately 93,000 Pakistani troops surrendered on December 16 to the Indian and Bangladeshi liberation forces, the largest military surrender since World War II. “All I remember is people running,” my mother says. She saw them breaking into sprints from a window in No. 1 Baburail, running toward something out of her sight.

On December 17 Almas Ali’s younger brother and close confidant, Mahi, went missing. The rumor was that independence fighters had tied his hands and feet together with rope, shot him, and dropped him into a lake. The next day Almas Ali woke up as usual to the call to prayer. He ate breakfast: boiled okra prepared by the maids. He sat on the veranda that looked out to the iron gates of his house. Before the war, the city used to thrum with rickshaw bells and Hindu women ululating on worship days. But that morning was still. 

I hear several versions of what happened next. My youngest aunt says that a call came, asking Almas Ali to stop by a nearby address. Their mother had told them that a few retreating Pakistani soldiers had urged Nana to go with them to Pakistan because he was, officially, a member of the Shanti Committee. They told him he was in grave danger. But he hadn’t hurt anyone; he hadn’t betrayed his people. He went to the address. 

My mother tells it differently. She says there was no call, no address. In fact Almas Ali, Nahar, and my aunt Papa, only an infant, went away to a safehouse while the other siblings hid at their uncle’s home. There they disguised their oldest brother, Iqbal, as a girl in a salwar kameez, afraid that the people who hunted their father would come for him next. My mother says that they all went to sleep, but over at the safehouse my aunt cried for milk, alerting the gunmen to their father’s location. My mother stops at this point in the story, her brows gathering. “I think Papa was born by then,” she says. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

One thing we know for certain: a group of Mukhti Bahini went after him. Mahbubur Rahman Masum says that my grandfather was initially imprisoned in Syed Ali Mansion and then taken to Sonakanda Fort. 

Before they killed him, my aunt tells me, they tied a blindfold around his eyes and kicked him in the chest. One of them pulled a gun out of the waistband of their trousers. Almas Ali pleaded, “Please. I have nine children.” These details come as a surprise to my mother, who overhears my phone call with her sister and cries down the line, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Almas Ali’s older brother searched for a body for months. “My uncle must have looked at a hundred dead bodies trying to find Abba,” my mother says. The title of Razakar stuck long after he was gone and loomed over those he left behind. Abdul, the Mukhti Bahini who was away in the villages during the war, returned to Narayanganj too late. “That should never have happened. If I was here…” 

My family says that my grandmother “raised her children under her aanchal,” the long train of a sari. She couldn’t disprove claims that Almas Ali was a traitor because the men who killed him now ran the country. Though Iqbal inherited his father’s charisma and popularity, his mother begged him not to go into politics, and he obliged.

In 2019 Almas Ali’s name was included in an official government list of almost 11,000 Razakars and pro-Pakistan leaders and collaborators. The document was repealed three days later. People complained that it had mistakenly included names of pro-liberation individuals and freedom fighters. The press revealed that the list was largely unverified. The Bangladeshi government promised to publish a new, verified list, but it never came.

One of my aunts, Luna, recounts a visit to the Ahsan Manzil Museum in Dhaka where the All-India Muslim League would meet in the 1940s. “I saw a lot of people’s portraits. Suhrawardy. Jinnah. But not Abba’s,” she says. “They’ve written him out of history.”

But a few people remember. Rajesh, the Hindu man who recalls that “people here loved him.” Abdul, the Mukhti Bahini who shakes his head and says my Nana “had no enemies here.” Ahidul, who insists thrice in one interview that “Almas shaheb was never a Razakar.”⁶ My aunt Papa once met a fishmonger who told her, “He was the last real leader we had. We will never forgive those people for what they did to him.” 

There is, it seems, a global amnesia over Bangladesh’s Liberation War. In history books across South Asia, it is a footnote in a timeline of hostilities between Pakistan and India. “The 1971 war was treated as another India and Pakistan conflict, a bilateral issue,” Anam Zakaria writes in 1971: A People’s History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.⁷ “The narratives of the East Pakistanis, their grievances and aspirations, and most importantly their struggle for Bangladesh, received little attention.” In the West, if it is mentioned at all, it is as minor collateral damage of the cold war. The Smithsonian Magazine called it “the genocide the U.S. can’t remember, but Bangladesh can’t forget.”

The nation misremembers, too. Mujib’s daughter Sheikh Hasina, who ruled as prime minister until a popular uprising overthrew her last summer, censored and rewrote history to center solely around her father. Had records not been tampered with, there might have been even more to discover about Almas Ali. Earlier this year, student protesters expressed their frustrations by defacing and toppling effigies of Sheikh Mujib. The reaction, though understandable, has been criticized as a quintessentially Bengali reflex—to be stuck in our own history even as we attempt to erase it. 

In the aftermath of another Bengali revolution, it is time to revisit the stories of our past. Almas Ali’s murderers tarnished his legacy, blotting out my grandfather’s contributions where they could. For fifty years they succeeded. But allow me, now, to correct the record.