Someone recently told me that I should stop talking about Bihar.

I have heard disagreements about identity before, but this one became personal very quickly. My parents came from Bihar, and many of my relatives have roots there. Yet I was told that my attachment to Bihar made my loyalty questionable.

Then came the word “traitor.”

I was compared with Afghans who live in Pakistan but retain an attachment to Afghanistan. The argument, as I understood it, was simple: once your family has made Pakistan its home, why keep talking about another place?

I thought about that for a while.

Then I thought about my grandfather.

What exactly am I supposed to do with him?

Erase him?

My Grandfather Never Came to Pakistan

My grandfather was originally from Deodah in Bihar.

After 1946, he shifted to Pinjrawan. He remained there on his land and eventually died there. He never migrated to Pakistan.

Pinjrawan is not merely a name preserved in our family memory. The Indian census records Pinjranwan as a village in the Kurtha sub-district of present-day Arwal district in Bihar.

The timing of my grandfather’s move interests me because 1946 was a terrible year in Bihar. Severe communal violence erupted in the province amid the growing tensions that preceded Partition. Historian Isha Dubey notes that Bihar had also become an important centre of support for the Pakistan movement by this period.

But I have to draw a line between history and family memory.

I know my grandfather moved from Deodah to Pinjrawan after 1946. I do not have evidence that the riots caused him to move. Perhaps one day I will learn more from relatives or family records.

Until then, I will not turn a possibility into a fact.

What I do know is more important to this story.

My grandfather stayed in Bihar.

Partition Did Not Give My Family a Clean Break

Pakistan appeared on the map in August 1947. Families were more complicated.

Some people crossed the new borders. Others remained where they had lived for years. Historians have documented how the violence beginning in 1946 spread through several parts of British India and became intertwined with the upheaval surrounding Partition.

My own family carries one small piece of that enormous history.

My grandfather remained in Bihar. My parents’ story eventually became connected with Pakistan. I grew up and built my own life here.

Those facts do not compete with one another.

Yet the accusation that I should not talk about Bihar seems to require a cleaner history. Once a family becomes Pakistani, apparently the places that came before Pakistan should gradually disappear from conversation.

I cannot make my family history work that way.

If I stop mentioning Bihar, my grandfather still lived there. Deodah does not disappear. Neither does Pinjrawan.

Silence would change only one thing: what I allow myself to remember publicly.

“Bihari” Does Not Describe One Simple History

There is another complication.

In Pakistan, the word “Bihari” can carry historical meanings that go well beyond having ancestors in the Indian state of Bihar.

After Partition, Muslims migrated into East Pakistan from different parts of India. Research on migration between 1947 and 1964 shows that language strongly shaped the experience of Muslim refugees there. The term “Bihari” consequently became associated with a wider Urdu-speaking, non-Bengali population and was not always a precise description of someone’s original province.

That later history became even more politically charged through the upheaval surrounding the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

My family history should not be collapsed into every political meaning that the word later acquired.

When I say my parents were from Bihar, I mean something quite literal.

There were places.

There was land. There were relatives who did not simply vanish when other members of the family built their lives elsewhere.

And there was my grandfather.

The Afghan Comparison Deserves an Answer

I do not want to avoid the comparison that was made with Afghans.

Perhaps the person who criticized me meant something more serious than an insult. Perhaps his argument was that a person who continually looks toward an ancestral homeland may develop divided political loyalties.

That question can be discussed.

But first we need to distinguish political allegiance from family memory.

My grandfather never migrated to Pakistan. I cannot accuse him of retaining loyalty to a country he supposedly left because he never left Bihar in the first place.

The comparison with Afghans also carries its own complicated history of migration and refugee movements. It cannot serve as shorthand for disloyalty.

More importantly, it does not answer my question.

Why should knowing where my grandfather lived tell anyone how loyal I am to Pakistan?

A memory is not a passport.

What Would Proving My Loyalty Require?

Suppose I accepted the criticism.

I would stop writing about Bihar.

Perhaps I would stop mentioning Deodah. Pinjrawan could disappear from my articles as well.

Then what?

I could talk about my life in Pakistan, but I would become quiet whenever the story reached my parents. Go back another generation and my grandfather would almost disappear.

That would leave me with a strange version of patriotism.

My Pakistani identity would remain acceptable only after I edited the inconvenient geography out of my family history.

I cannot do that.

My Pakistani identity does not require me to manufacture a different grandfather.

The Border Came. My Grandfather Stayed.

I often find myself returning to that simple fact.

My grandfather stayed.

Governments divided British India. New citizenships emerged and migration transformed millions of lives. But a political border could not reorganise every family into two neat national boxes.

My grandfather remained on his land in Bihar until his death.

Later generations of his family lived different lives.

I became Pakistani.

There is no contradiction in those sentences unless we decide to create one.

When I write about Bihar, I am not making a political claim on India. I am talking about where my family came from. When I write about Pakistan, I am writing about the country in which my own life took shape.

Sometimes the two histories meet.

They meet in my parents.

They meet in the relatives whose names and places remain part of our family story.

Most of all, they meet in a man who moved from Deodah to Pinjrawan after 1946, stayed on his land and died there.

My grandfather never came to Pakistan.

I did not choose that history. I inherited it.

So I will talk about Bihar when Bihar belongs in the story I am telling.

Remembering my grandfather does not require me to explain away Pakistan.

The question I am left with is much simpler.

Why should remembering where he lived require a loyalty test at all?