On 25 July 1971, at a small stadium in India packed to its brim, a team from what was then East Pakistan played a side representing the Nadia district of West Bengal. Just before kick-off, the East Pakistan captain unfurled a green flag with a map of modern day Bangladesh at its centre. To the sound of applause and cheering from the 10,000-strong crowd, the flag was paraded around the perimeter of the pitch, then hoisted alongside the national colours of India.In this dusty stadium in an inconspicuous corner of the world, the East Pakistan players had made history. This was the first time that the flag of Bangladesh – a country still not officially recognised – had been unfurled on foreign soil. As ambassadors of the war for liberation that was raging in East Pakistan, the Bangladesh XI – the country's first international football team – were rebels first and footballers second.In 1947, the last British forces and colonial administrators departed the Indian subcontinent. Behind them they left the new republic of India and the Islamic republic of Pakistan, the latter divided into East and West regions and flanking the Indian peninsula on both sides. Though long sought after, independence came at a high price. With the subcontinent split into two separate nations, the years before and after independence bore witness to a mass exodus of refugees travelling from one country to another, depending on their religion. As a result, pogroms, rioting and massacres erupted in the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab.East Pakistan had a prickly relationship with its counterpart in the West. The enormous peninsula of India dividing the two regions spatially meant that, barring religion, the two regions had very little in common. The people of East Pakistan shared cultural and linguistic similarities with the bordering Indian states of West Bengal and Assam, rather than the Punjabi and Pashtun cultures of West Pakistan.Read more on VICE Sports.
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