Claiming a Past, Making a Future: The Liberation
War Museum (Dhaka) as a Site of Struggle
Shelley Feldman
Cornell and Binghamton University
Once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And, in a way that bends time, so long as it is remembered, it will indicate the future. It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of forgetting. To remember is to face the enemy. The truth lies in remembering (Brookner 1981:5).
Prelude: Retrieving the Past
On 22 March 1996 the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, Bangladesh opened its doors, twenty-five years after the struggle for independence. It was founded by a consortium of businessmen and enthusiasts who sought to perpetuate the memory of the liberation war so that future generations can “know our rich heritage, … draw … inspiration and pride to build a better future, and pay homage to the great martyrs, the freedom fighters and people all over the world, who supported the Liberation War in 1971” (Background Documents 1996, Bangladesh Observer 26 March 1995). The Museum is located on a large lot in Segun Bagicha, a mixed zone of office and commercial space and residential dwellings in the city’s downtown. The renovation of the old home includes a lovely back garden and café where visitors are encouraged to sit, talk, and discuss the importance of the war and its meaning and experience for those who did not live through it. This is complemented by a library and video center; the latter donated by the United States, where regular performances, film, musical events, and workshops and conferences are held (Daily Star 1998). As Akku Chowdhury(Star Magazine 24 May 1996), the driving force behind the project, notes: “We want people to be proud of our country. . . unless we know about our heritage we cannot move forward….The Muktijudda is one of our greatest achievements. It was a time when every Bengali was united. If this spirit can be revived again, we can achieve great things.
Taken as a whole, the exhibit is structured to evoke a raw emotional response and provide a context for viewers to experience, through actual photographs, starkly presented in black and white newsprint, the pain and horror of the carnage. This situates the freedom struggle at its core, where the events, activities, and artifacts anticipate the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation. In Raffat Binte Rashid’s (1995:3) description of what was envisioned for the museum site, every effort was made to “[re]think of the past the instant you enter its premises.” This temporal construction suggests the inevitability of the war and outrage at its elision.
The six inside galleries display artifacts collected from people across the country, from the families of military leaders as well as peasant producers and rural dwellers. While many of the holdings are of officer uniforms and war accoutrements, these are interspersed with memorabilia from ordinary citizens to create an experience of the everydayness of the war and of the ways in which it intruded upon common citizens, sheltering neither women nor children from battle. This selection is built around the theme of violence: bloody clothes, guns and other battlements, photographs of murder, rape, and the dead, and posters, newspaper clippings, diaries, and photographs. Such images draw people into the story, helping those too young to recall the war to experience its power and pain as they connect to other sites, “important battle sites, killing fields and graves,” where freedom fighters and victims of the war were buried, sites of tortures (sic) by the Pakistan Army and their collaborators” (Daily Star 23 June 1995: 10). The democratic character of these holdings complements the iconic images of the region’s popular history with its images of the rebel poet Nazrul Islam and martyrs of the Language Movement.
The first two galleries are devoted to the period leading up to independence and the remaining four dedicated to documenting the ravages and horrors of the war itself. As one enters the first gallery they are struck by the placement of “a fossil,” marked “very old,” which draws you into the country’s long history. Moving farther into the room, a few “ancient relics” and items from the British colonial period come into view, introducing a common trope among Bangladeshi writers – ancestral origins and the soil – and signaling a deeply rooted linear and territorially based history that intimates the seamless movement from Bengal’s past to independence.
Notably absent from this rendering of the “pre-history” of Bangladesh is the 1947 partition, even as one is able to briefly “see” that moment in a subsequent gallery which gestures toward the second colonial encounter – the period of East Pakistan, 1947-1971. This period is represented as an aberration, an illogical connection forged by a theory of “two-nations” and justified on the basis of incompatible religious difference. Photographs and clippings display the Language Movement (1952) and its martyrs, positioned chronologically, to highlight the increasing violence associated with efforts to negotiate greater autonomy for East Pakistan. Interestingly, the movement to make Bengali one of the national languages of Pakistan actually began with a protest march on 11 March 1948, immediately following partition. In the exhibit, Dr. Md. Shahidullah is pictured at a rally proclaiming the significance and beauty of Bengali culture alongside photographs of Bhashani’s 21 Point election manifesto taken in 1951, at a conference held in Chittagong (the primary port city of then East Pakistan). The gallery closes with images of the electoral victory of the United Front in 1954. This teleology highlights the salience of language to Bengali cultural identity to epitomize the illogic of a partition based on shared religious identification.
The third gallery includes many rare photographs documenting the atrocities perpetrated by the Pakistani army to establish the primary thematic of the collection. It begins with pre-independence images of Sheikh Mujib’s March 7th speech announcing a parallel government in the East Wing to signal a turning point in negotiations between the Awami League and the Pakistan People’s Party. The photographs and news clips mark Mujb’s charismatic rise to power and the emergent popular mobilization for independence.
As one moves to the fourth gallery one is struck by the images and artifacts of Bengali war victims and of documents from the emergent government in exile. An adjoining balcony displays a map of occupied East Pakistan/Bangladesh and recognizes all of the sector commanders. The fifth gallery turns attention to the popular struggle with images and objects of those who suffered and died during the nine-month war. The last gallery, perhaps the most difficult to experience, turns attention to what is interpreted as emblematic of the genocide committed during the struggle, the rounding up and execution of East Pakistan’s renowned intellectuals by the Fifth Columnists Al-Badar, Al-Shams, Razakars and other collaborators. The collections “tear-soaked mementos” include frocks of children slain, helmets, munitions, rare photographs and personal letters, as well as images of freedom fighters and Indian soldiers credited with contributing to the final victory (Daily Star October 1995).
Remarkable about the exhibit as a whole is the relatively extensive coverage of women among activist and village members recognized for their central role in the war effort. Women students are seen marching across campus, preparing safety shelters for those fighting in the countryside, and as active participants in the mobilizations that led up to the war. Perhaps most telling upon a visit to the Museum in 2006, and absent from the display in 1996, is recognition of the rape victims and their stories of the war that is featured in a separate gallery closing the exhibition.
Introduction
Recent interest in memory opens to question the specific place of national museums in negotiating representations of the nation and in contestations over the meanings of nationalism and national belonging. War museums are especially suggestive sites for interpreting or, as some argue, documenting, the place of specific events in a national narrative. As sites of commemoration, they create and reproduce particular histories of the nation and mark occasions that constitute nationalist consciousness. Featuring specific events for celebration, they produce occasions for observing the institutional formations that construct as well as contest hegemonic national narratives. In Bangladesh, the Liberation War Museum is the product of popular opposition to state and bureaucratic interests that have sought to challenge the secular meanings associated with Sheik Mujibur Rahman, “the father of the country,” and the Awami League platform at independence. This oppositional stance positions the museum at the center of political debate and practice in the aftermath of Sheik Mujib’s murder in 1975.
Acknowledging the role of the museum as one of opposing the military and religiously inflected posture of successive regimes since 1975, concedes the selectivity of hegemonic discourses, the view of national narratives as products of negotiation over different interpretations of history, and understands history as a social activity and not merely a vehicle for realizing self-conscious political interests. As Schwartz (1982:393) argues, “The past cannot be literally construed; it can only be selectively exploited.” Prasenjit Duara (1995) similarly reminds us that “[n]ationalism is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather marks the site where different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with each other.” Exploring museums and memory, too, shows that different representations of the nation are outcomes of struggle over the way competing memories and accounts of history overlap, collide, or are erased to become, to quote Pierre Nora (1989), the “givenness” of history. As a product of struggle, the assumed givenness of national history is actually a partial and exclusionary rendering, the product of a “controlled exercise and automatic deepening of memory, the reconstitution of a past without lacunae or faults,” the creation of an obviously logical rendering of what “really” happened (Nora 1989:9).
War museums are especially suggestive sites for analyzing this telling of “historical truths” since collections embody arenas and outcomes of negotiation that shape how states and publics create, understand, represent, and respond to their past. In most cases, they “command us not merely to remember, but to remember a triumph” (Ebenshade 1995:72) and to celebrate “society’s glories” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991:376). But, some triumphs, particularly independence struggles, may change in meaning as some people, often elites, seek to refashion relations with their once defined colonizers or enemies. Such elites may, for instance, secure their positions by either suppressing prior or crafting new interpretations of shared historical events, where the latter are referenced to the changing exigencies of the global political economy. In discussing what to do with existing monuments in post-communist Eastern Europe, for example, Ebenshade (1995: 72) wonders how to move from monuments that once celebrated a triumph to what was eventually “to be seen as a tragedy.” How, in this context, does one make sense of the complex and contingent relationships “between the state that erases and the memory that resists” (Ibid. 77)? Such contingent relationships suggest that history takes various forms, concerned as it is with interpreting experience and memory to fit an emergent hegemony. The accomplishment of particular hegemonic projects (which are never totalizing) is revealed in the erasure of some memories and the reconfiguration of political relationships as if they were part of a seamless and self-evident historical present. The failure of the state to build a national museum focused on the independence struggle, and efforts by members of civil society to do so, suggests that the experience of many Bangladeshi’s in the post 1971 period are caught in this web of erasure, one that Milan Kundera (1981) brilliantly captures in his refrain, “the struggle of man (people) against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
In these circumstances of contestation and the consolidation of rule, how do memories resist erasure and re-present experiences for popular consumption? What is the character of the struggle against efforts by some — whether state bureaucrats, elites or other interests — to forget? The Museum explores this tension between remembering and forgetting and the politics of nationalist imaginings by historicizing negotiations among political parties and interests in the emergent democracy. As Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz’ (1991) analysis of the building the Vietnam War Memorial shows, the unpopularity of the war and its meaning tied to political failure resulted in competing interests and negotiations in the decision to build a memorial. Their study carefully reconstructs and reveals the tensions among popular, semi-autonomous, and government institutions over the meaning of the Vietnam War and the appropriate way to acknowledge its (American) victims. Importantly, they examine contestation over how to aesthetically represent a war that remains socially divisive and politically embarrassing. Their reconstruction challenges views of “hegemonic influences” that overdetermine the power of the state to offer instead a relational interpretation of the social production of the Wall and its aesthetic formation.
Drawing on their contributions, I examine contestations over the meanings attendant to the Mukktijoddah Jadughar. Unlike recognition, if not acceptance, of the outcome of the Vietnam War by state institutions and the body politic, even thirty-five years after independence, some continue to relegate the independence struggle to a footnote in the national narrative. While a National Martyrs Memorial was built in Nabinagar, Savar, approximately 35 km from Dhaka, the country’s capital, it was designed but not completed until 10 years after the war, and perhaps because of its distance, it does not provide a rallying site for discussion and debate. Consequently, the struggle over the meanings represented by the museum is less one of incorporating diverse interpretations into the memorial site and its aesthetic representation and more one of challenging the nationalist project as constructed by various political coalitions, demanding acknowledgement of the independence struggle and recognition of its freedom fighters. Struggles over the museum, in other words, are struggles over the narrative of the nation.
Following brief remarks on museums and memory, and the conditions that framed discussions of a commemorative site for the 1971 war, I turn attention to two periods of political tension in order to understand both contestations over the museum and the roles that different political regimes played in remaking “national” history. Changing political party alliances, comprising both military and democratic rule, showcase the class and religious/secular cleavages in independent Bangladesh and situate the proximate context and patterns of erasure that culminate in the formation of a Museum Trust. Their efforts illuminate on-going struggles over interpretations of independence and expose contested meanings of citizenship and challenges to sovereignty, particularly obvious since no state-supported war museum was built to celebrate independence. Framed thusly, I hope to contribute to understanding the coalition politics of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) of Zia Rahman and Khaleda Zia, Ershad’s Jatiyo Party, and the positions taken by the Awami League under Sheik Hasina.
Examining the museum as a political project thus offers a focal point for contestations over interpretations of Bangladesh’s independence, the different meanings accorded to her “national history,” and the place of Pakistan in these constructions. This might be queried thusly: How does the museum project attempt to “rescue history from the nation” (Duara 1995), and, in so doing, represent the war itself and other events in the national narrative of Bangladesh? How does the collection temporize the history of the region prior to the emergence of Bangladesh and how, in the process of memorializing the struggle, does it provide a window on the critical events that, up until 1971, framed the region’s construction of itself? To paraphrase Gillis (1994), how do the identities and memories distilled in the museum signal the hopes and aspirations of a different future and constitute what McEachern (1998:48-49) refers to as “the new”? The long-reach of such institutions, in other words, illuminates aspects of the contemporary political landscape.
Museums as Political Projects: Situating Debates and Insights
To explore the role of the Museum in struggles to recognize freedom fighters and demand accountability for those charged with war crimes, the argument draws together a number of different literatures. One addresses recent contributions to what Ivan Karp (1992:21) refers to as “the politics of public culture” where “museums and communities simultaneously cooperate and do battle” in the formation of identities. Importantly, the commitment of museum supporters to educate others, particularly their children’s and subsequent generations, is premised on their view of the museum as a repository “of knowledge, value and taste” that can “educate, refine, or produce social commitments beyond those that can be produced in ordinary educational and civic institutions.” The reference to ordinary educational and civic institutions points to efforts by the Ministry of Education to support revising school textbooks so as to exclude reference to the independence struggle. Such reference acknowledges that ministers of cultural affairs or education are state representatives who, by dint of their positions, help to implement the hegemonic project of nation building. Not surprisingly, their initiatives offer limited space for debate over the place of the liberation war in the (re)making of national history. But, others, particularly those who identify as muktijoddhas (freedom fighters) have been consistent in keeping the war in view. As recently as February 2005, a plea went out by Asma Kibria, the widow of a “fallen comrade,” appealing to efforts to continue to struggle against the politics of the Khaleda Zia regime. I quote it at length because it well represents the lure that such appeals have for freedom fighters and those seeking to acknowledge the liberation struggle in contemporary party politics.
I am calling for various programs that involve peaceful mass protests. Please join these protests wherever you are. Remember that your mere presence in a gathering gives renewed inspiration to the young and reminds them of the courage that Bengalis are capable of. When you lose sight of what we are fighting for, please remember the sight of the blood-soaked body of my husband, and do not just weep, but promise to yourselves that with Almighty Allah’s blessing you will take the right steps to ensure that Shah A.M.S. Kibria’s death was not in vain.
. . . You have given so much to this nation, and some of you may feel it is unfair for anyone to ask you to give something more. But you must do so to defend your legacy. . . . I now beseech you to summon every last reserve of strength in your bodies to once again gird yourselves with steely resolution for the struggle ahead, remembering the past. …
My husband was one of you and I know that even his own modest contributions to the struggle for Liberation have not gone unappreciated. There is one less of your number today, the “band of brothers” that brought freedom to our country. But there are still enough of you to make a difference, to turn the tide of battle and sweep away the forces of evil that have gripped the throat of this country that we love.
As the wife of a Muktijoddha, I say to you, “It is time to make a stand”. It is time to confront the forces of evil. It is time for you to lead us back towards the bright vision of the Republic that millions died for in 1971.
In the ongoing struggle to recognize liberation and the values of secularism, democracy, and socialism, the War Museum serves to resist the “coercive organs of the state” (Karp 1997:5). The struggle to build the museum, create a collection, and offer a venue for debate also provides a strategic site from which to examine democratic governance and reveal, for generations to come, the significance of the popular struggle for independence as crucial to Bangladeshi history and identity.
Importantly, too, examining the tension between memory and history reveals the “lack of congruity between personal experience and expectation” (Crane 1997: 44) and, like Karp, Crane locates this incongruity in the relationship between institutional representation and the experience of the museum viewer. Crane’s argument presumes general agreement about the event commemorated, even as she recognizes the intensity of disagreement and emotion that can be generated by the collision of personal experience and an exhibit. For Crane, the exhibit and the “fact” of the holocaust are not in question, only the possibility of misinterpreting or excluding a particular aspect of this traumatic event. Thus, in the relationship between curator or exhibit and viewer there is likely continuity in the representative narrative, even as one acknowledges and accommodates multiple interpretations among a diverse audience. History, in these circumstances, is not on trial. For members of the Muktijoddha Smriti Trust, in contrast, it is precisely the absence of an historical accounting that is at issue.
Vera Zolberg also explores the relationship between an exhibit and its diverse publics in her study of the multiple constructions of World War II. Distinguishing between historical accounts and collective memories, Zolberg (1998:583) argues that history museums are “institutions in which a nation’s qualities are ‘written’ and ‘displayed’,” a place to construct “the narrative of the nation,” and to whom “the role of promoting the monocultural notion of the nation” is assigned, challenging curators and generating specific expectations for viewers. Like national history museums, war museums are usually state projects to promote understanding events in ways that flatten out and smooth over conflicting interpretations and personal experience. The product is a normative, even if complex, understanding of an event or crisis in a nation’s past. But, as Crane (1997: 46) reminds us, there is often an excess of memory that is unable to be fully, or perhaps even adequately, documented in these exhibits, precisely because they refrain from, or resist, incorporation in institutions, texts, and practices. Such excess – of pain, trauma, and the inexplicable – often finds expression in personal narratives and diaries and, only later, is it possible to open such experiences to public scrutiny. As Menon and Bhasin (1998) and Butalia (1998) remind us, in the absence of historical records, literary texts provided a window on the place of women – raped, murdered, and killed to maintain the family’s honor — in the 1947 Partition. As Menon and Bhasin (1998: 7) argue, literature “can be considered a kind of social history not only because it so approximates reality (what Alok Rai calls “a hypnotic, fascinated but also slavish imitation of reality”) but because it is the only non-official contemporary record we have of the time, apart from reportage.”
Thus, the emotional angst that is generated for war museum viewers is partially located in a second order distinction, that between a “willingness to commemorate suffering experienced rather than suffering caused” (Milton in Crane 1997:59). While this analytic distinction is suggestive, liberation war museums are often established precisely because there is a need to account for how the suffering experienced by those who lived it, or lost family members to it, cannot but implicate the conditions that led to the loss. Thus, identifying and paying homage to those who suffered in the liberation war always implicates the ex-colonizer. This echoes what Meghna Guhathakurta (1996: 20) refers to as the difference between “journeys away from celebrating the glories of nationhood to revisit the painful memory of oppression.” Perhaps it is not surprising that the display of suffering in the Liberation War Museum provides the leitmotif of the collection in ways that differ from exhibits where viewers leave with an overwhelming recognition of the heroism that made independence possible. While crucial synergies exist between a frame of genocidal violence and the heroism that brought independence, the overwhelming experience for the observer is one of suffering and of a horrible and unrestrained genocide.
A Second Colonial Encounter: The Pakistan Period
In this section I briefly sketch the relations leading up to 1971 in order to suggest that the anti-colonial struggle was as much a battle over identity and political representation, as it was a struggle over resources and autonomy (Alam 1993; Islam 1974; Jahan 1972; Sobhan 1993:76-154). The decision to build the Museum and the particularities of its collection provide a trace on the moral outrage of freedom fighters as well as those for whom the experience and meaning of the struggle for independence was lived through its erasure from historical accounts and public debate. The Museum project, in short, is the realization of the desire to (re)claim one’s identity as a political subject. As a site of negotiation, it demands accountability for the millions of lives lost, the havoc caused by the war experience, and the right to be hold responsible those who fought against their fellow citizens, Importantly, it recognizes the dishonor suffered by the millions of women raped, an issue only recently publicly acknowledged (Mookherjee 2003; Saikia 2004). The celebrated sculptor Ferdousi Priyabhashini was among the first to share her war experience, a brave acknowledgement that opens a space for others to do likewise. Priyabhashini’s position has helped to center rape and women in analyses of the war, condemning both perpetrators and those who disowned or dishonored rape victims or their family for their role in the social exclusion that has been the long-term result.
The war in East Pakistan was a struggle for a second independence, twenty-four years after an anti-colonial struggle against the British where East Bengalis were recognized as important players in the creation of an independent Muslim state (Hashmi 1994; Samaddar 1997; Hashim 1998). But, the war unsettled those, intellectuals and popular classes alike, who had earlier fought so hard for an independent Pakistan. Intellectuals were split between those, often Urdu speakers, who saw advantage in ties to Pakistan, as were religious leaders who believed in and sought to maintain solidarity with the Pakistani Muslim community. Writing of an earlier period but clearly with resonances in the post-1971 period, Rafiuddin Ahmed (1981) stresses the heterogeneity of the Muslim community and the naiveté and fanaticism of religious preachers whose “lack of vision and proper understanding of the economic and political problems” of 1947, enabled them
to become willing instruments in the hands of more powerful interest-groups and help give shape to an ideology which could only have a limited success, and that too for a brief period. . . . Thus, when the Hindu threat passed after the partition in 1947, the enforced solidarity of mutually opposed interests and heterogeneous cultures could no longer withstand the pressure of a new situation; religious symbols were superseded by linguistic and cultural ones; new yearnings led to a re-assertion of regional identity and the consequent breakup of Pakistan (Ahmed 1981:190).
Partition, for Ahmed and others, was a turning point in Bengali cultural identification that sits uncomfortably with the assumed “naturalness” of membership in a single Islamic community. For the British, for Jinnah, and for a minority in Bengal, the two-nation theory made political sense. But, as the East Pakistan Sahitya Sangsad (East Pakistan Literary Society) posed it, despite clear support for Muslim nationalism, it was crucial to emphasize a separate Muslim state in eastern India to achieve economic, political and, importantly, cultural freedom. Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, the then editor of Azad framed it this way; “The Pakistan movement has given us a sense of uniqueness and new national identity, it has inaugurated the process of self-awareness … and the idea of Pakistan has caused revolutionary transformation in the thought of Indian Muslims.” For a majority of Bengali Muslims, support for Pakistan was viewed as a pragmatic compromise to gain access to the resources, particularly land and bureaucratic postings, held by those who were assumed to side with India in the division, predominantly Hindu Bengalis. This pragmatic impulse gained some leverage following the communal killings just prior to partition in Calcutta in 1946, in Noakhali a few weeks later, and in a number of mofusal towns as well as in Dhaka. These horrific incidents unsettled what it meant to be a Muslim Bengali and helped to establish a sufficient rationale for a separate Islamic community framed within a single nation-state that was separated by almost 1000 miles (Kabir 1994). But, as evidence would soon reveal, it did not unsettle what it meant to be a Bengali.
Others were also vocal about the conflation of religion, culture, and territory. As an attendee at the annual conference of the Sangsad in Dhaka proclaimed, “Religion and culture are not the same thing. Religion can transcend the geographical boundaries, but culture cannot. And here lie the boundaries of East and West Pakistan.” Badruddin Umar offers a similar refrain, “a Bengali is one who lives more or less permanently in some part of [present-day Bangladesh], speaks Bengali, participates in the economic life of Bangladesh and accepts the tradition of Bengal as his own. In this context, his (sic) religion is not of much relevance (quoted in Anisuzzaman 1993:104). But, even with partition, Umar retains the specificity of Bengali identification: “There are no inherent contradictions in being a Bengali, a Muslim and a Pakistani – all at the same time (Ibid. 104). The point worth emphasizing is that for some members of the East Bengal intelligentsia, autonomy from West Pakistan was imagined as constitutive of relations between the Wings and was echoed as early as 1948 in the call for a second national language. Sheik Mujib’s 1968 call for autonomy recognized the unequal relations between the wings, with a majority of the population living in the East and the majority of the power, including Pakistan’s bureaucratic, civil, and military infrastructure, residing in the West. Moreover, the economic exploitation of the East Wing, the agricultural breadbasket of Pakistan, was viewed as support for a growing industrial sector in the West at the cost of investment in the East.
Perhaps not surprisingly, relations with the West Wing were redefined almost immediately after independence. Struggles over language within the arena of institutional politics actually began as early as September 1947 – a month after formal partition – when students and faculty at Dacca (now Dhaka) University met to debate the question of a single national language. This was followed, in February 1948, with Direndra Nath Dutta’s resolution, at the first session of Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly, to recognize Bengali as a state language along with Urdu and English. The resolution failed to pass a majority and was subsequently proposed through constitutional amendments that met with similar resistance. Several members of the Provincial Assembly, however, including some ministers, supported the demand that, by this time, had gathered the support of Bengali civil servants, academics, students, and middle class followers. By the end of February 1948, the controversy had spilled into the streets of East Pakistan and, over the next four years, gained the support of rural dwellers as well (Hasan 1994). In February 1952, the arrest and torture of supporters of the Language Movement featured as part of a growing Bengali cultural and linguistic consciousness, and in May 1954, Bengali was accepted as a state language with formal recognition in 1956 with the first Constitution of Pakistan (Maniruzzaman 1980). This mobilization — a critical event in Bangladesh’s history — led, eventually, to what Anisuzzaman (1993) calls “a renewed confidence in the totality of the cultural past, … a past from a standpoint independent of religious affiliation.” The struggle over language and the massacre of those who fought for it would become the most revered moment in Bangladeshi history.
It is the language movement and the torture and murder of its martyrs, rather than the partition, that is privileged in the galleries of the Mukktijoddah Jadughar. The galleries exhibit numerous photographs of the horror of 1952 which privilege the students and others who gave their lives in the struggle and include many newspaper clippings of the Shahid Minar, a monument built in their honor that has come to symbolize Bengali or Bangladeshi nationalism. Although the language movement sought recognition of Bangla as one of the state languages, it also framed an early collective response to an unpopular and autocratic government. In the Museum’s narrative as in other accounts (Islam 1994), the language movement is seen to lead, as if inevitably, to independence in 1971.
Privileging the language movement as the basis for Bangladeshi independence signals a tension for some East Pakistani activists who supported the movement for partition (Feldman 1999). On the one hand, their support unsettles the equation of partition with independence and forces a reframing of a struggle for which many of their friends and kin gave their lives. On the other hand, the next generation, often including activist children who came of age under Pakistani colonial rule, sought independence as a cry against exploitation and inequality. This next generation emphasized cultural meanings and practices, not religious ones, as the basis of identity and (national) belonging, thus unsettling the assumed coherence of Islam as a shared religious and cultural marker of community. Interestingly, disagreement over the demands of 1971 did not forge marked generational breaks, presumably because the concrete practices of the various military regimes challenged the surety of the 1947 decision, even if it did not undermine the sensibilities of having struggled for and lost lives to the so-called independence of the 1947 partition. Today, Ekushey, the 21st of February, National Language Day, is observed as one of the most important national holidays where Bengali poetry, music, and dance, emblematic of the beauty of the language, are central to the celebration.
The language struggle also represented a class struggle against the Urdu-speaking Muslims of Bengal who were aligned with the Muslim League but who had only limited electoral support in urban and rural East Pakistan. These elite often secured professional positions that were vacated by Hindus who sided with India immediately after Partition but, among the East Pakistani majority, they were generally viewed as representing Pakistani rather than Bengali interests. Antagonism over language and the power of the Urdu-speaking elite, in other words, was a concrete expression of the experience of Pakistani colonization. While one need not support the inevitability of 1971 in the wake of the struggle over language, the connection between Bengali language and Bengali culture contributes to framing a budding nationalism. As Rehman Sobhan (1993) suggests more than four decades later, whatever Bengali nationalism may have meant prior to August 1947, after that date, Bengali nationalism could be said to be synonymous with the territory that constituted East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
The privileging of language over religion also weakened the rationale of a united Pakistan and, coupled with political shifts, including the 1954 provincial electoral victory of the secular parties — East Pakistan won 223 out of 237 seats — roundly defeated the Muslim League. Electorally, the Muslim League lost to the fragile five-party alliance, the United Front, that included the Awami Muslim League under the leadership of Maulana Abudl Hamid Khan Bhasani, the Krishak Sramik Party of Fazlul Huq, the Nezam-e-Islam led by Maulana Atahar Ali, and Ganatantri Dal led by Haji Mohammad Danesh who were variously involved in Muslim League politics. Contributing to the growing nationalist sentiment that their victory portended were the demands outlined in their 21 Point manifesto. These included the demand to recognize Bangla as one of the State Languages of Pakistan, acknowledging that only one percent of the population were Urdu speakers, to create an institute for research on Bangla language and literature, to erect a monument in memory of the martyrs of the Language Movement and compensation their families, to declare 21st February, “Shaheed Day,” a public holiday, and to secure full autonomy for East Pakistan.. These complemented demands to change the conditions for securing land, education, and industrial production. Importantly, too, the Front was able to generate support from a grassroots constituency, a challenge that the Muslim League, and later the Awami League, was unable to meet. The emphasis on secular nationalism and autonomy would soon become central tropes in an emergent Bengali nationalism, but first it would confront the imposition of martial law by General Ayub Khan in 1958, a political decision that reinforced the perception of economic and political discrimination and exploitation of the East.
The National Elections in December 1970 confirmed Awami League success with 160 out of the 162 National Assembly seats and 75 percent of the popular vote. These election results confirmed the need to recognize the autonomy of East Pakistan if a united Pakistan was to remain viable. Yet, General Yahya Khan, who came to power in 1969, saw in them the need for greater military control and went on the offensive by suspending civil rights and arresting numerous Awami League leaders (Jahan 1972). In response, an emergent government-in-exile in India, under the leadership of Sheik Mujibur Rahman, called for a non-cooperation campaign. This quickly escalated into a full-fledged conflict comprised of trade union activists, university students, rural and urban insurgents, and the unemployed who loosely organized themselves as the Mukthi Bahini – the liberation army. The Pakistan Army aggressively responded by targeting the political opposition in general, and Hindu areas in the eastern part of the city in particular, organizing a number of forces in addition to the Army and the Pakistani Special Police. These included paramilitary forces, the al-Badrs and Al-Shams, and importantly, the Razakars or auxiliary forces who were Bengali. The result was the slaughter of an estimated 1.5 to 3 million people between 26 March and 16 December 1971.
Like the partition experience in Punjab 25 years earlier, rape and murder were the cornerstones of the struggle, and women as bodies, as symbols of purity, as representations of honor to be despoiled, and as freedom fighters, were the targets of much of the aggression (Moon 1998; Menon and Bhasin 1998; Butalia 1998; Mookherjee 2003; Saikia 2004). And, as in the Language Movement, the intelligentsia was singled out for retribution, many brutally murdered on the campus of Dhaka University (Anisuzzaman 1993). But violence also was insinuated in the terror and brutality that came to characterize the everyday lives of both rural and urban dwellers that only ended with the formal surrender of the Pakistani army on 16 December 1971, following Indian military intervention in mid-November.
As I elaborate below, this challenge to alliance-building and a smooth history between the two wings provides the state rational for eliding the independence struggle in the teaching of history, establishing sites of commemoration, and explaining contemporary relations with Pakistan. Most importantly, perhaps, the elision avoids the contradictions posed by recognizing collaborators as citizens of independent Bangladesh. The case of Golam Azam, who maintained Pakistani citizenship until 1994 and was the former Ameer (president) of the Jamaat i’ Islami, lost his Bangladeshi citizenship immediately after the war only to be offered the right of return by Prime Minister Sheikh Mujib were he to renounce Jamaat politics. Azam chose instead to live in exile until 1978 when President Ziaur Rahman legalized previously banned fundamentalist parties and offered him a temporary visa to enable his return. His citizenship was restored in 1994 by a Supreme Court decision (See, DLR 1993).
Independent Bangladesh
Relations with Pakistan after independence were almost immediately renegotiated as Sheik Mujibur Rahman sought wide political recognition for the sovereign state and now secular nation of Bangladesh. He fought for recognition of Bangladesh in the United Nations, participated in the Islamic Summit held in Lahore in 1975, and, in Bangladesh, recognized the Islamic Foundation. As to the collaborators, a 1972 Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order sought to redress the crimes of East Pakistanis against their fellow citizens. But in 1973, a Tripartite Agreement between Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan granted limited amnesty to alleged collaborators releasing the majority of approximately 35,000 prisoners. While those charged with murder, rape, and arson were to be excluded from the amnesty, they too were eventually freed. Many of those so charged left for Pakistan, England, the U.S., or to rural communities in Bangladesh even as their unresolved status was to remain imbricated in the politics of each subsequent regime. Today, despite legal recognition, the status of alleged collaborators remains an undercurrent in efforts to constitute a national narrative especially one that recognizes the independence struggle as central to the sovereignty of Bangladesh and her citizens. For Hameeda Hossain (personal communication), a scholar and activist speaking on behalf of women war victims, the failure to recognize and hold accountable those who brutally ravaged women and other citizens remains crucial, not because one is interested in retribution, but rather, because failing to do so leaves open a space for replication. But, let me not jump ahead.
A 1973 International Crimes (Tribunals) Act also was designed to facilitate the trial of war criminals and allow 195 “major war criminals,” against whom evidence was said to be available to be tried. While a legal framework was established, the Act was never actually implemented for fear of retaliation against Bengalis detained and arrested in Pakistan, and because of pressure by other Islamic countries that sought to recognize both Bangladesh and Pakistan (The Redress Trust 2004). Moreover, under Sheik Mujib, the struggle to secure secularism, socialism, and democracy — pillars of the new state — was increasingly mired in personal greed and corruption that led eventually to factionalism between the regime, military, opposition parties, and the bureaucracy displacing what Maniruzzaman (1983) viewed as an important focus on redress. Combined with the inability to improve production in the nationalized sector, manage rising inflation, and counter declining living standards, especially in the countryside, the government quickly lost political control and legitimacy. The result was a military coup – organized by a factionalized military — that renewed its alliance with Pakistan and Islam and moved away from both the secular and socialist themes of the Mujib period as well as the perceived and real pro-Indian posture of the Awami League. Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that the museum gives rather scant attention to the period of Mujib’s rule.
The Return of the Militarized State
Three important changes characterize military rule under both Ziaur Rahman (1975-1981) and H. M. Ershad (1982-1990) that contribute to the move away from democracy, socialism, and secularism, the pillars of the independence platform. One was the move to raise the legitimacy of the military, especially in relation to the Mukti Bahini – freedom fighters, not soldiers – who were recognized for their role in the independence struggle. Contributing to Zia’s effort to establish formal military authority, he tried and executed Abu Taher, a decorated and well-known freedom fighter, and responded to unrest in numerous cantonments by massacring perceived opposition. In one instance alone, eleven senior Air Force and ten Army officers were executed along with an estimated 200 soldiers in the Dhaka cantonment. These efforts notwithstanding, hostilities between politicized officers and soldiers in support of the anti-colonial struggle and anti-Indian pro-Islamic repatriates continued to characterize factional interests and generational differences within the military.
Second, Zia reframed citizenship and belonging in a narrative that distinguished between Bengali and Bangladeshi identity in order to challenge an identification with West Bengal and India. These efforts to reframe national belonging were combined with institutional changes that privileged Islam as a cultural marker and were recognized by reorganizing the work week to signal the importance of Jumma prayer, expanding madrassa education, and improving relations with Saudi Arabia and the larger Muslim community. Further, Zia extended diplomatic and trade relations with the oil-rich countries of the Middle East, the European Community, and North America, welcomed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as significant players in the country’s economic program, denationalized much of the industrial sector, and reoriented the economy toward private investment and the creation of a new class of traders and entrepreneurs to serve the interests of the newly created Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
Importantly, Zia formally altered the Constitution and inserted, by Presidential proclamation, the words “absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah,” a change that simultaneously provided Islamist parties a space in politics as a show of Islamic solidarity. Jamaat was recognized as a political party and members were permitted to seek parliamentary representation and ceded power and participation in the cabinet even to those who were defined, although not tried, as collaborators. These changes, in conjunction with the reframing of citizenship in the idiom of Bangladeshi, enabled Zia to link the identity of the nation to a territorial space that would showcase the military as guardians of its borders, distinguishing and protecting the nation from the Bengalis of India. Moreover, Zia’s repeal of the Collaborators Act inviting those who had left the country to avoid trial and return to Bangladesh with full citizenship rights, lent support to a growing communal politics that gained momentum alongside the rising communal strife in India. Despite these initiatives, continued military factionalism eroded Zia’s legitimacy and led to Ershad’s seizure of power in 1981.
General Ershad furthered Zia’s economic strategy with a New Industrial Policy (1982) solidifying the privatization of the economy and strengthening the emergent, if still nascent, bourgeoisie by facilitating their ability to take advantage of the Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA) which governed world trade in textiles and garments from 1974 through 2004 and set quotas on US imports from a number of Southeast Asian economies. Subcontracting arrangements with Korean and Singaporean manufacturers were quickly negotiated to support the nascent entrepreneurial class that led to the rapid expansion of firms and a labor force of more than 1.2 million women workers in garment manufacturing alone. The availability of foreign currency and opportunities for over-invoicing contributed to a dramatic rise in private as well as public sector accumulation and corruption.
Ershad also militarized the bureaucracy and increased military spending. Between 1982 and 1990, a minimum of 294 military officers were appointed to key positions in government, semi-government and autonomous institutions, as well as in public corporations, including the appointment of a military officer as secretary to the prestigious Bangla Academy, the country’s premier research institute for Bengali literature and language. These changes were accompanied by the uncontrolled harassment of Hindus, justified against the growing communal tensions in India. Such practices helped to secure Bangladeshi nationalism that increasingly demanded a shared religious identification offered in dramatic contrast to that of a shared linguistic community whose base was the Language Movement. The result was recognition of Ekushey as a “cultural” event without history. The Museum’s commitment to situate the Language Movement within the nationalist narrative, and to seek ways to secure its place in school textbooks and public education, signal a critical tension that plagues negotiations and interpretations of the country’s history.
With support from the global Islamic community, Ershad also extended the place of the Jamaat in politics, extending their participation in the cabinet and on university campuses where Shibir, the student wing of Jamaat, is particularly strong. Significantly, he amended the Constitution by passing, on 7 June 1988, Section 2A to the Constitution declaring: “The state religion of the Republic is Islam, but other religions may be practiced in peace and harmony in the Republic” (Kamaluddin 1988:14-17). This temporarily secured the regime’s support of the religious opposition at a time when no political party was assured of a popular majority. These changes were coupled with growing corruption and lawlessness, anxiety over the reworking of the Collaborators Act, and the large number of suspected collaborators in government positions, all of which led to the declining legitimacy of the regime. The crisis reached its apex at the end of 1990, resulting in deposing Ershad by a mass mobilization of intellectuals, NGOs, and the women’s and trade union movements which opened a critical space for democratic elections.
In 1991, two dominant political parties, the Awami League under Sheik Hasina, the daughter of Sheik Mujiib, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) under Khaleda Zia, the wife of former Martial Law Administrator and subsequently President Zia Rahman, fought for democratic leadership. The BNP, having won the election with an insufficient margin, sought an alliance with the Jamaat in order to form a government. Jamaat won 12 percent of the vote (17 seats with an additional two seats from the quota for women) and emerged as the fourth largest party. Sheik Hasina and the Awami League won 28 percent and Ershad 12 percent of the seats.
Building a strategic coalition with Jamaat, the newly emergent and fragile democracy extended the economic programs of Generals Zia and Ershad and improved relations with Pakistan. Significantly, it was in December 1991 that the Jamaat declared Golam Azam its Ameer, at a time of growing expectations that the institutionalization of democratic rule would provide a political space for public debate and would try those charged with war crimes in 1971. However, in response to the call to bring to trial presumed collaborators, Khaleda Zia prevaricated and subsequently refused to honor the popular demand. This enhanced the support and determination of those seeking redress and led to the establishment of the National Coordinating Committee for the Realization of the Bangladesh Liberation War Ideals and the Trial of Bangladesh War Criminals of 1971 (http://www.cryforjustice.com/history). It also resurrected debate over the character of the liberation struggle and the charges raised by Bangladeshi and foreigner alike, the Archer Blood telegram of 6 April 1971 being among the most explicit,
Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy … [and the] atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has … chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. … We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected (National Security Archive 1971).
Earlier, Blood had noted that,
“Here in Dacca we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pak Military. Evidence continues to mount that the MLA authorities have list of Awami League supporters whom they are systematically eliminating by seeking them out in their homes and shooting them down” (Blood 2002: 244-245; National Security Archive 1971) with “evidence of a systematic persecution of the Hindu population [being] too detailed and too massive to be ignored….That many Hindu homes and villages have not only been looted, but also occupied by non-Hindus suggests that the Army intends the dislocation of Hindus to be permanent” (Blood 2002: 202).
Not surprisingly, Blood was recalled home only to learn that the reason behind Nixon’s hand-written note – “To all hands. Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time – RMN” (National Security Archive 1971) – was “the dramatic announcement of Kissinger’s secret trip to China via Islamabad” (Blood 2002: 256).
What negotiations and prevarications during the Khaleda Zia’s first term reveals is that the war and the ethnic cleansing establishes the ground for the positions and decisions that her administration takes, whether it concerns the place of Bangladesh in the global community, particularly in relation to the US, or her domestic politics. Thus, efforts to erase the war’s general significance from popular narratives also enable the internal fissures and otherwise plural character of the country to be elided. To expose the war and the conditions that led up to it is to query the very basis of the nationalist project established during the military regimes that preceded the beginning of the 1990 democratic movement is also to reveal its fragility as well as the unresolved character of the national imaginary. Its incompleteness is animated by tension around who belongs to the Bangladeshi nation, who is to be recognized among its citizens, how collaborators will be held accountable, and how the genocide of 1971 will be acknowledged, precisely the focus of the Liberation War Museum. It also is now more explicitly about the rape of scores of women, the borangonas. whose experience of displacement and exclusion has yet to be fully acknowledged, let alone redressed.
Political opposition to the BNP continued to grow and was usually led by the opposition Awami League whose election platform included invoking the image of Sheik Mujib and the liberation struggle. Appeals to the image of Sheik Mujib and the war was aided by Jahanara Imam’s sustained efforts to catalyze support to repatriate and bring to trial Bangladesh’s war criminals, as well as her commitment to show how the elision of the brutality, terror, and destruction of the war was simultaneously a denial of the pain and meanings of all those who fought for independence. Her diary, Ekattorer Dinguli (Those Days of 1971), followed the period of Pakistani military occupation, March through December 1971 and was published in 1986. An English translation in 1990 helped to extend public discussion of independence among a generation who did not live through the war. To mobilize popular sentiment, Imam also organized a mock trial of war criminals at a public park in Dhaka on March 26, 1992 with thousands in attendance. The demand to hold war criminals accountability gained further ground in 1993 when Golam Azam sought full citizenship rights through the High Court (DLR 45 1993). The trial raised questions about the meaning of rights and belonging and refocused discussion and recollections on the brutality of the war and the state’s failure to incorporate the independence struggle in public debate and accounts of the country’s past. The debate also highlighted the contested relationship between Bangladesh and Pakistan challenging the rewriting of school texts that, after the imposition of martial law, excluded discussions of the liberation struggle.
Sheik Hasina’s electoral victory (1996-2001) under a banner of the “government of National Consensus,” brought the promise of redress but, like Khaleda Zia before her, she too prevaricated when confronted with demands for action against identified war criminals. This failure led to disaffection among her supporters who anticipated redress given her demand for accountability as an opposition leader (1991-1996). Also, her use of Bangabandu to invoke connections between her father, the independence struggle, and her own coming to power created expectations that redress would be forthcoming. Although Sheik Hasina did not initially form a coalition government with the Jamaat, she included one minister from the Jatiya Party and another from the Jatiyo Samajtantric Dal, a very small leftist party. The Jatiya Party, headed by Ershad, never entered into a formal coalition with Hasina and eventually withdrew his support (September 1997). With only three parties (Awami League, the BNP, and the Jatiya Party) holding more than 10 members elected to the 1996 Parliament, the political climate under Sheik Hasina made for contentious and fragile politics including relations with Pakistan (Rahman 2001).
In 1999, for example, Ferdous Priyobhasini broke her vow of silence about the crimes of the Pakistani army to formally testify about her experiences. The edited collection by Shahrier Kabir, Tormenting 71 (1999), includes Priyobhasini’s experience as well as the experiences of others who were raped and tortured during the war to expose these horrors and to strengthen demands for redress. Sheik Hasina also signaled the question of redress by challenging General Mosharraf of Pakistan to apologize for the war atrocities. Expectations remained high as is evident from the demonstration on 24 September 2000 demanding that Hasina rethink ties with Pakistan if an apology was not forthcoming. These events, and others, sustained the fragile regime until Sheik Hasina was forced to hand over leadership to a caretaker government. Khaleda Zia returned to power in 2001.
Memories and Visions, Demands and Repressions
Catalyzed by the events just recounted, members of the Bangladesh freedom fighters, intelligentsia, business elite, and popular classes organized the Muktijoddha Smriti Trust to build the Mukijoddha Jadughar. Their purpose is to preserve the history of those that lived through the liberation struggle and to provide lessons and a historical record for future generations. As such, the Museum challenges the nationalist framing of Bangladeshi history as (re)created by state bureaucrats and military elites who have excluded the war and struggles for national sovereignty, whether by revising textbooks, agreeing to the repatriation of war criminals, forging alliances with Jamaat-e-Islami, the party led by Golam Azam, an identified political collaborator, or incorporating identified collaborators among their administrative cadres. Its purpose is to complicate the logic of the “new” national history through strategic efforts to construct a narrative that is distinct from, rather than continuous with, that of Pakistan. It represents what Cohn (1987) refers to as an ethnographic present interpellated with the past where contemporary experiences resignify past events in ways that reconstitute their importance and demand resolution of the contradictions they reveal.
As recent interest in museum studies reveals, contestations over a nation’s history is generally framed in relation to colonization. In two accounts of memory in the postcolony, for example, one in Iraq and another in Zimbabwe, Eric Davis (1994) and Richard Werbner (1998) respectively highlight contestations between orientalist and nationalist (re)presentations of history and memory. As Werbner argues, contestations over memory refract through the different ways that regimes can bury the traces of tyranny as others seek to “register memory for future accountability” (Werbner 1998:1). In such renderings, the control of what is defined as national history, and the ways in which it is represented, is a struggle over power and rights – power over the resources and institutions that sustain the imaginaries for future generations and rights over whose explanations and lives are represented or elided in such efforts. From this vantage point, the museum is a site of sedimented, if changing, memories to be viewed as a sustained practice of remembering.
In her account of the District Six Museum in Capetown, South Africa, Charmaine McEachern (1998) reveals how reconstructing the experience of apartheid draws on popular memories to refashion interpretations of a people’s history. This is accomplished through the active participation of museum attendees who locate, create, or relive their past by mapping their memories onto a large canvas that provides the stage for engagement. In constructing the exhibit, museum attendees nostalgically recall their lives in District Six as well as confront those responsible for the destruction caused by apartheid. The Muktijoddah Jadughar also is a site for interpreting horror and suffering as well as a place to challenge those held responsible for the atrocities of war. But, in contrast to District Six, where museum viewers actually reconstruct the site of struggle, the Dhaka museum draws on contributions from the personal archives of citizens, rural and urban, rich and poor, to show everyday artifacts and photographs of the war. It thus offers a fixed, rather than continually emergent, site for recuperating the experiences and trauma of visitors.
But, this difference need not devolve into a binary opposition of fixity and iteration. Instead, one might ask how the experience of the viewer is captured in different kinds of encounters. One way is to appreciate the openness of the museum’s collection to incorporating new materials for display. Since 1996, the museum has continued to expand its holding to share an increasingly layered and differentiated story of the war period. Its holding are supplemented by Museum support for others to recuperate and share their experiences in ways that keep the memory and the struggle for recognition alive. This is enabled by being a site for on-going discussion and for book and artistic representations of the war.
In different ways, then, the museum project contributes to an ongoing dialogue with the hegemonic narrative of nationhood as it struggles to insert the liberation war in the record of Bangladesh’s past. This dialogue includes efforts to demand accountability for the atrocities suffered, and to educate people about the importance of acknowledging the “difficult past” of a genocidal war. The War Crimes File (1995), a film that shared exclusive evidence of how three former Bangladeshi citizens incited torture, mutilation, and murder during the war provided a platform to demand the prosecution, in England, of these now British citizens. In 1997, P. Balan directed and widely circulated the film, Muktir Gaan (Song of Freedom), also drawing on footage taken during the war to document a group of traveling musicians who used songs of struggle to inspire the guerrilla cadres and war refugees. Muktir Kotha (Word of Freedom), made by Tareque and Catherine Masud, followed in 1999, and captured the memories of the war that were prompted by viewing Muktir Gaan, offering yet another recollection of the liberation struggle. Finally, in 1999, Shahrier Kabir’s Tormenting 71 drew attention to the particular plight of rape victims who, with only great difficulty, shared their experiences of pain and lost honor in ways that both demanded their recognition and empowered them as among those who lives should be honored among the country’s freedom fighters. In each of these efforts, the demand for accountability is explicit and follows with a demand for compensation, if only to help ensure that such brutality never happens again.
But what gives rise to the demand for accountability? According to Pierre Nora (1989), when real memory is erased, we create lieux de mémoire, which give voice to ethnic minorities, families, or groups who possess “reserves of memory but little or no historical capital” (1989:7). In his account, he draws suggestive distinctions between memory and history:
Memory is life. . . [i]t remains in permanent evolution, open to a dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation, and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. . . . History . . . is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond trying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. . . . [it] belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority. (1989:8-9).
Here, history is constituted as a relation of power constructed through a “controlled exercise” of reconstituting a past on the basis of a “teleological perspective of the nation” (Nora 1989:9-11). Such a reconstitution depends for its authority on neutralizing difference and erasing that which does not legitimate the present. As Davis and Starn (1989) note, the construction of a “once upon a time” is simultaneously the construction of the “here and now.” From this vantage point, it is hardly surprising that the efforts of successive regimes have been to keep discussion of the independence struggle and the accountability of war crimes at bay, if only because redefining identity in the idiom of religion, rather than language, was essential for their (fragile) legitimacy both at home and abroad.
By using memory to complicate the national narrative, the museum exhibit -– its story and the means by which it selects and excludes referents, artifacts, and symbols –- challenges the narrative of a seamless connection between Bangladesh and Pakistan and of a self-evident identity rooted in Islam. Instead, it reveals how historical interpretations are continuously negotiated in the creation of archives, anniversaries, and celebrations, complicating history, identity, and the meaning of national belonging. From this point of view, the museum limits the extent to which history can “besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it” (Nora 1989:12). As the museum organizers remark: the “great Liberation War brought the nation together. It was the moment of truth for Banglaees (sic) when they all united to join hands to fight the Pakistani aggressors.” For as long as these voices share their experiences and memories, the nationalist project will be revealed as partial and interest-laden, consciously excluding those that challenge or seek to limit its authoritative voice.
Through the instantiation of these experiences and memories at a site, the museum, it produces for others a vehicle for voice and representation. The collection and the efforts of the Trust force a renegotiation of “the nation” and its inclusions and exclusions, less in search of an accurate past than as a claim over contemporary rights of representation. In this sense, it is a movement of resistance by those who oppose the post-1975 direction of Bangladesh’s future and who struggle with Sheik Mujib’s political choices and failure to fully acknowledge the place of the independence struggle in the building of what was to become the community of Bangladeshis. Thus, despite the institutionalization of democratic elections in 1991, there remains little room for an account of the war that acknowledges and holds collaborators accountable, nor is there a way to honor the heroism of the freedom fighters and admit to the violence perpetrated against its citizenry. This situation is in marked contrast to efforts by the South African Truth Commission and other initiatives, for example, to confront and assuage the devastations of war and wanton attacks on often innocent victims. But, commemorative vigilance is important, and the Museum provides a critical venue for such efforts. To return to Nora (1989:19-22),
The most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial. . . It is also clear that lieux de memoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications….[I]ndeed, it is the exclusion of the event that defines the lieu de memoire. Memory attaches itself to site, whereas history attaches itself to events.
In addition to creating a space for redress and immortalization, museums are important sites to help “work-through” trauma and thus play an important role in mourning work (Brower 1999). As Brower (1999:10), citing Marzillier, notes, “So often the war seems something far away – even those who lived through it don’t talk about it. [War museums can bring it closer.] …The very raising of the issue of the war, bringing it [back] into open discourse, is an[other] important effect of the museum that clearly contributes to a climate more conducive to working through” the pain of the experience and the honor that accompanies struggles for independence and autonomy.
Concluding Remarks
As the history of the museum project suggests, contestation over the meaning and place of the liberation struggle characterizes the relationship between state interests and the interests of those communities who feel excluded from the national narrative. It also reflects different interpretations of the postcolonial moment, where struggles for authority over the new “national formation” partially depend on the varied meanings of independence and the exigencies that shape relations with the colonial past. For state authorities, the refusal to bring to trial those charged as war criminals sustains contemporary political interests and coalition politics under the guise of democracy. For freedom fighters, intellectuals, and those who experienced the brutality of the struggle for independence, however, this elision actually ruptures their experiences and fails to acknowledge a moment when the nation sought to create a collective future. The National Liberation Museum is one way to recognize the struggle and pay homage to those whose lives were lost or forever altered by the brutality of war. Boyarin (1994) is suggestive here: in the ‘invention’ or reproduction of the nation, and of identities and subjectivities, the concern ought not focus solely on the suppression of certain memories at the expense of others, or the elision of certain moments or events in history, particularly in the textbooks that frame the national emigre of the next generation, but on how the selective mix of heterogeneous and anachronistic images from the past interact with contemporary interests and relations to (re)invent the nation and its future imagineries.
The emphasis on unity and a future recalls Akku Chowdhury’s words: The liberation movement “was a time when every Bengali was united. If this spirit can be revived again, we can achieve great things.” In these words, the lens of history, memory, and commemoration guides us to the importance of struggles over state legitimacy, party politics in a weak and fragile state, and competing views of political alliances. As Nora (1989) suggests, sites of memory converge, condense, conflict, and define relationships beyond past, present, and future. They help define a collective moment of national accomplishment to create an imagined collective future that confers value on the actual collective past (Davis and Starn 1989).
Perhaps it is not surprising that the struggle to erect the Muktijoddah Jadughar was not about contestations over the right to open the museum, nor about what should be included in the collection, how it should be displayed, or its interpretations. Rather, the struggle continues to be centrally concerned with the state’s failure to recognize the war in the narrative of the nation and to honor its war heroes. It is not surprising, then, that the museum exhibit rewrites the national narrative by situating 1971 at the center of Bangladeshi history, grounding both the past and the future in an evolutionary imaginary that anticipates liberation and embodies natural subjectivities. Against the backdrop of contemporary politics, the collection keeps us attentive to the multiple and contradictory histories that compromise what might, in other circumstances, slip into binary oppositions; elite vs. popular, Muslim vs. Hindu. It is in the struggle to sustain this compromise that we recall Brookner (1981:5): “To remember is to face the enemy. The truth lies in remembering.”
References
Abrams, Philip. 1988 “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977).” Journal of Historical Sociology 1:58-89.
Alam, S.M. Shamsul. 1993 “Islam, Ideology, and the State in Bangladesh.” Journal of Asian and African Studies XXVIII:88-106.
Alochona Staff Writer, “Ferdousi Priyobhashini 1949-”, first published in Alochona Magazine, December 2001 online at http://www.adhunika.org/heroes/priyobhashini.html, accessed September 2005.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Azam, Golam. 1993. “Professor Golam Azam vs. Bangladesh.” Dhaka Law Review: High Court Division (Special Original Jurisdiction). p. 422.
Anisuzzaman. 1993. Creativity, Reality and Identity. Dhaka: International Centre for Bengal Studies.
Appadurai, Arjun and Carol A. Breckenridge. 1992. “Museums are Good to Think: Heritage on View in India.” Pp. 35-55 in Museums and Communities, edited by I. Karp, C. M. Kreamer, and S. D. Lavine. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Bangladesh Observer. 1995. Editorial. 26 March.
Bhalla, Alok. 1994. Stories about the Partition of India, Volumes I-III, New Delhi: Indus, An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Boyarin, Jonathan. 1994 Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Brookner, Anita 1981 Look at Me. London: TriadGrafton.
Brower, Benjamin C. 1999. “The Preserving Machine: The “New” Museum and Working through Trauma — the Musee Memorial pour la Paix of Caen.” History & Memory 11:77-103.
Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Viking by Penguin Books India Ltd.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1997. “The Second Partition of Bengal.” Pp. 27-46 in The Present History of West Bengal, edited by P. Chatterjee. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. An Anthropologist among the Historians: Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Corrigan, Philip, and Derek Sayer. 1985. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Crane, Susan A. 1997. “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum.” History and Theory 36:44-63.
Daily Star. 1998. “Pak HR groups press govt for full apology” 4 August.
1998. “US donates ‘video projection system’ to Muktjuddha Jadughar.” 1 December.
1996 “Martyred freedom fighters’ clothes on display at Muktijoddha Jadughar” 20 October
1997 “Dhonarkandi Resistance of 14 May, 1971.” 14 May 1997
1995 “Collection of tear-soaked mementos starts.” 23 October.
1995 “Muktijuddho Museum in the City.” 23 June, p. 10.
Das, Veena. 1996. “Introduction.” Pp. 1-24 in Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, edited by Veena Das. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Eric. 1994. “The Museum and the Politics of Social Control in Modern Iraq.” Pp. 90-104 in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Davis, Natalie Zemon, and Randolph Starn. 1989. “Introduction.” Representations 26.
Devi, Jyotirmoyee. 1995. Epar Ganga, opar Ganga, The River Churning: A Partition Nove. Translated from the original Bengali by Enakshi Chatterjee. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Dhaka Courier. 1995. “Sweetness of Freedom” 31 March.
Esbenshade, Richard S. 1995. “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe.” Representations 49:72-96.
Feldman, Shelley. 2006. Field notes.
2001. “Metaphor and Myth: Gender and Islam in Bangladesh.” In Understanding the Bengal Muslims: Interpretative Essays, Rafiuddin Ahmed, ed. Pp. 209-235. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1999. Field notes, AIBS Fellow.
Gillis, John R. 1994. “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, John R. Gillis, ed. Pp. 3-24. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Guhathakurta, Megna . 1997. Understanding the Bengal Partition Through Reconstructing Family Histories: A Case Study.” Journal of Social Studies 76:57-65.
Hasan, Mushirul. 1994 India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Hashim, Abul. 1998. In Retrospect. Dhaka and Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-Operative Book Society Ltd.
Hashmi, Taj Ul-Islam. 1994. Peasant Utopia: The Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920-1947. Dhaka: University Press Limited.
Imam, Jahanara. 1998 Of Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of Bangladesh’s War of Independence. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
The Independent. 1997. “Map used by Gen Niazi handed over to museum.” 7 March.
Islam, Nurul. 1974. “The State and Prospects of the Bangladesh Economy.” In Economic Development in Pakistan, E. A. G. Robinson and Keith Griffin, eds. Pp. 184-219. London: Macmillan.
Islam, Syed Manzoorul. 1994. Essays on Ekushey: The Language Movement, 1952. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Bangla Academy.
Jahan, Rounaq. 1972. Pakistan: Failure in National Integration. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kabir, Shahriar. Ed.1999. Tormenting Seventy-One: An account of Pakistan army’s atrocities during Bangladesh liberation war of 1971. Dhaka: Nirmul Committee, Committee for Resisting Killers & Collaborators of Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.
Kamaluddin, S. 1988. “The Islamic Way.” Far Eastern Economic Review:14-17.
Karp, Ivan. 1992. “Introduction: Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture.” Pp. 1-17 in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by I. Karp, C. M. Kreamer, and S. D. Lavine. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kundera, Milan. 1981. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Translated by Michael Henry Heim New York: Penguin Books.
Maniruzzaman, Talukder. 1980. The Bangladesh revolution and its aftermath. Dacca: Bangladesh Books International.
Maniruzzaman, Talukder. 1983. “Bangladesh Politics: Secular and Islamic Trends.” In Islam in Bangladesh: Society, Culture, and Politics. Rafiuddin Ahmed, ed. Pp. 184-219. Dhaka: Bangladesh Itihas Samiti.
McEachern, Charmaine. 1998 “Working with Memory: The District Six Museum in the New South Africa.” Social Analysis 42:48-72.
Menon, Ritu. and Kamla. Bhasin. 1998. Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Mookerkee, Nayanika. 1999. “Remembering to forget’: Public secrecy and memory of sexual violence in the Bangladesh war of 1971.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12:433-450.
Moon, Penderel. 1998 Divide and Quit. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 10:7-24.
Rahman, Tariq. 1996. Language and Politics in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Rashid, Haroon-Or. 1987. The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim Leaps in Muslim Politics 1936-1947. Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.
Rashid, Raffat Binte. 1996. “Muktijoddha Museum” The Daily Star, 29 March.
The Redress Trust. 2004. Torture in Bangladesh, 1971-2004: Making International Commitments a Reality and Providing Justice and Reparations to Victims. London: The Redress Trust
Riaz, Ali. 1994. State, Class & Military Rule: Political Economy of Martial Law in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Nadi New Press.
Samaddar, Ranabir. 1997. Reflections on Partition in the East. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd.
Sidwa, Bapsi. 1988. Ice-Candy-Man, New Delhi: Penguin Books Ltd.
Sobhan, Rehman. 1993. Bangladesh: Problems of Governance. New Delhi: Konark Publishers.
Sobhan, Rehman, and Muzaffer Ahmad. 1980. Public Enterprise in an Intermediate Regime: A Study in the Political Economy of Bangladesh. Dacca: Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies.
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, and Barry Schwartz. 1991. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past.” American Journal of Sociology 97:375-421.
Werbner, Richard. 1998. “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe.” In Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, Richard Werbner, ed. Pp. 717-102. London: Zed Books.
Zolberg, Vera L. 1998. “Contested Remembrance: The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy.” Theory and Society 27:565-590.
Zolberg, Vera. L. 1996. “Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair.” In Theorizing Museums. S. MacDonald and G. Fyfe, eds. Pp. 69-82. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.