Love in the Time of 1971: The Furore over Meherjaan

Economic & Political Weekly
March 19, 2011

Love in the Time of 1971: The Furore over Meherjaan
BYLINE: Nayanika Mookherjee
LENGTH: 2717 words

The film Meherjaan, which was released in Dhaka in January 2011, was quickly pulled out of theatres after it created a furore among audiences. The hostile responses to the film from across generations highlight the discomfort about the portrayal of a raped woman, and its depiction of female and multiple sexualities during the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971. The furore also underscores the nationalist repoliticisation of the younger generation in Bangladesh and its support for the ongoing war crimes tribunal of the 1971 war.

On 24 January 2011, while forwarding a set of email exchanges to me, relating to a recently released film in Dhaka, Meherjaan, my friend Khaleda exclaimed that I should watch the film. A three-nation film (including Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani actors), with a budget of Rs 2.5 crore, it starred Jaya Bachchan and Victor Banerjee from India, Omar Rahim from Pakistan, and Humayun Faridi and Reetu Sattar among others from Bangladesh. Directed by a young Bangladeshi female director, Rubaiyat Hossain, and billed as “loving the other”, the film depicts the lives of three women and their different trajectories during the war of 1971. Central to these three women is Meher who falls in love with a Balochi soldier of the West Pakistani army during the liberation war. The soldier rescues her from falling into the hands of the Pakistani troops and deserts the Pakistani army and the war. Neela, who is raped during the war, is outspoken about her experience of wartime rape and seeks revenge and fulfilment by joining the liberation movement. Salma, a clairvoyant, ultimately marries a liberation fighter. All these three women reside within the household of their grandfather – nanajaan – in a rural area while the war is being fought in Bangladesh. The film is remembered by the middle-aged Meher when Sarah – a “war baby” – Neela’s child born as a result of rape and given up for international adoption – returns from Germany to Bangladesh and starts asking Meher questions.
Reactions to the Film
Meherjaan was premiered on 18 January 2011, thereafter released on 21 January and screened to packed audiences in six theatres all over the country, and was finally taken out of the theatres on 2 February. The movie was sold out on all the days it had a chance to run. While a minority supported the freedom of expression of the director to show this film, viewers across generations – those who had experienced 1971 and the younger generation which had not experienced 1971 – responded to this film vociferously, particularly in response to the relationship between the Pakistani soldier and the Bengali woman in the midst of the liberation war. The blogosphere was ablaze with various analyses, arguments and positions taken by many about the ownership of love and war in this film. Some feminists deemed the film to be “an insult to women, liberation war and Bangladesh”. 1 Others considered the film to be “a depoliticisation of our liberation war”; that it was denying the genocide of 1971; “was nuanced but provocative and had angered many who don’t like nuances and have clearly and adamantly misinterpreted them”; that the film was an account of the good Pakistani soldier and bad liberation fighter and was seen as a pro-Jamaati Islami film. Viewers were also angry that such a film was released at a time when the war crimes tribunal is in full sway in Bangladesh after 40 years of independence.
I write the following discussion with the privilege of having asked the director various questions about the film,2 and having read through various blogs and newspaper articles on the furore relating to Meherjaan. According to its blurb, the film “attempts to offer an aesthetic solution to war and violence by seeking refuge in love and spiritual submission”. The director was attempting to address the various unresolved accounts of the war of 1971 through aesthetics – accounts which are not acceptable within the mainstream nationalist and feminist narratives of 1971. Pinning her hopes on the transcendental aspects of the aesthetics of love as a balm to the wounds of 1971 might have been the pitfall for the director, who was thereby confronted with the furore. This is because aesthetic representations in Bangladesh on the history of war-time rape often operate as sites of the real and reportage. There are reasons for this.
In 1972, women raped during the liberation war of 1971 were eulogised by the newly formed Bangladeshi state as birangonas (war-heroines) in a publicly persuasive rhetoric. The history of rape has been a topic of literary and visual media through the last 40 years in Bangladesh. Throughout my decade-long research on the public memories of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war (Mookherjee 2011), I found myself reading poems, novels and plays, or watching television serials, plays and movies because of the various references to literary and visual texts made by individuals during conversations to explain who a birangona is. Meherjaan contributes to these constructions of the birangona – yet its female characters are unidentifiable with the representations in the existing pantheon. This is where Meherjaan makes its audience uncomfortable. It pushes certain boundaries relating to female sexuality during the 1971 liberation war, which has not been addressed in “good” Muktijuddho films. Various personal comments have also been made about the director in many of the blogs in relation to her financial and familial links, her education background in women and south Asian studies in the United States and the United Kingdom. I outline below some of the themes around which the furore about Meherjaan exists.
The Agentive War-Heroine
Neela arrives at her grandfather’s house having been raped. However, unlike the predominant image of the birangona who looks devastated as a result of sexual violence, Neela looks quite pristine and glamorous. Audiences have not considered this to be a credible image of a raped woman, as is apparent from many blog responses. This is because the birangona is seemingly known from her earlier visual and literary representations. Throughout the film, Neela is portrayed as an urban woman, dressed in the 1970s fashion of a sleeveless blouse and chiffon saree in rural surroundings. Nonetheless, the stereotypical markers of being raped are still present – she walks listlessly, her hair is open and in due course she becomes hysterical, slightly imbalanced. According to blog discussions, audiences laughed when Neela dramatically threatened to kill various khansena (Pakistani army) with her kitchen knife (boti). It is significant that Neela does not want to hide the fact that she was raped during the war even though she is referred to as khanelaga (touched by the Khan – the Pakistani army).
Another point of discomfort for the audience has been the encounter between Neela and Shumon, the liberation fighter. Neela comes across as someone who is quite hysterical and without sexual inhibitions. This could be problematically read – that as a result of being raped, Neela is sexually available – an implicit assumption which is often made about the warheroines in Bangladesh in various public discourses. Neela is shown to physically attack Shumon by beating her fists on his chest as she is disturbed by men in general (email communication). This attack also ends in an embrace, with a suggested sexual tryst. The director clarifies that there is no suggestion of sexual intimacy. Significantly, Neela says, “ai ki prothom bar” (this is not the first time) and hints at the wider structural context within which violence against women is embedded in non-war contexts. However, this significant point is considered as “Neela giving dialogue” in many of the blogs.3 When Neela’s cousin is enraged and seeks to go to war to avenge her rape, she tells him that she herself would avenge her experience.
Neela finally meets a woman liberation fighter and leaves with her to get arms training and join the liberation war. Here the director uses the familiar trope of the agentive raped woman common in various accounts of the war. This woman might kill a Pakistani soldier and then die or commit suicide. Here, Neela is not killed in the script, and we only hear a mediated account from the adult Meher that she had joined the freedom movement and had a baby as a result of the rape. At the same time, it is worthwhile to note that we are caught in the prevalent binary between the agentive and victim birangona. By being the agentive war-heroine Neela can get fulfilment. The lived lives of many warheroines actually fall between these victim and agentive trajectories. Nonetheless, the director makes various important points (like Neela talking about her experience of rape and commenting on the wider structural context in which women are violated in a non-war context).
A Controversial Relationship
The second and perhaps one of the foremost issues having resulted in the controversy is Meher’s romantic relationship with the Balochi soldier of the West Pakistani army. The film here has attempted to highlight the presence of various minority groups within the Pakistani army. In my own research, liberation fighters would always refer to the killings and rapes perpetrated by the Punjabi soldier during 1971. But various Balochi and Pathan soldiers are often attributed with having helped East Pakistani civilians by aiding their escape. However, as pointed out by feminist activists, nine out of the 25 odd regiments based in Bangladesh in 1971 were Balochi and the 22nd Baloch regiment allegedly carried out unprecedented atrocities in Chittagong.
The gender politics of what has been derogatorily referred to as Pakisongom (union with the Pakistani) on the blogs has been criticised the most. That this relationship portrayed in the film is out of volition and unlike Ferdousy Priyobhashini’s narrative (the Bangladeshi sculptor who has publicly acknowledged being raped by the Pakistani army in 1971), not a survival strategy, has created the greatest discomfort among the Bangladeshi audiences. People have been enraged by the fact that a relationship between a Pakistani male soldier and a Bengali woman in the midst of the liberation war is politically incorrect, transgressive and unrealistic. Various bloggers have instead suggested that if it involved a Pakistani woman and a Bengali liberation fighter it would have been a better and different kind of a narrative.
One cannot help but note the politics of acceptance of such aesthetic formulations in the representation of “the other” in the context of 1971. Tareque and Catherine Masud’s recent tense short film Noroshundor (The Barber, 2010) comes to mind. In this film a Bihari barber protects a Bengali young man from the Pakistani army by saying (something like) “We are all Muslim brothers here”. This protection by the “other” has not created a controversy in Bangladesh. Individual expression of female sexuality however remains a hugely territorial issue and has thus generated this gendered debate directed primarily at a young film director, who also happens to be a woman. The furore about the relationship with the Pakistani soldier in the film also needs to be juxtaposed with the disavowal towards the figure of the Pakistani in Bangladesh. On the one hand, they have been the brutal khansena (the army of the Khans) and on the other, young women put up posters directed towards Pakistani cricket players saying “Love you Afridi”, “Marry me Afridi”.
Defying Stereotypical Portrayals
Another theme around which the film has been severely criticised is the portrayal of liberation fighters as argumentative, cowardly, being more concerned with love than war and waiting for the feudal landlord’s (nanajaan) permission to attack. That the mother of a liberation fighter is discouraging her son to go to war has also been criticised, as all mothers are meant to have sent their sons to war without any hesitation. All these portrayals of the liberation fighters seemingly disrupt the narrative of valour of the liberation war of 1971 and any male subjectivity which slips from that position of valour cannot be represented. Even in my research, there are various instances when the men fled and as a result the women got raped. It is significant to note that no one mentions or discusses the brief presence of the female liberation fighter (rarely present in Bangladeshi commercial films on 1971) who inspires Neela to leave her family and join the liberation movement.
The figure of the grandfather (nanajaan) has also come under intense criticism. He is seen to criticise the partition of Bengal in 1947 and he brings out the role of the paternal patron in rural communities. While it is true that everywhere liberation fighters were not waiting for the diktat of the feudal landlord, in my research, I did find that patron-client relationships continued during the war.
Concern over War Crimes Tribunal
Films on war-time rape during the liberation war address other issues (be it a romantic relationship with the “other”, the agentive, heroic war-heroine as in Meherjaan, or friendship among feminist friends as depicted in Itihash Konna) through the issue of the raped woman. Till date there have been no nuanced accounts of the daily negotiations of the war-heroines in Bangladesh after 1971. There is a lot in oral history projects which film scripts could draw upon. A film which has parallels to Meherjaan comes to mind – Itihash Konna (Daughter of History, 2001). Directed by a feminist filmmaker Shamim Akhtar, the film explores in a middle class context, the memory, subjectivities, the accommodation of rape and its consequences through the war baby, among two Bangladeshi and Pakistani feminists who were childhood friends before 1971. However, what is missing is a nuanced account of the raped woman. Meherjaan would be strengthened if it had dwelt upon Neela’s wartime activities, her post-war negotiations, her having a baby and giving her up for international adoption – themes which remain unaddressed in Bangladeshi cinema despite the plethora of films on 1971. A discussion between Meher and Wasim about Neela’s rape and the Pakistani army’s position on this would have addressed various uncomfortable issues. Finally, a great opportunity is lost by not making Sarah’s character multidimensional to explore the thorny issue of the “war baby”.
In terms of cinematography the film is beautiful, the music is brilliant and the director obviously has an amazing eye for image. However the unrealistic romance scenes, the “feminine” (pink prettiness) as a genre and the “too beautiful” texture (according to the director pre-Raphaelite paintings are the visual template) of the film end up working against the film. This is because audiences do not deem aesthetic choices to be apolitical.
In light of the brilliant (yes, flawed too) attempt made by this young female director, the film should be re-released in cinema halls in Bangladesh. The response to Meherjaan was a reaction to the demasculinisation that might be felt by some and is an insight into the psyche of Bangladeshi masculinity which is uncomfortable with individual expressions of female sexuality. When I started my research in Bangladesh in the late 1990s, I was told by various activists that the projonmo (younger generation) needed to be educated as they only knew “distorted” history. In the blogs however, there is a constant reference to how the narratives in this film could have an impact on the war crimes tribunal. These responses thus highlight the nationalist politicisation of the projonmo, whether we like its manifestation or not. It has shown the projonmo’s support for the war crimes tribunals. Is Bangladesh ready to see this tribunal through and include sexual violence of women during 1971 as part of its agenda? That is yet to be seen.
Notes
1 http://unheardvoice.net/blog/2011/01/23/meherjaan/
2 Which were sent to me in UK by the director, given my research interest on wartime rape.
3 Neela is being polemical about prevalent practices of violence against women.
Reference
Mookherjee, Nayanika (2011): The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Durham NC: Duke University Press).

LOAD-DATE: March 23, 2011
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Magazine