IN THE LAND OF BURIED TONGUES – CHAITY DAS
Preface
One of the springs of this book was certainly a desire to examine ‘war’ literature of the subcontinent. While we may now talk of partition literature or a ‘riots’ archive (for want of a better expression), the lack of any sustained examination of the wars since 1947, until recently, is telling. While we have military memoirs and accounts of journalists and bureaucrats about the war of 1971, one can perhaps safely say that it is only in the last decade that critical research has come into its own. While sociological, historical, and anthropological approaches have started yielding dividends in the past few years, this work recognizes that testimonial narratives and fiction cannot be ignored if we are to take stock of the war of liberation of Bangladesh. For, to cut a long story short, literature not only provides a bridge between memory and history by allowing for euphoria, melancholy, and mourning, it re-presents violence-its gut-wrenching and at times cathartic spectacularity, the experience of terror, shame, humiliation, victory, defeat, and annihilation. By providing a place to remember and mourn, the texts discussed in the chapters write and rewrite history, pushing the borders of truth telling, Read closely, they also map how intensely notions of history, future, and nationhood were called into question and reconfigured in that significant year.
This work is entitled In the Land of Buried Tongues: Testimonies and Literary Narratives of the War of Liberation of Bangladesh, since it explores the commemoration of the war in fiction and testimonial literature. Literature of the war in the context of Bangladesh may be likened to a ‘lieux de memoire: Though in the context of France Nora contends that literature has had to abdicate its role as memory’s sentinel to history, a close perusal of the literature of 1971 in our context suggests otherwise. The celebration of 21 February as World Language Day in the memory of the martyrs of Ekushey and the annual book fair celebrated with much pomp and symbolism is as close an approximation to a yearly ritual of collective remembering as there can be. Lieux de memoire or places of memory, says Nora, is accompanied by a will to remember. This separates them from ordinary memorials. As the matted debates around 1971 will suggest, literature is a veritable space where memory and history are written, edited, rewritten, and contested.
In Intizar Husain’s Sorrow City, the three dead men (the number three is resonant with allusion to partitioned nations) are speaking to each other: ‘So you mean we did recognize each other when we were alive?’ asked the first person. The second person was at a loss. But right at that moment the third person came up with a wonderful idea. He asked both parties if any of them had got his corpse with him. The first person said that he had. Then the third person suggested, ‘Why are we then shooting arrows blindly? Let us take a look at the corpse instead and sift fact from fiction [3]
When they actually try to read the corpse in an attempt to recover the past, they find that the face has metamorphosed and identification appears impossible. Indeed to return to 1971 to examine its implications is like returning to a place that has been marked with the traces of future. To separate fact from fiction then appears difficult and perhaps harmful for constructing notions of history. Revisiting 1971 thus requires a mixing of genres, an alertness to multiple voices from multiple contexts, and often competing versions.
Of those one hears are voices of the dead, those who lost their lives, the ‘lost ones, as Intizar Husain would say, the ones who went missing. Meanwhile, the women survivors who suffered sexual violence/rape in the war of 1971 speak, retract, dissemble, hide, remonstrate, and pass into oblivion; often their post-war lives afford little more than an opportunity
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to non-victims to celebrate their resilience. Still others like Gurudasi Mondol seek respite from their memories of the war in madness. Firdausi Priyobhashini seeks in art the comfort, silence, and healing from trauma denied to her by post-war society. As I will argue, the literature emerging from the year of the formation of Bangladesh commemorates 1971, often analogous to consecrating plaques to the spirit of the Liberation War. This ‘spirit’ has the ability to evoke myriad emotions and memories; it has been equally productive of history, myth, and notions of national identity that are contested and contestable. This overdetermined ‘spirit’ has been appropriated by regimes of power seeking to define to its people Bangladesh’s unique place in the world order. Such attempts have been met with both encouragement and resistance. The consequences for the entire subcontinent have been long-drawn and persistent. As Srinath Raghavan writes:
The consequences of the conflict continue to stalk the subcontinent. The Line of Control in Kashmir, the nuclearisation of India and Pakistan, the conflicts in the Siachen glacier and Kargil, the insurgency in Kashmir, the political travails of Bangladesh: all can be traced back to nine intense months in 1971.[4]
Post the Cold War, the Gulf War, 11 September 2001, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the Arab Spring, the rise of the Taliban and ISIS coinciding with the increased mediatization of what comes across as’events’ into our living rooms, to remain a democratic, secular, Muslimmajority country that was historically critical to the very legitimacy of the Liberation War is clearly fraught with challenges. In what is largely a bipartisan system (the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP]), the charges of distortion of history and betrayal of the legacy of the Muktijuddho continue to rage to the present day. While the president of the principal opposition party (BNP) places wreaths on the memorial in Savar to the martyrs of 1971 on Victory Day, its clamour for the head of the ruling establishment for serving ‘alien masters’ (a pointed reference to India and, perhaps, Russia, which supported the war) remains a familiar element in its political rhetoric. The Awami League, trying to reclaim the inheritance of the war of liberation, hanged the killers of Sheikh Mujib thirty-five years after the event in 2010, and in November 2011 the War Crimes Tribunal began the trial of the collaborators accused of war crimes during the nine months of 1971. In November 2015 two alleged war criminals accused of belonging to death squads during the war and killing intellectuals and Hindus
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were executed, having been earlier sentenced to death by the Court and their purported plea for clemency being rejected.
In his essay ‘Secularism and Toleration, Partha Chatterjee remarks on the location of the Hindu Right in India within the domain of the modernizing state. It has a strong parallel to the politics of General Ziaur Rahman, the founder of the BNP, who was among the first to talk about family planning, women’s rights, reform of educational institutions, and austerity measures to rebuild the economy of Bangladesh after the war. During his regime, in an attempt to carve out a distinct Bangladeshi identity, the word ‘secular’ was dropped from the constitution. He promised protection to the minority Hindus and encouraged them to develop a spirit of Bangladeshi nationalism. A freedom fighter himself, he was brutally eliminated by his own fraternity in 1981, barely six years after Mujib’s family was wiped out by a few army officers who called themselves nationalists. The acrimony between the inheritors of freedom’s legacy, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, is too well known to need elucidation.
In a moving account given to the journalist Salil Tripathi, activist Aroma Datta?-granddaughter of Dhirendranath Datta of the Pakistan Congress and the first to raise the demand for recognition of Bengali as a national language in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly-speaks about her experience during the war. Targeted as a Hindu politician abetting disintegration of the country, Dhirendranath Datta and his son were picked up for interrogation after the crackdown on 25 March, tortured and killed, and their bodies were thrown into a ditch and never seen again by family and friends. In independent Bangladesh, Aroma finds her ancestral property confiscated under the Enemy Property Bill and her grandfather’s legacy is more the stuff of private conversation than public recognition. Independent Bangladesh has had an uneasy relationship with its minorities including Hindus, Christians, ‘Biharis, Chakmas, Garos, Santals, and so on. The pain of exclusion is poignantly captured in the short story ‘Hangover’ by Akhtaruzzaman Elias discussed in the fourth chapter. The author captures in the metaphor of a ‘hangover’ the violent swagger of youths radicalized during the war, who are looking for power after freedom as the Hindus and Urdu speakers remain anxious bystanders. While the Muktijuddho’ narrative is a powerful one in that its appeal is premised on a concept of shared pain and sacrifice, post-war history has shown that such ideas necessarily come with an expiry date. Thus, even though we may look at the story of liberation being told and retold as part of
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the politics of mobilizing votes, its recurrence cannot be explained away without recourse to the idea of a compulsive return of the people and their memories to an age both golden and traumatic.
The sentencing and execution of war criminals by the War Crimes Tribunal has received considerable attention from the international press with many calling the process hasty and prejudiced. In Bangladesh the Shahbag movement in 2013 galvanized the youth and acquired the proportions of a civil resistance movement. This was followed by increased retaliation from Islamist groups as journalists and activists were hacked to death. If we are to look at the trials as a nation state’s process of self-criticism and its attempt to retroactively punish impunity and not simply as vengeance or an attempt to snuff out political opposition, the backlash cannot be attributed to fringe groups who pathologically dislike freedom. Rather the nation state and its civil society must accept this as part of the story that began unfolding in 1947 and deal with it not by means of surgical strikes but as emplotted in its own narrative of ‘liberation, a word which was bound to have multiple connotations, not all of them soothing or therapeutic.
In an article by the writer and visual artist Naim Mohaieman, which appeared in The Hindu on 16 December (Victory Day) 2011, the author articulates a problem that goes to the heart of this work:
The embers of memory, and tensions with Pakistan, keep reviving through unresolved issues such as war crimes trials and reparations, as well as micro-debates such as whether audiences should cheer for the Pakistan cricket team when they play at Mirpur stadium. The ghosts of 1971 keep returning to plague the body politic, reflected particularly in our troubled relationship with secularism. After 40 years, the main argument for separation of mosque and state still remains this: the Jamaat e Islami has leaders who operated wartime death squads. But what happens when 1971 memory is no longer sufficient to protect this concept of secularism? (My italics.)
This is where Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, written in 1961 but currently experiencing an academic revival of sorts, arrives as an already existing critique of the trial of war criminals by states. If the process is guided by the effects that it is intended to produce or used to demonstrate the moral springs of state authority, it is likely to fall into the familiar pattern of nationalist idiom: to access and appropriate the past from within the discourses of the present and yet present future
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as utopia. As recent researches into the concept of ‘secularism’ have demonstrated, in India the definition of secularism has deviated from the Western paradigm that insisted on a rigid separation of state and religion based on the historical experience of their intertwining. Indeed the secularism that Mohaieman refers to retains the Western meaning of the term and in the south Asian postcolonies, including Bangladesh, its uses have been complex. Tahmima Anam, for instance, in her The Good Muslim dramatizes the transformation of a Neruda-reading Sohail, who, returning from the war falls in love with the Book, becomes a religious preacher and leaves for Saudi Arabia in the end. She raises questions about the war, its trauma and victims, and the place of religion in an anarchic post-war Bangladesh.
The italicized portion of the quote above allows us to articulate the following questions: What is at stake when we refer to memories of 1971 today? Is there a consensual space that victims and witnesses inhabit? If not, how is it that their remembrances differ and why? As times and discourses change in Bangladesh, how is the war and its aftermath represented/remembered in culture? And to address Mohaieman’s anxiety, one might say that with the import of the war being examined in terms of the global discourses that shaped it, its human costs, its erasure of familiar patterns of living, narratives of responses to terror, annihilation, rape, and the unprecedented, questions put to 1971 are changing. In the posing of these questions as researchers travel further back in history to 1947 and beyond, the past will perhaps yield signs to read the present. As this book will submit, the expression 1971 memory cannot be viewed as a monolithic category. Indeed, there are meanings emerging from the war which reach beyond the threat posed by collaborators and lay their claim upon posterity to recognize the trauma and wounds of history and imagine spaces of ethical coexistence. It has relevance for our understanding of history across the three nations and who we are today. As a teacher of literature from Assam, who grew up under the shadow of the Anti-Foreigners Movement and living in Delhi with ancestors buried in Sylhet, I find that the awareness of the history of the subcontinent far from resonates within us. It is as if history ended in 1947 with the Partition. The relevance of the wars fought with Pakistan and the events of 1971 are conspicuous by their absence in the stories that our current generations are telling themselves. While we remain beholden to the past, as accounts of 1947, 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and 2002 Gujarat riots amply demonstrate, the archives of our memory are well-nigh vacant when it comes to the wars fought in the name of the nation. Thus what
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we have are either the platitudes of official propaganda or an indifference that can only be described as deeply unsettling.
The literature of 1971 and the formation of Bangladesh allows us to examine the heterogeneous experiences of witnesses and victims and the place of the event in questions of national identity. Taking stock of the serrated legacy of freedom will allow us to read the post-war anomie in the new nation as a consequence of the war, though all its links may not lead there. The reading of post-1971 as a ‘betrayal of the true spirit of liberation is to succumb to a nationalist rhetoric that attempts to fix and essentialize, and represent the violence of the war as a necessary stopover to a grand future that would have been a reality but for a few enemies. While testimonies of suffering may be factually correct, it is a sad reality of our times that they are often appropriated to smuggle in a sovereign under a new name with no substantive difference in its conceptualization of power from older regimes. By juxtaposing literary texts from all three nations in the concluding sections, I have tried to make space for their voices to encounter, collide, meet, and argue by implication that while this work is about the writing of about the war in Bangladesh, it is metonymically about other spaces and histories both within the boundaries of the nation and without.
Notes and References
1. Pierre Nora, ‘Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire,
Representations 26 (Spring, 1989): 6-24.
2. Those executed were Mohd. Kamarruzzaman, Sheikh Sirajul Haque, and Khan Akram Hossain, all right-wing leaders accused of facilitating geno cide and who were opposed to the Awami League.
3. Intizar Husain, ‘Sorrow City, in his Stories, translated by Moazzam Sheikh
(New Delhi: Katha, 2004), p. 203.
4. Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh
(New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2013), p. 4.
5. Marcus Franda, ‘Ziaur Rehman and Bangladeshi Nationalism, Economic
and Political Weekly, 16, nos. 10/12 (1981): 357–80, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/4369609.
6. Salil Tripathi, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War
and Its Unquiet Legacy (New Delhi: Aleph, 2014).
7. She was conferred the Begum Rokeya Award in 2016 by the Sheikh
Hasina government for the contribution to the women’s rights.
8. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New Delhi: Penguin, 2006 [1977]).
9. Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim (New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, 2011).
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Acknowledgements
Come to think of it, the Acknowledgements section is really the conclusion of a book. It means an admission that the work, in some way, is ready to be surrendered. As I write this, I wonder if the time is ripe.
I must mention that those who are not named here inhabit my writing in ways too subtle for me to see at this moment.
To begin with, I thank my supervisor, Professor G.J.V. Prasad, for his quick and meaningful insights when I had the right questions. Whether it was getting a visa or a study leave, his willingness to make things move has been reassuring in my years of interaction with him. I can only talk of Professor Syed Manzoorul Islam of University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, with deep respect; my discussions with him were always enriching and to have met a man of such humility and learning is my good fortune. Professor Niaz Zaman put me on the scent of many an important text and I would like to thank Meghana Guhathakurta for the gift of a precious book and memories. The librarian at the Liberation War Museum
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library, the indefatigable Mr Mamun Siddiqui, took a personal interest in helping me conduct interviews and locate relevant books. I would also like to thank Asad Chowdhury, a poet and person of great warmth, and the unforgettable Priyobhashini. A special note for Badal-da and his family whom I stayed with in Dhaka-their care and affection softened the trepidation of being in a city of strangers. If I had to mention the warmth of everyone I came across in Bangladesh, it would indeed be a tall order. This work would only have been a concept without them.
I must remember Arup-da whose joy in my most insignificant achievements’ is heart-warming; my sister Mimi (who will not fail to remark that her name has arrived too late in the pecking order) for her obsession with whether I have ‘finished and the quaint oddity of her love; Aishani who washed my weariness away with her laughter; and Kumkum and Jethimoni for reminding me of things at stake.
It is only fitting to remember my friends Palashi, Smita, Gayatri, and Monica for the gift of variegated friendships; Vinod, who never clenched his teeth when I asked him the silliest of questions about formatting and citation; and Ruhi, for the pleasure of knowing her. Paulami, for giving in a way only she can.
Here’s a note for Paplu and Payel for the unforgettable warmth of their North Campus home; Bura and Shanai, for being there; Unta and Babi dada for those humid walks down College Street and Chelamma, for your large-heartedness.
I do not know whether I would have felt the same way during the years of writing without the concern and solicitude of my mother-in-law. I mention Ankur-da, Juri-ba, Jilmil, and now Avnish, for knowing them has made my life richer.
I wonder what to say about my father. To acknowledge’ his contribution would be an act of presumption; I can almost visualize his discomfiture if I ever attempted to thank him and there is little else I can do. This work is enabled by all he has given without my asking.
Deuta, who came and went, and left for me a world of words, poetry, and beauty. It is rare that you come across a life that seems to you like a poem you want to read all over again. His involvement in my work is something I have deeply missed.
Abir, for the sun that always comes through the window on wintry days. Agnibh, for choosing us.For all this and more, to my mother who lives in each word I write.
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Introduction
In Hasan Azizul Haq’s short narrative ‘Naamheen Gotraheen, we
encounter the image of a man furiously digging. Set in wartime East Pakistan, the night is silent with fear as he has walked through the deathly city to his destination. He finds bits and pieces of people he knows; here a bone, there a skull. He utters a cry of recognition and continues digging. In this work of exhuming bodies of witnesses for traces of history, the tongues do not appear. It is not a fact that strikes the digger but as Giorgio Agamben and Primo Levi have reminded us so chillingly and eloquently in the context of Auschwitz, the true witnesses cannot speak because they are either dead or missing. In our enthusiastic attempts to tell the stories of the war of 1971 through history, anthropology, or fiction, our hubris of providing a comprehensive or authoritative account is thus put in check.
The birth of Pakistan was as much a product of an aspirational colonial modernity and politics as it was a culmination of grievances against a Hindu-dominated polity and the spectre of an independent India where Muslims would remain a numerical and political minority.
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The contexts of political formations in the northwest and the east were hardly identical and ultimately when West and East Pakistan became territorial realities, the business of cultural cohesion remained, if a euphemism be permitted, in an infantile stage. Also the war fought over Kashmir in 1948 against India enhanced the insecurity of the ruling establishment and, as Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal have argued, made ʻrevenue extraction’ the primary basis of the relation between the centre and the states. Henceforth national self-defence became the obsession of the ruling establishment and that inevitably resulted in a move towards administrative consolidation. Thus, the colonial bureaucratic establishment came to the fore. Bose and Jalal also make the cogent observation that it was only by delaying the drafting of the constitution that the vested interests of the social upper classes, military, and bureaucrats could be saved since any democratic dispensation would have to recognize the numerical preponderance of Bengalis. Small wonder then that the first general elections in Pakistan were not held before 1970. The Awami League of East Pakistan received an overwhelming verdict in the east and staked a claim to rule Pakistan. However, Yahya Khan’s government ordered a military crackdown on 25 March 1971 alleging that the elected leaders of the country had been unable to reach a consensus on power sharing. The postcolonial military regime drew its legitimacy from maintaining the colonial construct of the inefficient and venal native politician, the tragic prospect of being ruled by the effeminate Bengali, and the spectre of Indian imperialistic designs. Not too far in the future,
a common religious bond, abused and distorted to serve the interests of authoritarian rulers, snapped all too easily as the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army) fought a war of resistance and the army of the Indian state crossed the lines of 1947 to liberate one Muslim majority region from its tormenters in another.?
The appeal to a shared experience as co-religionists to keep a country together, which had been posited as the moral basis of Pakistan, had started to fall apart immediately after the Partition when, in 1948, Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah defended Urdu as the sole repository of Pakistani values during his visit to Dhaka. The history of the subcontinent underwent a further transformation; cartographers were troubled by historical forces and human actors once again. Bangladesh felt itself on the verge on something momentous, Pakistan dismembered and
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emasculated. Faced with massive numbers of refugees fleeing the brutal assault of the armed forces, the anxiety of the incumbent government under Indira Gandhi increased on account of resources and internal security; with the Naxalite movement peaking in Bengal, the government was nervous about refugees joining the ranks. This merged with nationalist rhetoric, moral duty, and public opinion, and was churned in the pot of international politics and diplomacy. Thus began a war within twenty-four years of the Partition, and fratricidal violence, killing, and rape showed its capacity to recur and create another nation. It is important that the literature of and about the war be examined for its mapping of the process of disintegration of a state, the formation of a new one, and the culture of repression legitimized by utopias and unitarianism.
In the course of the five chapters into which this work is divided, the commemoration of the war of 1971 in fiction and testimonial literature shall be explored. Simply put, this work will revisit the war and pose questions about its place in memory and history. The choice of the words ‘commemoration’ and ‘buried tongues’ conjures images of death and yet a wish to say something in the face of loss of speech, visibility, and relevance. I wish to capitalize on the association of memorial and death as interrelated terms. However, while commemoration bestows an aura of permanence/immortality on the person/thing/event being commemorated, it also relegates it to the past.
The title ‘In the Land of Buried Tongues’ does not conjure up the image of a democratic country and Bangladesh is one. So are Pakistan and India, if all three nations involved in the 1971 war are to be considered. In India, declassification of the 1971 war documents has not happened yet; the only sustained official analysis in Pakistan was the Hamoodur Rehman Commission of Inquiry in 1972 about the omissions of which more will be said in the following chapters. Testimonies and literary narratives help us listen to voices buried beneath official historiography and memorialization.
Recent news from Bangladesh-with images of young men from elite schools and colleges turning executioners in the name of the Islamic State (IS) — has been disquieting. This was preceded by the attack on un-Islamic secular/liberal bloggers and journalists. Meanwhile, the War Crimes Tribunal conducted its hearings in the face of international criticism. Buoyed by popular legitimacy created by the Shahbag movement, those accused of war crimes during the war of liberation were tried and sentenced, and so far four have been executed. With some of the alleged
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collaborators linked to the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, a political opponent of the Awami League, the spectre of retaliatory violence has loomed large. Clearly, all sides partially trace the source of divisive politics and religion back to the war.
The year 1971 is remembered in India as a year in which a war of very short duration took place between India and Pakistan. In twelve days the surrender of the enemy was ensured and what remains for posterity is the famous photograph of General Niazi signing the instrument of surrender sitting beside Lieutenant General J.S. Aurora at the Ramana Race Course in Dhaka. For India and East Pakistan, this was a ‘just war’ fought under duress; for the latter, to avert annihilation. For eight months since March, the Mukti Bahini had been fighting a fierce guerrilla war with the Pakistani forces; while the men were being trained in India, their friends and family lived in terror. Millions of refugees spilled into India, especially into West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, and Tripura. To demonstrate the extent to which the rulers of Pakistan were willing to go to preserve the integrity of their country, mass murders, rapes, custodial torture, and surveillance became the means towards justifiable ends. The army inflicted exemplary punishment on the Hindus who they believed had been inciting the Bengali Muslim majority, furthering the designs of their co-religionists in India. In the cold logic of violent conflict and war, the Urdu-speaking community in East Pakistan, referred to as ‘Biharis, was singled out for punitive action by the Bengalis, who saw them as mere agents of the West Pakistani military-bureaucratic ruling establishment, their bodies becoming the site where a complex question of identity would be settled. After the war, the ‘Biharis’ would gain familiarity as collaborators in Bangladesh and in the international community as people living in the subhuman Geneva camps, awaiting repatriation to Pakistan. Indeed, Yasmin Saikia’s encounter with ‘Bihari’ women raped by Bengali men during her fieldwork reminds us of the complexities involved in an ethical understanding of the war of 1971.
This work, in taking stock of literature commemorating 1971, is of the view that these texts are also metonyms of the post-war anomie considered by liberal Bangladeshis to be deeply contrarian in spirit’ to the ‘Liberation War’ and its dominant narrative and yet inseparable from its inheritances and memories. In this process they also articulate the inherent ambivalence of narrating the birth of the nation and of nationalism itself. Unlike such scholarly works as that of Sisson and Rose, Sarmila Bose, and Yasmin Saikia—which are hesitant to
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refer to the war in 1971 as a’war of liberation’—as will be clear from the title of this work, I choose to retain the term used by Bangladeshis to refer to the year they became a sovereign country. While I do not contest the appellation civil war”, to me one way of contending with the memories of 1971 is to acknowledge it as a ‘Liberation War. A critical use of the term buttressed by the methodology applied to its canonical texts—a reading of 1971 in terms of the larger history of colonial India and communal politics–is attendant on this shift. While this approach might not have the ready-made neutrality sought to be assumed by referring to it as a civil war’ in political discourse, it struck me as one more sensitized to the suffering incurred on behalf of the nation, so much a part of the native accounts that constitute my point of departure. Needless to say, this work treats the physical and sexual violence visited upon non-combatant civilians not as an aberration but as embedded in the universe of warfare. As will be visible to the readers of this work, while I do critique the tendency to treat the war as the fruition of the long ages of Bengali Muslims’ struggle for identity, by focusing on interpretive choices made by people when faced with new meanings of (in)humanity, I hope to introduce a strain that researchers need to heed in order not to appear above and beyond the pale of what we seek to understand.
In the struggle for liberation, the Language Movement of 1952 is seen as the point of rupture, and it is the primary basis on which a narrative of difference was constructed. Bengali, an object of contention when it came to being a medium of instruction and culture in precolonial East Bengal, became the overwhelming rallying point in 1971. While this is likely to suggest a secularization-exemplified by the dropping of the word ‘Muslim’ from the Awami Muslim League urged by one of its founding members Maulana Bhashani-after Bangladesh attained sovereignty, the discourses of reconstruction and Bengali exceptionalism were sought to be reinforced with religious pieties beginning with the stint of Khandekar Moshtaque Ahmad in power after Mujib’s murder. However, the collaboration of members of the right-wing religious parties (called the Razakars) with the Pakistani army in 1971, which undercut the very legitimacy of Bengali separatism, remains a historical blind spot. Parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami thus operate with a fractured narrative; to maintain their description of the commonsensical value of Islam in running the affairs of a fractious state, they need to remain silent on the function served by the protectors of religion in 1971.
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The figures of three million dead and more than two lakh raped that appear in native accounts may have been contested, as we shall see in the chapters. In the faux debate that this generates, testimonies of traumatic experiences are received as evidence, thus threatening to transform suffering into spectacle. Conversely as the testimonies examined in the second and the third chapters will suggest, this debate has also determined the form and purpose of these oral histories in Bangladesh. While I have sought to provide space to memories of a violent time in testimonial literature and fiction, an assessment of the tools of understanding applied by the actors and victims’ in anomalous times is made. As will be clear they often suggest continuity with pre-war culture and structures; on the other hand, we also come across testimonial literature and fiction, which illuminate possibilities of and thereby mourn the failures of a post-war politics. Indeed this sense of writing as mourning-where even as authors spin stories of intrepid men and mothers they turn the war into a golden age’ and cast it as a departure from the mundane that came to replace it-became stronger during the years of this research. Surely, in terms of the place that 1971 has come to occupy in imagining the nation and its resonances in public and private memories, this work will hopefully demonstrate that it is misleading to single the war out and make it an unquestionable/pure element of Bangladeshi identity. Not only is this anachronistic, any nationalism/notion of identity that draws its legitimacy from war will have little meaning unless (a) its historical context is examined and (b) it is considered inseparable from the exclusions it both foregrounded and engendered. Examples of vigilante justice against the minority Urdu-speaking community and the place of victims of wartime rape in nationalist discourse will suffice to clinch the argument.
The colonial administration in India had been a strongly centralized one designed to impose patterns on an almost ungovernable variety, particularly after 1857. In post-independence Pakistan the dispute over the need for one national language to arrest fissiparous tendencies in Muslim society (the Balochs and the Pathans would prove difficult subjects) and the resultant repression during the Language Movement of 1952 suggested the continuation of old structures of control. Similarly, the resurrection of Islam as an element of cohesion in a brutalized society that had recently witnessed the cruelty of coreligionists was strange but coherent. As the Awami League and its secular nationalism’ declined and with it memories of Mujib’s answer to post-war chaos—in the forms of the one-party system, Bangladesh
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Krishak Sramik Awami League (BKSAL), and Rokkhi Bahini-Islam provided the warmth of a credible narrative of state-building and legitimacy of power. It also opened the door for political participation of parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Islamic Oikya Jote among others. Members of the Jamaat had collaborated with the Pakistan army, providing information about Awami Leaguers, Hindus, the Mukti Bahini, and procuring women and volunteers for locally trained militias. When Bangladesh emerged out of its tryst with military regime and democracy was restored, the Awami League came to stand for a secular nationalism’ and Zia’s BNP for a right-wing nationalist leaning. Mujib’s daughter and Zia’s wife were installed at the helm of these organizations.
In this work I treat post-war Bangladesh as having emerged from the war with its traces, as with the fissures of a postcolonial nation partitioned on the basis of a common religious identity. Several scholars such as Sugata Bose have treated the economic aspect as critical to the evolution of communal identities in Bengal, and if the Awami League database for the neglect of East Pakistan is considered, the Partition had merely changed the oppressors’ religious identities. The cyclone of 1970 and the tardy official response pushed matters to the brink. When the general elections followed less than a month later, memories of devastation were still green. The overwhelming victory of the Awami League symbolized to the ruling military establishment a possibility that a fregional minded party could assume power at the centre. Meanwhile the Agartala Conspiracy Case of 1969 had turned Mujibur Rahman into the most visible symbol of the Bengali demand for autonomy. Therefore, when the election results were declared in December 1970, the Awami League won 162 of the 164 seats in East Pakistan. The Awami League had successfully rallied the voters on the six-point charter of demands, popularly known as chhoy-dofa. This charter of demands (reminiscent of the six-point charter of the Chartist Movement in 1838) called for a federal form of government, separate currencies in the two wings, and the maintenance of separate paramilitary forces, among others. As things turned out, the demand for autonomy’ gradually transformed into ‘freedom’ assisted, in no mean way, by the thrust of student politics.
Yet one would have thought that the catastrophe of 1947 would have constituted a point of reference to measure the human costs of the deployment of violence as a means of solution for political problems. The Pakistani state in its military crackdown on 25 March, barely
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twenty-four years after the event, showed how the present trumps reason and ethics in politics. As the Pakistani authors I discuss in the final chapter will repeatedly suggest, in its response to the crisis of authority and the challenge to the writ of the state in 1970–1, the ruling dispensation created rather a point of reference for the future. In the silence in Pakistani history about the war and its state of denial (maintained at the time, as argued by Ayesha Jalal, by the national press), memory seems to have been the burden of only those directly affected by the conflict. The return to stories of 1971 (Shamsie, Khan, and Fazli, for instance) in recent years in the face of the Balkanization of the Pakistani statemay be seen as an attempt to reopen the debate between history and memory when the daily spectacle of violence as part of the ordinary threatens to privilege forgetting as a way of coping with the present.
What then is the justification of this present study? Primarily the memoirs and testimonies are accounts of remembrance, of how people experienced the war and attempted to narrativize its place in their lives. The recent works on the war of 1971 that have appeared delve into history, anthropology, memory studies, and trauma. Sarmila Bose, Yasmin Saikia, Nayanika Mookherjee, and Srinath Raghavan have taken stock of the war, its history, and memories of violence and trauma. War memoirs and fiction, apart from Cara Cilano’s work on national identities in Pakistan, have not been considered in detail in the English-speaking academia. Yet, it appears impossible to appreciate the legacies of 1971 without these texts, and hence this endeavour.
The authors of fiction are variously located. Tahmima Anam, for instance, describes her first novel, A Golden Age, as her song of belonging to a time that defined her parents’ lives, a time both magical and tragic. Writing on the war began during the war, and the concerns of a Rifles, Bread, Women, whose author was murdered a few days before the liberation by war collaborators, are significantly different from The Good Muslim, Anam’s second novel published in 2011 (followed by Bones of Grace in 2016). There is now a genre of literature in Bangladesh that can be called war literature. Since it also doubles as an account of the foundational moment of the country, its implications for Bangladeshi notions of identity is significant. In the technique of reading applied to the texts, we have treated them as representations of the past mediated by the present. In the brief survey of historical research in the first chapter till the fifth and final chapter where works from Pakistan and Bangladesh are juxtaposed, we will see how the war continues to be reinterpreted returning to cast its elongated shadows over the history
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of the subcontinent. In addition, the study of the war in testimonial and fictional narratives allows us to envisage an ethical history, the writing of which has been delayed in all the three nations involved in the conflict. Given the peculiar circumstances of the war of 1971, it was perhaps unlikely that accounts which talk of the futility of violence should emerge from Bangladesh in contrast to the poems and fiction, for instance, of the World Wars (“Break of Day in the Trenches, ‘An Anthem for Doomed Youth, Slaughterhouse [5], Gravity’s Rainbow, Catch-22, and so on). The fact that military dictatorship returned to Bangladesh in 1977 after Mujib’s assassination and continued for fourteen long years ensured that a critical evaluation of the legacies of the war was further delayed in both politics and literature.
This work tries to account for the problems that is encountered by any idea of return to 1971 from within the needs of the present. The heroic narratives of those who were left out because their victimhood’ could not be accommodated into the national imaginary or for that matter the pain of women (mothers/wives/sisters/daughters) that remained in excess of their patriotism constitute the well of memories of 1971 from which memorialization of the past needs to be fashioned. These stories, told by authors such as Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Shaheen Akhtar, and Tahmima Anam, and a strong underlying strain in nationalistic memoirs of Imam and Guhathakurta ask questions of an unbroken tale of sacrifice and martyrdom. Since the war has long functioned as a moral paradigm against which post-war politics has been measured and found to have failed, 1971 must be critically examined as a point of reference. Else it will yield little apart from a lesson of a reductive militant, masculinist nationalism. The changed dreams and nightmares of militarized young men across classes who returned from the war; the ‘Biharis’ who having gambled on the wrong side looked to the future with misgiving; the sexually violated women who fought a lonely battle with their pain against a society which called them birangonas (war heroines); and the war babies who often vanished without a trace are the remnants of a just war’ fought from a position of sheer inequality.
The literature emerging from the war allows us to critique not just the aftermath of the war but war itself. In the pain felt by, responded to, and interpreted by women we find a creativity inseparable from sadness and loss, whether it is in the works of Jahanara Imam, Mushtari Shafi, or Basanti Guhathakurta. This emptiness aggravated by the turn of events after the war spurs their writing; they seem to mourn those lost and their individual act of mourning can be read as a symptom of the present that
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would render their sacrifice irrelevant. In appreciating the myths and elisions of war, gender appears to be a significant category structuring what sustains warfare and what it permits as legitimate use of violence. While orders to fetch or rape women were not official, these circulated as currency between male soldiers, as Yasmin Saikia’s study shows us. Even in memoirs of Bangladeshi male civilians, such as Nirmalendu Goon’s, the reality of violent conflict is softened by the presence of a fleeting woman who offers him a glass of water during his fugitive life, shows him all that is worth fighting for. In the memoir written by Mahbub Alam, Guerrilla Theke Shommukh Juddhe, a similar longing for a vanishing refugee woman, with the neck as graceful as a swan’s, lingers. Alam, from his watch-post on the Indian side of the border, watches a woman being raped by Pakistani soldiers. He equates it with Bangladesh caught in the middle and being raped, taking a cue from the Indian officer who intentionally sends him on this shift so that his resolve as a warrior for the motherland may be hardened. Niazi’s bravado, Rao Farman Ali’s self-pity, and Siddiq Salik’s evasiveness in the military accounts of perpetrators’ stick out as symptoms of the years of reluctance in Pakistan to take a critical view of the war. In fictional accounts such as that of Anisul Hoque we encounter the mothers who fought battles of their own as their sons went to war and they stood steadfast in their duty to the nation, becoming a moral touchstone for succeeding generations. When Selina Hossain in her Hangor Nodi Grenade makes Buri push her autistic son Royees towards the bloodthirsty Pakistani soldiers as a sacrifice, stung by his uselessness’ in the service of the nation, we are given a militant mother who overcomes the limitation of her sex finally when her son dies, as it were, in her place.
Shaheen Akhtar returns to the subject of sexually violated women in Talaash. In her bleak delineation the erasure of these women and their wartime experiences from nationalist narratives and memorials, except in the form of statistical acknowledgement, appears irreversible. Finding a home in fiction and in oral testimonies, where their names are inevitably changed to avoid detection, they signify the unfinished task of memorialization and historiography. Yasmin Saikia seeks an answer to the unacknowledged crimes of the past when she visits Pakistan and where there is still a culture of denial around the events of 1971. She brings us the tales of two contrite men who confront the implications of their acts committed during the war in the army and live their post-war lives, Saikia argues, according to the lessons on (in)humanity that they learnt during 1971. She finds her response to the spiral of violence in
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these societies and nations in Rumi’s concept of insaniyat (shared sense of humanity) and locates herself within a transformative idea of suffering. As I will dispute, her solution, though stirring, does not address the failure of politics and empathy in Bangladesh and Pakistan adequately, often bypassing the fact that both those who suffer and those who inflict pain are placed across national borders. Further, the relevance of 1971 has changed over the years as new zones of conflict have opened up in these sovereign states. In the near future at least, her prescription will sadly remain little more than a textual resolution.
This is thus a work written from a position of immanence. Part of the stake is personal. In this I partially share the context of Yasmin Saikia who writes about her early suspicion of Bangladeshis, who are synonymous in Assam with ‘illegal immigrants. However, being a Bengali speaker of East Bengali origin, my location in discourses of identity is fundamentally different from hers. Born and raised in Guwahati, the capital of Assam, I had access to Hindu Bengali families who lost their homes and land in 1947 and in the riots of the 1950s. A few who had fled across the border as wartime refugees in 1971 and never felt secure enough to return were personal acquaintances. It was comforting in my years of adolescence to know that my grandfather had been a government employee in Lumding, Assam, and not a refugee. Studying in a convent where our peers and bosom friends were mostly Assamese and some were from the business community of Marwaris, my sister and I were relieved to have a grandfather who had voted in the Sylhet Referendum to stay in Assam. Needless to say at that time we were not aware of the colonial politics of the Assam Congress, the Muslim League, and others.
In such a milieu the schisms of 1947 were deep. Here Hindu migrants from across the border (in the Pakistan and Bangladeshi areas) were perceived to be victims of persecution and neglect and the context of post-Partition riots against minorities in Pakistan predominated. Muslims on the other hand were ‘illegal immigrants who had chosen the division and were ethically bound to remain in their own country. With their emotional links to another country where they were in a majority, seditious tendencies were bound to ‘resurface and the spectre of a surreptitious invasion found currency in Assamese politics both for speakers of Assamese and Bengali, though the explanatory frameworks were not identical. The fear of incursions into the territory of Assam and changing demography led to the Assam agitation of the early 1980s culminating in the Nellie massacre. One of the reasons I chose to focus on
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the war of 1971 was that while 1947 in its end of colonial rule and the Partition are recognized as formative elements of Indian and Pakistani nationhood and ways of living together, the second partition of the subcontinent has been largely ignored.
The explanatory potential of that event in the context of the present requires evaluation. Its lessons go much further than the failure of the two-nation theory. In the context of this book, where we look at ‘literature’as commemorating the nine months of the war and its bewildering aftermath, we are reminded again and again of the persistence of a conception of the state as an impediment to the fulfilment of the true destiny of a people. To those leading the struggle against either a colonial government or an imperialistic native one, this narrative has been extraordinarily helpful. It is the post-liberation phase which constitutes a rupture in that conceptualization. For instance, while the war/ Muktijuddho in Bangladesh is generally acknowledged in the public sphere as one inspired by selfless idealism to the extent that noncombatant victims are also referred to as ‘martyrs’ —the years till the fall of Ershad in 1991 and the restoration of democracy are a seen as ‘duplicitous. Mujib’s BKSAL and Rokkhi Bahini, Zia’s regime when religion and politics returned as inseparable bedfellows, and the rule of General Ershad, himself a repatriated soldier from West Pakistan after the war, are all episodes in this narrative of betrayal. In the rhetoric of the two mainstream political parties claiming the legacy of the war-the Awami League and the BNP seeking to account for the uneasy postwar political careers of Sheikh Mujib and General Zia–is reflected a problematic. Having failed to address the sexual violation, suffering, and trauma after the war, how, indeed, is the true destiny’ of the Bangladeshi people to be rescued? The deferral of this empathy from the state may be seen as the continuation of a form of politics where parts are considered to be dispensable to the whole. Surelyʻreconstruction’ remained a severely contested term for those who experienced the war in myriad ways.
To understand the implications of the genocidal military crackdown by the army and the concomitant declaration of independence by East Pakistan and the aftermath of liberation, this book offers a close reading of memoirs, testimonies, and fiction that draw on memories of the war. While the chapters are broadly divided according to genre, their respective boundaries are often renegotiated. Considering that they attempt to give narrative form to an event of catastrophic dimensions, the slippages appear critical to representability. Existing feminist research into war helped me to articulate the deeply gendered universe of the war of 1971
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which cannot be bypassed by a reminder that a few women also fought alongside men. The narratives of victims of wartime rape should act as a reality check on theories that perceive empowerment of women in their militarization. The formulation of parameters to study mass suffering imposed by the state occasioned by the Holocaust serves as an important reminder of issues at stake as we undertake a study of this nature. In making sense of the memories/traces of war, memoirists and authors of fiction draw parallels with Auschwitz and the memorial at Mirpur in Dhaka lists the genocides of the twentieth century, with Bangladesh providing a particularly heinous instance.
Post-Auschwitz research into memories and discussions of modes of studying testimonials and fiction relating to the event proved helpful in conceiving the aftermath of 1971. The marshalling of stories of (in)human experiences to provide evidence of incredible cruelty often shifts the focus from the subject and the world she inhabits to the construction of a factual/authentic history. This lesson learnt from representations of the concentration camps provided a roadmap for this study and a solid ground from which to refute studies such as that of Sarmila Bose. Academic studies of and methodology applied to the Partition of India in 1947 also provided a historical precedent for the violent reshaping of a nation’s memories and identities.
While I have clearly pointed out the differences between the Holocaust and 1971 in the chapters, it is clear that spectacular and mass violence by the state after 1945 has tended to appropriate the established critiques of the Nazi state. In allowing us to shift from a tale of unrelieved victimhood, it helps us listen attentively to the pain, loss, and attendant responses of survivors. This in turn leads us to critically examine the discourses of Bengali martial valour and militarized nationalism and the purposes that they served in post-war Bangladesh—both in fashioning ruling regimes and the memorialization of the war in public space, culture, and memory. I would argue that attention to these narratives that form the genre of literary memorialization’ illuminates the complex inheritance of 1971 both deliberately and inadvertently.
The reader will come across a comparative method both in the division of chapters and discussion of texts. Where such a method has suggested itself as useful, I have not eschewed it. However, I do hope that the analogies drawn bring forth the complexity of the discourses that we are addressing when we talk about the ‘war of liberation. For instance, when in the final chapter fiction from Pakistan and Bangladesh are juxtaposed, the purpose is to underscore the continuing attempts
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to come to terms with the splitting of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh as imperfect expressions of an ethical need. Towards the end I try to take theoretical stock of the separation of genres with help from Derrida. The decision to conclude with a consideration of two works of Tahmima Anam arises from a perception that in writing a work that is definitively about post-war Bangladesh (The Good Muslim) to follow one that is suggestively called The Golden Age set during the war, Anam is able to explore the complexities that are consequent on the violent memories that a nation calls its past.
The first chapter offers a glimpse of the historical research into the Liberation War: the discourses that inform the writing of history in an attempt to capture the events leading to 1971. It takes stock of the way post-war events have shaped both historiography and memorialization when orthodox Islam was officially sought to be reintroduced as an element of cohesion. The return of the military regime shook the moral foundation of Bangladesh premised on difference from Pakistan, which had arguably merely continued oppressive colonial structures of administration. This chapter hints towards the silences of the language of martyrdom and sacrifice and the exclusionary nature of memorialization of the war by drawing on heterogeneous instances. It will make a case for an exploration of the processes that inform the representation of the war and argue for its relevance to definitions of ‘Bangladeshi’ identity even as notions of modernization, development, and globalization seduce with their promise of newness and reprieve from the untidiness of the past.
The second chapter marks a separation of gender and genre as I take stock of non-fictional accounts of the war in terms of women memoirists and testimonies of female victims of rape. This was guided by the nature of the material which persuaded me that while the authors of memoirs and repositories of oral history occupy different zones of memory, the role of gender in determining how the war impinged on non-combatant victims is significant. While the literature in Bangladesh on women fighters increases, I have excluded them from my analysis for I do not believe that it provides a critical insight into the business of conducting war and taking stock of its effects. Introducing Firdausi Priyobhashini’s testimony was both a decision to share her story and her mode of narration and situate sexually violated women in the domain of war trauma/neuroses along with war veterans. In confounding borders of fiction and non-fiction, in weaving her experiences as a victim of wartime rape into the story of her life, she seemed,
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in a way, to portend the methodology of this book which imbibes the permeability of genres.
The first section of the third chapter provides a reading of male combatant and non-combatant’s memoirs. Here I sparingly introduce a few Pakistani military accounts in order to underscore the sharply divided accounts of human destruction mediated by nationalistic lenses. The following section takes up male testimonies of witnesses and victims of the war. The two sections taken together reveal the workings of gendered constructions of social roles that come to the fore even in the representation of violence and unprecedented human suffering. Wartime rape emerges as an inassimilable element of the language of ‘sacrifice and martyrdom’ critical to a post-war nationalism. While the memoir of the poet Nirmalendu Goon intertwines his itinerant life, fleeing from the Pakistani army and their collaborators with the journey of a nation towards liberation, an account like Hasan Azizul Haq’s will suggest, however, that the humanity of the once fearful, monstrous, and now-defeated enemy is also part of the well of war’s memories and images.
The fourth chapter shifts the genre to fiction. In taking note of fictitious narratives (short stories, novellas, and novels) the works that I have chosen to discuss foreground the anxieties of a post-war society and the interpretation of the war often shaped to meet the needs of the present. In the works of Akhtaruzzaman Elias and Shaheen Akhtar, for instance, the dominant narratives of war are destabilized. In their critical attitude to the legacy of the war, they help us read the chaos of post-war Bangladesh and the evasions and omissions of official histories. While authors such as Anisul Hoque and Selina Hossain construct a universe of war in tandem with popular/populist notions of nationalism, the former are able to bring us stories where pain and loss are always in excess of emancipatory narratives. Thus, in the memorialization of 1971, fiction traverses a complex path; in its conflicting emphases and memories this broad genre dramatizes the unfinished task of interpretation and struggle to place the fateful year in the context of questions that trouble the polity today.
The fifth and final chapter juxtaposes fiction written by Pakistani authors with 1971 as the theme with Tahmima Anam’s recent works A Golden Age and The Good Muslim. It also accounts for O.V. Vijayan’s The Infinity of Grace and, briefly, Qurratulain Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist in a cross section that attempts to barely highlight the issues at stake in the appropriation of a violent history. With wildly varying official
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versions, fiction in this chapter appears in a supplementary role. By capturing the war in terms of human suffering and responsibility (as by Intizar Husain, for instance) that makes overtures to the pain of the other, however shaky and self-absorbed, the fiction treated in this chapter hints towards the possibility of giving an ethical account of the war and its aftermath. In remembering loss Pakistani accounts revisit the meanings of 1971 for its people today in its struggle to understand itself and its citizens’ identities under a ravaged nation state. By arguing the relevance of Pakistan’s dismemberment in the midst of officially encouraged forgetting and by contesting the disguising of defeat in xenophobic language, these works construct belated memorials to the war. In their limitations lies the path that needs to be forged. Tahmima Anam’s novels, an eloquent if sometimes problematic return by a nonvictim, non-witness who positions herself nonetheless as the inheritor of memories, articulates the alchemy of ‘freedom’ and its traumatic aftermath. By bringing her works close to the Bangladesh of today, she raises important questions about what it means to fail in the deeply ethical task of understanding and interpretation in a society torn apart by violence.
As will be noticed in the division of chapters, I have segregated testimonial writing and fiction, dividing them into two sections of two chapters. In the final chapter, I invoke Derrida and Blanchot to put the division into context. A study of Intizar Husain’s short fiction ‘Prisoner(s)’ and ‘A Letter from India’—which writes of the bewilderment of West Pakistanis caught in the war in the east in 1971 and the violence they encountered-supplements the lack of such civilian testimonies of war in Pakistan, where military accounts dominate. Surely the failure of reason of the state in 1971 also includes what was suffered by non-political men, women, and children from the west living in the east during those months of anomie. Shaheen Akhtar’s novel lurks in this indistinct zone of fiction and testimony in the backdrop of mainstream historiography in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Also, in interpreting testimonies the reading strategies often overlap with fiction. For instance, the interpretation of what one had never seen in one’s life is treated in this work as creative; the testimonies of victims of wartime rape appear with names and identities changed/concealed and in a text such as Nilima Ibrahim’s they are written as life stories with a beginning-middle-end structure. Read with their fictional identities, they often produce a disturbing fictional effect. While the structure of the book would mean that I intend to retain a separation of the two genres and their divergent truth
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claims, the elucidation in the fifth chapter was necessary to articulate the conviction that especially in stories of violence and war from Pakistan and Bangladesh human experiences and suffering require us to expand and nuance our reading of literature and the possibilities of genre that emerge from such conflict.
In Bangladesh the war has clearly been remembered for a variety of reasons. Victory and the formation of an independent country secured its relevance to subsequent versions of nationalism. So did the moral significance of withstanding present pain for future goals. The appellation ‘birangona’ coined by the Father of the Nation, Sheikh Mujib, and the discharging of debt to the dead in the form of three million martyrs’ were meant to highlight the idea of freedom won at great cost and due to immense sacrifice. Does such a politics of recognition’ account for the legacies of war? It is clear that while post-Partition perception of neglect by East Pakistan became the spring of revolt, the strains of fissures and schisms need to be traced beyond 1947; the ‘Bihari’ question, the Indian flag raised by Chakmas in Chittagong in 1947, the siding of the Chakma king Raja Tridiv Roy with West Pakistan in 1971 and his subsequent exile, and the post-Bangladesh struggle of Chakmas to retain their land, culture, and identity assume new meanings after the war. Jahanara Imam’s struggle, without much success, to bring war criminals to trial until her death in 1994 became an iconic episode in the political struggle to restore democracy in the country. In 1992 a flawed but significant mock trial was held in Dhaka where, among others, a few faceless, impoverished victims of wartime rape had been brought to the city by activists who had offered them inducements of money and jobs. The War Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh started its proceedings in 2011 with the arrest of Delawar Hossain Sayedee, an alleged key collaborator, amidst rumours of another military coup being attempted by a faction of the army threatened by the prosecution of war criminals. This surely determines that the aftermath of the war of 1971 continues. As Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem reminds us, the implications of such a process can run far and deep. It appears that the memories of just war’ cannot be extricated from recollections of terror, fear of rape, injury, and annihilation experienced by all those who felt at the mercy of a potent “enemy’ in those nine months in East Pakistan. Those who had fled to save their lives did so at grave economic and psychological costs as arson, looting, and encroachment (not necessarily by the adversary) persisted along with the war. Testimonial writing and fiction both dramatize and critique the exclusions of the most preferred stories of the war,
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retained in memorials and monuments. By treating literature as a memorial form in the context of Bangladeshi war writing, the discursive space of the future of a Muslim-majority nation state and democracy is shown to be far away from closure. Notions of identity are closely premised on the struggle between memory and forgetting in narratives of a nation’s violent birth. As Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim shows us, the stake of these questions is no longer a’local one.
The land of buried tongues’ is a reference to the voices of/from the war that lie beneath the noisy clutter of state-/nation-making.
Notes and References
1. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
2. Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, p. 181.
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1
In Freedom’s Wake
Unquiet Histories, Persistent Memories
The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of the earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of a permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.
-Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the
World, 1914–19911 It is perhaps not possible to dream great dreams and at the same time take care of the down to earth realities that dreams require. A Pakistan sufficiently imagined might not have provided the inspiration necessary to bring the state into existence. If so, there is one sense in which the tragedy of 1971 was inevitable, rooted as it was in conflicting beliefs of what Pakistan should have been.
-Philip Oldenburg, ‘A Place Insufficiently Imagined: Language,
Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 19712
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The story of Bangladesh, like many embattled nations across the world, is one of struggle over/of memory in a space of too much history. It is a postcolonial state that was born under a new name in 1947, and sought and gained freedom again twenty-four years later. The warp and woof of history in its territory has seen instant heroes and villains fighting over details in their anxiety about how posterity should remember, and in an attempt to memorialize a war that fudged the registers of enemies and friends. It is not surprising that in an era when freedom and nations are brandished on T-shirts and bandannas, historians, memoirists, and intellectuals should be bearing the uneasy burden of bequeathing a legacy. It is an age where survivors of genocides and wars realize that in the deluge of moving images streamed every minute on lighted screens, their pain might seem distant and common, even fantastic. Postcolonial South Asia needs to be understood with reference to 1971 as much as the events of 1947 and colonial India. It is a legacy of violence, death, rape, and torture and at the same time one of understanding what freedom meant, claimed, and delivered, and certainly what Pakistan meant, prospectively and retrospectively—a continuous engagement with the place of language and religion in postcolonial modernity. Eric Hobsbawm talks about a ‘permanent present and the ‘eerie’ phenomena of the destruction of the past. Hobsbawm underlines the autobiographical impulse behind his writing a history of the twentieth century; people who have lived through the age of catastrophe’ (referring to the World Wars) have their personal and public lives shaped by what they had seen. It is almost as if Hobsbawm constructs a memorial to the post-1914 world, which he fears has little resonance in the consciousness of the succeeding generations. Pierre Nora has written about the disappearance of milieux de memoire’ or real environments of memory as the context for the modern archival notion of history. The recent emphasis on ‘memory’ in culture (which has led some cultural historians such as Jay Winter to switch from memory’ to remembrance in order to avoid the connotative burden of the former4) is seen by Nora as the search for one’s history’in a society which obsessively seeks to consign everything to the archives. It is as if societies, self-conscious of their tendency to forget seek to render their debt to the past by maintaining places of memory. Caught in the discursive space between forgetting and memorialization, these anxieties are at the core of the attempts to understand the problem of identity’ in Bangladesh today,
The year 1971 did not deliver Shonar Bangla (Golden Bengal); indeed the man who tended to use that expression most naturally as part
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of his political rhetoric, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Friend of Bengal (‘Bongobondhu’), was murdered by a nationalist’ army in 1975. A series of coups and counter-coups resulting in a protracted bloodbath took the lives of most of those who led the war of liberation, politically and militarily. The ghosts of Pakistan, as Jatin Sarkar puts it in another context, had returned. One is reminded of the image in Abel Gance’s film J’accuse where the dead soldiers of the First World War come back to haunt the living and accuse them of living on as usual.
The war of liberation of Bangladesh appears to be one of the least remembered wars in world history. As a third nation carved out of what was ‘undivided India, its history remains a problem, albeit one that can provide an insight into the strange life and times of what to the west is South Asia, indeed a source of more than an international migraine In The Ethics of Nationalism, where she takes note of secessionist movements in the context of nationalism, Margaret Moore writes that prior to 1989 ‘liberal debate about political and institutional arrangements’ was mostly concentrated on the just distribution’ of money, power, status, and so on. To her it is only post 1989 that ‘issues of group identity, membership in the state and cultural biases of the state’ began to take centre stage when various groups (gender, ethnic, religious) began to point out their marginalization in the public sphere.? However, in 1971 East Pakistan had already seceded because language/culture, as we shall see, had become a major unifying force against the dominant Punjabi-ruling elite. This is not to cancel the force of the economic argument leading to the break-up, but the movement had implications more complex than perceived injustice in the distribution of social goods. Barely twenty-four years after India split into two, Jinnah’s two-nation theory was negated and ironically affirmed in a way he could never have foreseen, and thus continued the series of uncanny parallels which the postcolonial histories of these nations seem to exhibit.
We live in an age where phenomena/terms such as ‘visits to space, ‘nuclear arsenals, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty’ (CTBT’), ‘virtual social networking, ‘World Trade Organization’ (‘WTO’), sub-nationalisms’ (or what Prasenjit Duara calls ‘nation-views) jostle with Gujarat riots, Kashmir, the Gaza Strip, attacks on heritage structures such as Bamiyan Buddha, and the consistent sterling performances of South Asian countries on the corruption index. The rich become richer, the middle class is believed to have arrived’, but the poor do not disappear.
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All these nations struggle with memories that continue to make the past present in a way that often rips the future wide open. But a peek into the heart of the future reveals nothing, for it is as if the gods and goddesses were at a game where the prize is deportation to the island of forgetfulness. Critical historical events are not self-consciously understood in the larger public space. They are equal parts forgotten by subsequent generations, retained in the form of easily inherited vocabularies, or frozen in esoteric academic discourse. However, memory has an eccentric relationship with forgetting. The very return to the points of rupture in modern Indian history by scholars such as Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamala Bhasin, Suvir Kaul, Alok Bhalla, and so on suggest that exorcism of the past goes through a tortuous route and traumatic memories have not achieved catharsis.[ 8]
Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan in 1971 and this book will visit the memorialization of its past in writing in order to understand the processes that lie beneath what in time settles down as accepted truisms. In history, we have seen such certainties jealously patrol their territory with all the guile, power, violence, and legitimate authority at its command when it perceives a crisis. In that sense the struggle over national language in the pre-Bangladesh period, the possibility in 1970 of East Pakistani (Bengali) ascendancy in Pakistan politics, the Sinhala-Tamil conflict, the sub-nationalistic movements of northeast India, the Tibetan struggle, and the responses of the state to such disputation of its authority may be cited as examples. This chapter will attempt to arrange a kaleidoscopic view of questions that riddle Bangladesh’s search for a stable narrative of identity.
Diverse genres appropriate the past in diverse manners and, in spite of overlapping, their understanding of what qualifies as reality, is heterogeneous. For the purposes of this discussion, we turn to Prasenjit Duara’s conception of history as a genre vis-à-vis other discourses:
Because our own historical conceptions have shared so much with the linear History of the nation, we have tended to regard history more as a transparent medium of understanding than a discourse enabling historical players (including historians) to deploy its resources to occlude, repress, appropriate and sometimes negotiate with other modes of depicting the past, and thus the present and the future.'[9]
Pierre Nora credits history’s appearance as the authoritative account of the past to the recession of living memory or ways in which the past
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was kept alive in lived realities; history’s claim upon memory is described by him as ‘the spectacular bereavement of literature! I wish to retain the ways in which the two authors take their critical stances toward the discipline they represent: (a) Duara’s acknowledgement of the knack of history to turn language into a simple medium transmitting the past; and (b) Nora’s recognition of the hegemonic move of history in appropriating memory’ and thus displacing the latter’s constant metamorphosis through remembrance and forgetting. I am also aware of the implications of his verdict on literature’s bereavement, and hope that the arguments here shall clinch the fact that in the context of Bangladesh such a generalization appears premature. Conversely the need to strike a conversation with the discipline of history’in placing/locating memory’s traces is seen in our age as the fulfilment of an ethical responsibility of ‘literature
Until Srinath Raghavan’s work 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh arrived on the scene, the history of the war was caught in national frameworks with Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian accounts.[10] This is not to suggest that all accounts were uniformly productive of only myth. For instance, Raghavan’s critical account of the war as the outcome of contingencies involving Cold War politics, the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and globalizing tendencies rather than being an inalienable and inevitable occurrence is a refreshing and philosophically significant addition to the debates surrounding 1971. Incorporating details such as the famous Bangladesh concert[11] and its impact on world opinion, for instance, Raghavan demystifies the war and by extension the accounts in thrall of nationalist prisms. It ought to be seen as a necessary supplement to writing about the war, especially in Bangladesh where much is at stake.
To the teleological interpretation of history, which is particularly conducive to the nation state and exclusionary nationalism, [12] Duara poses his theory of the ‘bifurcated conception of history. ‘Bifurcation’ in his vocabulary articulates and identifies the process by which historical narratives and language appropriate dispersed histories’ and transmit a past commensurate with the needs with the present; simultaneously by examining this process of appropriation, it helps ‘recover a historicity’ beyond the aporias of the totalizing discourse. The relevance of Duara’s framework is applicable to (a) the consolidation of the postcolonial Indian state; (b) ‘Pakistani’ nationalism after 1947; and (c) even the attempt to construct a stable Bengali/Bangladeshi nationalism after 1971. By accessing the past through testimonies
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and fiction, we will perhaps gain some insight into the process of representation of the pain and annihilation experienced by people in East Pakistan in 1971, which has shown a tendency towards subsuming the polyvalent implications of the war in both military and democratic discourses in free Bangladesh. Thus while a case is being made here for texts which by virtue of their genre may supplement, critique, and point towards the aporias of memorialization/history, I am aware that they do not escape their scaffolding in the idea of the nation and its formation. That a number of memoirists, testimonies, and authors of fiction would rather see themselves as the witness to the creation of a new state (their nation, nourished with their ‘blood’ and ‘tears’) or as the progeny of a heroic age is significant.
Suvir Kaul in his introduction to The Partitions of Memory, a collection of essays on the partition of India and its aftermath, begins with a sobering thought. The politics and fault lines of the subcontinent underline the ways in which the division of the country left a fund of ideas for the future which we continue to encash, often leading to the enhancement of suffering and a culture of fear. He begins by demonstrating that the idea of the nation under threat is a powerful one and may be used for ends that overreach the original circumstances. Showing us how the legacy of 1947 has been bequeathed and nurtured, he draws linkages between the testing of nuclear weaponry in India and Pakistan, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hindu and Muslim bigotry, the rankling issue of Kashmir, and the formation of Bangladesh. Taking a critical view of those who see a Partition Industry blossoming, he argues that the memories of 1947 that continue to haunt and blight our politics and personal perceptions, the afterlife of violence and officially repressed histories, should not and cannot claim that the legacy of the past has exhausted itself. He remarks:
We have not forgotten, for we memorialise selectively and thus produce authorised histories of the time, histories that are sanctioned by the state and its institutions and the smaller social collectivities. For the most part however (to use a psychoanalytical truism) we remember by refusing to remember.[13]
However, the interpretative process born out of suffering and closely related notions of sacrifice with which is bound a nation’s self-fashioning is a perhaps an intuitive and necessary one. It desires to comprehend the past objectively, politically, aesthetically, and emotionally though
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these categories are not exclusive of each other. There are several reasons why the process of telling the true story of the war is felt so urgently in Bangladesh today.
The photograph of General Niazi signing the Instrument of Surrender at the historic site of Ramana Park remains one of the abiding images of the golden age, to borrow an expression from Tahmima Anam. The moment is sculpted in stone and occupies pride of place in the precincts of the University of Dhaka (see Image 1.1).
In the letters written by combatant young men in the war to loved ones, the language suggests the propensity to embrace this glorious death rather than one in humiliation or perhaps oblivion. As Hannah Arendt writes in her On Violence, death as an experience is often nonpolitical when it rides age, accident, and illness. It is a death that signifies impotence. However, as reams of war literature tell us, when part of collective action, it alters its appearance. Hasan Hafizur Rahman wistfully remarks in his ironically titled poem Martyrs Preferred’: ‘In your careful chronicles/There is room/Not for men of courage/But for Martyrs alone Death becomes, as it were, not only the way in which men seek to
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achieve the immortality of the group that they belong to but something that their loved ones will spin stories about, as will become clear in a later section of this chapter.
The Liberation War of Bangladesh was for the most part fought by guerrilla fighters, a number of whom were students and teenagers, and there are tales which glorify even ten-year-olds’ deaths in trying to inflict maximum damage on the enemy. In addition to the soldiers of the East Bengal Regiment (EBR) who mutinied on the day of the crackdown and the East Pakistan Rifles (EPR), the ground battles were often fought by peasants, semi-literate workers, school, college, and university students who would train briefly in camps run by soldiers from both India and the EBR. What preceded these events was the West Pakistani military crackdown that ended in a massacre for which no one takes responsibility even almost four decades after the war. When the Pakistani army began a spate of indiscriminate killings in Dhaka on the night intervening 25 and 26 March 1971, one of the first monuments they sought to destroy was the Shahid Minar, dedicated to the martyrs of 1952 (see Image 1.2).
This act of sacrilege, which fuelled popular ire against the army, finds a mention in several memoirs and works of fiction,[14] and was a confirmation that it was not only economic domination but cultural
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submission of the Bengalis that the Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan ruling establishment desired.
During the siege of Dhaka, soldiers had set up camps in graveyards so that they could abort any attempt to secretly bury the dead in the darkness of the night when curfew had been imposed. This problem of burying/cremating the dead is poignantly captured in Guhathakurta’s Ekattorer Smriti when her husband is fatally wounded on 25 March and dies in hospital a few days later of bullet injuries.[15] There are several instances of bodies being hurriedly buried in the courtyard of homes where suspects’ were lined up and shot, as all cultural forms of mourning had to be suspended in the emergency. There were times when the dead had to be abandoned. There were lives to save, often of children, and mouths to feed. For those who witnessed the war or lived in the aftermath of its horrors, Arendt’s bifurcation of death’s meaning is particularly significant. Psychologically it appears that the awareness of individual mortality seeks reassurance in cultural forms of remembrance. Though Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1972 constituted the Hamoodur Rehman Commission of Inquiry into the 1971 War,[16] like most commissions that are victims of bureaucratic red tape, it provides more an insight into the politics of Pakistan and a need to rationalize the defeat in order to pacify the real/imagined humiliation inflicted on the sense of self of the nation than any sense of accountability to history and a critical assessment of the debacle. Rehman’s account begins with the history of the formation of Pakistan and in a language that appears to sum up in its body the very mirror image of the language of bureaucratic nationalism that emerged from India in the light of the events of 1947, blanching out the multi-vocal past and taking refuge in easy stereotypes. These then define state policy and responses to crises in postcolonies, which reinforce prejudicial conclusions. While commenting on the insecurity felt by Muslims in a prospectively Hindu India with dreams of Hindu supremacy (anticipated by the venomous Hindu protests against the partition of Bengal in 1905 which was based on ‘purely administrative reasons’) Rehman writes about the aftermath of the elections that followed the Government of India Act of 1935:
This realisation was further confirmed when in eight out of the eleven provinces in India and particularly in Bihar, where Congress governments had been formed, the persecution of Muslims had commenced. They were forced to learn Hindi and give up their language and culture.
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They were even obstructed in the performance of their religious ceremonies.[17]
He furnishes, by means of illustration, the Pirpur Report of 1939 which reported that the song ‘Bande Mataram’ was being forced on the minorities and he criticized the Congress’ insistence on calling village schools ‘Vidhya Mandirs. Finally he refers to the anti-Muslim pogroms of 1946 following Jinnah’s call for Direct Action, while what occurred in Muslim-dominated areas were only ‘commonplace disturbances:[18] What is of importance is that armed with a selective reading of historical events, the Rehman commission went on to investigate the reasons for the war of 1971, the circumstances that led to the defeat and surrender of West Pakistani forces, the emerging reports of excesses of the army, the mass murder of civilians, intellectuals, Hindus, and the rape and killing of women.
The commission’s inquiry report makes the assertions that the Language Movement, a spur to 1971, was incited by insidious Hindu influence, that though there were acts of indiscipline on the part of the army, it was preceded by and was in retaliation to the cruelty and violence of the Awami League against the pro-Pakistan elements. The allegations of the killing of intellectuals on 25 March and 14 December 1971 (the latter occurred in Rayerbazar and scores of rotting bodies were discovered where a national memorial now stands) could not be proved and hence stood dismissed. The cases of rape and arson being alluded to were in most cases the handiwork the Awami League and their Indian instigators, or else an act of revenge extracted for similar injury suffered at their hands by the Pakistani army and its supporters.
There is an indictment of atrocities committed in uniform but it is clothed in the language of retaliatory violence and ‘indiscipline. The commission puts down a reference to an order in writing to kill Hindus to’anger’ and desire for ‘revenge. In addition, when the commission was confronted with reports of sexual violence and destruction of property, it responded by saying that the numbers were exaggerated and the army, which had several tasks of an administrative nature, could not physically have been present to execute all these alleged crimes. The mendacity of the following remark of the commission unwittingly reveals the gendered universe of war: ‘The falsity of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s repeated allegation that Pakistani troops had raped 200,000 Bengali girls in 1971 was borne out when the abortion team he had commissioned from
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Britain in early 1972 found its workload involved the termination of only a hundred or more pregnancies:[19]
The commission ends its brief by suggesting that provision be made for better training in the army so that soldiers ‘refrain from acts of violence and immorality:
With the downfall of General Ershad’s regime in 1991, there was a touching and desperate scramble to record that past. Memoirs of 1971 had begun to appear from the mid-1980s, one of the best known of which was Jahanara Imam’s Ekattorer Dinguli. Imam then went on to become one of the icons of the movement to bring war criminals to trial. Both civilians and military witness accounts of the war began to surface as did historical accounts and fiction. There are prefaces provided by authors who write how publishers had approached them to wield their pen, for instance, Basanti Guhathakurta’s Ekattorer Smriti, and bring their stories into the public domain. It was as if, to return to the theme of death, a narrative humanization of the past was required to save it from becoming a statistical obsession with corpses. One recalls that in India, critical research on the Partition had much to do with the stirring of the ghosts of 1947 during the anti-Sikh riots and the rise of a right-wing political party in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its increasing popular legitimacy. There are reasons for which the ‘nationalistic’ writing of the past in Bangladesh should not be treated with impatience as critical theories of nationalism sometimes tend to overwhelm the context in which they are applied. The instability of popularly elected governments in a largely ethnically homogeneous country and as small as Bangladesh cannot be wished away.
The intellectual class in Bangladesh has been intimately associated with the project of nation-making. Whether it was the assertion of the right to celebrate the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in undivided Pakistan (who had been branded as a Hindu bard), the agitation to celebrate the Bengali new year (a throwback to life before 1947), the championing of the Language Movement, or the taking up of arms by students across the country during the war, students and the intelligentsia spearheaded the struggle. The major targets of the carnage in Dhaka during the fateful night of 25 March 1971 were professors, doctors, artists, and students, and the resident hostels of the university campus were strewn with bodies according to eyewitness accounts of the following morning. Iqbal Hall, Jagannath Hall, and Rokeya Hall, which was a hostel for women, were prime targets. There was widespread physical as well as sexual violence as the army unleashed its fury upon the students.[20]
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Just before the surrender of the Pakistani army, the local militia-drawn mostly from right-wing Bengali and ‘Bihari’ Muslims in East Pakistan (christened Al Badr)—on 14 December 1971 accomplished a second spate of killing of intellectuals in Dhaka, in which, among others, Anwar Pasha and Shahidullah Kaiser were killed. Some bodies were recovered from the Rayerbazar area while others could never be found. In its activism in the socio-cultural and political sphere, a bulk of the intelligentsia found itself closely associated with the process of reconstruction in Bangladesh. It is also at the centre of the discourses of sacrifices made for the nation. In addition, following the years of military dictatorship a large section has been involved in the movement for the restoration of ‘secular democracy, which was part of the principles enshrined in the constitution framed when Sheikh Mujib became the prime minister in 1972. Religion has played a complex role in the fostering of Bengali/ Bangladeshi nationalism.
This brings us to the important paper by Ranabir Samaddar on the problems of writing a critical history of the war of 1971. In his Many Histories and Few Silences: The Nationalist History of Nationalism in Bangladesh, he mounts a perceptive critique of nationalistic history and the process of setting up a nationalist iconography in the country. He writes:
But it is the modern imperative of nationalism that must straighten out the whole course, smoothen the rough edges, silence the disturbing zones and construct a monolithic whole of Muslim history in Bangladesh so that the nation making agenda in Bengal receives genealogical legitimacy. Liberal nationalism in Bangladesh is caught in this self-defeating discursive urge today. 21
In the analyses that follow, Samaddar argues that the biggest silence’ of the historiography in Bangladesh is the reluctance to deal with 1947 and re-evaluate it in the light of the events of 1971. He further observes that the process of creation of a nationalist iconography in Bangladesh ‘exacerbates the crucial problematic: Bengali nationalism or Bangladeshi nationalism: The point of rupture needs to be stated here in its obviousness. East Bengal had fought for Pakistan. It was a rallying on the basis of religion, which was based on a fear of the hegemonic drive of the Congress and a centre that would bulldoze differences in the favour of a unitary form of government. Beginning from the 1930s the Muslims had been persuaded that in the event of a Congress rule they would be reduced to the status of a minority. However, it needs to be said that
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not all sections of the people understood constitutional niceties and for many it was fundamental whether under a particular ruling dispensation their interests would be safeguarded. As historian A.F. Salahuddin Ahmad writes in his Bengali Nationalism and the Emergence of Bangladesh, Pakistan was not a religious movement but a political one which wished to protect the social, economic, and political interests of Indian Muslims. He suggests that in modern Muslim thought, politics and religion are not inseparably intertwined as in traditional Islam. For him further proof of this may be adduced from the social background and character of the Muslim League leadership and its continuous opposition by the Jamaat-e-Islami. However, as he winds up his arguments in the book, the author writes: ‘Pakistan was the product of Muslim religious nationalism. Soon after its creation, however, its inherent contradiction became apparent[22] Ahmad’s theory of radical change after 1947 in the Bengali Muslim psyche towards ‘Pakistan’ is not easily explained. Seen in this context, the rhetoric of a new and free nation soon needed to address the persisting socio-economic and political neglect of East Pakistan. Those in the east who saw/had seen in Pakistan’ the hope of a beginning which in some ways merged with the expectations of a more egalitarian society could not adequately theorize the changing political reality. Thus we find authors contradicting themselves or using explanatory frameworks that do not account for the processes that underlie nation formation: what Duara would call competing ‘nation-views. One could argue that the crux of the problem was power sharing. The pre-1947 discourse around the idea of Pakistan creates problems for an uncritical celebration of Bengali nationalism.
One such attempt to write the history of Bangladesh is encapsulated in the text Bangladesher Muktisangramer Itihas (1947-1971), and the first section authored by Dr Nurul Islam Manzur will serve to illustrate the critique of Samaddar’s views. Significantly the expression ‘Muktisangram’ (freedom struggle) in the title differs from a slew of other texts which deal with ‘Muktijuddho’ (war of liberation). The latter often tend to open with a pious reminder of the sacrifices made by Muslim Bengalis to the partition movement, refer to it in passing, and then move on to demonstrate how in Pakistan there was a conspiracy’ to treat Bengalis as subjects rather than citizens. In the text referred to above, the vivisection of India appears in the form of a missing link in the narrative with a teleological movement towards the war of liberation. Samaddar’s charge appears to be a valid one as there is neither any attempt to look at the war as redefining memories/meaning(s) generated
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by the partition of 1947 nor is there a move in another direction that can look at the partition as a potent narrative that wrote the script of another bloody episode, this time predominantly among co-religionists in 1971.
Dr Nurul Islam Manzur suggests in his article that Bengali Muslims were sterling in their contribution to the Pakistan movement but as was borne out by later history they were merely tools in the hands of what he calls the communal and bigoted Muslim League. The argument runs that apart from religion there was nothing really that was common between the two regions, whether in language, culture, history, heritage, geographical identity, or world view. This logic is closely parallel to the two-nation theory (that has been attributed to Jinnah) according to which essential difference appeared too obvious a fact to be ignored and was furnished as a reason why Hindus and Muslims could not stay as one people. Such a view, however, fails to represent the complex nature of the Pakistan movement in Bengal. There was cultural support for the movement as evidenced in the formation of organizations such as the East Pakistan Renaissance Society as well as East Pakistan Sahitya Sangsad, which were formed in Dhaka.[23] While the intelligentsia gave shape to Muslim nationalism, well-known figures such as Abul Mansur Ahmad and Mujibur Rahman Khan also stressed the separate cultural identity of Bengalis in the early 1940s. As Anisuzzaman writes in his Creativity, Reality and Identity, there were those like Syed Ali Ahsan who said that he was ready to give up Tagore for the sake of Pakistani nationalism. He also cites the interesting case of Md. Shahidullah who in 1929 had argued for the primacy of religious identity above the linguistic, but by 1948 in Dhaka, during the East Pakistan Literary Conference, was arguing that more than the fact that one was a Muslim or a Hindu it was important that being a Bengali was the core of one’s identity, Ghulam Muhammad Kabir also points out that the East Pakistan Renaissance Society had even drawn up a map of East Pakistan that included the present areas of Bangladesh and Assam. The reasons for such separatism were various. Part of the diagnoses would lead one back to the partition of Bengal in 1905. In 1906-7 there had been riots between Hindu and Muslims in Mymensingh and Comilla and later in Narsinghdi in 1921 as the Swadeshi Movement began after the bifurcation. The more serious Kishoreganj riots in 1930, as Sugata Bose’s study shows us, left little doubt that there had been a successful mass mobilization along communal lines in East Bengal as well. While the social and economic reasons behind this unrest are clear, the role of
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religion in the consolidation of grievances cannot be underplayed. Some were contingent factors such as the role played by the radical faction of the Muslim League led by Abul Hashim in providing relief during the Bengal famine. Victimized by profiteering Hindu landlords during this period, Bengali Muslims increasingly supported the League and activists defected from the Krishak Praja Party (KPP).[24] The Direct Action Day (1946) and the response to it (as well as the retaliation) had effectively deconstructed the myth of Bengali secularism. In Noakhali and Tippera districts Muslim peasants led by demobilized soldiers attacked Hindu landlords. Meanwhile after it became apparent that Bengal would have to be divided in April-May 1947, Sarat Chandra Bose and Kiran Shankar Roy reached an understanding with H.S. Suhrawardy (former Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal before the Partition) and Hashim for a united, independent Bengal. There is no agreement on the views that the central Congress and Muslim League leaders held. However, Haimanti Roy analyses the discourses in the public sphere circulating in 1946 and 1947 to demonstrate how the historiography of the Cambridge school of the Partition traces a teleological path of communalization of Bengal politics—the Partition was precipitated more by contingency than anything else. The views expressed in the public sphere by those whose opinions ultimately did not seem to matter are seen by her as alternative possibilities and thus of account when we take stock of the realities of 1947. Needless to say the intertwining of class, religion, and culture in the political discourse on Pakistan among Bengali Muslims before 1947 is clear as Joya Chatterji (2002) and Nitish Sengupta (2007)among others have argued.[25] It is also obvious that historians are faced with a great complexity of material when faced with the event that fractured the legacy of freedom from colonial rule. Within a few years of the Partition, we see in Pakistan the return of a similar pattern of irreconcilable differences.
Contesting the volte-face’ theory of understanding the transition from 1947–71 is Sana Aiyar’s interesting addition to the debate. Her article entitled ‘Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal:
The Forgotten Alternative of 1940-43′ links the colonial politics of the early 1940s to the eventual dismemberment of Pakistan.[26] While Ayesha Jalal has referred to the strong provincial energies of politics in the British era, Sana Aiyar articulates the implications of such a strand in the politics of Bengal and in the process moves away from liberal historiography’s predilection to view high politics through the prism of the League and the Congress. Scholars such as Sufia
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M. Uddin and Muhammad Ghulam Kabir have pointed out the tension between Bengali and Bangladeshi identities in Bangladesh on the basis of which the two major representative political parties have constructed their narratives of self-determination. Aiyar links this to the history of colonial politics in Bengal and demonstrates how Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Huq managed a unique articulation of identity which manifested in the eventful years of Jinnah’s and Nehru’s claims to speak for Muslims and Indians as a whole respectively. Aiyar’s main contention appears to be that while Fazlul Huq unapologetically spoke for Muslims and aligned himself with the politics of his religious community he did not perceive this identity to be in conflict with his Bengali origin. Arguing that religious identities in Bengal were positive, she cites as evidence the coalition ministry formed by Haq with Mookherjee of the Hindu Mahasabha, another communal organization in 1941. This she recognizes as possibly the genuine alternative political discourse in Bengal, one that was a casualty to the intransigence of General Herbert. Aiyar argues that with Bengal especially vulnerable to the threat of Japanese attack in 1942, Herbert was wary of a ruling coalition that was not beholden to him. He attacked Huq for being pliant to Hindu politicians and a puppet in their hands, a stance which the Muslim League and the Congress found convenient and productive for their own positions.
Choosing to read as an emphatic political gesture Huq’s decision to address the delegates in English rather than Urdu (even though the crowds urged him to do so) in moving the Lahore resolution in 1940, Sana Aiyar contends that Fazlul Huq emerged as Jinnah’s regional other. As A.F. Salahuddin informs us, in 1937 at the annual conference of the All-India Muslim League (AIML), Huq had chosen to speak in Urdu.[27] Aiyar cites several instances in order to buttress her point; in Huq’s understanding the problems faced by Muslims in regions where they constituted a minority was significantly different from where they were in a majority, and this called for a nuancing of politics:
Huq’s politics followed a third trajectory that sought to reconcile religious and regional identification within a political discourse that was not exclusionary. Huq, however, has been relegated to the footnotes of history, for his particular brand of politics does not conform to current understandings of provincial politics. Although he opposed Jinnah, he was not a secularist and believed completely in the idea of Pakistan. Although a Muslim leader, he constantly asserted his position as a Bengali Premier. Being neither a leader whose provincial imperative prevailed
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over a communal line as portrayed by Ayesha Jalal nor a mainstream communal leader envisioned by Mushirul Hasan, Huq has been difficult to categorize within these two recognized trends of identity politics.[28]
Establishing continuity with the legacy of Huq, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (who had by then journeyed from the Muslim League to the Awami League) appeared to be articulating a similar notion of self, a process that began following the Government of India Act of 1935. Huq, having fallen out with the Congress due to post-electoral differences, formed a coalition government with the League in 1937. Sana Aiyar’s article strongly posits that it was this notion of plural identity that culminated in 1971 and not a sudden change of heart’ among Bengali Muslims. Thus, we have two differing assessments of what led to 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. While Aiyar’s account locates the roots of 1971 in colonial politics and verbalization of notions of identity before 1947, Manzur looks to legitimize the freedom struggle’ from the vantage point of post-1947 West Pakistani colonial’ domination and the betrayal of the Bengalis who had willingly in his opinion, even enthusiastically) cast their lot in favour of Pakistan. In the accounts of Bangladeshi historians, Huq occupies an uncomfortable position due to his conduct in the Pakistan period for his willingness to serve as governor in 1956, a post from which he was unceremoniously removed two years later.
This creates a paradox of its own kind. In a changing world where postcolonies were asserting their right to self-determination and colonial power was noticeably shrinking, freedom struggles could be accommodated into a discourse of legitimacy. The experiences of the Second World War created a moral community that seemed to not merely accept changes in the configurations of political power but also to question the legitimacy of oppressive regimes, which is acutely visible in the literature of the period. However, the question is whether the same register of subjugation can be applied to identity struggles that take place within newly formed political units and result in the secession of the same people twice in quick succession. Interestingly, the nomenclature war of liberation’ has been eschewed by authors such as Sisson and Rose, and applied by authors such as Sarmila Bose and Yasmin Saikia as a claim made by Bangladesh.[29] Civil war, appears to be more acceptable to these scholars.
What led to the emergence of Bangladesh (Badruddin Umar’s interesting term that suggests that the seed of the idea perhaps always existed
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and only found expression in specific, particular events) is variously seen in historiography as the consequence of the following:
1. The discriminatory policies of a neo-colonial power exerted
from the centre in West Pakistan crippled the economy and
political and social institutions in East Pakistan. 2. The Language Movement was based on popular demand, since
the people of East Pakistan were in numerical majority and there was no reason why Bengali should not be recognized as the national language along with Urdu. The final blow was struck when Jinnah visited East Pakistan in 1948 and declared that Urdu and only Urdu would be the language of Pakistan and any other demand was designated as inimical to the integrity of the nation. (Jatin Sarkar in his memoir writes that he could hear the death knell of Pakistan during this visit and declaration of the Quaid-e-Azam.)[30] The attitude of the ‘Punjabis’ was seen as a direct attack on the dignity, culture, and identity of the millions of Bengalis who had thrown in their lot with Pakistan. Islam was fraying as the thread that bound the two far-flung
parts of the country. 3. As discussed earlier, it was the culmination of differences that
were too deep and strong to be overcome, and was accentuated
by the geographical distance that lay between the two regions. 4. There was also a too strong a reliance on religion (as Manzur
again argues that the definition of faith was also a site of contestation as the West Pakistanis were adherents of a medieval version of Islam, as opposed to Bangladeshis) as a default solution to problems and the inability to imagine and develop other spaces of identification.
Dr Manzur indicates that Bengal had joined the struggle for Partition since they were persuaded by their experience that their socioeconomic life could be improved and they could live with dignity only under a Muslim nation. Otherwise the way of life of Bengalis was largely secular and that was demonstrated by the events that culminated in the creation of Bangladesh. ‘Secularism’ is surely not an essence that is either present or absent in communities. It is also not something that is proved by the fact that it is enshrined in the constitution and hence externalizes the principles by which a people wish to govern themselves. The different interpretations of secularism have been
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widely debated by several scholars.[31] The response of a community to such a phenomenon will depend on how far its culture has been able to develop ideas and social and political institutions that privilege inclusiveness and can call upon them in times of anomie. In many cases both ‘secularism’ and communalism'[32] can be mere strategies in the hands of a certain ruling dispensation to remain in power. Authors have written on the unorthodox personal lives of Zia and Ershad and the reasons for which right-wing groups were co-opted into political structures after the war. Else how would one explain the idea of Bangladesh and the resurgence of radicalism in religion after the war of liberation’? Authors such as Muhammad Ghulam Kabir have taken a more critical look at the problem of national identity in Bangladeshi history. Jatin Sarkar in his memoirs laments the fact that even in comparatively more inclusive East Pakistan the riots against minorities have not been rigorously documented in official history. The role of the ‘Bihari’ Muslims in the war and their image that emerges from wartime combatant and noncombatant memoirs are an interesting case in point. The fact that they had thrown in their lot largely with Urdu-speaking West Pakistan can, in addition to religious identification, be seen as a counter to the overwhelming Bengali speaking majority and their apprehensions about being governed by a ruling class that is completely dominated with the representatives of one linguistic community. Ahmad Iliyas (2007)[33] writes of the tendency of the Urdu-speaking population to support the Muslim League in the hope of protection of their lives, property, and livelihood. Of these post-Partition emigrants from India, many had occupied the homes and businesses of local Hindus who had abandoned their properties in search of safety and economic opportunities in India. Also their predominance in factories and as craftsmen (often in return for a pittance) fuelled the insecurity of the local Bengalis. The role of an Urdu-speaking officer, Shamsul Haq Qureshi, in ordering the firing on 21 February 1952 that led to the death and injury of some protestors also added to the suspicion. However, as Iliyas persuasively points out, often during 1971, the common ‘Biharis’ lived in terror of the Bengalis as well as the army. The latter, in exchange for protection, often forced them into menial tasks. Supporters of the Awami League belonging to the community were also tortured and their names were part of the hit lists of the army. Iliyas argues that had it not been for the shelter and help provided by local Bengalis, the loss of Bihari’ lives could have been much higher. Indeed, as he says, the casualties on their side have never been quantified, though Bengalis put the numbers of
37
dead at three million. For their part they had been vocal in support of Jinnah’s declaration in 1948 and had organized rallies in support of the move in East Pakistan. It has also to be seen in conjunction with their position in post-liberation Bangladesh, where thousands awaiting repatriation to Pakistan have lived their lives in the dingy, sub-human conditions of the Geneva camp in Mirpur, ironically close to the Liberation War memorial built on the site of the killing fields in which the ‘Biharis’ were supposed to have played a role. It also admittedly became a spring of Yasmin Saikia’s work Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh when she met victims of the arbitrary violence inflicted by freedom fighters on the community to punish them for their role during the war, which was seen to be collaborationist.
The war that really liberated Bangladesh was under neither the direct control nor the command of the League. Indeed as most accounts suggest,[34] Sheikh Mujib preferred the negotiating table to the battlefield right till the end; the declaration of independence by the Mukti Bahini was not only unplanned,[35] it was also in deference to public clamour that swayed the turn of events. When the crackdown happened it only confirmed the grim sense of foreboding[36] which had filled the hearts of people closer to the metropolis. Manzur adds:
It has been historically accepted that in thousands of years of history Bengalis were never communal. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and other communities lived as neighbours in the same cultural milieu. In their common existence, religion was never a contentious issue. Such differences were a direct consequence of colonial rule in both Bengal and India. It was in the backdrop of widespread riots and rivalry that India was partitioned to form separate nations. Immediately after the formation of Pakistan, the cultural and linguistic movement gave rise to a secular Bengali nationalism.[37]
The available literature and research on the partition of India would look askance at any such assertion that seeks to imply that ‘secular’ Bengalis were induced with communalism during the British rule, which led them to participate in acts such as the 1946 riots with obvious enthusiasm and finally opt for the Partition.[38] While it is possible to refute such a claim solely on the basis of facts, the idea is certainly not to draw comparisons between Bengalis and other communities on the basis of the degree of their communalization.[39] What is at issue is the method followed by the historian. Without going into the nature of
38
precolonial Bengali society and its accent on class and caste rather than religion, Nurul Islam Manzur absolves the community.
Religion in the public space has been a contested terrain in Bangladeshi politics. Sheikh Mujib in his statement of defence during the Agartala Conspiracy Case tried to ward off the charge of treason by arguing that he had had given the best years of his youth to the Pakistan movement. He had contributed to bring it into existence. Hence his loyalty could not be under question. Pakistan newspapers reported on 4 January 1971 that the day before, Mujib had tried to counter West Pakistani claims of Islam being in danger by directing the chanting of the Quran before his speech and beginning his address with ‘Assalamo Aleikum? He said that there was no question of Islam under threat because the Awami League had been overwhelmingly voted to power.[40] The proceedings of the rally were suspended during Asr Azan. While one can see here an attempt to reclaim the ground of practising true Islam and repudiating allegations of the Awami League being hand-in-glove with Hindu India, there is also a recognition that religion being an important element of culture in East Pakistan would play an significant part in the political life of the nation. In addition a party that sought to speak for the entire ‘Awam’ or people/masses sought to co-opt both right- and left-wing politics under its banner.On his return from Pakistan after the war, Mujib again tried to define the tenor of nationalism in Bangladesh. The use of ‘Khuda Hafez along with “Joi Bangla’ appeared at a time when there was a growing disquiet with signs of Indian domination of Bangladesh’s foreign policy and the gradual perception that Mujib had faltered on the economic front.[41] However, in a speech in the National Assembly on 25 January 1975, he opened with a reference to the ‘long ages’ of domination faced by Bengalis. He mentions 200 years of colonial rule and 25 years of Pakistani rule. He clearly and carefully sidestepped referring to Hindu supremacy before 1947, the crux of the Pakistan movement as his biography informs us. The reasons are not far to seek. In 1975 a reference to the agitation for Pakistan would have been a political faux pas. On the other hand his use of religious words and symbols was not perceived by him to be inconsistent with the principle of secularism, which was a basic principle of the constitution (and of which he is seen as the chief architect); and the presence of Hindus as the largest minority group required a nuanced politics that was conducive to a democracy.
Historiography in Bangladesh, laments Ranabir Samaddar, is becoming a hostage to the nationalistic project. As I will argue, this
39
is not an inaccurate critique. He also believes that the historians use historicism as a crutch to tide over the unpleasant issues in writing the past of the nation that was given form in the state of Bangladesh. The trajectory that the nation’s politics took after the liberation has split the political discourse (and one is consciously generalizing here) between the secular camp, those who wish secularism to remain a factor in Bangladesh state policy but are ‘pragmatic’ in their approach to politics, the ones who accept and utilize religion in political life and prescribe complete assimilation for minority groups, and those who believe that there is a case in Bangladesh for Allah’s rule, and the claim is cemented by the several years of chaos. It is argued by the last category that a return to the ideals that resulted in Pakistan is the way forward for the country. Politically this line of thought is represented by members of the Muslim League, Jamaat-e-Islami, and the Islamic Oikya Jote. Their role as right-wing parties is complicated by the fact that the Jamiat is associated in Bangladesh with ‘Razakars’ or war collaborators whose roles ranged from becoming implementers of peace’ on behalf of the Pakistani army to identifying the Mukti Bahini and their families, Awami Leaguers, and others who then faced the wrath of military occupation. They are also widely known to have procured women for sexual slavery in the army and in some cases committed loot, rape, and murder themselves. In many cases, if testimonies are anything to go by, through ingratiating themselves to the enemy soldiers and obtaining immunity for their crimes, they mixed motives of personal vengeance with the noble task of saving the people from the clutches of Hindu India, which they deigned was the real instigator of the Language Movement, the six-point charter of demands, struggle for autonomy, and finally the war of liberation (which they often characterized as a civil war’). With the assassination of Mujib in 1975, came the ascension to the presidential chair of Khandekar Moshtaque Ahmad who began his first televised address to the nation with the words ‘Bismillah-hurRahman-ar-Rahim’ (in the name of Allah, the kind and Merciful), a Koranic expression used by pious Muslims to signal the commencing of some action. “Joi Bangla’ was replaced with ‘Bangladesh Zindabad. In a secular’ country the symbolism was not lost on the people. Moshtaque Ahmed was followed by Ziaur Rahman (the general who had declared independence, designated himself president, and then retracted after the carnage of 25 March 1971), who was later assassinated in 1981. In 1977 the principle of secularism’ was dropped from the constitution and socialism’ amended to social and economic justice’ by a presidential
40
proclamation. This was followed by the military dictatorship of General Ershad, who announced the new ‘education policy of making Arabic compulsory in the primary and secondary education curriculum. Zia floated a party, which he called the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), and Ershad called his the Jatiya Party (JP). These two parties are credited with the rehabilitation of reactionary forces in the country to counter the might of the Awami League that had cut its teeth in politics under Suhrawardy and Mujib and enjoyed considerable mass support.
To return to the point, the post-liberation romance was rudely interrupted since the new government inherited a crumbling system and institutions, ravaged buildings, youth with unaccounted-for arms, retaliatory violence, and a sea of dead bodies. Emotions were running high, the language of loss and sacrifice created a messiah in Mujib who would soothe the masses and heal their hurt. The challenges were many, ranging from organizing the army to the rehabilitation the young men who had taken up arms, been brutalized in battle, and had turned arbiters of life and death. Not all the young war volunteers could resume their ordinary lives. Not many could be drafted into the army, which was also in tatters. Its barely existent arsenal was severely depleted and it did not help that Indian soldiers, reportedly, took away most of the sophisticated weaponry seized from the Pakistani army during the surrender. The difficulty of framing a policy to deal with Razakars was steep. The Amnesty of 1973, granted for lesser crimes during the Liberation War, was controversial and hastily implemented.
After a war won against oppression, it is difficult for a people to return to unexceptional living. According to official figures, around three million people were killed and two hundred thousand women were raped. (We shall dwell a little on the controversy surrounding these numbers later.) In the accounts of victims it is certainly not uncommon to encounter disappointment regarding the implications of freedom, to be ruled by those who had been, even for a brief period, fellow travellers with the same mission. One comes across remarks such as ‘For all that we sacrificed, what did we get from the State?’ in Narir Ekattor. [42] Those who had lost loved ones in the war wanted a clearer sense of justice, something to assuage their pain, the healing that could have been provided by a feeling that their suffering was consequential, for a cause. So too did those whose homes were broken into and looted, sometimes by their own countrymen. Women had been picked up and raped in camps for months. Some did not see the end of the war to be able to bear witness while some left the country with Pakistani soldiers. Still
41
others were either turned out of their homes or pleaded with to leave. In a brutalized society, in its incapacity to address the traumatic memories of its citizens or initiate a discourse of reconciliation, people had a lot to forgive. There were hurts that economic development could not address but reconstruction was critical to the country’s survival. A crucial difference between the division in 1947 and that in 1971 appears to be that 1971 was a war fought with maps, plans, and weapons (a deployment of violence, which according to Hannah Arendt is an instrumental use of power, with tools and implements which can impose grave physical suffering) and it subdued means in favour of ends. The violence of the partition of India was an event that departed from the freedom struggle, which partially drew its moral authority from non-violent methods of protest. Thus the explanation of human cruelty in the Partition, if it can be explained at all, is mostly seen either in historical terms of the two-nation theory, as the parting shot of colonial rule, or, as more common in literary explorations, as the expression of the rapacious beast that lies buried in the most ordinary of men. The explosion lent itself to agonized questioning of the self and community, and the literature that emerged sought to negotiate with the meaning of being human. Violence did not achieve the Partition since it was fait accompli and hence invoked a sense of sterility and loss. As a consequence it became difficult to conceptualize but easier to critique as did Manto, the bard of that brutal time in history, or Veena Das, in her sensitive studies of cultural appropriations of suffering during the Partition.[43] Violence in the context of the secession of East Pakistan revealed itself as both annihilation and creation. Born out of a threat of extermination, its place in the national imagination is ambiguous. Its legitimacy as a retaliation first made from a position of inequality and then with assistance from India, resulting in victory, secured the authority of retaliatory violence. The excesses of the Indian army, the Mukti Bahini, or the guerrillas after the war as leaders of lynching mobs targeting ‘Biharis’ and Razakars in many cases met with the tacit approval of the people enraged by their wartime activities. The hostility between the Bengalis and the ‘Biharis’ predate the war; since they were not merely non-indigenous settlers who made East Pakistan their home in and after 1947, they were seen as the owners of businesses and factories and the blue-eyed boys of the ruling elite in the west. The trial of the war criminals was a casualty of the lack of clarity in state actors over the rule of law and pressure from other nations. Forgetting could not be effectively induced by a vulnerable government, and national memory was constructed through the
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continuing contest between a party that led the war and cast itself as the bearer of a legacy and other political forces, which in trying to compete with that legacy willy-nilly ended up negating the foundational truth(s) of Bangladesh.
One would do well to remember that on matter of principle, Islam was opposed to nationalism and during the gradual acceptance of the two-nation theory among pre-Partition Muslims, there were several who were opposed to it. Not only the likes of Maulana Azad, Rezaul Karim, and S. Wazed Ali[44] but several religious leaders such as Maulana Maududi, who was the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, also found it inimical to Islamic teachings. So while it may be pertinent to argue that it was in the defence of naked self-interest that the Jamaat supported the marauding Pakistani army, as scholars such as Badruddin Umar and Muntasir Mamun, inter alia, have suggested, the opposition to the division was not unprecedented since the Awami League was making overtures towards a secular polity. Its oppositional voice smelt of treason to those persuaded by the vision of a pan-Islamic brotherhood.
To some it signified a return to ideals of Hindu India, which was unIslamic. In the Matiur Rahman edited Second Thoughts on Bangladesh, secularism is seen as a euphemism which masks a rehabilitation of Hindu myths and legends and which, in tandem with the educational policy, discourages madrassas,[45] It would only serve to turn Bengali Muslims into schizophrenics since their upbringing was decidedly Islamic. While it is common to encounter a fear of engulfment by India, there is also a parallel strain which holds that the real roots of the Islamic way of life are to be found in the unlettered masses. Elora Shehabuddin in her article “Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh: Women, Democracy and the Transformation of Islamist Politics’ writes about Maulana Maududi’s views on the real constituency of Islam when questioned about whether the poor would not be more inclined to support movements and policies that paid more attention to their material requirements:
Their hearts throb with the love of Islam and they cannot be lured away by the slogans of bread and clothing. Even in Arab countries the popularity of un-Islamic movements is a mere propaganda. I have observed the situation obtaining there and have also had the opportunity to study closely the Arab masses. They love Islam from the core of their heart. But whether in Syria, Egypt, Iraq or some other Arab country, the masses have never been allowed the right to choose their
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In a similar line of argument, Akhtaruddin Ahmed-who spent two years in prison in independent Bangladesh on charges of being a war collaborator–in his article Nationalism or Islam[ 47] finds ‘mere territorial integrity’ the biggest problem of nationalism. It keeps masses in captivity and impedes real progress towards material and spiritual prosperity. Imperialism, which replaced spiritual aspirations in subcontinental cultures with material ones and the identification of the West with power, led Pasha’s Turkey and Pahlavi Iran on a self-destructive path. Associating war with territorialism, Ahmed imagines a system of unified nations on the lines on the United Nations, which according to him failed because it did not have a cohesive force. So far the reasoning seems cogent enough. However, the glue to stick the world body, which would abolish war and employ reason and persuasion as tools of consensus, would be Islam administered by divine law. States according to him can be religious without being theocratic and a true Islamic regime would accommodate all.
Mujib granted a general amnesty to collaborators, except those that were involved in murder, rape, loot, and arson, in May 1973. Only 195 Pakistanis were identified as war criminals and under international pressure they were deported to Pakistan. The right-wing groups, which were defeated decisively in the elections before and after the war, were rehabilitated into politics and a number of their leaders who had left the country returned during the tenure of General Zia. So what transpired after the war was that while there were instances of Mukti Bahini soldiers as well as enraged people buoyed by the victory torturing and killing Razakars as punishment for the reign of terror they had become representative of, the state convicted only a couple of hundred of them when thousands of cases had been registered. It was compounded by the fact that, as pointed out earlier, post-liberation events in a sense eroded the moral ground of a politics based on the ideals of the ‘Muktijuddho, which the ruling party would understandably make its platform. Clearly the ceding of ground to reactionary forces rose from a legitimacy that was born out of an aspiration of the Awami League to be seen as the giant patriarch that can absorb under its wing all hues of opinion. The formation of the BKSAL by Mujib, where the state recognized only the renamed ruling party, appeared to many as the spectre of tyranny in a nation that had barely begun to come to terms with the events of the recent past. Bangladesh was plunged into an emergency right after freedom and after 1975 has never returned to the predominance of one party. Also the reluctance
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to return to the Partition and the lack of desire to engage in a complex reinterpretation might impress upon the reader that the intellectual class in Bangladesh accepts 1947 as a legitimate point of rupture in bequeathing history to posterity. However, this claim needs to be qualified. In his Muktijuddho O Tarpor: Ekti Nirdoliyo Itihas (‘The War of Liberation and After: A Non-Partisan History’), Gholam Morshed writes about the socio-political, economic, and religio-cultural ways in which the war was betrothed to the precolonial and colonial consciousness of Bengali Muslims. [48]
In the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, the visual narrative begins with the rich ancient culture of Bengal and the deep roots of Bengali syncretism. However, the unease in Bangladeshi politics about the role of India and with Indian military and bureaucratic accounts appearing to dispute the ownership of freedom is reflected in the public sphere as well as academic historiography. To seek support from India, as has been mentioned earlier, was met with suspicion in some sections of the army as well as politicians and intellectuals since it was believed that overt military intervention by a state considered hegemonic and hostile to the idea of Pakistan would taint a pure Bengali/Bangladeshi resistance. There were many among the liberationists, including Sheikh Mujib, who had participated in the movement for Pakistan. In some ways this move proved to be a millstone around the neck of the ruling party, and provided a fillip to oppositional politics in the country after the war. The struggle for a secular politics in the face of anti-minority (anti-Hindu) riots since 1950 in some parts of Bangladesh and the encroachment of property (for long symbolized by the Vested Property Act) that demonstrate the complexities involved may be viewed as reinterpretation of the Partition without negating it. Though officially the two-nation theory gained mileage in post-1947 East Pakistan, one would do well to remember that in the predominantly agrarian Bengal, perception of economic injustice particularly at the hands of caste Hindu landowners, rent collectors, and moneylenders, had actually led to a communalization of mass politics as Sugata Bose persuasively argues in his study on agrarian Bengal.[49]
Philip Oldenburg makes an significant addition to the debate. In his significant article of 1985, Oldenburg calls Pakistan at the time of Partition in 1947 a place ‘insufficiently imagined, after Rushdie. Thereafter he outlines the non-compatible dreams of what Pakistan would be; dreams dreamt by the west and the east wings, geographically apart and yet made into one in one of the many cunning alleys of
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history.[50] For the dominant group in West Pakistan composed mostly of Punjabis, the new state was the true Muslim nation of the Indian subcontinent and a space for attainment of the rightful place of its followers, where the Islamic heritage of Indian history would be protected. For the Muslim Bengalis, it was a place where Muslims would rule, free from domination and oppression of caste Hindu zamindars. What appears to be missing in the article is any consideration of the reasons why the minority communities, whether in terms of religion or language, threw in their lot with Pakistan. While it is possible that it was in several cases a question of land/identity, other motivations are also worth considering for the shape of the events following the vivisection of India were not determined solipsistically by the ruling or the dominant group. In their policies and mode of governance or for that matter the language in which they addressed the people, one can hear the slow, silent roar of the other and its presence that could not be wished away. In West Pakistan’s demeanour towards Bengali sub-nationalism, which even as late as 1967 Bengali scholars such as Talukder Maniruzzaman were referring to as ‘regionalism, could be sensed the anxiety about the rebellion infecting the disgruntled groups closer home in the west such as the Pathans. Therefore, in the methods adopted the constituency addressed was not only the one that was being directly spoken to. It was also reflected in the Awami League in East Pakistan altering its name from the original Awami Muslim League under the auspices of Maulana Bhashani to provide inclusivity not long after it was born. It was variously imagined by the national leaders, bureaucrats, and even the press in the west wing-right from the inception of the Language Movement until the crescendo that repression reached on the fateful night of 25 March 1971 with the murder of Bengali intellectuals and thousands of alleged Mukti Bahini sympathizers during the army crackdown—that the integrity of the nation was under threat from forces in the east inimical to its existence.
In the predominantly agrarian Bengal before freedom from colonial rule, Muslim leaders such as Fazlul Huq of the KPP had risen to prominence with the support of peasants that often surpassed religious lines. Before the Congress made its alleged ‘monumental blunder’ and pushed Fazlul Huq towards the Muslim League, he was perhaps one of the strongest challengers of the Congress and the Muslim League in Bengal, which often found itself in opposition to the decision-making body at the Centre. Joya Chatterji has eloquently followed the above antagonism in her well-researched book on the emergence of Hindu
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communalism in Bengal and the role of the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, which eventually became one of the factors in Muslims throwing in their lot with Pakistan.51 What is also of note here is that Oldenburg believes that a sufficiently imagined Pakistan would not have provided the necessary inspiration to bring the state into existence. This is a statement that deserves analysis. At the beginning of his article he questions the colour of inevitability that was being given to the dismemberment of Pakistan–that it was just a matter of time in a country with such a strange geography; two peoples far apart in their culture and form would lead to a lack of communication resulting in secession. Oldenburg, with his training in political science, then concludes that it was West Pakistan’s inability to understand or appreciate the expectations of the Bengalis from a post-1947 Muslim nation that led to the tragedy of 1971. It needs to be said that the otherness’ that he is referring to here is not that of a numerical minority. Indeed in terms of number, the Bengalis were a majority and the role of that fact in legitimizing their share in the power structure should not be missed. However, as keepers of true Islamic heritage, the taint of a ‘Hinduized Bengali culture and language had to be kept at bay and some westerners actually believed that in time Muslims in the east would come to appreciate the logic and rationality of the argument. This issue, due to the obfuscation of history in Bangladesh after the war by military and civilian rule, seems to have occupied the minds of the intellectuals. It lies behind the desire to establish the fact that the uprisings that led to the separation were indigenous and not inspired from across the border, and accounts for the occasional defensive strain of historiography. This is one of the recurring strands that has emerged about the freedom movement and betrays how historical meanings remain insecure and subject to change and transformation even within a community that is deemed to have achieved sovereignty negating 1947. This struggle for ownership over sovereignty in Bangladesh had not only to be fought against the enemy, which was West Pakistan, but also at the same time its legitimacy depended on its autonomy from India. This is, according to Ranabir Samaddar, one of the problems of writing a critical history of 1971. He detects unsavoury haste among scholars to wish away the involvement of India. This puts a shroud over the actual nature of the role played by a neighbouring country in the emergence of Bangladesh and buttresses Samaddar’s argument as to why there is a hiatus in Bangladeshi historiography. While it is easy to see how the patriarchal language of nationalism insists on the purity of victory’ (in the same way that the Pakistani establishment
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must establish the spurious nature of their defeat), it can be argued that at times this becomes a critique of Indian political and military accounts that make inflated claims about having delivered East Pakistan from disaster. Another jarring note that one encounters from the vantage point of being secondary witnesses is that the discourse of the war of liberation is centred on personalities.[52] The questions that return obsessively in most of the literature that one reads may be simplified in the following manner:
1. Who was responsible for the division of Pakistan and for the
breakdown of negotiations after the elections of 1970? Decades after the event, it remains a blind spot in the writing of historywith each side demonizing the others’ heroes.
2. Was there a point of no return? Could it have been avoided?
Who worked to abort a consensus?
3. Who authored the genocide on 25 March 1971 and the ruthless
second round of murders of intellectuals on 14 December 1971 just before the declaration of surrender?
4. Who is the father of the Liberation War?
One may argue that history needs to establish a cause-effect connection between events, to look at the debris as a truth seeker. In Bangladesh the urgency of establishing the ‘correct version’ extends to fiction about the war. An illustration of this contention will be clear from the fact that in the first edition of Anisul Hoque’s significant novel Maa he had not incorporated the 7 March 1971 speech of Bongobondhu, an ‘error’ which he felt needed to be corrected in the second edition.[53]
When Jinnah in his speech of 1948 referred to the enemy’ he was obviously referring to the trouble being fomented by India through their Hindu agents in Pakistan. It is crucial to note the role of Dhirendranath Datta (a Hindu parliamentarian) of the Pakistan Congress in raising the language question in parliament as early as 1948. Rabeya Khatun, a 1971 war survivor who was witness to the killing of her two brothers and brothers-in-law by the ‘Khansenas’ (the Khan-army), recalls that the army came into their house looking for indurs. ‘Indur’ was a reference to Hindus, used for both its closeness in articulation to ‘Hindu’ and, more importantly, as in Bengali the word denotes a ‘rat. A standard question that was often asked during the agitation by the West Pakistani sympathizers was, ‘Are you a Bengali or a Muslim?’ The litmus test was to clinch the question of identity.[54] What it articulates in reality
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was a question that had vexed Muslims in Bengal from colonial times right up to the freedom movement, the events of 1947, and thereafter. In fact it is a question that has undergone a history of its own in the selfdefinition and desire of self-determination in the community and still continues to influence the socio-political and cultural life of the people in Bangladesh as has been discussed earlier in this chapter with reference to Manzur’s work on the freedom struggle.
Suffering, understandably, is a recurring theme. It is encountered by those who have gone to war and those who are left behind. It is common to refugees who had crossed the border and those who had to move from one place to another in search of a safe haven. In fact during a war it is purported that suffering unites the community and the individual with the community. Narratives suggest it is an emotion/phenomenon experienced by the aggressors too, in this case the Pakistanis, which understandably fails to earn the moral legitimacy that is associated with the victim. In the letters written by those who went to the war of liberation, compiled in Ekattorer Chithi, it is the imagination of suffering and torment suffered by those one knows (who begin to stand for the multitude that have to be rescued from the morass) that sustains the men and turn mothers into their muse. Says Rumi (son of Jahanara Imam, the author of Ekattorer Dinguli, who attains martyrdom halfway through the war) in his letter to his Uncle Pasha: ‘We are fighting a just war. We shall win…. They have torn into us with a savagery unparalleled in human history. And sure as Newton was right, so shall we too tear into them with like ferocity:[55] The letters written are not those of battle-hardened men. In many we come across an adolescent note overwhelmed with emotion. For instance, one Mukti Bahini recruit, writing to the mother from a training camp when it is raining outside, recounts comrades lost in battle and looks back with yearning on his childhood when his mother would not let him out into the rain and would shed tears over his little injuries. His present sadness is, however, relieved by hope of homecoming after the war when his country is liberated. Another letter, in particular, is addressed as ‘O’Mother’ and the manuscript shows a map of Bangladesh that surrounds the word, doodled by the son. The writer, Dulaal, has just come back from the battlefront to his camp. He is writing from his bunker:
O Mother, today I remember the sadness on your face when I said goodbye. You were looking beautiful in a stark white sari. Do you know what I was thinking then, Mother? The red sun had been brightened
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with the blood of many Bengalis. Each ray has on earth, given birth to those who had been touched by fire, initiated by the incantation of freedom, one Bengali offspring. O Mother I am blessed to have been born to you…. Wasn’t it you who had said once that the day is not far when children shall ask for pistols and revolvers from their parents instead of biscuits and chocolates. That is the day that every child is waiting for, the day when the sun of Bangladesh shall rise, of the hopes of seven crore oppressed, persecuted, hungry Bengalis, deprived of their rights.[56]
The letter ends with the hope of glory in battle. The mother like the sun is made symbolic of life and birth. Even in the bunker, surrounded by enemies, there is talk of life. However, it is the tone of the letter, breaking continuously into O Mother’ and wanting to know from her why all Bengalis cannot stand by each other, why all sisters cannot stand by their brothers, and why all mothers do not send their sons to war, that seems to offer an insight into the content. The rhetorical mode adopted follows a successful operation: ‘They have murdered human beings. We are murdering beasts. It is the rhetoric of just war. Prima facie, the Bengalis were retaliating after a military crackdown, the dimensions of which had been shocking. However, parts of the letter and the tone sound gratuitous. The moral authority of a just war waged against injustice is interrupted by the image of young guerrillas wallowing in revenge, turning their mothers into muses. Perhaps that is the paradox, a necessary one if we, as witnesses, are to stop short of identifying with the idiom of inevitable violence. Conversely it is this ambiguity that is the reason for the language of description. The letters get written because one may not be able to acknowledge the ambiguity of one’s actions but they lurk underneath and explain the desire to remain connected to a more ordinary world away from the necessity of moral rectitude to defend one’s actions. Suffering imagined as inflicted on the body of the nation, and often these letters refer to the desecrated honour of mothers and sisters (izzat), substitutes the agony of the present with the resolve to restore what is lost. There are instances when the discourse of a ‘larger cause controls immediate action however ethical it may seem to witnesses removed from that time. Again, a freedom fighter, Mahbubur Rahman, writes to his mother on 5 April 1971:
Met a few Razakars on the way. They only took some money and some four or five Hindu girls. Had a strong desire to lay down my life and save those girls. But the next moment I thought that if I die protecting their
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honour, what would happen to the thousands of mothers and sisters out there:[57]
The importance of genre in understanding the different experiences and discourses generated by the war is obvious. These letters were obviously meant for private consumption, unlike memoirs, fiction, and history; and listening to the young, restless combatants allows us to glimpse the nuances of a just war. From a closed masculine world of injury, hunger, approaching winter, and impending death there are messages to the world outside, people for whom one has taken up arms.
There is fear of death and the responsibilities that belong to a normal world and time. Gholam Rahman asks his wife to save the land that they have, not to give it away to anyone, even if persuaded by well-wishers. The world that one has left behind and fights for is not always imagined in a homogeneous image of beauty that is under threat. In his letter there is no evocation of lush green Shonar Bangla invaded by a barbaric enemy and where the red sun of revolution is rising. Instead he pleads with his wife, Fazila, on what she should do if he does not return from the war:
Do not take decisions on other’s advice even if it is well intentioned. You will be hurt and then you will remember me. Hold your child against your breast and live, you will find happiness. If you listen to others the land will no longer remain yours. You will be hated then. A woman who loses her husband or is turned away by him is never respected. Even if she is a pampered child; this is a woman’s curse. I don’t need to say much, you will see many around you. If you own land and material comforts people will care for you, they might even want to help you take off your shoes.[ 58]
If the series of injunctions instruct the wife on how to live and conduct her affairs after he is dead, it also reflects the unchanging social structures. One may have gone to war to avenge the mindless killing of one’s countrymen and to win freedom to shape one’s destiny, but in contrast to the anger and occasional swagger of the preceding quotations, the mothers-and-sisters alibi in the light of the above letter appears plausible only in the strangely wanting moralities that war gives rise to. As an argument, war in order to protect the world that one knows is always suspect, which is why it must promise a better future as an ameliorating factor, the future as a land of fantasy. Moreover, when a war is won at such a huge cost of human lives, it transforms in immutable ways the present and the future of both the individual and his community.
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In a rare moment of vulnerability and reflection, Firdaus writes to his mother on 3 September 1971:
Mother, if you see me now, you won’t recognise me. Though I do not know what I look like exactly for there is no mirror here. Mihir says I look like a savage. Mihir is right. I can feel a savagery inside me these days. I am no longer who I was. Do you remember mother that I used to turn my gaze away when a chicken was to be slaughtered? That same Mihir now swims in rivers of blood.[59]
It is for the sake of the mother (land), as the letters suggest, that the men went to war. It is an oft-cited rationale of war, more common in the register of retaliatory violence. It is also to mothers that these young men write their more intimate letters sharing anecdotes of heroism and difficulties, apologizing for leaving, and in the act of writing creating the loving, patient, suffering mother who is urged to pray for her son’s return. If he does not, he will still return to her in a dissolute form since she is the extension of the motherland. While the letters, in some sense, conjure the image of women waiting for their sons and husbands, as the next chapter will illustrate, the reality was that in addition to her anxiety about the son, in a war such as the one of 1971, where ‘enemies’ were fellow citizens belonging to the same state and where the military was in control of public space, she had more roles to perform than one. In the warfront the fear and anxiety of the present was relieved by memories of heroic acts and the nation in danger, while at home civilians were confronted with a situation where suddenly shelter, food, and safety, which are the basics of survival, were under threat. Maintenance of life itself had become a problem and women battled loss and death and still strove to sustain it. Of course women had fought in the war too. Shirin Bano Mithil, whom I had interviewed, was one of them. But in the face of the violence and brutalities that threatened to rip apart the social fabric, there were domestic battles fought by men and women without knowing what was to come. This was true of those who had to turn into refugees as well those who faced the threat of an inglorious extinction due to hunger and disease and not a heroic death in battle.
What does a war memorial treat as its past? In Jay Winter’s poignant study of the forms of commemoration that the First World War took in monuments, memorials, art, and literature, he describes how there was an attempt to come to terms with the chaos of death whether in the form of creation of public spaces of mourning or in claiming that the dead had spoken and could be seen.[60] In the years after the war, efforts
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were directed towards connection with what was lost, in the midst of controversies over mass graves, and how and where the dead should be buried. Understandably, a war is preoccupied with death and the postwar healing of wounds, in which governance can play no mean part. Needless to say, it often does not. However, survivors wish to remember a cataclysm of such a magnitude, if only as a debt they owe to the living. In Bangladesh it is said (and I have mentioned earlier) three million people are believed to have died. In the National Martyrs Memorial at Savar, which I visited in January 2010, we are informed through an installed board of the following, a part of which I quote verbatim:
The war of liberation began on 25th March 1971 and ended in the victory on 16th December, 1971. Three million undaunting (sic) patriots laid down their lives in this struggle for freedom. The memorial is dedicated to the memory of the heroic struggle of the people and a mark of respect of an indebted nation of the martyrs. The foundation stone was laid here at Savar on 16th December 1972…. The monument with its pointed spires stand to speak of the victory and triumph and link the patriotic people, the Shahid and the living freedom fighters in an eternal bond (sic).
There are ten graves of martyrs considered as representative of the countless other unnamed dead. On them is inscribed Graves of Unknown Martyrs. The memorial structure is one that includes seven isosceles triangles, purportedly denoting the seven stages of the liberation movement starting with the Language Movement in 1952, suggesting the inseparability of memorialization, mourning, and history. In order that these cenotaphs do not become soothing architectural curiosities frequented for recreational reasons, the graves are placed in the guardianship of their historical context, however contested that framework might be. The three photographs furnished later are all taken at the memorial at Savar (see Images 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5). Spanning a huge expanse in the outskirts of Dhaka the structure is a popular weekend park.
The simplicity of argument and vision that these monuments symbolize also make them an escape from the present. On top flutters the flag of Bangladesh. It took sixteen long years to finish the monument, which houses a community centre and a mosque among other things. In addition to the dead, however, official figures peg the number of rapes at two hundred thousand. Some women were tortured and killed and some were kept in camps for months and served as sexual slaves to itinerant army units. Some took their own lives while others continued to live
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National Martyrs Memorial
The war of liberation began on 26 march, 1971 and ended in the victory on 16 December, 1971. Three million undounting patriots laid down their lives in this struggle for freedom. The memorial is dedicated to the memory of the heroic struggle of the people and as a mark of respect of an indebted nation of the martyrs. The foundation stone of the monument was laid here at Savar on 16 December, 1972. The area of the monument and its compound is 34 hectares (84 acres) with a surrounding buffer zone of additional 10 hectares(24 acres) green belt of planted bushes and trees. The monument with its pointed spire stand to speak of the victory and triumph and link the patriotic people, the shahid and the living freedom fighters in an eternal bond. The tower tapers upwards on seven isosceles triangles signifying the seven stages of the national movement that led to the independence of the country. The seeds of the movement sprouted through the struggle for the honour of the national language, Bangla in 1952 and there after grew in phases through the mass upheavals of 1954,62,66,69 and eventually the liberation movement in 1971. The 45 meter (150 feet) high tower (minar) is at an important point of the monument complex. An artificial lake, a twin bridge, a reflecting pool and a picturesque garden Surround the monument. The twin bridge crossing a canal leads to the most sacred part of the monument where ten mass graves of martyrs are preserved as marks of respect to the countless unknown freedom fighters who laid down their lives for their motherland. The complex also contains an open air stage, reception room, mosque, green house, twin helipads and a cafeteria. Master plan of the monument and other architectural drawing of the complex excepting main tower have been designed by the architects of the Department of Architecture, Government of the people’s Republic of Bangladesh, Architect Syed Mainul Hossain has designed the main tower of the monument. The complex has beer constructed in three phases at total cost of 130 million Taka. Work started in july, 1972 and ended in June 1988, Entire construction work has been done by the Public Works Department of the Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
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with their families pretending, in some cases, that nothing had happened and suffering secretly. In some cases, when it came to the knowledge of the larger community, it set into motion a steady supply of humiliation and taunts that effected a slow mental crumbling of the women and in some cases of their families as well. After the war these women were sought to be co-opted into in official discourse of martyrdom or ‘war heroines. Sheikh Mujib conferred the title of birangona’ on the violated women. Rehabilitation efforts were introduced and compensation was promised to those who had suffered for the sake of freedom. The war babies presented a problem. It was sought to be solved by giving them away to foreigners keen on adoption. There were views expressed by the religious right against such a move as the children would grow up as Christians. Mujib is believed to have argued that the unfortunate children should grow up as human beings and that would not be possible in Bangladesh’s social set-up, which would stigmatize them. At the same time he confessed that he himself was not keen on retaining the polluted blood of the enemy in his nation.[61]
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In his The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi in the chapter entitled ‘Useless Violence’ makes a point about wars, which is pertinent to our discussion:
Wars are detestable. They are a bad way to settle controversies between nations and factions, but they cannot be called useless. They aim at a goal though it may be wicked or perverse. They are not gratuitous, their purpose is not to inflict suffering; suffering is there, it is collective, anguishing, unjust but it is a by-product, something extra. Now, I believe that the twelve Hitlerian years shared their violence with many other historical space-times, but that they were characterized by widespread useless violence, as an end in itself, with the sole purpose of creating pain, occasionally having a purpose, yet always redundant, disproportionate to the purpose itself.[62]
I do not mean to go into the nuances of whether wars can be useful, in the sense of having a purpose but only to consider the nature of violence and suffering. In the lager (camp) suffering could not be mitigated by the fact of it being oriented towards a purpose, like in a war where suffering is a by-product, but it may be accommodated into narratives of sacrifice and suffering for a just cause or for the nation. That the violence is experienced collectively may also help healing. Not all kinds of violence in a war, however, is towards a purpose Rape is one of them. While one may argue that it is intended to emasculate the nation and mark the bodies of its women (or various other reasons as offered by John Gotschall, given later), the collectivity of that experience is dissimilar to death or casualty or even physical torture suffered in war. As Levi says, of those in the lager, each one in this experience is a monad, and a survivor who has been raped during a war is placed in a different relationship with language than other survivors. Not one raped woman in the 1971 war has yet written a memoir of her experiences unlike Jahanara Imam, Basanti Guhathakurta, and Mushtari Shafi, who suffered as mother, wife, or sister. Firdausi Priyobhashini writes about her life in which what happened during the war is an important chapter. But unlike Levi, the sexually violated women cannot be the survivors speaking for/of the past. The women carry no guilt like survivors of Auschwitz do for having lived on unless it is impressed upon them by family and society that they were better dead than living in shame. Rape, and suffering experienced as a result, is gratuitous even if it is a war. For the silenced it is useless violence, and the title of ‘birangona’ may have been well-meaning but none felt in it the pride associated with a war hero. None felt it enough
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to desist from destroying their identities in official records or pleading in prefaces and articles to leave the women alone, not to inflict more shame and suffering on them by seeking them out. The few who spoke were often left with a bitter taste in their mouth as their speech could not be integrated into a patriarchal and conservative society. Though their visibility seemed necessary in the cause of justice, the consequences of that visibility was difficult to control.
Wartime rape (considered as a war crime) may be effected for a number of reasons. A. Stiglmayer sums up the phenomenon succinctly:
A rape is an aggressive and humiliating act, as even a soldier knows, or at least suspects. He rapes because he wants to engage in violence. He rapes because he wants to demonstrate his power. He rapes because he is the victor. He rapes because the woman is the enemy’s woman, and he wants to humiliate and annihilate the enemy. He rapes because the woman is herself the enemy whom he wishes to humiliate and annihilate. He rapes because he despises women. He rapes to prove his virility. He rapes because the acquisition of the female body means a piece of territory conquered. He rapes to take out on someone else the humiliation he has suffered in the war. He rapes to work off his fears. He rapes because it’s really only some ‘fun’ with the guys. He rapes because war is a man’s business, has awakened his aggressiveness, and he directs it at those who play a subordinate role in the world of war.[ 63]
The causes of wartime rape are a combination of several factors and may be both instinctive and strategic. Both forms are, however, sustained by patriarchal permissibility. The brutality of the act and the physical torture cannot be explained by theories of repressed and unfulfilled sexual desires and difficult and hostile conditions of service, in which light the military often represents it. As Elisabeth Joan Wood argues, the sheer variety of wartime rape ‘may lure us into reducing the causes of wartime rape to raw primal misogyny:[64] However, this analytical temptation’ may suggest that the mere fact of maleness is sufficient for wartime rape. It may also divert’war waging policymakers’ from serious engagement with the strategic use of sexual violence and the conditions which sustain it.[65] The Liberation War Museum in Dhaka was begun on a civilians’ initiative and engaged in pioneering work in preserving, restoring, and producing narratives of the war.[66] Here again, the accent is on the gradual climaxing of the struggle for Bengali self-determination in the war, albeit a forced one but one that aroused the spirit of a
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stereotypically soft and non-martial race. There is a remark in passing on the participation of women in the war and the violence inflicted on them but in visual terms, the skulls of martyrs and people killed in official discourse they are often equated), the bullet-ridden military uniforms, their belts, and tin mugs create an experiential world of their own. One of the most poetic images that I came back with was the displayed briefcase of Professor Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta in the museum, a teacher of English Literature, who was wounded on the night of 25 March on the university campus when he was shot by the Pakistani soldiers just outside his house. He later succumbed to his injuries in the hospital. On the shelf beside his case lies a weather-beaten edition of Joan Bennett’s edited Five Metaphysical Poets, which was inside it along with his lecture notes. It provides a detailing to the whole narrative, which personalizes a monumental event often told in a larger-than-life style. Statistics may be used to hammer home a point, but in time it loses its persuasive power when the conditions no longer persist in the same form. Needless to say we do not find the ravished women represented in a way that would introduce them into the narrative of the Liberation War by preserving the specificity of their stories.
I have argued earlier that one of the biggest tests of the government and society’s ability to manage trauma was the rehabilitation of the militarized youth, many of whom refused to part with their weapons, and who acquired a paradoxical relation to law in a free country with an elected government and a constitution. The second challenge was dealing with the collaborators and war criminals. The third challenge was embodied by raped women and the unravelling of stories of glory that they presented. And surely, the need to interpret the events of 1947, the birth of Pakistan, the beginning of the disenchantment, the war, and suffering and freedom was deeply felt. The tussle was between a resumption of pre-war social structures, psyche, language, and ways of receiving facts in an altered world where new meanings were being discovered. One comes across responses in research on sexual violation such as ‘It’s not their fault, we could not protect them’; ‘They have sacrificed their greatest wealth, their honour, for their country’; ‘How is it that some of them were singled out for such treatment and not others?’; ‘They have been tainted by the enemy’; ‘Perhaps they were willing’; ‘Why had they not killed themselves?” It is a common motif that one encounters in testimonies of the women who were kept in rehabilitation homes. Their fathers or brothers would come as visitors, weep and promise to take them back when things would cool off a bit or express their inability to do so, and
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bring them a sari as a gift. The guileless cruelty of the last gesture is a reflection of the way in which individuals/collectives approach healing as compensation. In many ways this is a direct corollary of the charges of the government fudging and destroying records of sexually violated women on the pretext of necessity, that they had the right to lead normal lives and their visibility would jeopardize that so-called process of restoration. It was a duty the nation owed to the pain suffered by these women that they were protected’ and erasing of those records was supposed to be in line with it.
Hobsbawm’s fear of destruction of the past sounded in the beginning has significance for us. The fact that this generation is living in a permanent present, if such a blanket observation can be made, is more a symptom of our times than its actual problem. How we remember and what we choose to remember is as important as why we think we are called upon to not forget certain things. In addition we remember in certain available forms and hence our remembrance is cast in certain culturally available modes. Even within forms such as literature, our memories are contained in genres. In recollections of suffering, if we extend the forms to history and memorials we understand how meaning making is controlled by the type of structure in which it appears.[67] Collective remembrance is fostered by memorialization, which creates second-hand witnesses to the past. History, monuments, literature, and testimonies all forge within their genres a link with how we were, who we are, and what we wish to be. This is not to suggest a collective consciousness that mulls over these terms or a handful of thinkers who mull over these questions on behalf of others. Reminiscences are constantly shaped by the present. In the Ain-O-Salish Kendra publication Narir Ekattor, we come across Jebunissa Begum, a barely literate Bengali Muslim mother and her struggle to educate and raise her children. As the piece on her informs us, she was the wife of a local Awami League leader and owned a two-storeyed house in the heart of Dhaka, which was destroyed when her family was attacked by local ‘Biharis’ in March 1971. She was an eyewitness to her husband’s murder. However, it is a local Bihari’ boy, Iqbal, who in spite of leading the rampant mob, stops his gang from attacking her and her children and gives them shelter in his house defying strictures of his community. When a mob surrounds Iqbal’s house baying for their blood, they are secretly sent to the residence of a Punjabi doctor Mr Mujahidi and his wife who then transfer them to a less hostile location. Iqbal, who had saved their lives, is later killed by Bengali freedom fighters. Jebunissa Begum
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rescues the Punjabi family from the army cantonment after the war and ensures that they leave safely for Pakistan. Admittedly, she blames nonBengalis for her strife during the war and in liberated Bangladesh never gives alms to‘Bihari’ beggars. In the same breath she tells the interviewer Qurratul-ain Tahmina that in the fear that pervaded, non-Bengalis and Bengalis were mutually terrified of each other. She recalls how local Bengalis had attacked homes of ‘Biharis’ and looted valuables. She, like several Bangladeshis with bitter memories of the war, is unappreciative of the state’s overtures of friendship with Pakistan and confesses that her heart burns with rage at political bonhomie when Pakistan has not apologized officially for its violations let alone face trials for crimes committed.
While it may appear that in times of crisis it is individual ethics which spring into motion and write the script of our encounter with the other, our interpretation of the past has a deep relationship with dominant discourses that certainly shape if not dictate thinking. It is disturbing when in excavating stories about the war, ethical behaviour and ‘hospitality’ (in the Derridean sense) towards the other are cast in terms triumph of character, a ‘there are good people in every community’ kind of argument, which is only the softer flipside of entrenched stereotyping. When the issue of trial is raised, there surface questions of collecting evidence and an unbiased judicial system. In order that the institution of justice does not appear to regress into a lynch mob or its activities appear as retributive justice, the past must be comprehended in its multilayered manifestations. One of the ethical aims of the increasing demand for trial of war crimes across societies starting with Nuremberg was to build a consensus on gratuitous violence. The bid to re-examine the moral universe of war gains urgency in the light of the availability of weapons of mass destruction and the increasing sophistication of argument with which their existence is justified.
The need to have a war crimes trial almost four decades after the war in Bangladesh and the purpose of such an exercise merits reflection. The act of granting amnesty and governmental indifference to the cause of justice/redressal did not help. The years after the war saw an increasing radicalization of religion in addition to a steady stream of political murders. It also saw an exodus of minorities to India, the reduction of ‘Biharis’ to ‘nowhere citizens, and illegal occupation of vacant property. The question of the repatriation of ‘Biharis’ to Pakistan has languished and questions about their loyalty to Bangladesh still remain. It is believed
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that a transparent judicial process for conviction of war criminals (those of them who are not dead already) shall be exemplary and restorative of secular, democratic, and nationalistic values.
Hannah Arendt’s 1961 coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official who was captured in Argentina by the Israeli secret police and brought to Jerusalem for trial, was a controversial one.[68] In the famous trial, the first by the Jewish state, Arendt (a Jew herself) took issue with the representation of the offence as a crime committed against the Jewish people (by an Israeli court) and its linkage to a history of Jewish persecution in the West. It was rather (according to Arendt) a crime against humanity committed on the body of Jews and the perfect illustration of the monstrosities that a modern totalitarian regime was capable of. Arendt faced the ire of Jewish readers and intellectuals for critiquing the method of trial and it was said that she was insensitive to the anguish of Jewish survivors. Her second contention that Eichmann was a not a demon but a mediocre official interested in career advancement and in his banality lay his chilling criminality was also found by enraged readers to be sympathetic to Eichmann. Third and most provocative was her suggestion that the Jews had to share responsibility for the Holocaust; the Judenrate (or the Jewish councils) negotiated with the Nazis to save certain Jews and found others expendable. This policy according to her resulted in far greater casualties than if there had been total distancing. In her refusal to emphasize the Jewish nature of the trauma she underlined the moral importance of conceiving an act of justice in a way that anticipates its implications for the future and further ethical crises of a similar kind. This explains the renewed interest in the work that was harangued primarily by her co-religionists at the time of its publication. With the evolution of the Israeli state to its present form, we need to pause and think what an official discourse of self-righteous victimhood can do. What Arendt was trying to question was the exceptionalism of the post-Holocaust discourse and identify the possibilities of recurrence. For those who argued that she could take a stand of this kind because she was neither a witness nor a survivor, Arendt contends the following in an epilogue to her book:
The argument that we cannot judge if we are not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone, although it seems obvious that if that were true neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would be possible.[69]
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In her account Arendt writes a report which is at the same time a critique of the context of the trial in Jerusalem and the Israeli state’s prosecution of Adolf Eichmann accused of inhuman crimes against the Jewish people. The question is complicated by the fact that it is always difficult to evaluate intentions in/of times of anomie where conventional ways of living together have collapsed; dispensation of justice requires interpretation of evidence and establishment of guilt beyond reasonable doubt. The political use(s) of the War Crimes Trial in Bangladesh is an important question. Its meaning for survivors and witnesses and their progeny four decades after the event will surely be in excess of a perception that justice has been finally done. Why do we need to judge? After all, since justice is enforceable only by the state under the law and the institutions of the state, does it not mean a proliferation of the state’s functions and an increased control over the citizen/subject? Moreover, Bangladesh as a sovereign state shall not, and indeed cannot, try the war criminals in Pakistan. It can only book the collaborators within its jurisdiction. Ideologically the decision to support Pakistan, which was the parent country when the war of secession began, may have been a product of religious fervour that was seen as a higher ideal than dissenting with an oppressive regime but cannot in itself be an unacceptable argument. The task of bringing criminals to trial is one of the privileges of the state.
We often tend to judge, for events which cause human destruction of such a magnitude bring changes in our relationship with the world and a change (often imperceptible) in how we conduct businesses with it. In the process will emerge the complexities that provide an analogue and hopefully, pointers and correctives to trials undertaken by the state. The trials in Nuremberg and Israel may not have changed the course of history but they did become reference points for future events of this kind. In addition the controversy over Arendt’s report, the difference in its interpretation/reception when wounds were fresh, and years later its changed relevance for witnesses now are suggestive. The ethical issues at stake then and now are, therefore, very large since they become markers of the kinds of antidotes we imagine in order to deal with strife. In scarcely observed ways they also leave their traces on the life of nations, The causes of the insistence for a closure to the consequences of impunity are clear enough. Since it calls history into the courtroom, this continuous process of writing that is happening in society, its evasions and limitations need scrutiny.
Memory and memorialization are also complex processes that land us in Babel’s world. When the reminiscences are of human suffering, the need
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of an expansion of our idea of moral community (and oral testimonies and literature–not strictly apart though—are a couple of the ways in which it is sought to be effected) attains more depth. Bangladesh has long been in the throes of ruling powers that have sought to build its cities upon the hush of tongues that over months lived in fear of death and annihilation, injury, and rape. Reconstruction beyond the architectural cannot happen over amnesia. The ethos of societies are sometimes called upon to reveal themselves; every time they respond they tell us something about who we are and what we might become. In the following chapters, we shall see how the genres of memoirs, testimony, and literary discourse are placed in the context of the process of forging a Bengali/Bangladeshi identity and recollections of war and liberation. It is in this context that we have to situate how a four-decade-old state negotiates with its people who have memories and allegiances that go further into the past, further than 1947, and intimations of a future that is being constantly forged and influenced by discourses outside its borders as it was in 1971 as Raghavan has demonstrated.
If it is capitalism’s hedonism that sustains the permanent present’ for Hobsbawm’s post-war generation, or perhaps the collapse of the Soviet Union (an event of critical importance in his thesis), the precariousness of this stupor has already been revealed in the first decade of the twenty-first century. At times, however, historians in their fidelity to the coherence of something called ‘world history’ necessarily elide over newborn nations such as Bangladesh and what they may add to the generality of such diagnoses. In his opening chapter Eric Hobsbawm ends by saying, ‘The old century has not ended well.[70] He tells us of his un-Micawberian anticipation that the new one shall see a just and more viable world. The twenty-two years since this work appeared have not done much to transform the melancholy behind this hope. As the theatre of ‘catastrophe’ shifts to Asia and the Arab world, we are again between anguish, hope, and the guilty thrill of the macabre.
Thus even if we accept Hobsbawm’s thesis and are sometimes stupefied by history’s commoditization and its freezing in readily available words, we can rest assured that the past is never destroyed. If some believe it can be, a look within ourselves and the communities or spaces we belong to/ or choose not to belong to will reveal monuments to that destruction.
Notes and References
1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World from 1914
1991 (New York: Vintage, 1994).
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2. Philip Oldenburg, A Place Insufficiently Imagined: Language, Belief, and
the Pakistan Crisis of 1971, The Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 4 (1985): 711-33, doi 10.2307/2056443, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/
stable/ 2056443.
3. Pierre Nora, ‘Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire.
Representations 26 (1989): 7-24.
4. Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Historical Memory
and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2006).
5. Jatin Sarkar, Pakistaneir Jonmomrityu Dorshon, 2nd ed. (Dhaka: Jatiya
Sahitya Prokash, 2008).
6. Madeleine Albright, in a reference to violent upheavals in Pakistan in 2012,
available at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/pakistan-is-an-interna
tional- migraine/1/202444.html, last accessed on 3 November 2016.
7. Margaret Moore, The Ethics of Nationalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), p. 2.
8. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
(New Delhi: Penguin, 1998); Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2007 (1998]); Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003 [2001]); Alok Bhalla, Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home, 2nd ed. (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
9. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives
of Modern China (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1995), p.5.
10. Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh
(New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2013).
11. The Concert for Bangladesh undertaken by the musician George Harrison
and featuring musicians such as Ravi Shankar, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Ustad Alla Rakha, Ringo Starr, and several other internationally acclaimed artists was a monumental event in the history of the war of liberation. Organized in August 1971 it remains a unique mobilization for a humanitarian cause and made the world to sit up and take notice of what was going on in East Pakistan. With Nixon firmly backing West Pakistan, this concert in Madison Square Garden in New York drew
attention to the suffering multitudes and refugees.
12. Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
13. Kaul, The Partitions of Memory, p. 3.
14. Jahanara Imam in her Ekattorer Dinguli writes how her son Rumi, as he
drove her through the ravaged city after the first round of the crackdown, stood transfixed in front of the pillar and she watched his jaws harden
64
with resolve. The monument symbolizes a mother watching over her children as the taller bent pillar stands in a gesture of protection to the smaller ones. The mother figure is the language/nation. Rumi later goes to the war and in a few months returns for guerrilla action in Dhaka, is picked up for interrogation and killed (Jahanara Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli, 6th ed. [Dhaka: Sondhanee Prokashoni, 1988]). The protagonist who teaches English Literature at the university in Anwar Pasha’s Rifles, Bread, Women cries inconsolably when he discovers the desecrated Minar (Anwar Pasha, Rifles, Bread, Women, translated by Kabir Chowdhury (Dhaka: Adorn
Publications, 2008]).
15. Basanti Guhathakurta, Ekattorer Smriti (Dhaka: The University Press
Limited, 1991).
16. It could not be declassified for many years after the event. Nor was the
semblance of action it recommended ever actualized. Democracy has had a tiring career in Pakistan and with the complex nature of the position that the military establishment holds in the scheme of things such fact-finding
could not but remain an academic exercise.
17. The Report of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission of Inquiry into the 1971
War (As Declassified by the Government of Pakistan) (Lahore: Vanguard
Books, 2004), p. 23.
18. The Report of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission, p. 25. 19. The Report of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission, p. 513.
20. The army on its part alleged that the university had turned into a hideout
for militant students and weapons were stowed away in hostel rooms. While visual evidence of the killing of students behind Jagannath Hall exists, the fact that there had been any noticeable resistance to the assault
still remains an unsubstantiated claim.
21. Ranabir Samaddar, Many Histories and Few Silences: The Nationalist
History of Nationalism in Bangladesh (Calcutta: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
Institute of Asian Studies, 1995), p. 8.
22. A.F. Salahuddin Ahmad, Bengali Nationalism and the Emergence of
Bangladesh (Dhaka: ICBS, 2000 (1994]). My emphasis.
23. As Muhammad Ghulam Kabir writes in his important work:
In order to create a new and distinct trend in Bengali Literature which was Hindu dominated at that time, they advocated the inclusion of more Arabic-Persian words in that language. They also urged Muslims to discard the Sanskritized vocabulary current in the Bengali language. The Sangsad in Dhaka had as one of its objectives the re-establishment of Punthi as the true literary heritage of Bengali Muslims. (Muhammad Ghulam Kabir, Changing Face of Nationalism: The Case of Bangladesh (Dhaka: University The Press Limited, 1995), p. 94.)
65
24. One also needs to mention here that the ultimate form that Pakistan would
take was probably not clear. The implications of movements of population in case of a division had clearly not been anticipated by many who accepted
the Partition in principle.
25. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932
1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1994]); Nitish Sengupta, Bengal Divided: The Unmaking of a Nation (1905-71) (New
Delhi: Viking (Penguin), 2007).
26. Sana Aiyar, ‘Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal: The Forgotten
Alternative of 1940-43. Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 6 (2008): 1213-41,
doi: 10.1017/S0026749X07003022.
27. Ahmad, Bengali Nationalism.
28. Aiyar,’Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal’: 1216.
29. Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War
(Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2011); Yasmin Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (New Delhi: Women Unlimited,
2011).
30. This is what Jinnah said at the public meeting organized for him on 21
March 1948:
Let me tell you in the clearest language that there is no truth that your normal life is going to be touched or disturbed as far as your Bengali language is concerned…. But let me make it clear to you that the State language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. (Jinnah, n.d., 86, quoted in Oldenburg, A Place Insufficiently Imagined!)
31. Sana Aiyar, whom I have discussed earlier, suggests that pluralism
need not be the forte of a form of politics that wishes to be seen as ‘secular! Fazlul Huq in politics and Intizar Husain in literature epitomize the acceptance of difference while operating within a religious idiom. Indeed Nehruvian secularism has had its critics in scholars such as Ayesha Jalal, Mukulika Banerjee (who has researched on the alternative political possibility provided by Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars before the Partition), and Joya Chatterji, among
others.
32. The term is used here in its denotative aspect and not in terms of the nega
tive connotation that it acquires specially in the context of Indian history
when used in conjunction with secularism 33. Ahmed Iliyas, Bihari: Bangladeshe Bharotiyo Obhibashi: Ek Bostunishtho
Bishleshon (Dhaka: Shamsul Haque Foundation, 2007).
66
24. One also needs to mention here that the ultimate form that Pakistan would
take was probably not clear. The implications of movements of population in case of a division had clearly not been anticipated by many who accepted
the Partition in principle.
25. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932
1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1994]); Nitish Sengupta, Bengal Divided: The Unmaking of a Nation (1905-71) (New
Delhi: Viking (Penguin), 2007).
26. Sana Aiyar, ‘Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal: The Forgotten
Alternative of 1940-43. Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 6 (2008): 1213-41
doi: 10.1017/S0026749X07003022.
27. Ahmad, Bengali Nationalism.
28. Aiyar,’Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal’: 1216.
29. Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War
(Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2011); Yasmin Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (New Delhi: Women Unlimited,
2011).
30. This is what Jinnah said at the public meeting organized for him on 21
March 1948:
Let me tell you in the clearest language that there is no truth that your normal life is going to be touched or disturbed as far as your Bengali language is concerned…. But let me make it clear to you that the State language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. (Jinnah, n.d., 86, quoted in Oldenburg, A Place Insufficiently Imagined!)
31. Sana Aiyar, whom I have discussed earlier, suggests that pluralism
need not be the forte of a form of politics that wishes to be seen as ‘secular! Fazlul Huq in politics and Intizar Husain in literature epitomize the acceptance of difference while operating within a religious idiom. Indeed Nehruvian secularism has had its critics in scholars such as Ayesha Jalal, Mukulika Banerjee (who has researched on the alternative political possibility provided by Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars before the Partition), and Joya Chatterji, among
others.
32. The term is used here in its denotative aspect and not in terms of the nega
tive connotation that it acquires specially in the context of Indian history
when used in conjunction with secularism 33. Ahmed Iliyas, Bihari: Bangladeshe Bharotiyo Obhibashi: Ek Bostunishtho
Bishleshon (Dhaka: Shamsul Haque Foundation, 2007).
67
43. Veena Das says it worries her that one has been unable to name that which
was lost when during the Partition men were transformed into monsters (Veena Das, ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain, Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 67-91, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027354, last accessed on 7 February 2017).
44. D.P. De calls S. Wazed Ali a ‘theist-rationalist and Amalendu De points
out his early advocacy of a ‘secular state’ where there would be a clean separation of state and religion and a linguistic division of provinces where
there would be religious intermixture.
45. This need not be an entirely valid critique since Badruddin Umar in his
article ‘Bangladesh: Intellectuals, Culture and Ruling Class (Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 20 (1999): 1175-6) attacks the Awami League’s sponsorship of madrassa education and its encouragement of right-wing political groups.
46. Quoted in Elora Shehabuddin, “Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh: Women,
Democracy and the Transformation of Islamist Politics, Islam in South Asia 42, nos 2-3 (2008): 577-603, doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X07003204.
47. The text of this essay has been included as an appendix in Muntasir
Mamun, Razakarer Mon (Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2001).
48. Gholam Morshed, Muktijuddho O Tarpor: Ekti Nirdoliyo Itihas (Dhaka:
Prothoma, 2010).
49. Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics:
1919–1947 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
50. This is to extract the maximum out of this particular point of Oldenburg’s.
Of course the reader would be aware that unresolved claims of the position of groups such as the Balochs and the Pathans of the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP), and the status of ‘Bihari’ Muslims and Hindus in an East Pakistan that had been carved out of Bengal—where the demand for separate Muslim statehood had a different history than that in northern India–never let the discourse be settled as a conflict
between only two clear sides to the debate.
51. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and the Partition
(New Delhi: Foundation Books, 1995).
52. In his studies of the Partition of 1947, Gyanendra Pandey has referred to
the limitations of a personality-based approach to the politics that led to the division of the country, an approach adopted by Ayesha Jalal, among others.
53. This he informed me in my interview with him in the office of the newspa
per Prothom Alo in January 2010. I have discussed the issue threadbare in Chapter 4 where I take up his novel and its place in the national discourse on memorialization.
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54. Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘The Absent Piece of Skin: Gendered, Racialized
and Territorial Inscriptions of Sexual Violence during the Bangladesh
War, Modern Asian Studies, 46, no. 6 (2012): 1572-1601.
55. A.F. Salahuddin Ahmad et al., Ekattorer Chithi (Dhaka: Prothoma, 2009),
p. 25 (all translations mine unless mentioned otherwise).
56. Ahmad et al., Ekattorer Chithi, p. 73.
57. Ahmad et al., Ekattorer Chithi, p. 14.
58. Ahmad et al., Ekattorer Chithi, pp. 30-1.
59. Ahmad et al., Ekattorer Chithi, p. 57.
60. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European
Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 (1995]).
61. The above is drawn from personal recollections of Nilima Ibrahim who
was a pioneer in the rehabilitation of violated women and the author of Ami Birangona Bolchhi, a collection of testimonies of raped women struggling for breathing space in a newly liberated Bangladesh. There is an instance where she recalls how a girl barely in her teens in the rehab centre, who had been raped by a Pakistani soldier, used to scream the moment she saw the author fearing that her newborn would be taken away from her (Nilima Ibrahim, Ami Birangona Bolchhi (Dhaka: Jagriti Prokashoni, 2010
(1996)]).
62. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 2007 (1989]),
p. 83.
63. A. Stiglmayer, ed., The War against Women in Bosnia Herzegovina, trans
lated by Marion Faber (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 84, quoted in John Gottschall, ‘Explaining Wartime Rape Journal of Sex Research 41, no. 2 (2004): 129–36.
64. Elisabeth Joan Wood, Militarizing Women’s Lives: When Soldiers Rape,
in Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader, edited by Uli Linke and Danielle Taana Smith (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2009), p. 251.
65. In the following chapter, the section on the testimonies of raped women
will explore the place of ‘war heroines’ in the nationalist imagination in Bangladesh. Even as we examine the processes of nation-building’ after the war and the notions of identity that emerge from enforced social invisibility of victims of rape in post-war Bangladesh, I maintain that the functions’ of sexual violence during war are not in the nature of an aberration. Rather the discourses of gender in ‘peace’ lay the ground for the meanings’ of rape that emerge from war and conflict (Linke and Smith, Cultures of Fear).
66. The Museum trustees have recently undertaken a project across the coun
try where school children are asked to talk to elders in their community in order to access their experiences of 1971, track people who may not have had a platform to tell their stories, and formalize them in short essays with their reflections, which are then sent to the museum. Most of them are then
69
printed and published in small booklets and the best stories get rewarded.
They are then made part of the oral history archives of the museum.
67. David Morris in his article About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral
Community’ says: “The power of genre reaches even beyond meaning to influence the very possibility of speech’ (p. 34). This observation is quoted here in order to illustrate that in the representation of the authentic history of the war in opposition to a collective propensity to forget due to various reasons, one encounters not only silences and voices that one needs to interpret in history and the present but also the limitations of genre. Hence, the work of remembrance shall always remain an unfinished task. The import of this statement shall be felt in the following chapter when we deal with memoirs told from various points of view. The constraints of genre also impinge upon authors according to their position and relationship(s) with the world (David B. Morris, ‘About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community, Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 25-45, available at http://www.
jstor.org/stable/20027352, last accessed on 7 February 2017).
68. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New Delhi: Penguin, 2006 [1977]).
69. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 295-6.
70. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 17.
70
Another Front, Another War
Women’s Memoirs and Testimonies of the Sexual Violence in 1971
In looking at the ways in which the war has been remembered
in Bangladesh, we shall begin with memoirs and testimonies of
women. In the section on testimonies, we shall confine ourselves to those provided by women who were victims of wartime rape. The reason for this choice needs some explanation. The memoirs under consideration are primarily of middle-class women, and while they were witness to the genocide’ and the war of liberation of 1971 and suffered bereavement, what emerges from their accounts are narratives of sacrifice. Unlike the ones who experienced victimhood directly, they had to fight for the survival and safety/well-being of the ones who were left behind while mourning the dead and the missing. In the accounts of those sexually violated, this discourse is ruptured. The women who were confined in camps meant for the army had hardly any sense of place and time, and unless some sympathetic sweeper or errand-person
71
brought details of the war, they were severed from the world outside. Even the sexually violated village women who tell their stories do not seem to dwell much on how they got through the days; they do not demonstrate any awareness of victory and freedom, a consciousness that appears powerfully in the memoirs, almost as a source of sustenance. They are more likely to talk about the struggles of their postwar lives. Also the attempt to subsume the experiences of war of the sexually violated women in a narrative of ‘sacrifice cannot be received on the same terms as the women memoirists. Equal parts visibility, shame, silence, and rejection remain motifs of the post-war lives of women who incurred the wounds of the nation on their bodies. A second reason that persuaded me on this choice is that the memoirs and the testimonies bring to us, in terms of experience, an important distinction. In the works of Jahanara Imam and Basanti Guhathakurta (the two memoirists who shall be discussed at length), we encounter the death of a son, a husband, or a brother. This loss is spoken of with pride. (One may argue that pride or honour psychologically substitutes loss.) While Jahanara Imam is interred in Dhaka in the section of a graveyard meant for the burial of intellectuals (her tombstone reads ‘Amma, Shahid Jononi Jahanara Imam, which would translate as ‘Amma, Mother of a Martyr, Jahanara Imam’), the national monument at Savar, mentioned in the first chapter, has a generic equivalent ‘Graveyard for Unknown Martyrs’ inscribed in marble (see Image 2.1). While memorials are interspersed across Dhaka University (there is one at the site of the carnage in Jagannath Hall), Rokeya Hall, a hostel for women, which on the day of the genocide witnessed both sexual violence and murder, lacks a monument in the university’s premises. The exhibits in the Liberation War Museum gloss over sexual violence while there is a passing mention that women fought alongside men both as caregivers and combatants in the war. In several testimonies that are included in Ami Birangona Bolchhi, women accuse the apathy of a memorial process that do not dedicate one street or monument to those who are deemed ‘heroines’ or ‘martyrs’ of a different genre of violence. One is, therefore, led to believe that a selective inclusion of testimonies of victims of gendered/sexual violence cannot be considered as belabouring a point. What it also does is set up an interesting juxtaposition, not only in terms of genre but also of different memories of the war and the nature of violence it inflicts. As an aside it must be said that this appears to be a motif running across wars–the exclusion of violated women from the memorial process is paralleled by their post-war invisibility, as Joshua S. Goldstein
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argues about comfort women’ kept by the Japanese soldiers during the Second World War in his study on war and gender.[1]
In the following chapter the testimonies and memoirs of military and non-combatant men shall be analysed. In the concluding section of the third chapter, we shall explicate the nature of the complexities that underlie the memories of a violent historical event. It shall also become more apparent how the ambivalence between the catharsis of victory won in combat and the dehumanization suffered as a consequence of the genocide and mass brutalization and rape is sustained in the process of nation building. There have been allegations made in academia about a Holocaust Industry and a Partition Industry and there is no reason why one cannot see a similar conspiracy of the market in a Liberation War Industry. Indeed, in the past few decades scores of memoirs have been published, some of them merely descriptive, appearing to look at what happened through a screen, unable to look at the other’s suffering as anything but a spectacle and eager to record one’s presence and establish oneself as witnesses to things that had come to pass. However, Hasan Azizul Haq’s ironic observation was of the following nature: ‘I didn’t know that in water a male corpse floats on its back and a female corpse on its belly. In death they are separated by this detail. This knowledge
73
came to me in 1971 towards the end of March-it must have been the 30th or the 29th His memories of the war are graphic and unsparing. His writing seethes in parts with remembered experience. Paul Fussell writing about the First World War isolates the ironic mode as one most frequently used by authors. The observation does have resonances for Haq’s text. He does not have a personal story of loss to tell and the above quote suggests the nature of the ‘knowledge’ he gained from the war. It will perhaps not be inopportune to compare it with an extract from a memoir written by Shahida Begum. During the war she heard the progress of the war on the radio and changed shelters after a local collaborator brought a Pakistani soldier to their home when her father was away and her mother was living in fear with her daughters, the fear of being noticed by the ‘hyenas. Her Juddhe Juddhe Noy Mas is elated with the liberation:
With a bit of joy, excitement and a little doubt, I went to sleep. I woke up with the sun-kissed dawn of a free country.I breathed in, filling myself with the open, unrestrained air.[4] These are the concluding lines of her memoir, providing a sort of climax to the motif of the journey, a personal one that is weaved into that of the nation simultaneously. The tone, as will be clear, is in sharp contrast to the memoirs and testimonies that shall be examined in the course of this chapter. The experience of Shahida Begum on the day of liberation and after was clearly not representative of the way the war came into the lives of other women. Feminist scholars such as Cynthia Enloe have alerted us to the tendency of masculinist discourses of war to generalize women as victims (and men as the militia), which diverts the gaze from exactly the ‘conditions and decisions that turned them into casualties in the service of nationalist mobilization. In contrast to Enloe’s pacifist critique, which sees the war as necessarily gendered in its constitution and legacy, in Bangladesh there has been a reaction against the portrayal of women as victims of war. This opposition has generally taken the form of arguing that women had also participated as combatants (Selina Hossain and Farida Akhtar), and combat’ is sought to be differentiated from an exclusive militarized notion and made to include those women who served wounded soldiers, tended to refugees, ran programmes on Swadhin Bangla Betar, helped the guerrillas by providing shelter, food, and clothes, and sent their loved ones to war. By this means the silences of the memorial process are sought to be addressed by critics
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who remain within the paradigms of a nationalist critique. This book, meanwhile, will argue that the task of making sense of 1971, irrespective of genre, remains unfinished and the call for justice will have to address hierarchies of gender for one in the acknowledgement of pain.
The Holocaust as an Analytical Framework for 1971
The two events of the Holocaust and the Partition of 1947 have become points of reference for history in Bangladesh. They have become, as it were, touchstones against which the magnitude of the barbarity of the human can be measured. The Holocaust in particular assumes metonymic significance in the minds of the survivors, witnesses, and historians of 1971, underscoring the impunity of the perpetrators, the trauma of the victims, and the legitimacy of the demand for the trial of war crimes while establishing a ‘historical continuity’ between the two epochs. In this vocabulary the dispensation of justice then becomes an unfinished business of a state and nation) while paradoxically attempting to be symbolic of the assertion of the rights of a civilized’, ‘democratic’ civil society against the arbitrary power of the state to use institutionalized violence against its own citizens. In making historical comparisons as secondary witnesses one needs to evaluate the nature of the event involved and the ethical parameters within which we may receive it.
One important distinction between the Holocaust and the events of 1971 was in their objectives. The army crackdown on 25 March and the large-scale mass murder of Bengalis was aimed at total repression and fixing the problem (which was, more than anything, a demand for a fair share of power) once and for all, in that it was believed that faced with the sheer exemplary nature of the violence, the mass democratic upsurge in erstwhile East Pakistan could be crushed once and for all. Unlike the Final Solution, it was not aimed at the total extermination of the Bengali race. This is not to suggest that racism was not a dominant strain in the psyche of the Pakistani (predominantly feudal Punjabi) ruling dispensation in the west. The stereotype of the lilylivered, effeminate, Hinduized Bengali Muslim was one of the colonial residues that persisted and intensified for reasons ranging from territorial distance between the two wings to the often stark, debilitating poverty in which the Bengali Muslim peasant lived. Nevertheless it will be worthwhile mentioning that the extermination of innocent Bengalis was aimed more at extinguishing opposition and ensuring submission
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to an authority that could only retain its fearfulness with the use of brute force and anchor its perpetuation in evoking the emotion of terror in its citizens. While Hitler’s Germany (and in the course of the war it turned out that several nations) wished to purify itself of Jews to realize its true destiny, Yahya Khan’s Pakistan disintegrated due to the reluctance to share power albeit with inferior coreligionists. The perfidy was felt even more strongly since less than three decades ago Pakistan had come into being as a land where the followers of Islam would be free to realize their destiny.
In analyzing the texts that memorialize 1971 and in looking for conceptual assistance from the Holocaust, we do not confuse different interpretive categories. In order to establish an ethical relationship with the pain of survivors, victims, and witnesses, suffering needs to be contextualized so that its complexities can be conceived and represented. Prior to 1971 and the eventual liberation of Bangladesh, there existed a narrative of struggle of the Bengali against the West Pakistani ‘Punjabi, and the position of the leaders on Urdu and Bengali was one of the first territories on which battle lines were drawn between coreligionists. As has been mentioned in the first chapter, the vocabulary of colonial’ domination of the east by the west had entered the public domain riding the Trojan horse of language. Though Bengali was incorporated as an official language in the short-lived constitution of 1956, it was not before lives had been lost in 1952 in police firing at protestors who had taken to the streets demanding the official recognition of Bengali as a state language, a language spoken by 54.6 per cent of the total population when Pakistan had come into existence. The threat to the language and culture united Bengalis of all religions, more significantly the Hindus and the Muslims, the former being the largest religious minority as also the tainted vestiges of an enemy nation. While the Awami League secured a majority in the general assembly in the elections held in 1970 by virtue of winning 160 of the 162 seats in East Pakistan, the second-largest party that emerged with a majority in West Pakistan (Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party) had 83 seats in all. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had earned the right to govern Pakistan in a democratic dispensation. However, Yahya Khan dallied and delayed the handing over of the reins of government to the party in majority fearing not only a shift in the centre of power but also citing the official reason that a handing over of power to Mujib would be tantamount to encouraging sedition. Since the six-point charter of demands that the Awami League had used as an election manifesto clearly advocated autonomy to try and rehabilitate
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And even when we were no longer hungry, there was still no one who thought of revenge. On the following day some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign.[11]
Revenge forms a substantial part of the rhetoric of war. And the Mukti Bahini, whether locked in frontal combat or guerrilla warfare, were retaliating. Conversely in lager-survivor Primo Levi there is reluctance to think about ‘home and family’ and indeed a relief to be able to forget them. In war, of course, heroism remains an inherent part of the narrative. And the hope of returning home as victors sustains the idealism of combatants. For the Jews their suffering was to a large extent inexplicable and even those who tried to take shelter in faith could discern no purpose, except for the Biblical idea of Jewish suffering and displacement. For the Bengalis the affliction was for the nation and then a war was won, a nationality gained, and victims could be called martyrs. A certain sense of affirmation is, therefore, visible in the memoirs of the war, and as I shall demonstrate later, they are largely nationalist in their orientation. They are not, one must clarify, thus reduced to mere adjuncts of mainstream historiography. Also, while in Primo Levi’s ghetto one survived by forgetting known rhythms of life before the incarceration, once out of it (as the extract from Wiesel suggests) one reacts by acknowledging the body, that which is alive. All this is perhaps sufficient to suggest that the memory of violence differs in the two events; the survivor witnesses see and talk of different things and in shaping the narratives of self, community, and nation contend with distinct traces of events.
Having said that, one cannot deny that the Holocaust has willy-nilly been transformed into a touchstone for measuring modern suffering. It redefined humanities by redefining the markers of human cruelty and human endurance-as also the ability of language to access that which was supposed to be unrepresentable-or questions of representation, justice, relationships, nation and nationalism, the outsider, and so on. Among other things it also gave shape to the Second World War, which was a point of rupture in Western philosophy, literature, and art. It opened up the question of history’; the Yale Oral History project and several other studies modelled on that provided historians with problems of methodology and genre which needed reflection. With the growth of Holocaust deniers, it appeared that memoirs and testimonies had gained in seriousness in the art of historiography if we
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are to look at the works of Dominick La Capra, James E. Young, and Anthony Kushner, to name a few.[12]
The memoirs that shall be discussed are testimonials of/to their time. Some of these texts, as the prefaces claim, are written after repeated goading by friends and publishers, perhaps as much to strengthen the archive of the war with authentic’ accounts as to work as a process of healing for those who suffered in bringing their experiences into the public domain. So while according to the demands/expectations of genre, memoirs, diaries, and testimonies are apart and indeed instructively so, they are treated here as testimonials bearing witness to events that had no parallel in the experiences of those who write or speak and in the unexceptionable fact that they may be considered, in their claims to truth, under the rubric of non-fiction. It is true that the revelations following the publication and successful reception of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memoirs of a Wartime Childhood-as a sensitive portrayal of the Final Solution and the Holocaust through the eyes of a childgave grist to the mills of deniers and critics who would insist on the Holocaust memoir as an artefact collapsible with all other writings that belong to this genre. [13] Copies of the author’s books were withdrawn when it was revealed by a Swiss journalist that the memoir was a hoax written by Bruno Dossekker under the constructed identity of Wilkomirski’, who had found the Holocaust a fit cathartic trope for his own traumatized childhood. Dossekker is believed to have said later that it was the readers’ business to either read it as a testimony or a memoir.[14] However, for those who would wish to retain categories such as fiction and non-fiction (even while acknowledging that these borders are being constantly redefined), it presented an opportunity, as Tony Kushner argues in his ‘Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation’:
It is crucial for scholars and others to be sensitive in their use, or absence of use, of Holocaust testimony. They have to take such testimony seriously, as revealing its own internal dynamics, which might mean revealing its strong mythologies and contradictions–the real nature of any life story. For scholars and others to lose that critical perspective is ultimately not to honor the survivors but to do them damage, as has become so apparent with the Wilkomirski Fragments affair.[15]
This approach to the core of a work through not merely its content but the possibilities of its form/genre is one that will perhaps allow us
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in this work to gently refute the claim of Ranabir Samaddar that literature in Bangladesh has become an appendage to the project of nation building. The thrust of his critique is not wide off the mark but the techniques of reading across disciplines and genres deeply influence how as witnesses far removed from the time of the event we access the attempts at memorialization by eyewitnesses. When we turn our attention to the memoirs written by women we shall try to listen to what Kushner calls their ‘internal dynamics. In doing so we will attempt to articulate their contradictions as they occupy critical space in the work of remembering 1971 in Bangladesh and at the same time tell us how it was to be both women and witnesses to war at the same time. By applying a framework that Kushner suggests in the context of Holocaust memoirs to read the experiences of women in war, are we confusing categories? First, it needs to be said that advocating such an approach, the critic has already argued for its general relevance—’strong mythologies and contradictions are the ‘real nature of any life story. Second, in the acutely gendered nature of experience of women in wartime, a close reading of texts of testimonial literature highlights the instability of paternalist post-war nationalism that lies at the heart of even what can be classed as nationalist memoirs. In the following section, we shall turn our attention to two iconic memoirs commemorative of the war and examine how in remembering the war and serving as memorials to it, they also retain the ambiguity of the nationalist endeavour, which is inseparable in Bangladesh from memories of a violent birth.
Martyr, Mother, and Memories of Unprecedented Cruelty: Ekattorer Dinguli and Female Agency. Jahanara Imam, it must be mentioned, spent her post-war years trying to bring to fruition the efforts of the war crimes tribunal (the Gono Adalot as it was referred to in Bangladesh, which held its first mock trial in 1992) and in addition to other things, to which we will have occasion to refer later, became an enduring symbol of the struggle of memory against forgetting and the attempt to define an ethical space from where the narrative of collective and individual sacrifice could be told. Imam authored another book for children with illustrations and material drawn out of the experiences that go into the making of her Ekattorer Dinguli (“Those
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Days of 1971′), which she named Bidai De Ma Ghurey Aashi (‘Bid Me Farewell, Mother, I’ll be Back”).
One must mention here that the appearance of testimonies, memoirs, and diaries was noticed around the mid-1980s. Jahanara Imam’s was one of the earliest works in this genre. No other work worth mentioning comes to mind in the fifteen intervening years. One can perhaps put that down to the invisible processes within reconstruction and coming to terms that a cataclysm brings in its train. However, it would not be incorrect to say that with the installation of army rule with Major Zia in 1977 and the length of time that Ershad ruled as the head of a military regime till 1990, works commemorative of the war were few and far between. The profusion may be dated to the mid-1990s and continuing up to the present.
The need to revisit loss and pain is made possible with interesting narrative strategies and it is clear that though written in parts as entries in a diary, it must have been given continuity and structure after the war. When Victoria Stewart turns her attention to war and trauma in women’s autobiography, she argues that in ‘less finished and polished autobiographical texts such as diaries the processes of transformation of psychic and social subjectivity of women by war is not merely represented but enacted through the narration of these events:[16] This point will serve as a framework for this section when we turn to the interpretive strategies of the authors as events happen to them. The denouement of this memoir is of a pattern similar to the rest of the texts under this section-it begins with the political build-up to 25 March 1971 and ends with the surrender of the West Pakistani forces. In the memoirs of the middle-class women, as I have had occasion to mention earlier, the historical event is accessed in the way that it impinges upon their lives and alters the topography of emotions, communication between members of a family, and the well-oiled patterns of a secure middle-class life. Imam’s text is evocative and Dhaka under siege comes alive; though mostly through the months the family is confined to their Dhanmondi residence with short visits outside during relaxation of curfew. The narrative (starting on 1 April 1971) begins with a slightly confused Imam driving through the city, struck by the sudden change:
I can see several cars on the streets today with Urdu nameplates. The sign boards of more than a few little shops on Elephant Road have been rewritten in Urdu. I asked at the shop-‘Why have you changed the signboard?’ The vendor answered, ‘From now on, at home, in shops and on
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cars, names and numbers have to be written in Urdu. It’s an order from above:[17]
Imam is aware that her mobility in the city with growing number of men in uniform is due to the fact that she is a woman and, therefore, harmless. Later days in April bring home the fragility of this perception as the position of the female witness here changes dramatically.
There is in Imam a strong belief in the legitimacy of the disgruntlement that leads to the war. However, for the city elite such as Jahanara Imam it was the violence upon language and culture that seemed unbearable. There is no nostalgia for the stillborn dream of Pakistan and in these texts history begins with the attack upon Bengali that was unleashed in Jinnah’s Pakistan. However, in the memoirs of the women under consideration here we are primarily concerned with the work done by them that then gains place in the memories of the events of the war, how women responded to the unforeseen at the level of interpretation, which then became the basis of further action. Also, if we look at testimonial literature as a sine qua non of historiography, narrative choices will surely determine how the phenomenon of nationalism, war, and its afterlife shall be received by posterity.
Of what appear as crucial moments of the work of the writers in the work of memory and mourning for loss, pain, and suffering incurred in genocide and war, ideas of agency and response are reconfigured and expanded:
30th April: We sat on the chair and waited in silence. Motahar Saheb said: Couldn’t find him anywhere. The corpses in the morgue had their intestines sticking out. The devils had first struck at the stomach. Then the other parts of the body.[18] I have never seen such a ghastly sight in my life. I don’t think that the police were able to recover all the bodies. The driver witnessed many being thrown into the water. It must have been too tiring to lift the bodies and hurl them or they would have heaved all of them.
Motahar Saheb closed his eyes,We said: You don’t talk of those things now, don’t even think of them. Have two Valium tablets tonight before you sleep. Saying this, we left.
That night we too needed a dose of Valium. It didn’t help. I would sit up scared after fits of drowsiness. [19]
The expression ‘I have never seen such a ghastly sight in my life’ is repeated by several authors in their diaries and memoirs in the context
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of the war, dead bodies strewn on the streets, bobbing and floating in the water, mutilated and bullet-ridden corpses, and naked bodies of women, in a transformation of what qualified as quotidian. At one level this is a statement of fact, of this being a spectacle without precedence and at the same time an appeal to the listeners to lend credence to his words. At another it is a response to what one has seen, a genuine addition to one’s knowledge of things human. It is an acknowledgement of the newness of this violence. What has happened to a victim is interpreted as a ‘sight, and the immediate recognition of the lack of a model (‘never seen’) is both a distancing of the witness from the victim and a reaching out to the listener, hoping that he/she can hear what is being said. To see is to know and since Imam and Sharif (her husband) do not see they do not know. One may or may not have read/heard of such things but the bewilderment at having been a witness strikes the reader. In the loneliness of his experience, Motahar Saheb searches for a catharsis in narration. The closing of his eyes could be a struggle to forget at the same time when the images have clearest visibility. To this the response of his listener–don’t talk, don’t think and take two Valium tablets’ -is practical in the sense that it arises perhaps from practice, from known ways of coping with trauma and grief. At night the listeners (Imam and her husband) cannot sleep. As the writer Imam says, the tranquilizers too do not work. If the purpose of the act was to terrorize, it also becomes the writing of the possibilities of humanity on the enemy’s body, the enemy who has no name or face (in the Levinasian sense) but only a language, sex, religion, or a political affiliation. For those who see/hear/read and remember, there is a constant translation in terms of antecedents as if the fact that something has occurred before would make it conceivable in the register of human action. In coping with the events, the passive’ witnesses draw resources at their disposal to respond to the consequences, both practical/visible and moral.
A shift away from the binary of oppression and resistance in reading processes of the remembering of and working through traumatic events such as a war might make us able to appreciate the moral choices and interpretive acts of women often considered to be passive victims or witnesses. These choices range from withholding alms to non-Bengali beggars in independent Bangladesh (as mentioned in the first chapter) to helping a Punjabi couple to safely depart from East Pakistan. It also includes what the mothers of Rumi and Azad do when confronted with sights and situations they have never seen or imagined in their lives. It means making a choice to savour the injury inflicted on the enemy by
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one’s own boys. It means in the case of Firdausi Priyobhashini to seek the assistance of a sympathetic Pakistani soldier to free someone in their custody even after being serially raped by others like him. The enumeration could go on. The commemoration of these moral choices is as much a legacy of the war as the Mirpur killing fields, the memorial to martyrs at Savar and the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka.
There is a strand of opinion in the aftermath of the Holocaust which holds that one should not interpret the event at all since it may function as a justification of what happened. However, as the critical endeavour of James E. Young shows us, the diaries and memoirs of the Holocaust reveal a constant, almost compulsive need to interpret and respond to a situation in the lives of the Jews that had never been thought, heard, or seen before. So it was, too, in the case of war survivors. It did take them more than a decade to bring forth their experiences into the public domain. Imam’s book was published in 1986, one of the earliest memoirs to have appeared. The interpretive impulse of victims and witnesses (primary or secondary) instructs not in the adequacy of the solution (“take two Valium tablets) but in the deepening of its affect (‘the inability to sleep’). To witness and then to interpret is a responsibility that is discharged not without pain. The act of reading the changed world of action and proceeding to act on what one has learnt illustrates the lived truth of a moment and is captured in words which are remembered after the exchange actually happens in real time. The ethical act of writing, which Imam for the most part of the book continues even in terrible circumstances, assigns the daily act of recording a place and meaning.
On 1 May when Ronju brings news of men being picked up by the Pakistani army and their collaborators and blood being drained out of their body in order to treat wounded soldiers, Imam finds it hard to believe. These men were then left to die on the streets. The doctor who informed Ronju could have been lying, she suggests. Her son Rumi is exasperated: ‘Ma, you disbelieve everything. You seem to always require proof. Sharif responded: ‘It is difficult to believe that such brutality can be devised? To this Rumi responds:
Why don’t you know what the Gestapo did to the inmates of the concentration camps in Hitler’s Germany? At least ten books on what happened during the Second World War are lying in the house [20]
The referential point is the Holocaust. The son does not require proof; it is almost as if he is saying that the limit (or lack of it) of human capacity
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to inflict violence was established in the lager and subsequent events in history should, ethically, have lost their ability to shock or induce disbelief. He too has not witnessed such human degradation first-hand. His lessons are learnt from books and narratives. The accusatory tone seems to suggest that after Auschwitz it is unethical/insensitive to question the veracity of brutal human acts. The Holocaust is cited as evidence of the viciousness of the Pakistani army. Imam and her husband, Sharif, isolate the instances as if the refutation of one horrifying ‘fact would assuage their fears. This denial is also evident in their visit to Motahar Saheb when they stop him from thinking or talking about what he had seen at the morgue or heard about what the Biharis’ had done. The reluctance to give immediate credence to/imagine graphic descriptions of murder and torture itself wishes to be a form of healing when it is happening elsewhere. When Imam’s sons and husband are picked up for interrogation, they undergo the fate of other offenders. The younger son Jami returns first but spares his mother the description of what his father and elder brother have been subjected to. Sharif returns a changed man excommunicated by his suffering from everyone and also the trauma of imagining what must have befallen his elder son Rumi who never returns. The only moments of relief for him become the losses sustained by the enemy in the war and the sounds of imminent freedom. He succumbs to his trauma before Bangladesh is liberated. It is significant here that now Imam wants to know and she forces her son to tell her what had happened in the interrogation camp after the three had been taken away. She demands that he tell her every single detail and Jami has to renege on his promise to his brother not to tell their mother anything at all. What we see here is a reversal of roles. The following conversation between Imam and Jami, a part of her memoir, will illustrate a necessary point.
Jami raised his head and looked straight into my eyes and said: We last saw Bhaiyya on 30th afternoon. Bhaiyya, Bodi Bhai and Chullu Bhai were then taken away from that small room in which we had been kept. I didn’t see him after that. When he was brought into our room he told us that all four of us should tell the army the same version of what had happened. A little later he moved away from Abbu (father) and came and sat close to me. He said then: ‘I have taken responsibility for the 25th. They hit me constantly to find out who else had taken part in the operation. I told them only about me and Bodi.
I asked him: What if they torture you further?
Bhaiyya said: ‘You know how tough I am. They have also understood by now. In order to break me they have tortured me in a way that has left
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no visible marks, no cuts, and no broken bones. But I feel as if my insides have crumbled to dust. Remember, Amma should never come to know of this:
Ma, you forced me to tell you. Bhaiyya had forbidden me.[21]
It is Imam’s reaction that needs to be taken note of.
I drew all my strength and hardened myself and told him: ‘I had to know. Do not fear, I will be alright! I got up and went to Rumi’s room. I opened the bookcase and extracted a book: Henri Alleg’s Jigyasa Rumi had given it to me a few days back, saying: ‘Amma, the one who is tortured, after a while loses all feeling. The ones who hear or read about it later shiver in fear. Rumi had told me a lot of other things; how to withstand torture when captured by the enemy; what strategies may be employed to make the pain bearable without giving in…. Rumi. Rumi. Could you endure their torture with these strategies? Do you really turn numb after the initial assault? Who will tell me what is happening to you now?[22]
The above instances taken together describe a noteworthy trajectory. The role reversal is clear. While the sons and the husband try to shield the mother from knowledge about their suffering, she, in a disavowal of her earlier denial, wants to confront the ‘fact. While the son (Rumi) is irritated when the mother questions rumours of inhuman torment inflicted on those arrested earlier and refers her to books in the house about the Holocaust, he wants to hide his pain from her when it comes home to them. The mother goes back to a book to find confirmation and perhaps succour that the agony stops after reaching a crescendo. The book in question is probably a Bengali translation of Alleg’s 1958 memoir La Question, written in French and translated into The Question in English. Alleg, an underground communist and a strident advocate of Algerian independence, was arrested by French paratroopers. He was confined and tortured in order to make him reveal the names of those who had sheltered him when he had been in hiding. Alleg managed to smuggle accounts of the torture he suffered when he was convalescing in a hospital. It had become a bestseller and contained not only an exposure of the brutalities but also insights into the nature of the victim’s experience, resilience, and methods of resistance.
In Ekattorer Dinguli a mother pays an ethical debt to her martyred son by opening the pages of the book. As a witness she is closest to the victim in this act that replaces her former escapism. The transition to an acknowledgement of the pain of being made victims, of being at
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the mercy of a force that has power over the life and death of someone dearly beloved is a movement toward an ethical memory. It disavows an uncritical language of heroism. It lacks the inevitability of glorification which presents its usefulness as a constituent of post-war politics. In another incident that Imam recounts in her memoir, we are acquainted with Azad’s mother, a close acquaintance of the family. Like Rumi, Azad also joins the war as a guerrilla fighter and is captured by the Pakistani army. Imam reproduces her conversation with Azad’s mother, entered in her work as having happened on 6 September.
Imam writes:
My heart was stuck in my throat. I asked her:
They allowed you to meet him?
No, sister. Just once. They used to bring him to Ramana police station, A man I know bribed the soldier and somehow managed to let me in. I spoke to him surreptitiously through the window.
What did you say to each other? How is he?
Oh Sister! They have beaten him mercilessly. I asked him, ‘Son, you haven’t revealed anyone’s name, have you?’ He said, ‘No ma, I haven’t. But Ma, if they keep hitting me? I am afraid I might. I told him: ‘Son, if they keep hurting you, harden yourself and try to bear it.[23]
What is striking in the above lines are two exchanges, both between mother and son. This dialogue between the two mothers is part of the mythology of 1971 as Anisul Hoque’s Maa will attest. Meanwhile, the reader is aware that both Imam and Azad’s mother have sought the intervention of divine prayers for their sons’ return. When their sons do not return and neither can news be obtained of what had become of them, both Imam and Azad’s mother take refuge in religion and pir sahebs (a term of description for a Sufi spiritual guide). They do the bidding of these spiritual leaders and on these visits, as Imam tells us, are acquainted with many more of those who believe that it is the Lord’s messenger who can bring their sons, husbands, and fathers back. In a few instances, Imam lets her mother take over as prayer sessions are held for Rumi which shuttle between mourning and hope for a miracle. These meetings at the holy shrine are also a collective expression of grief and acknowledgement of the loss that can never be made whole again and pre-war patterns of living that are no more. It reminds us of the families of those killed in the Second World War seeking solace in religion and séances and claims that the dead had spoken to them;[24] the cultural forms of consolation come into play in the aftermath of loss in
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1971. At the same time when Azad’s mother asks him to withstand the torture and not reveal the names of his accomplices, we are reminded of Jahanara Imam picking up Alleg’s book on torture. It is at this point that the gap between the actor/victim and the witness is breached. The women in these instances are not merely bearing the consequences of someone else’s actions. Through their responses they create a space of remembrance that includes not only the discourse of sacrifice and heroism that is eventually built around their sons but also a transformation of the meaning of the pain suffered by both parties in the exchange. While it is true that uncomplicated heroism or victimhood easily enters the language or mythology of nationalism in its preference for binaries, a consideration of the place of the witnesses and survivors in shaping the event and its memory may perhaps expand our associations with just war.
In the chapter entitled ‘Gendered Militaries, Gendered Wars’ incorporated in her work Gender and Nation, Nira Yuval-Davis suggests that while on the one hand there is recognition that war and the experiences that it gives rise to are gendered, there are differences among feminists on the way out of the impasse.[25] Some believe that the inclusion of women in the military and in combat roles is an alternative to the overwhelmingly masculine world of war, that this shall signify a vital change in the relationship of women to war and to their gender in general, given that for years women performed the work of caregiving, mourning, or were passive recipients of sexual violence. This is not to suggest that women warriors are a particularly recent phenomena; exploits of Amazon-like beings who challenged the limits of their sex are part of every folklore. However, modern war, its philosophies, and military organizations seemed to take the inappropriateness of women fighters for granted. Hence, at one level, it is possible (as Yuval-Davis does) to accept the validity of this argument. Joshua S. Goldstein, however, argues that it is difficult to sustain the argument that women are biologically less predisposed to war activity. The opponents of this theory, however, make the consequences of militarization of women their point of departure. They suggest that women with their very being perform a critique of war and its methods and to barter this role for a right to wield weapons is to move towards a more violent world compromising on pacifist solutions. This contention is complicated by what Imam, as a woman and a grieving other, records in her memoir. Throughout her work, which is strongly nationalist in nature, she assumes the role of a mother figure for all the freedom fighters. On Eid though her son Rumi
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is still officially in army custody and hope of his return is fast dimming, she cooks a sumptuous meal hoping that some guerrilla friends of her son might drop in. She agonizes over how the young boys would survive the winter in such conditions and buys warm clothes and socks to send to them. There is a sense of loss but this loss can only be interpreted as sacrifice and there is no sense in her work of the futility of war. There is pain at the heart of the work, there is a subtle yet effective critique of the gratuitous violence; it coexists with an angry thrill at the losses suffered by an enemy that had showed no remorse when it cracked down on hapless, innocent Bengalis. She recounts her excitement and her sleeplessness if the reassuring sounds of air raids and explosions undertaken by the Mukti Bahini and the Indian Air Force were missing even for a night. For those associating women and their wartime roles as naturally incompatible with the rhetoric of war, whether of the just or unjust variety, Imam’s Ekattorer Dinguli would present a problem. On 7 December 1971, Jahanara Imam gets news of India becoming the first country to recognize Bangladesh as an independent nation. It would be pertinent to record what she writes on that day after this information gives her immense relief and she wonders whether the ones who have died and had fought for this day would learn in their graves that their dreams had fructified. I will reproduce a translated version of her conversation with her younger son Jami.
With my head bowed over the newspaper, did I lose my consciousness? Jami came and picked me up. He wiped my tears and said: Do you know, mother, that the day is not far? Vey soon the Mukti Bahini will enter Dhaka. But the war is not going to be an easy one. The Pakistan army camp here is quite sturdy. Do you know that Ali and I will be deputed in Azimpur Colony? I have told father to give us two Chinese Sten guns. Do you remember when Bhaiyya after his operation last August had brought Sten guns home? Such beautiful weapons, small and shining, they were. I had liked the Chinese Sten guns the most. Bhaiyya was also crazy for one of those Chinese ones. Only Alam Bhai in that group had one. No one else did. Whenever Bhaiyya got a chance, he would fondle the weapon.[26]
Jami’s attempt to comfort his mother was successful. Imam stops crying. Jami does not get an opportunity to go to war; his father dies of heart seizure, probably an implosion of the torture during the interrogation and his inability to effectively mourn for his lost elder son. Jami seethes with anger and thirst for revenge but is rendered impotent by the circumstances and responsibility towards his bereaved mother. He
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broods constantly and Imam is anxious that it might result in grievous mental harm. When the war is over and Rumi’s companions in guerrilla warfare led by Major Haider come to pay their respects and share the grief of the family, Imam tells them:
Jami couldn’t join the war because of certain family problems. He is going mad. Put him to work. Major Haider responds: ‘Fine. From this moment you are my bodyguard. Come with me right now. I will issue a Sten in your name. Do you know how to drive?'[2]7
Jami stands upright and salutes Haider. And for the first time in months, Jami, hardly a sixteen-year-old at the time of the war, smiles.This is the point where Imam’s memoir concludes. Thus whereas feminists such as Sara Ruddick foreground the practice of motherhood as the clinching vote in favour of pacifism/anti-militaristic movements, in Imam’s text belief in a just war against oppression helps her place her loss in the context of love for the nation. Like his brother Rumi-who as we have encountered in the first chapter promises to tear into the Pakistanis with ‘like ferocity’ in a letter to his uncle–he is keen to join the war. What comes across also is the enthusiasm of a teenager for sleeklooking guns, obviously a hangover from childhood games with replicas. Goldstein’s study of reciprocal relation between war and gender-shaping clearly demonstrate that not only do combatants sometimes exhibit an almost erotic love for weapons but also that the gendered nature of play in peacetime addresses the possibility of war and seems to envision roles towards such an eventuality. Jami’s brother had achieved martyrdom by wielding weapons and killing the enemy and finally laying down his life.
The difficult life and the inhuman torture that his sibling might have faced as a guerrilla fighter clearly do not deter him. Major Haider’s offer to him also sounds like child’s play. In response to Imam’s request to ‘put him to work, the Major’s decision to issue Sten guns to him and his friend Ali sounds like a ruse to pacify a petulant child but in fact is meant to instil a sense of affirmative manhood, a sense of having done something in the cause of the nation. It is also relieves his experience of victimhood, and the fact that he will finally lay his hands on a real and much coveted Sten brings a smile to his lips. This episode illustrates the ways in which pre-war patterns of life known as a child and an adolescent and the masculine fantasy of vanquishing the enemy that is part of childhood games, legends, and myths co-exist with the state of emergency that the army crackdown and repression gave rise to in 1971.
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An anecdote shared by the Indian General J.F.R. Jacob in his memoirs of the 1971 war entitled Birth of a Nation runs thus:
Sometime later when I examined the revolver surrendered by Niazi, I realized that the weapon was not Niazi’s. It was a normal Army issue 38 revolver. The barrel was choked with muck and apparently had not been cleaned for some considerable time… This was not the personal weapon of a commanding general. More likely Niazi had taken it from one of his military policeman and surrendered it as his personal weapon. I could not help feeling that in his own way Niazi had got a little of his own back.[28]
The above tale highlights the ethics of war. While the World Wars and the magnitude of what had happened did much to create a moral community that continues to argue for the monstrousness of organized violence sanctioned by the state, wars did not stop nor did the emotions associated with winning or losing vanish. And as the instances cited from Jahanara Imam’s memoir suggests, it is possible that stories that cast a decisive vote in favour of war, martyrdom, and notions of heroism may cohere (without the awareness of any contradiction) with the most heart-wrenching ones that would seem to permanently impair war’s chances of gaining moral legitimacy. Therefore, to associate one gender or the other with certain ideals would be to simplify issues.
Imam is a proud and suffering mother as conjured by Ekattorer Dinguli. No wonder, therefore, that she was at the vanguard of a protracted battle against the war collaborators and criminals in post-war Bangladesh. She was recognized as a martyr after her death and reserved her space in nationalist iconography. Her house in Dhanmondi is now a memorial to the war of liberation having been turned into a museum. Ironically, one would perhaps note that the failure in her lifetime of the state to bring war criminals to trial and thus address the pain of a grieving mother would function as a sign of troubled nationalist mythology.
The Fugitive Woman and War Memories: The Case of Ekattorer Smriti There is a general recognition in Bangladesh among those documenting the history of women in the war of 1971 that women have been too glibly cast as passive receptors or witnesses of violence and hence it is almost an act of recovering some agency through memorializing the past, the writing of their memoirs. It is often seen as the authentication
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of what happened, a testimonial that doubles up as a social document since official history in Bangladesh has been straddled with imputations of ulterior motives while at the same time casting them as agents (mostly caregivers) in the form of mothers or wives. In the narratives and the language that they employ, there is a necessity to juxtapose the experiences of the nine months of struggle for survival, the living in fear, and the habitation of an idiom of loss with the heroic tales of valour of the freedom fighters in the war. The agency of those who took up arms seems to have a self-evident quality. The masculine world of bitter and difficult action and sheer physical toil as they walk interminable roads and wade through water day after day is relieved by the nourishment that they draw from their community who give them food and water and even shelter in their own humble homes.
However, these images of the ‘march towards freedom, the dream which lent strength and thrill to those fearsome days of violence, are for the reader relieved by what lay at the end of the tunnel, namely a sovereign nation. For one who witnesses the events of those nine months through texts of different genre, the knowledge of the future that lay in wait for the fighters tempers one’s reading. If nothing, the hurt sense of virility would surely be nursed back to health. The texts also throw up searching questions of our response to the narratives of the war, of war in general, the self-fashioning of the authors of the memoirs and their relation to the chain of events (post-liberation) that form the context of their writing as well as their publication.
When victory arrived, it was not what Basanti Guhathakurta had hoped to see. In her Ekattorer Smriti she writes:
In the nine months when war raged, those who could not come home as the atrocities of the army increased on the families of freedom fighters, now their anger and their thirst for vengeance on the collaborators had turned into an unforgiving resolve. Not confined to a particular place the accumulated hatred and anger had turned into retaliatory violence. Then every house had a muktijoddha, and each home had arms and ammunition and with all these they lunged at the local spies, in emulation of the Razakars, the Al-Badr and the Al-Samsh. The cunning had fled on the day of independence. The unlucky were left behind and became the target of mob fury. The boiling blood of the youth again shed streams of more blood. Freedom won with blood. The skies were clouded immediately after liberation.[29]
While most memoirs by women end with the freedom,[30] Guhathakurta takes an ethical look at the aftermath of the war where
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in the fury of triumph, anger, and revenge, blood was spilled. If freedom was won with blood, freedom had to be anointed with blood. The tone in Ekattorer Dinguli is also one of the enemies receiving their just deserts. The stance of the writer and the tone while talking about the war and her experiences strike the reader as having been chosen with the knowledge gained from the post-war years which have brought forth the complex meanings of the end of the war/attainment of freedom.
Guhathakurta symbolizes a voice that looks at the founding moment of Bangladesh with some misgiving and sadness at the engulfing violence; a critical voice, it needs to be mentioned. In terms of style it remains one of the most economic testimonials of 1971. Events are narrated in such a way that one may easily lose the perspective that this tale is being told by a witness who was in the vortex of events and in the nine months led a life of sheer vulnerability. Indeed Guhathakurta manages to integrate the voice of the witness with the voice of the victim, maintaining the balance throughout the text. The non-exceptionality of her suffering is captured in the form of spare sentences, a descriptive style, and rare moments of unguarded emotion. While in Imam the mother tries to remember the son’s pain in several ways, here the author observes and endures simultaneously. Eschewing isolating her pain, she is focused on survival, having to constantly change shelters within the city with her daughter. Guhathakurta’s memoir opens up a space of re-evaluation of the perception about women in wartime from within the wife-mother paradigm.
Since she had lost her husband to the bullets of the West Pakistani army and since her religious identity was that of a Hindu—therefore, to the enemy she was a direct bearer of the taint of an impure Pakistani—she was doubly vulnerable. There is a stern refusal to indulge in sentiment even when such an evocation of the past would have been far from gratuitous. She is not allowed to claim her husband’s body; it lies in bed no. 7 in the hospital where he dies of a gunshot wound. She is never allowed the comfort of knowing who took care of the corpse and whether it was cremated, as is the ritual for Hindus, or buried. It did not matter much to her, she says, even if he were interred since she learnt later that the West Pakistan soldiers had turned graveyards too into camps in order to monitor the movement of people and since Hindus consign the dead to flames, they kept a watch hoping to nab any Hindu who dared to perform such a ritual under the cover of darkness night for a loved one. Later she is handed a certificate that mentions pneumonia as the cause of death.
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In the memoirs by Mushtari Shafi (Swadhinota Amar Rokto Jhora Din3l), Imam and other women, the emotionalism of the narrative is strong. The affective element, I would argue, is a rhetorical choice at the same time that it may have been keenly felt, a choice influenced by the turn of events after the war where the registers of heroes and villains were merged. In the memoirs of Imam and Shafi, there is an emphasis on the pain and anguish that they experience as their loved ones are picked up for interrogation by the Pakistani soldiers and who do not return.
This is not a pain that immobilizes. Shafi along with her children leaves her home, has to frequently change addresses and ultimately becomes a refugee in India. Imam attends to her family at the same time that she ensures a constant supply of medicines and money for the guerrillas. Having said that, since these memoirs are written or at any rate completed as part of a process of memorialization of the war, which seemed to have been ignited by the compromised ideal of Bangladesh, they would be inevitably influenced by how the memories of loss stood transfigured in the light of the traumatic post-war history of Bangladesh.
In the months following the death of her husband, Guhathakurta and her daughter scurry for refuge from one place to another in Dhaka and are mostly received by Muslim friends who stake their lives by letting them stay. This passage of time is also marked by her struggle to procure her husband’s death certificate, pay his income tax dues, settle insurance claims, turn over to appropriate authorities the answer scripts of the university examination that were in his possession on the day that he was fatally shot, and return the books he had borrowed from the library. It is perhaps in this way that Basanti Guhathakurta performs the ritual of mourning for her husband, though his corpse may have gone missing from the hospital. The processes that are attendant on a death in unexceptionable times are enacted here with the sanctity of a holy rite. The stubborn thoroughness with which she approaches these tasks that must be discharged in the absence of her husband Professor Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta is her response to the trauma of helplessness in the face of his death and the events that followed. This strong eye on protecting what is left behind and the deferring of mourning may be one of the responses to grief that the text Ekattorer Smriti memorializes through the author-witness.
She has just returned alone for a brief moment to her ransacked home:
The value of these university answer sheets is even higher. When the shooting began Professor Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta had been examining
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these sheets. I decided that these had to be removed without any further deliberation. I opened the door and called out to the driver to arrange for a handcart. Just as I turned around to re-enter the house suddenly I noticed that the replica of a newborn Jesus in the arms of Mary next to the door had been broken, pierced by a bullet. From the spot where Professor Jyotirmoy had stood facing the Jagannath Hall and had been shot in the throat from the right, the bullet had travelled through him and the net on the verandah and had hit the statue in a straight line. My heart missed a beat. A Greek girl had given it to me as a token when I was leaving the school in London where I had been teaching. In a few seconds I calculated that given the angle from which they had shot my husband, the hole in the net and the position of the statue, it was a geometric straight line. Then according to the rules of carom the bullet would have rebounded and must be lying on my verandah. That is exactly what happened. I looked around and found it. I stood in the empty house, bullet in my palm. A shiver ran through me.[32]
Guhathakurta reconstructs the scene of the crime. In returning to her now-abandoned home, she returns to the place where one of the worst carnages of the genocide happened. Her husband was the proctor of Jagannath Hall, the men’s hostel of Dhaka University where the Pakistani army had struck on the night of the 25th. On her return she does not confront her grief. The pierced Jesus had received the bullet that had killed the professor. A shiver ran through me’ is perhaps the only line in her writing about her personal loss that betrays an affective quality. In her narration, the loss of her husband and her separation from her daughter Meghana—who is given shelter in a Christian orphanageappear in a taut, unsentimental style. When she is hiding in a hospital as a patient and the Catholic sisters bring Meghana to meet her, the exchange between the mother and daughter are narrated in a reportorial style. In grieving over the death of her ‘Dadababu’ (an affectionate yet respectful form of addressing an elder brother) their household help, Swarna, pays her debt through a chore that would have formed the rhythm of her duties in normal times as a servant.
I first crossed the huge hall downstairs and went to the verandah where I saw Swarna by the running tap washing the blood soaked mattress and bedspread where my husband had lain. I asked her: Why did you get these from the hospital? Swarna replied: These are Dadababu’s effects. I will keep them. Why, when someone dies at home do we throw all that belongs to him? So she scrubbed the mattress clean and dried it in the sun by turning it over throughout the day. I understood that she had
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to do something to bide the time. None of those whom she knew were around her with whom she could share her grief and perhaps lessen it. It was a strange place, the hospital and she could not bring herself to eat.[33]
Just like Basanti Guhathakurta, who insists on doing her duty for the dead, Swarna washes the sheets and mattresses of the hospital stained with the blood of her Dadababu. In the process they create what will become memories for them in the future while trying to defeat the debilitating and painful inertia of the present. The rituals of mourning here stand in, as it were, for the missing body that could not be cremated.
In the course of her memoir, the loss of familiar sights and sounds of the city is noted and mourned. Like human beings nature had also been trimmed to prepare for war and violent destruction. The spaces of living and growing up are transformed into strategic spots for the smooth entry of tanks and soldiers.
Now in 1971 the enemy wasn’t satiated with killing our loved ones, these demons have swallowed the beauty of our natural landscape; they have hacked the bougainvilleas and plucked them from their very roots. At the corner of the Hotel Intercon where the road turns a bend stood the serpent tree, one of just three in the city of Dhaka. They have stripped it bare. Why? Because it was impeding the movement of their tanks. They have trimmed the branches of the banyan trees that line the streets. It seems that tanks are going to be scripted into the battle inside the city very soon. That is why they have trampled upon the dark green foliage of Ramana.[34]
In concluding the narrative, Guhathakurta tries to reconcile herself to the loss of her husband’s body after the war is over, and the struggle to survive has also been suspended. That is why his body will become part of the elements. This reconciliation also seeks to generalize the loss, which makes it easier to accept it. So many could never be found; well-known intellectuals of Dhaka went missing two days before the surrender. The image of the blue seas and the blue skies is summoned to place the loss first within the nation (‘Let his heart remain in Bengal’) and then within the cosmos, creation itself. This is an image that belongs to the world of the memoir, and indeed hyperbolic images and emotions in this otherwise sparely written account seem to be the only way out of remembering loss without measure.
Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta has become part of the earth, the sky, the wind, the five elements of Bangladesh. Let his heart remain with the Bengalis
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of Bangladesh. Bengal’s Munir Choudhury and Moffazal could never be found. The corpses of many journalists and writers also disappeared. To find them the entire land of Bangladesh has to be tilled. In the rivers dead bodies do not remain in one place. Or is it that their skeletons have travelled out of Bangladesh and flowed into the sea? Has it merged in the blue seas under the blue skies:[35] Mourning in Guhathakurta’s text moves towards a fragile closure, marked not only by hyperbole but also by the interrogative. By inserting her dead husband into the visibly unchanging elements of nature, she tries in a narrative move to transcend the memories of a war that denied her husband and the family the conventional rites of bereavement. This nationalistic moment in her memoir, when her husband is consigned to eternity, is the way in which she seeks to sublimate her suffering and traumatic memories of the gratuitous violence in/of 1971.
Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman in their introductory chapter of Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones make an accurate observation when they say: ‘The incorporation of civilians into contemporary conflicts has been a highly gendered practice. It has occurred on the finest spatial scale: that of the human body, a site always marked by relations of gender, class, nation, race, caste, religion, and geographical location.[36]
The interrelatedness of the first and the second sections of this chapter needs to be emphasized. While the memoirists discussed in the earlier section are encouraged within a patriarchal setting to articulate their experiences in the service of memorial-nationalism, the embarrassment and controversy surrounding the women who fall in this section demonstrate the flipside of nationalist idolatry. While the term 200,000 women lost their honour for their country’ is an inalienable part of nationalist rhetoric in Bangladesh, one cannot say that the state has been willing/ able to restore to them their just place in post-war society. The spatial scale of the two sections is not identical though the subjects may share their gender.
This section shall begin with a close reading of the two most important works published in Bangladesh that includes testimonies of sexually violated women during the war; one being Ami Birangona Bolchhi, the first volume of which was published in 1998. Nilima Ibrahim who puts these narratives together with generous editorial intervention first met
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some of these women when in 1972 she had learnt that a few of them were planning to leave with the Pakistani army and along with two of her colleagues had persuaded the Indian army to allow them to interview the women. Later her association with the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre brought her into close proximity with the women who then become her testimonial subjects. The first thing that one notices about the seven testimonies that find place here is that they are more life stories than descriptions of incidents. It is apparent that Ibrahim has met most of these women more than once over the years, rather than listening to them for the first time. This listening makes a difference to what is heard. Another facet that needs to be remembered is the fact that in providing a chronological narrative, the experience of violence appears to be the beginning of a story or something that happened in the course of events rather than a point of rupture that can be seen in isolation. It is as if the nationalist discourse which influences Ibrahim’s methodology is the only way through which the women’s experiences of wartime rape can be re-introduced in a’new’ and ‘free’ country. In the second work Narir Ekattor O Juddhoporoborti Kothyokahini, the self-conscious narrative form first contextualizes the time and place of the interview/testimony. It then breaks the testimonies with questions that arrested the flow of thought and directed it, includes responses of the interviewer-researcher and the reception, and finally makes an attempt to accord the subject a position through which one can make surmises about not merely the testimony but the researcher’s observations as well. Both works operate with a principle of empathy, though it appears in different forms. In Ibrahim the author hankers for a particular pattern. In Narir Ekattor, with multiple editors and authors, the form encourages dialogue and unlike Ami Birangona Bolchhi its narrative structure does not appear closed. A recent work in anthropology, Nayanika Mookherjee’s Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 argues that in Bangladesh the issue of wartime rape is not simply a public secret.[37] In fact, Sheikh Mujib’s use of the word ‘birangona’ opened up the possibility of the women being visible in public as citizens to whom an ethical debt was owed by the nation. Nevertheless their post-war lives exemplify the fact of their continuity as a ‘spectral wound on the nation’s body, Even if they are reconciled with their families, as Mookherjee argues, khota (scorn) is part of their ordinary mode of being and living since the event. Yasmin Saikia’s Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh offers an insight into violence experienced by Bengali and Bihari’ women during the war.[38] It juxtaposes memories of both victim and perpetrator
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in a research into memories of the war that takes her to both Bangladesh and Pakistan
What is of real concern to women is to consider and question how their lack of recognition as human is made possible. The power of nation and masculinity in 1971 became impervious to the responsibility of protecting, but became the force of terror. There is thus a profound connection between the person acting or being acted upon, and the realm of structures created by human power and need, which turns against humanity time and again. Women’s testimonies question how power endowed to institutions triumphed over human beings who created it. [39]
In addition to trying to create an archive of 1971 as a historian, Saikia’s work explores the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation. When the contrite perpetrator looks at his acts during the war as a failure of insaniyat or humanity, he prompts the author to read this transformative act as an overture towards healing the deep fissures of South Asian history and politics.
With both perpetrators and victims in the autumn of their lives (unless we count the war babies) the dynamics of such a space of transnational reconciliation are hazy to say the least. Saikia’s work reminds one of Noor, a novel by Pakistani author Sorayya Khan (discussed in the final chapter) and Pierre Nora’s argument of history appropriating the domain of literature. Saikia’s discussion of huqquq-il-ibad (rights of individuals’) in the context of insaniyat appears to be more a response to contemporary global discourses on Islam and violence rather than of germinating from the context she seeks to illuminate.
The final section shall begin with the reproduction of the testimony, rather a monologue which I have translated from the original Bengali, of Firdausi Priyobhashini whom I had interviewed in January 2010. She is one of Bangladesh’s best-known artists and has placed her experience of rape during the war in the public domain. This shall be juxtaposed with Shaheen Akhtar’s chapter on Priyobhashini that appears in Narir Ekattor gleaned from her several interviews of the nature sculptor. This suggested itself as important because it shall point by implication to the work of memory and raise questions of genre and the telling of experiences of violence and suffering.
Karl J. Weintraub has the following observation to make about memoirs.
In memoir external fact is, indeed, translated into conscious experience, but the eye of the writer is focused less on the inner experience than on
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the external realm of fact. The interest of the memoirist is on the world of events, he records the memories of significant happenings; ideally he aspires to God’s all-seeing eye. It is indicative that the historian loves him the more he can trust the urge to be the objective witness, the objectoriented recorder. [40]
The memoirists whom we have dealt with in the earlier section do concentrate on external fact and it appears that gender makes a difference in what one recognizes as significant happenings. The women here record events of personal significance as they become intertwined with history and its violent upheavals. Impression/affect remains important in these writings and even as they act, they negotiate with changed meanings of preservation of those under their care. Writing a memoir is a deliberate attempt to render how one witnessed a significant event of history, Testimony on the other hand is primarily verbal, and ordinarily belongs to the realm of oral history. Being in most cases a face-to-face encounter, it includes in its form the listener who is visible. However, when made part of a larger narrative (as in the two works under consideration), it not only obeys its own internal dynamics but also the discourses in which the authors place it. Testimony focuses on the impact of the event on the victim/witness and her life. It would not be an exaggeration to provisionally say that while the memoir makes the event(s) the point of departure, testimony makes the individual the locus. The final section of this chapter in which is reproduced Priyobhashini’s testimony, I would dare say, is a testimony narrated like an autobiography, and juxtaposed with the preceding content raises issues of gender, genre and suffering, the self, and how a violent past witnessed is understood and remembered in writings that wish to be read as constitutive of the history of a nation. When in the final chapter we dwell in some detail on the relationship between fiction and testimony the impossibility of maintaining rigid borders of genre will be clear.
Voices of the Birangona: The (Un)Heroic Narrative of Wartime Rape
“The inheritors of the legacy of 1971 have felicitated these patriotic women as mothers. Nilima Ibrahim, writing on her inability to begin work on a promised third volume of testimonies, cites two reasons: (a) the energy that a subject of this nature wrenches out of her leaves her physically and mentally depleted; and (b) in comparison with the society
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of 1972 (which is when she collected the first testimonies of women) the present social order is growing increasingly conservative and does not hesitate to brand these women sinners. I wish to emphasize here that as witnesses of the present times when we access the past through the experiences of these characters, we must acknowledge that our need to revisit arises out of concerns and difficult questions raised by the present. This was evident in the much-cited study of Urvashi Butalia who was drawn by the violence against the Sikhs in 1984 to return to the ghosts of the Partition of 1947 as they inhabit the living. Prima facie there hardly appears to be a connection between 1984 and 1947. However, what it did was force a closer look at our own social milieu, one that would force open the past and articulate with the urgency of the present questions that are not easily accommodated into the task of nation building. And yet, as so many scholars have agreed, those dark times’ live on in the everyday social, economic, psychological, and moral dimensions. Butalia writes that her co-researcher Suresh Vaid opted out of the collaboration unable to listen to the often unnerving and gory details of violence and transformation of familiar patterns of life. The ability of certain times and spaces of history to invade our sensibilities and reposition our notions of objectivity, truth, and falsehood marks an useful point of departure into an examination of our relationship with events which wrecked others and did not touch our lives in any significant way. Nilima Ibrahim’s work stands in a different relationship with her times than Butalia’s or Menon and Bhasin’s. Indeed its motivations were different and the work that took the shape of The Other Side of Silence or Borders and Boundaries emerged almost fifty years after the Partition as a critique of official histories of the Partition of 1947. What we get to hear in Ami Birangona Bolchhi are voices of women who were raped (name changed, place missing, except those who no longer live in the territory of Bangladesh), some serially and over a period of months during the war. It is common knowledge that Sheikh Mujib had conferred the title of birangona’ on women who had been raped during the war. In her dedication to this work, Nilima Ibrahim writes: ‘To the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Begum Sheikh Fajilatunnesa Mujib and those women who for the sake of the freedom of Bangladesh were disgraced, insulted, humiliated and raped, those who have lost their husbands and sons, fathers and mothers and loved ones, ennobled by their sacrifice. While a generation like Ibrahim’s sought refuge in the notion of the ‘sacrifice that must be made for the nation it was the same sentiment/rhetoric that led to Mujib christening them birangonas. It would not be a case of over-reading to
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notice the (unintended) irony in including the raped women in the list of those who have laid down their lives (or were killed) for the sake of the nation. Rape indeed is a form of social death and it ensures exclusion from mythologies and folklore of nationalism in contrast to the others in the dedication who are seen to have gained immortality through their sacrifice. While the category of wartime rape victims has had a complex purchase and visibility in Bangladesh, as individuals they are strange war heroes of a pyrrhic victory.
Roughly translated as ‘heroine’ or in this context more accurately as ‘war heroine’, ‘birangona’ was a rhetorical inspiration meant to reintroduce these women into society which was apt to look at them as having lost their ‘honour!. Indeed whether it is Suraiya Begum or Sufia Kamal in her Ekattorer Diary they appear to read the pain and despondency of the women from within the narrative of such a loss.[ 41] And this is the loss that Sheikh Mujib confirms when he tries to compensate for it with the well-meaning title that he confers. This has to be seen as an act of a culture that treats the motherland as mother and vice versa, as the establishment of continuity with the patriarchal discourse of rape and its implications even if it is wartime rape. Even the repeated appeals to readers to desist from trying to identify these women and to leave them alone’ so that they can lead their normal lives is an attitude that assists official forgetting more than a personal one. Ironically the ‘T’ of the title of Ibrahim’s book is effaced.
The articulation of memories of violence belonging to a certain public event such as a war changes its shape and connotation according to the discourses in which they appear. In trying to access the truth of the past through testimonies, they often become burdened with what would appear extraneous but in fact can often require a reappraisal of the ethics of those who articulate it (victims, in most cases) and more importantly those who mediate in order to make these stories or voices visible. In the rigorously researched collection of testimonies Narir Ekattor 0 Juddhoporoborti Kothyokahini (‘Women’s 1971 and Post-war Stories’), the preface mentions how after the stories were put together, the editors had to fashion a change in the title by adding the latter part (when the original title was supposed to have been simply Narir Ekattor), for the afterlife of the traumatic events seemed to strongly intervene in the telling and rape could not mean an incident that need not be ‘raked up’; it defines the identity of the victim and her relationship to herself, her family, and the world at large, even if concealment is chosen as a way of dealing with the trauma. Ibrahim’s text narrativizes the victims’
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testimonies and generously writes herself into the space of the missing mother figure, an empathizer with the pain and anger of her subjects who reflects with sadness on the failure of society to receive them in their pre-war roles as sisters, daughters, wives, or mothers. There are instances where Ibrahim seems to consider it an ethical task to listen to the traumatic stories of characters whose names have been changed to avoid detection. When Tara Banerjee (Ms Nielsen at the time of the meeting, married to a Danish journalist and a citizen of Denmark by then) apologizes for not keeping track of time as she narrates her experiences late into the night, Ibrahim tells her, ‘We have not given you your due. You have a right to trouble me. The’we’ here is the nation (which was once Tara’s too) and Ibrahim becomes the symbol here as a solitary penitent soul. A strand that runs through the interviews is a clear distinction between the suffering victim and an unfeeling society, a people whose failure has been to do the work of mourning for the losses suffered in the war-loss, Ibrahim would say in this case, of the women’s izzat, home, and hearth. While Tara curses the nation that commits parricide (obviously a reference to the assassination of Sheikh Mujib) and dishonours its women, Meherjaan-who leaves for Pakistan as the wife of the Pathan guard of the camp in which she had been confined and raped with other women, rejecting the society that would call her a whore—says, in what Ibrahim makes the concluding lines of her testimony:
What if I could never hold the national flag, what if I will never live in my golden Bengal, I have fulfilled the dream of my father![42] When I visited Bangladesh I touched it as a victorious hero. This is my triumph, my pride, and a gift that I value over all others.[43]
However, when she looks at her passport which reads Wife of Layak Khan; Nationality: Pakistani, it is like a chip of wood that has pierced her being, a document of all that she has lost, her punishment for the use of subterfuge in self-defence. In a complex admixture of guilt and irony, Meherjaan leaves her brother’s house in Bangladesh asking the land of her birth for forgiveness for lacking the courage to die, for greedily choosing life over annihilation when she left. As quoted above, there is also a sense of pride which attends having settled questions of survival on her own-a self-owned house that both Meherjaan and her son are proud of and her work and at having earned the title of birangona. This feeling along with that of guilt and loss and the pain of rejection several
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years after the incident is in sharp contrast to the protest with which she begins her narrative:
I have realized above all that I am a woman. I have seen the drooling, bestial gaze of men, have endured torture and censure and have experienced my womanhood every moment over those eight months, felt that I am a woman. To be born a woman is a feat in itself; we can create life, breastfeed, carry it in our womb for ten months and nurture the child. Today I am also a mother. I may not have got the love of my husband, marital bliss, but I have earned a life of dignity.[44]
Raped and tortured by the Pakistani soldiers, she comes alive to a new meaning of being a woman. At our time in history, when the literature of rape (or wartime rape) revolves around questions of justice, meaning(s) of rape, interpretation of the violent experience by the victim, and ways of rethinking it in the face of social and institutional complicity. [45] when we have gained the critical tools of feminist analysis, it is important that in reading traumatic testimonies of rape (in this case during the war) emerging from conservative societies, we mark how the same ideals that lead to their erasure from national narratives and memorials to the war are affirmed as the markers of the greatness of women. The roles that these women imagine and hope to fulfil in testimony after testimony are that of lover, wife, or mother. At some level they become complicit in the same structures that excised their identity, but this collaboration is not one of equals. While some women struggle for it, some are saved by the generosity of those who recognize that it is, after all, not her fault, but a mere turn of fate and circumstance or the inability of men to protect their women since they went to war.[46] Tara reminds the author of the fifteen-year-old girl Marjeena in the rehabilitation camp who would not send her son out of the country as war babies were sought to be accommodated into families abroad, the same girl who would scream the moment she would see Ibrahim in the fear that her son would be stolen. Ibrahim tells her that this was the toughest job she had done in her life, forcibly sending Marjeena’s son to Sweden. Ibrahim tells Tara that when she spoke to the Prime Minister Mujib about the girl, he had said that those children whose fathers’ identities were unknown should be sent out of the country; that they should grow like human beings; and, moreover, that their polluted blood had no place in his Bangladesh. A lot of people had expressed the misgiving to Mujib that the infants might be converted to Christianity but he was not swayed by them and sent as many war babies out of the country as possible. Ibrahim does not
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reveal the names of her respondents. As a result they appear as characters in a narrative. Second, she appeals that no attempt be made to trace them, since they have fought hard with their memories and achieved a sense of resolution, as she perceives it, by returning to conventional social spaces.
Meherjaan’s choice to leave for an enemy country, by whose soldiers and agents she had been raped, was consequent on an experience of gender, an excruciatingly felt displacement due to war. She repudiates the request of the women social workers to stay back in her own country like several others, aware of the fact that reintegration into the ‘normal structures would be impossible and she was unwilling to suffer more ignominy. Anuradha, the wise and prophetic woman in Shaheen Akhtar’s novel Talaash calls it a kind of ‘revenge, a challenge thrown in the face of a ‘free’ nation that its women choose to leave with their defeated tormentors. Meherjaan marries Layak Khan, old enough to be her father, not out of love or attraction but because in his humaneness she sees an opportunity for a life away from the prison-house of guilt, pity, and calumny that her country would hand out to her as a birangona. In Pakistan though Layak Khan is unable to give her the recognition due to a wife since he has already married in the village, she is known in the city as a married woman, gives birth to a son, and works her way to a degree of educational and economic respectability. Meherjaan embraces the title of birangona as an honour. In the perpetrator’s Pakistan she finds the space, the anonymity that had become critical to her personhood after the traumatic event. Though she is pained at the entry of ‘Pakistani’ as her nationality in her passport, her rejection of her homeland militates against the narrative framework of Ibrahim’s text. Ibrahim obviously edits the testimonies, and the primacy given to a certain kind of rhetoric recurs in most of these stories replete with notions of nationalism and womanhood. The author, however, does not analyse or try to illuminate the structures that allow such victimization of women nor does she critique the use of rape as a weapon/instrument of waging war, a fact that emerges from these heart-rending stories. Located within the discourses of war, freedom, human rights, justice, post-war events, and reconstruction the stories do not address our understanding of the experience of gender in a post-war world. The war of liberation followed a genocide and churned new spaces for men and women to fill, at the same time leaving traces of violence, some of which, as Nayanika Mookherjee argues, ensure the silence of its victims by establishing it as a form of enablement, making it preferable to visibility.
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The Long Aftermath of Liberation and Sexual Violation This work aims at capturing the role of women in the war that led to the liberation of Bangladesh. It contains testimonies of survivors, whether of rape or of genocide that claimed their family members and loved ones and those who suffered heavy loss of property. Some fought in the war as part of Mukti Bahini. In all cases they were called upon to reconstruct their lives in a post-war society and their struggle led them to encounter their power and limits in a patriarchal society in a way that was different from if the war had never happened.
While concluding the testimony of Roison, a simple village woman who was raped during the war, Suraiya Begum writes:
The late evening light cast its shadow on Roison’s face. As I kept watching her it struck me that I had seen something like sadness, and in addition a kind of helplessness, something that woman has endured for centuries. Her body, her shame, her honour has been violated, against her will, at gun-point; this despair seemed to permeate Roison’s entire being.[47]
Roison’s account is not one of victory over circumstances, unless being alive is considered as heroic in itself. Some knew what had happened to her, some did not, but as she says, her life has been spent in ensuring the next meal, a hand-to-mouth existence which has submerged the horrific nature of her experiences, in that when she narrates them, those days seem distant and far away. She remembers times when she would be taunted, people would clap and abuse her as ‘touched by a Khan’ and advise her half-crazed husband to abandon her. But then few people were informed of the details and it gradually seemed to have slipped out of public memory, only one of her two daughters knew what had happened to her in 1971. She remembers the pain in her body and the fact that she had been given some medicine by her mother-in-law. The everyday and its demands gave her no respite during which she could reflect on the nature of what had happened to her. The sadness that Begum witnessed on her respondent’s visage is a remnant of the process of memorialization of the war, a remnant that persists beside all official and non-official discourses of sacrifice, martyrdom, and freedom. Unlike the narratives that find their way into Ami Birangona Bolchhi, in this work the focus is to understand the work of memory in recalling a past of violence and loss, how in living on after a traumatic event, women (re)interpret their circumstances and readjust to a ‘normal’ world. This process has also been mapped by Mookherjee, mentioned earlier. In all
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these cases whether they find a place in Nilima Ibrahim’s work or in Narir Ekattor, in Nayanika Mookherjee’s text or Yasmin Saikia’s, there is a basic desire for the recognition of pain. To some, in dire straits economically, it even acquired the form of a monetary compensation from the state. In the case of Roison and Masuda there is hardly a reference to sacrifice made for the nation. The angst is directed at the fact that their suffering continues as governments come and go. Masuda was one of the women who had been taken to Dhaka to testify at the Gono Adalot to bring war criminals to trial. She was not informed that she would have to testify but was assured of remuneration and later even that her son would be given a job and sent abroad if she attended the mock trial. The fact of her rape, which was unknown to her sons and several others, became public knowledge after the trial and not only did Masuda receive no compensation, her sons were denied work wherever they went. She tells Begum: ‘I feel ashamed to face even my children who were born out of my own womb. My sons rebuke me, they say, “Whoever asks you, you go and sing. Why didn’t you give us some poison?”
The narratives of Ami Birangona Bolchhi end where the author feels that there is a closure. When Meena marries a man who accepts her and she finally has a daughter by him, Ibrahim meets her at the wedding of her daughter by her first husband who had turned her out after she returned from the army camp after liberation. The daughter was adopted by her sister and was not aware of the truth of her parentage. This is what Ibrahim has to say with a sense of satisfaction: ‘Birangona Meena’s struggle had finally ended? In contrast women like Masuda had not been able to place their trauma in the scheme of things and it remained as raw as ever in its ability to shatter the normalcy of their lives. Elijaan Nesa has a similar story to tell. She was promised a house in Dhaka if she testified at the public trial. Now no one wanted to employ her husband and she could not get her daughter married due to poverty. Her neighbour Abul Hasan assured her that if he wrote about her experiences in the newspaper she would receive a monthly allowance and free treatment when she was pregnant. In lieu of her value as a witness to the barbarity of the enemy, and to further the cause of justice, Elijaan received a saucepan, three plates of silver, and a certain quantity of rice and pulses from different people who made use of her testimony. Her identity card of a war-affected person was taken away by the one who was in charge of the police station in those days. Duljaan Nesa comes out of her hiding place to save her husband when her mother-in-law calls her a whore and asks her to reveal herself to the soldiers. They then rape her in front of
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her husband who is tied to a tree. Duljaan Nesa had not revealed this fact to the researchers; they came to know of it later. They had thrust a bayonet into her left breast and since then she had never been able to feed her children. She still did not have a nakphul (a nose ring), the loss of which is supposed to denote loss of honour.[48] After Duljaan’s story attained prominence, her privacy was regularly invaded and she was led without knowledge of the implications to Dhaka for the public trial, in the hope of getting a job. She, of course, had received as remuneration a saucepan, two plates, and 5,000 taka with which she had bought a tin to act as a roof of her poverty-stricken habitat.[49] Momena Khatun, who was around thirteen years old in 1971 when she was sexually violated by the Pakistani army, and lived in the same area as three other women discussed earlier, refused to go to Dhaka to attend Gono Adalot proceedings. These women were all given a bath after the incident, a feature that is common in their memories of that day that altered their lives forever. A sense of betrayal is palpable as they had been emboldened to dream of a better life stimulated by those who listened to and recorded their stories. Those hopes haven’t materialized.
Yasmin Saikia’s attempt to write an account of the war detached from nationalist perspectives is an ambitious one. She reads the violence of the war in terms of a loss of ‘insaniyat, the capacity of making a choice. In her words:
The journey towards one’s humanity: becoming insan and gaining a repository of insaniyat are concomitant and evolving processes…. Men choosing to commit violence, women remind us, led to the loss of insaniyat.[50]
It is a methodology inspired by the prospect of healing and makes an impassioned plea for engaging the governments of Pakistan and Bangladesh:
It is time for the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh who were involved in creating and facilitating the violence to execute their national will and take responsibility for their crimes…. In the absence of the governments taking responsibility individuals cannot implement the principles of justice and forgiveness even if they have the tools to imagine the possibilities. At this juncture, the narrative testimony of men admitting to their crimes and states acknowledging their misuse of power against the vulnerable people discriminated on the basis of religion and ethnicity is the first challenge.[51]
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Prior to the observation given here Saikia argues that those who committed violence irrespective of their identity ‘must be identified by the state and society to seek women’s forgiveness: [52] Before we go on to our argument we perhaps need to dwell on how is it that the author conceptualizes forgiveness:
It must be actively sought by the perpetrator who must first acknowledge and recognise the full and holistic humanity of the victim and then appeal for forgiveness. To a large measure the reformed outlook of the perpetrator toward the victim is a necessary first step and must accompany the act of submission and humility in relation to the victim, seeking her compassion and forgiveness which she can refuse to grant. Religion encourages the victim to forgive the repentant rather than seek retribution … to help the perpetrator recover his humanity and fulfil his obligation of upholding the principle of huqquq al-ibad.[53]
While peace and reconciliation are needs of currently traumatized and fragmented societies, when we introduce them into discourses of violence we must be mindful of being seduced by the possibilities away from the practical and ethical/moral feasibility of such interpretive moves. The idea of moral reform of the state and individuals who commit acts under the sanction of the state perhaps informs most critiques of nationalism and modernity. However, before we accept the prescriptive framework of Saikia, it needs to be examined for its relevance to the situation that it tries to address. For one, when it comes to sexually violated women during the war of 1971, a large number were killed after torture, some took their own lives, still others died a social death so that they could lead ‘normal’ lives. Only a few have been made visible by feminist research. Indeed when Levi says that the real witnesses are all dead, it has particular resonance here. The act of forgiveness as it addresses individual suffering will address history too. The symbolism of the absolution which I believe is a critical part of Saikia’s imagination may appropriate the voices of those who may have been silenced forever, their pain and humiliation unknown to the world. It is with profound unease that we recall Jean Amery’s observation on ‘resentment and its place in politics:
What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals and intellect. The moral power to resist contains the protest, the revolt against reality, which is rational only as long as it is moral. The moral person demands annulment of time-in the particular case under
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question, by nailing the criminal to his deed. Thereby, and through a moral turning-back of the clock, the latter can join his victim as a fellow human being.[54]
In the language of reconciliation and forgiveness, a dominant strain is the necessity of coming to terms with the past and building on the future. The inability to forgive, as Amery shows us, may at times be a moral act. Unable to accept ‘impunity and the sight of Nazis in postwar Germany able to enjoy a healthy, reasonably unencumbered life, the author of At the Mind’s Limits: An Intellectual in Auschwitz prefers a lonely resentful silence; notions such as collective guilt appear unhelpful to him. Self-conscious, he says ‘I have placed my mean irreconcilability in the shining light of morals and morality:[55] Indeed the writer is acutely aware of the implications of such a point of view; he often wonders if the language of ‘forgive and forget’ is itself not the flipside of impotent vengefulness and more importantly for our purpose knows that the world’s ‘non-victims’ will not agree with him. In quoting Amery in the context of Saikia’s work where she highlights the need to recover the humanity of both victim and perpetrator, I wish to point towards the pitfalls of a work that combines an unfinished task of history (testimonies of sexually violated women in the current context) with a discourse of healing drawn from religio-cultural concepts. Her point about justice is, to be sure, unexceptionable; so is her exhortation that the countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh (many would be uncomfortable that they have been bracketed together without much explanation) should assume responsibility for their crimes. Such a move will encourage individuals to seek forgiveness and compassion from their victims.
In her final chapter Saikia tells us the story of the transformation of a couple of soldiers. Religion, she effectively argues, gives the woman the tool with which she may help her tormenter/rapist/torturer recover his humanity. Indeed, healing cannot happen (more so when it involves state intervention) without concomitant processes, which include the writing of an inclusive nationalism and the recognition of the complex legacy of the war beyond victory and defeat. In a Bangladesh where birangonas (one assumes that the term cannot encompass non-Bengali victims) even when they speak are far from assured dignity by their own’ society, state forgiveness and reconciliation can only be consequent on economic, social, and political justice. For many, as Ami Birangona Bolchhi, Narir Ekattor, and Saikia’s own work shows us, mere survival remains a problem. As far as the humanity of the perpetrator is concerned, the
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recognition of its importance shall remain a rare, isolated instance unless the systems and institutions that sustain the gendered nature of war (as the following chapter will show, a certain language of war is central to its sustenance) are subjected to an untiring critique. While a state rendering an apology for its crimes may be seen by many as an significant symbolic gesture, we cannot forget that it is only preferable to none at all. As Adolf Eichmann reminds us, often acceptance of moral guilt may be preferable to legal accountability. The implication of an official apology may often be little more than an official closure.
The Art of Testimony: The Case of Firdausi Priyobhashini In dealing with the testimony of Firdausi Priyobhashini we enter a different realm of memory and forgetting. It shook Shaheen Akhtar, the interviewer, enough for her to dedicate her novel Talaash to Firdausi, where she writes: ‘To Firdausi Priyobhashini, who led me to the inner sanctum through the hidden doors of the war of liberation. Akhtar first interviewed Priyobhashini as part of the Narir Ekattor project of the Ain-O-Salish Kendra in 1996. To make sense of 1971 in her life, Priyobhashini delved into her childhood, economic hardship, personal hazards, and society’s psyche. Akhtar was bewildered with her narration that sometimes seemed to run from everywhere to everywhere, recognizing no signposts, and getting caught in places. The listener was impelled towards her testimony that was recorded over many sessions and each time she returned with a link that did not seem to fit into the story. On her next visit this link would click into place and complete the chain; but again Akhtar would come back with newer questions. Priyobhashini’s written statement and the transcripts of the tapes would lie before Akhtar but she would be completely unable to even put a scratch on paper, until she wrote ‘Firdausi Priyobhashini: 1971’s Concealed Chapter’ in Narir Ekattor.
Shaheen Akhtar visited Firdausi Priyobhashini as part of the oral history project of Ain-O-Salish Kendra in the hope of gathering some facts from her about atrocities on women in the industrial town of Khalishpur during the war of liberation. She seems to have had an experience similar to mine; Priyobhashini’s monologue rolled into hours, long after the click in the dictaphone had marked the end of the last
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of my cassettes. Her narrative did not begin and end with the violence, often unimaginable and nauseous, that she had lived through during the war. It ran criss-cross her entire life, it was the case of a story invading a life, culling from its deep unwieldy corners memories that could only be beaten into shape with some violence. This was not a case of simple addition; one could not add her life to that of women like Jolekha[56] and Roison as another victim of rape, and sit back with the feeling of having appended another life that was transformed forever during the war of 1971. Like Akhtar says there is not much similarity between their lives and hers, apart from the bare fact of rape itself. Throughout her interview, Priyobhashini kept referring to circumstances, her family life, she being the sole breadwinner, the dangers she faced, and the kind of understanding people around her held of her situation. Unlike the testimonies of other victims of war rape who chose to speak to the researchers, there was no linearity to Priyobhashini’s testimony. On their second meeting Akhtar realized that the colour of the events kept changing, things could be perceived in a different light and yet remain disjointed enough to slide through one’s grasp. Her witnessing of the war in the form of the brushfire of fourteen people, destitution, loneliness, and rape does not begin with the war and end with her marrying the man she loves. Nor does it merge with questions of compensation and poverty. It certainly does not, like the memoirs, end with the war. Of course she had a perspective from which to begin her monologue. She was peering at me (a look that seemed to be suspended between curiosity and foreknowledge) when I related the parameters of my interest. I had taken her art as a point of convergence of all my questions and she frankly admitted that she was suspicious that like most others, I would want to know what actually happened to her during 1971. I remember being unable to shrug off the feeling of the literariness’ of her monologue when I interviewed her. Reluctant to easily apply terms of literature to a narrative like hers, wondering whether what I heard was only a manifestation of my training as a student of literature, I agonized over whether I would end up subsuming what she said in an argument that would inflict gratuitous aggression on my ‘material. In some way perhaps it is inevitable. Yet for purposes of coherence it is necessary to interpolate, put together, and in a significant way, in changing the form in which she tells her life, flit between the biographical and the autobiographical modes.
Priyobhashini was the eldest of her siblings. Her mother had remarried after being divorced from her father and had children by her second husband, who was by now dead. At the time the war found her, she was
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the only breadwinner in a family that had three sons of her own by her first husband. Her mother and her siblings were also dependent on her. After 25 March 1971, her ex-husband joined the Liberation War and left their three sons with their paternal grandmother. Firdausi was twenty-five then, having joined work around the age of twenty. In the 1960s when East Pakistan was redefining its political philosophy and reinterpreting the legacy of 1947, issues of livelihood perhaps kept her. away from the mass uprising for self-determination and against what was perceived as colonial oppression from West Pakistan. Khalishpur, being an area dominated by ‘Bihari’ collaborators of a marauding Pakistani army, witnessed a mass exodus of Bengalis and non-aggressive ‘Biharis: Priyobhashini’s then friend and colleague, and later husband, Ehsaanullah Ahmed would visit them in their one-storeyed rented house every evening. A few days into the mayhem, he stopped coming fearing for both his reputation and life since he would be targeted by ‘Biharis’ as word was out that he had helped the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) in making bombs before the war broke out. For a while Priyobhashini and her family took shelter at her maternal grandmother’s place but soon they returned to the insecurity of Khalishpur unable to find adequate shelter. Ehsaanullah turned up and warned them of the danger of living unprotected (Priyobhashini’s family was devoid of any male member) and advised them to leave. Priyobhashini packed her mother and siblings off to another destination with money borrowed from a ‘Bihari’ neighbour and stayed back hoping to straighten things rather than blindly running from one place to another.
Firdausi’s past then caught up with her. She was turned out of that house by people who decreed that she was charitraheen, a characterless woman, who would move around with a man who was not her husband. Akhtar steps in at this point, filling up the gap, telling the reader how as a single woman unprotected by a patriarchal figure Priyobhashini would often have to face obscene and unsolicited sexual advances at her workplace and had to give up her shelter since she had acquired a reputation of one with loose morals. What followed was not a tale of heroism in the language and form that we are conditioned to understand. Not certainly of the birangona that the testimonies of Nilima Ibrahim’s Ami Birangona Bolchhi etch for us. Those seven women do not present any serious epistemological challenge for the latter-day witness, whether it is the researcher or the reader. They often profoundly disturb us but the universe in which they are cast is one in which their struggle and suffering is glorified and they being victims’ in a more identifiable sense
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can be elevated into an official discourse of having sacrificed their honour for the nation more easily. In formulating her response to situations (and Akhtar writes a deeply sympathetic account), a history of the war was taking shape and its memories sought a habitat between her past, present and future. In her untidy narration in the essay being discussed and the translation of my encounter with her, which will follow), the memoirs and testimonies of women who we have dealt with so far are opened up. Surely, to grasp the experience of war in terms of death, loss, and rape we need to approach the post-war lives of these women in the context of their pasts in order to learn how they confronted their experiences and to appreciate the nuances of their representation of those anomalous times. As Shaheen Akhtar’s piece tells us, Priyobhashini was sexually exploited by her seniors and juniors and was made to entertain a Pakistani naval officer. She also used her proximity to the officer to obtain the release of a detenu or information about those missing. In the aftermath of the war, she was branded a prostitute and collaborator and humiliated by family and neighbours.
The following is a translated transcript of her testimony recorded by me, prefaced with a few preliminary comments.
Priyobhashini It was an evening in January 2010 in the retreating winter of Dhaka that I met Firdausi Priyobhashini. I took a rickshaw to her Dhanmondi residence and was accosted at the gate by a young man who, frankly, looked very stern and appeared not to have heard me when I said that I wished to meet her, but led me like a zombie towards an open door on a portico. It turned out to be her son, who helped her with her work of sculpting. The room where we sat was replete with trophies and works of art, objects sculpted out of nature. I had not read Shaheen Akhtar’s rendition of her testimony then, it was only later that I came upon Narir Ekattor. I was told that she would be an important person to meet and I must confess that I knew little about her till I sought her out on Google a couple of days before the interview. On the eve of my meeting with her, I was nervous. I now knew that she had been a victim of sexual violence and rape during the war and that she had by now given her statement on several forums including the Tokyo Conference. It puzzled me how a woman who had worked as a receptionist in a jute mill during the war could suddenly have discovered the beauty of natural forms. What was it that sent her on that search: True she had gone through such
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experiences that living would perhaps ask of her a little more meaning and significance than if all this had never happened. I was wary of asking her what had happened to her, for by now I surmised it would either have become a mechanical exercise or it could hurt that her life had become so intertwined with the traumatic events that her value lay in her being a witness and being lacerated again and again. A few people I spoke to also seemed cynical about her eagerness to share her past.
A few months after this interview I found that Shaheen Akhtar had concluded her essay on Priyobhashini with these lines:
Priyobhashini thought to herself, no more people. She would wipe human beings off the slate of her world. She would learn to live by not taking them into account. I do not know how far she has been able to do that, but she does feel that she has found an alternative shelter in her craft for now.[58]
We are drawn to receive her narrative through childhood and growing up—the oppressive father figure, the talented, scared mother, adolescence, love, and the insistence that she never longed for a sexual fulfilment in any of the encounters. To love was enough, to feel the grace and beauty of those she loved it was an escape from the drudgery of household chores and a fearsome patriarch, from carrying her younger siblings on her lap, from her inability to break into the charmed circle of elder’s conversations and from being always pinched for money. The cooling off of her marriage (at the age of fifteen), her falling in love again with a social superior whom she eventually married after the war, and the gradual disappearance of the preponderance of her family were significant points. Her allusions to songs she had heard or poetry she has read in narrating her story is noteworthy. It is not always that she kept in mind what my questions were, and the narrative is also a repository of unsolicited responses and unasked questions. Unlike those engaged in constructing oral histories of critical historical events, my task was more anchored in the interpretive aspect of events, how the war is remembered and accessed from the realities of what happened thereafter, and the belief that the past is a place that arises out of our present and is not a land that we may travel to and travel light.
Innumerable people, when we go out we never see the same ones every day, we can never approximate the Creator but there is perhaps a sense of art and creativity in each one of us. A child’s consciousness is like the leaves of a tree, its flowers, and then they grow, they understand things.
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They grow on their own, from their own nature even if they are nursed. Isn’t it amazing, the fact that milk appears in the mother’s breast only after a child is born? Since childhood I always felt like a lover. In those days people started talking of marriage from the time that we turned nine of ten years of age, proposals would come and I would think … it would be nice to be married, I’ll be free. I’ll count the money and give it to my husband before he would go to the market. I would wonder … Mother gets so much money, why doesn’t she buy herself a soan papdi:[59] When I will have the money I will go the market and buy myself the biggest and the largest soan papdi and I wouldn’t share it with anybody. Clouds fascinated me, when it would rain and the clouds would pass by no one could keep me confined to the house. The feeling of love, not the fact that I was in love with a particular person, nor would I want anyone to come close to me or touch me or kiss me, I couldn’t see people but felt like a lover all the time. I would suddenly feel alone and would read Rabindranath’s poetry, recite them, the pain and laughter of human beings, Sukanta Bhattacharya’s words would live inside me all the time. I was a celebrated child, did not try to be one, but, for instance, never came second in recitation and things like that. In my movements there was a kind of intoxication, a certain kind of recklessness, a kind of innocence which would often lead me to situations where I could have been violated or raped. I wasn’t raped but went close enough and came back from the edge of such possibilities. Like you see, in Taslima Nasrin (she is a close friend of mine) she suggests how our childhood is open, unprotected, and insecure and none of us are safe in front of men, of whatever age they might be. Some talk about it, some don’t but all are exposed to the fearfulness of it. When we grow up we can resist but when we are young we become trapped. I think my awareness of art was awakened because at home we would often have cultural evenings and sessions, I find it difficult to believe that without knowing Rabindranath one can be a true human. If one can understand even one song of Tagore’s and sing along, it would be enough to create human beings … however big the earth is, doesn’t matter. I don’t think my parents understood each other very well, my mother was oppressed, my father … he belonged to an aristocratic family, always wanted to dominate my mother and adhere to tradition … he was a college teacher, an educator but we were scared of him, I could never deal with him or learn from him. When I grew up I learnt that a lot of things he did were right … but his oppressiveness is something I still regret. I think I was seven when I was so angry that I stopped talking to him. My mother used to sing very well, would hide it from him. She never became famous but she kept the desire to be connected. My mother had worked with the accused of the Chittagong Armoury Theft, she was a friend of Preetilata. She would read books late into the night by
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candlelight or by the hurricane lamp. But my father could not stand the fact that even after such hardship she could find time to read. He was a knowledgeable person, people loved him. He was a dancer in the Bulbul Choudhary troupe. That was true of both the maternal and paternal sides of my family. My aunts and uncles could sing and dance. The discipline in our family was perhaps a bit too much. I grew up among my aunts but every moment I remember looking for a bit more freedom. When the elders would be talking among themselves if we knew it was something we weren’t supposed to hear we would walk away or if they caught me staring like a fool at them unable to grasp what was happening then I would be sent off (the phone rings. Priyobhashini raises her voice, Don’t call me if anyone asks for me. I am working’).
My mother would pester me to sing. We lived six miles away from Khulna, it was a suburb … [I interrupted. I asked: ‘Were you the only child?’)
No. I had seven siblings. I was the eldest of eight children. The place where my father used to teach was a romantic one. It had lakes, meadows, trees, fruits, and flowers in abundance. Childhood needs something to feed on. Growing up cannot happen solely in schools or through the injunction of your elders. Nature is a definite need. We need to be able to identify the seasons since these things are deeply connected to our inner being. I got that in great profusion. The consciousness of an artist keeps collecting inside. I would talk to the clouds and tell myself stories; there goes the prince, the princess, the soldiers, Neelkamal, Laalkamal wake up. I would help mother in her domestic chores. When I couldn’t stand properly I had to carry one of my brothers in my lap. I was so young, My father’s students were very fond of me; I wasn’t free, had no playmates and had to look after my brothers and sisters. Every half an hour a shuttle train used to come from Khulna, students going and coming, how beautiful it was, students in their white pyjamas and check-shirts getting off and I would run to them. I had seen Bibhuti Bhushan’s novel Pather Pachali when I was eleven years old. These experiences occurred before I had seen that book. I found myself similar to Apu and Durga, their love for the sound of the train. I would whistle along with the engine … cooh … and the trees and flowers by the railway line. I would run through the fields and the cotton would stick to my eyes and face, start itching and wouldn’t come off, and the students would pull my ear and tease me and laugh at me. Those were the games I played. My brothers and sisters wouldn’t let me play, and when my mother was pregnant again, my tears wouldn’t stop and I would cry all day worried that this year too I would have to carry a child around the house in my lap. Like I’ve said before I always felt as if I was in love, I didn’t know with whom or with what. I would imagine getting married and once I did I would be free,
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spend money and order people around. There was a culture at home that domestic workers could not be commanded by us, they would only do the bidding of the elders and I would tell myself that once I became a mother I could direct others. My father was a good comedian, a teacher, but that belonged to his life outside. He was a good organizer, a good cook, could speak fluent English, Persian, and Bangla, couldn’t write much, it was difficult to find publishers and in those days, we had no computers. But he was merciless.[60] when he got angry. He used to hit me often and cruelly. Sometimes I still wonder how I survived. If you hit kids even once these days they make you feel as if they will die or at least need to be hospitalized. He used to take off his belt and hit us, not just me but all my siblings. I couldn’t accept that. But he was a very honest man. He would get the question papers of the merit test home, he was the tabulator and I was an examinee. He would lock the papers up in a room and if my mother would ask him about the keys he would say he was taking the keys with him. He wasn’t sure my mother wouldn’t indulge her daughter by showing those papers to me. I didn’t like it then and I couldn’t stand him, it was his cruelty that had overshadowed all other possibilities of our relationship. Once in a blue moon (Priyobhashini’s expression) he would cook for us, he was good at it and sometimes even tell me affectionately that we will sleep together. But I would hide myself and cry at the thought of having to sleep with him; I couldn’t reach the other side of him. He would perform roles of women in plays and direct them. In the afternoons the wives of other teachers would come over to our place and my mother would clandestinely perform Chandalika but we couldn’t share these moments with him. I remember Vinod master who was appointed as my tutor at home used to wear a short kurta and teach me and my younger brother under the tree. My mother would get tea for him in a nice cup and sometimes biscuits or puffed rice. One day we thought he was sleeping as usual and tried to poke his nostrils with a blade of grass but it later turned out that he had died and I was only seven then…. I remember running to the graveyard and the man there would yell at me and tell me, run away for the place was full of ghosts, but what transfixed me was the music of the wind in friction with the abandoned skulls, the breeze hitting those skulls and either passing through or unable to pierce them returning. It was an incredible feeling.
One day I remember we were all playing and I saw a handsome man. We were playing with dolls and he found our conversation quite amusing, He had come from Khulna to my father who would become his private tutor and would give me a piece of chocolate every day. I remember I was twelve then. One day when he didn’t turn up I felt so sad that I couldn’t play anymore. I went off alone to see the clouds; it was a nice feeling whenever he would come, almost a kind of romance. His name was
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Mana. He used to say, ‘You are so pretty, a very nice girl, why don’t you come to my room in Ashok Hostel?’ But you know in those days it was impossible. And I did not want to say nice things to him or touch him. If I could see the light through his window, the door was always shut, it would be enough. I wouldn’t yearn to catch a glimpse of him. Life felt easy, I wouldn’t brood if someone scolded me or feel lonely. Three siblings were born in a span of two and a half years and when we would go out people would remark: See, that’s Professor Hoque’s regiment. I didn’t know what regiment meant then but I sensed that they were laughing at us. Now I like to live alone. In married life, your husband cannot be the only friend. He becomes someone towards whom you are responsible. You should never marry a friend, that’s a thing that I have learnt. Although the person I have married is so handsome, so good looking that when I see him I forgive him all his faults. I used to be very attracted to his beauty, his eloquence and his manliness … but of course deep inside he isn’t all male … I wanted to be like him. I am a woman but I thought people should be like that. He is fifteen years older but I did not let him dominate me, I did what I thought was right. I spoke my mind. I talked to him as an equal. He often speaks to me in English, I am not very good at it but I try. Sometimes when we have fought for five minutes, I pick up a cassette of some piece of music I love and we go on a long drive. He doesn’t remember fights. When Mana Bhai used to come for tuitions I told my mother to give him something nice to eat. And immediately I would feel shy, what if my mother sensed what I felt, at that age it would have been difficult to explain. Moonlight would inundate our verandah; would I break the moonlight, walking towards Ashok Hostel. The rich boys lived there. He would come down in a silk kurta with a nice ring on his finger. Then one day the light from his window went missing. My heart went cold. I had been coping with the troubles and drudgery with that one little feeling. I still cannot forget the window and the light that used to glow from there. My maternal grandfather had been elected speaker from the United Front.
When was this? I asked. It was 1957. I went with him and was received with garlands. I remember the butter toasts. Hospitality was still British style. My aunts would often comment on my clothes, ask me to wear an ‘orna’ to cover myself. It embarrassed me, and it encouraged outsiders too. I disliked that. I had received around four/five love letters by then. I wouldn’t reply for in those times if you replied you would have to marry the person. I was scared and angry with the staunch disciplining and I made up my mind to reply to the next love letter I got, no matter what. I felt imprisoned and couldn’t see their affection. I made a mistake and married this boy when I was only fifteen. My grandfather called me and said, ‘You can
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be friends but don’t marry. No one will utter a word against you. If you like someone, ask him to have tea with you, but don’t marry him! … But I did marry. And at night by the moonlight with Talat Mehmood’s songs playing in the background he gave me something which looked very nice, it sparkled. When I held it aloft I saw it was a burqa. I protested, and in due course was forced to wear it. For ten years there was no peace. I had three children, in quick succession. By the age of eighteen I had become the mother of three children … I worked in a school with a salary of 60 taka. The Aga Khanis used to run their businesses here. Their children would learn Bangla in schools. Then I would provide private tuitions to a three children at 20 Taka each. [In the background the Azan sounds on the loudspeaker. Priyobhashini raises her voice. My husband had lied to me. He had told me that he was a graduate. All around me were scholars—my father, my maternal uncles. Now he asked me for another opportunity. I agreed. I would work and he would study … finally he passed his BSc and became an engineer. During this period he had mistreated me. At an age all women look beautiful. People think now that I was probably very pretty but I wasn’t. At an age if people see a vulnerable or a sad face, they either demonstrate affection or show disgust. Or make an indecent proposition. He wouldn’t let me venture out anywhere from the office. One day my mother sent me a letter which said that the headmistress of a certain school was at our home and wished to meet me once. He asked me whether I intended to go. I said if I didn’t my mother would feel awkward. I had to go. He threatened that I would have to divorce him if I went ahead. He suddenly slapped me with all his strength. I made up my mind to leave him. The moment I got a pocket of escape I would go. Love inhabited me, still. That green light showed from the window of that room in the hostel in my mind. After getting married I discovered that this wasn’t love. Then I met him (indicating her current husband) at my workplace. He was good looking and interesting. He took care that I reached home on time. He wanted me to call him Bear Bhai instead of the more common ‘Sir! The driver used to sing his praises. He tipped them generously. He was of a rich and educated family and his father had been an ICS. Our relationship grew stronger. He told me that he was separated from his wife and she would visit him occasionally. But I couldn’t, I had three children. I told him that I wouldn’t be able to follow him down the road. He quietly withdrew himself. By then 1971 had arrived. My sons were with their father and they had left for the interiors. There was a rumour that Bear Bhai could be killed by the army. He had to go away. I was completely alone. Sometimes I would meet him under a tree near the light post and talk on my way back from work. I was constantly being raped then, my whole life was collapsing. But I wouldn’t leave. I was too much in love with him and wanted to be in a place where I could see him.
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I could probably have left. I asked him to save me, take me away from that place. Every evening I would have to receive three army officers. He only said, ‘I am worried about my dog and my batman! My insides turned to ice. He asked me to take up a house that he would visit sometimes. I wanted him to wait for ten minutes. He said he would leave …
After the war, I was married to him, a new life began … I was called a collaborator and the police came to arrest me. I told my husband ‘Let them arrest me. I will fight with truth on my side. I will tell them I am a rape victim. But he wouldn’t listen. He bribed a few people, got them jobs and the case was withdrawn. I was confined for twenty-eight hours at end and raped. They did not look at me, my face. But after we got married, at social functions wives of officers would drag them away from me, calling me a prostitute. When there were invitations he would subtly ask me to stay at home. I would wonder why, if he is my life partner, he should attend such parties where they say things about his wife. But I wouldn’t stop him. Plates at parties would be handed over to all but me. He got a job offer at Sylhet. People would tell him, ‘Bear, will you give your wife to us on rent?’ I saw him hitting those men, something I had never seen him do all his life. In Sylhet, things were slightly better. I could see the hills of Cherrapunji in India from my dining room. It was as if the hills were clad in a golden saree. I loved form. It was very inspiring. At my in-laws I was tortured, humiliated. Then we moved to another place. I was close to the time of the delivery of my first child with him. Once when he went on a picnic without me, I felt lonely but I tried to understand that as an adult he has separate needs. I was learning to accept things. But it was eating me from within that there hadn’t been a resolution. I was wounded physically. I couldn’t tell anyone. Sometimes during my periods I would bleed incessantly and at other times there wouldn’t be any blood. There were stitches, I played hide and seek with my husband for a long time, scared that he might leave me. During those days I had also started drawing pictures, gardening, decorating the house with objects. He used to inspire me … I loved the house … I was deeply in love then. He might just be walking down the road. It didn’t matter. But it was becoming difficult, I used to pray for relief from so much love, I hadn’t much left inside me. I had got a few jobs but would constantly call the servants to give him his sandals, change the towel in the bathroom, put the newspaper where he likes it, serve him tea in a certain way… I used to sit in deep meditation asking god to give me something else … he had started drinking heavily, all night long I would be awake. Around two o’clock I would hear the leaves crackling under his shoes, I would be sick with worry. We were told that in this mill bungalow we wouldn’t be getting any furniture or things to set up home. That is where it all began; I did everything on my own, right from the chairs and tables. I would put things out
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in the rain so that they attained the colour that I was looking for. I created the house with my own hands. It was like a miracle. One day I told him that I wanted to leave. I couldn’t find him present, I said: ‘You are such a beautiful person, but we are no longer companions. Another thing that disturbed me was that when he wished to be physically intimate with me, he controlled his urge to drink. It hurt me. He couldn’t believe that I could leave. You know he was such a big officer, there were all comforts of lifestyle.
I rented a place where I could live. That was 1975. Till then I was working towards utility, then I started looking at pure forms…. S.M. Sultan discovered me and organized my first exhibition…. Today I have put up eleven solo exhibitions and several group ones. I work all the time. In the last three decades I don’t think I have been off work for more than a month in all. I work till one or two in the night. I cook in between, make sure everyone’s eaten. One of my sons whom I have groomed comes from Jessore to work with me. He fixes and cleans, rubs the sandpaper. The rest of the work is done by me. (She breaks off at this point and says:) I have used too much time to just respond to one question.
[I assure her that a lot of the answers lie embedded in what she has said. Then I pose another question.] People I have spoken to and met here seem to be desperate to remember. That posterity should not forget the war of liberation. One mode of remembrance is the writing of history. One other way is to speak out, like you have said, women should share their experiences, else all will fall silent. But there is also this aspect which you alluded to in an earlier interview, that one can hold a thousand years of thought inside but once it is expressed, it is limited. Could you elaborate on that a little? For what I think you are saying here is that till the time language and words are held in us, they belong to an inner world. Once they are released, the public’ owns it. Is it a kind of anxiety that you felt?
Yes, and I will be happy if you spread it as far as you can for I don’t think I have said this before…. Things that are stored in the mind, it is a world, another earth in itself, thoughts are beautiful things, swifter than everything. But I haven’t given away all that I have. My friends love me, but I still have myself. I know that the kind of voice I have raised, what I have said, will make people desert me, they will depart. So what? I still have a rich world.
[She stops here. I remind her of one of my earlier questions.] It’s been around forty years now. One thing that is associated with the birth of this country is the sacrifice of the martyrs and freedom fighters. Freedom became a confirmation of having done something, that a purpose had been achieved. On parallel lines runs the violence towards non-combatant
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men, women, and children. We are told that there needs to be a process of healing. At the same time we need to remember the cost at which freedom was earned. How do you see the relationship between the two? For in healing, forgetting too plays a role.
Healing isn’t forgetting. For me what is important is that we are alive. We aren’t dead. For instance, I witnessed fourteen people killed in a brushfire. They raped me, they raped others. I saw all that. This is not something anyone will ever forget. There has to be movement. So many nights have passed since then. We have to live. My husband would always be scared that people would come to know of ’71. I cannot forget how my in-laws treated me; they never addressed me as anything except that woman’ or ‘prostitute. I used to feel responsible, I couldn’t sleep. I would be ill for days, and became a diabetic. I was admitted in hospital. The doctor said he would look at my history. The moment he said that, something gave way inside me. He was a dark and handsome young boy. He was a quiet man, talked less. He asked me about my food habits and my conjugal life. Then he wanted to know if I had something stored inside me, and kept in an airtight container. Everything was turning upside down inside me. I was afraid that I would be turned out of the hospital since I was a rape victim … I couldn’t tell him. I felt terrible later; I should have got it out of me. When Taslima Nasrin had to be hidden, I was given the responsibility of keeping her in safe places. I was a little foolish. I thought I could share it with her but I could see clearly that she was trying to listen to my pain, she heard in a way which told me that it was a detail which she would pass on to others. My husband told me once that I was lucky he had given shelter to a woman like me. Since then I have wanted to pass on my life, a small part of it of what happened in the days of Pakistan … sometimes I would think what was my fault, I was witness to the birth of a nation, I have seen history from so close … then I would recall the day I was gang raped someone said: ‘Put Vicks on her private parts, they would rinse their mouth and spit the water on me. I had lost all sensation of dirt.
[I interrupted.] After you have put your experiences in public domain, has it affected your art? Have you discovered anything new, perceived any change?
I think my art is a gift of god.
[I clarified myself.] No. What I mean is, when we have things, such stories of suffering hidden within, the position of art/work in our lives is of a certain nature. When, for the sake of society, you express what you had kept stored, does your relation with it change?
Yes. For instance, I have worked on concentration camps, the Holocaust, Rape Victim of ’71 after that. I have sculpted the head of a man in a hole. I have to depend on form; I have to wait patiently to
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find it. A Pakistani Mr Malik saw one of my sculptures where raped women abandoned on streets were depicted. He wanted to buy it. I told him I don’t sell certain things but he could show it to his countrymen. He knelt down and apologized, saying, ‘Firdausi Apa we are so sorry Asma Jahangir hugged me, comforted me. I have received things that I had never hoped for. I haven’t fought in the war; I am a victim and a witness. One day Hamida Hossain told me that she would send me to interview a rape victim in Khulna. Again I felt the same storm inside me like I had felt a year and a half back with the doctor. I told her I knew someone of that description. She immediately replied she would send Shaheen Akhtar. She wrote the novel Talaash eventually. During my first session I named the character as ‘xyz’ but fainted during narration. She understood what it meant and hugged me. She said: ‘Firdausi Apa, you speak. Things will be alright. Then I told her. With xyz’ I was finding it difficult to maintain the pace. Then, along with my own statement she summarized the whole thing so beautifully; it subsequently appeared in a book on women in 1971. (Her grandson came in at this point. She raised her voice and called someone, probably a young female domestic help, to find out what he wants to eat and give him some milk.] His parents are divorced. He lives with me. I can’t live without him around. We have a beautiful relationship, me, my sculpture, and him…. Every day he waits for me to get him something.
I was deeply in love with my husband. It wasn’t sexual, this feeling, I can’t explain. I never wanted things to happen between us, I wasn’t looking for anything, just loved him. I have had many friends, I cannot confine myself. There isn’t a conclusion to them. Little explosions that just happened. Like David from England. He would hold my hand and say, ‘Firdausi, you are an aesthetic feeling’ …
I am not an artist in any accepted sense of the term. It comes from my thoughts, my pain, my consciousness, and the way I live and understand life. She suddenly asks me] Can you read Bangla?
[I reply] I read but I cannot write all that well. I cannot write in English competently but I do write in Bangla.
Life has to be managed beautifully. Peace itself is an art, a complete art in itself. When children fight you should play such an unbiased role, that itself is a craft. I try to bring people closer by liquefying antagonisms. When people tell me that they like me, I feel awkward and self-conscious. But I do not let those words exploit me…. You have to be an architect in relationships. My husband tells me I am too worldly, constantly worried over whether people have eaten. This tribal boy has been working here for five years now, he has teenage problems, behaves oddly sometimes. I talk to him, I don’t pounce on him the moment he misbehaves … I just tell him … I can’t stand depression in this house, no one will be
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depressed here … I can’t tolerate even a sigh that sounds like it. My buyers are all Bengali. For me a true sculpture is one that moves, unless there is movement it doesn’t work. Sometimes its two boats by a river, you might suddenly feel that you are sitting on one of them. Or perhaps a temple in ruins, at some time in the past people had prayed there. These feelings have to be created in people. Say an old man is running, do you always have to show him from the front? Why can’t he be seen from the back? Why should the focus always be on the face? This kind of experimentation is only possible in found objects. I had made two dolls-that of a husband and wife, walking with a suitcase. I didn’t want to make them immobile. Let them look ugly, doesn’t matter, but the metaphor of movement in their expressions always attracted me. I had made it with pieces of cloth when I was very young. Once I found an object that looked like an angry bird, I didn’t have to do much, nature had already made it. There are lovely forms …
[She broke off at this point. The final part has to do with a tiny conversation we had about my work and she wished me luck. She mentioned that she was glad I didn’t force the point and indeed this was the first time she had approached her memories of violence through her work and not vice versa. I do not know whether the disjointed structure above will satisfy this observation. Also the form of what she said was perhaps determined by the fact that this was the only session I would have with her. The parts that I have omitted are at my discretion, where I thought she indulged herself like any person who dislikes being interrupted much in the course of a narration.]
Notes and References
1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
2. Here I agree with Suvir Kaul who argues in his edited) The Partitions of
Memory how the resonances of 1947 continue up to the present. The very fact that it sometimes does appear that memories may be appropriated or misappropriated in the service of a narrative is all the more reason that the study of events such as the Partition, the Holocaust, or the war of liberation of Bangladesh needs to be critically received.
3. Hasan Azizul Haq, Ekattor: Kortole Chhinnomatha (Dhaka: Sahitya
Prokash, 2008 (1995]), p. 9.
4. Shahida Begum, Juddhe Juddhe Noy Mas (Dhaka: Sahitya Prokash, 1993
(1986]), p. 184.
5. Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of
Empire (California: University of California Press, 2004).c
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6. Selina Hossain, ed., Ami Naari, Ami Muktijodhha (Dhaka: Onyoprokash,
2004); Farida Akhtar, ed., Mohila Muktijoddha (Dhaka: Nobogriho
Probortona, 2008[1991]).
7. Swadhin Bangla Betar was the clandestine radio broadcasting service
established by the Bangladesh government in exile from Indian soil in
1971.
8. This expression was used by Dr Syed Manzoorul Islam, professor in the
Department of English, University of Dhaka, in an interview with me in November, 2010, in an attempt to take a closer look at the comparisons regularly drawn with the Holocaust while explaining 1971 in Bangladesh. In an interesting formulation Dr Islam argued that the association of the Holocaust with evil also provides a moral paradigm to the demand for trial of war criminals, which can otherwise lapse into a language of retributive justice. I agree with both the observations and, as will become clear by the final chapter, a self-reflexive understanding of this analogy is important in both the representation of 1971 in public discourse in Bangladesh and to counter any simplistic dismissal of the parallels drawn, such as in Sarmila
Bose’s Dead Reckoning
9. Kader Siddiqui, Swadhinota ’71, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1997
[1985]).
10. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 2007 (1989]),
p. 115.
11. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), p. 109.
12. Dominick La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (USA: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001); James E. Young, ‘Toward a Received History of the Holocaust”, History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 21-43, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505573, last accessed on 8 February 2017; James E. Young, ‘Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Re-reading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs, New Literary History 18, no. 2 (1997): 403-23, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/468737, last accessed on 8 February 2017; Tony Kushner, ‘Holocaust Testimony, Ethics and the Problem of Representation, Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 275-95, doi 10.1215/03335372-2005-004, last accessed on
8 February 2017
13. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (UK:
Picador, 1999).
14. Julia Hartley-Brewer, ‘Nothing to Lose but Our Clothes, The Guardian,
15 October 1999, available at www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/
oct/15/features11.g2, last accessed on 8 February 2017.
15. Kushner, ‘Holocaust Testimony, Ethics and the Problem of Representation,
p. 282.
16. Victoria Stewart, Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 22.
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17. Jahanara Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli (Dhaka: Sondhanee Prokashoni, 1988
(1986]), p. 70. Unless otherwise mentioned, all translations from Bengali to English are mine in all chapters. Where an English translation of the text
is used as a source text, it has been separately mentioned.
18. There is a sigh of agony here, which I have not translated due to the lack of
a suitable equivalent. Its retention also seemed unproductive.
19. Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli, p. 94.
20. Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli, p. 96.
21. Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli, p. 259.
22. Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli, pp. 259-60.
23. Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli, p. 266.
24. In his account of the First World War, Jay Winter records the strains of
pre-war culture that assist in the act of commemoration and coming to terms with the loss. Religion and the supernatural, as we shall have occasion to discuss in Chapter 4, fulfilled a restorative function often, Winter
argues, allowing those left behind to overcome debilitating melancholy.
25. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London and New Delhi: Thousand
Oaks, SAGE Publications, 1997).
26. Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli, p. 337.
27. Imam, Ekattorer Dinguli, p. 356.
28. J.F.R. Jacob, Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation (New Delhi: Manohar
Publishers, 1997), p. 148.
29. Basanti Guhathakurta, Ekattorer Smriti (Dhaka: The University Press
Limited, 1991), pp. 142–3.
30. With one of the notable exceptions being Panna Kaiser’s Muktijuddho:
Agey O Porey (Dhaka: Agamee Prokashoni: 1993 (1991]), which ends in
post-war Bangladesh.
31. Begum Mushtari Shafi, Swadhinota Amar Rokto Jhora Din (Dhaka:
Anupam Prokashonee, 2006 (1989]).
32. Guhathakurta, Ekattorer Smriti, p. 34.
33. Guhathakurta, Ekattorer Smriti, p. 28.
34. Guhathakurta, Ekattorer Smriti, p. 111.
35. Guhathakurta, Ekattorer Smriti, p. 163.
36. Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, eds, Sites of Violence: Gender and
Conflict Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 5.
37. Nayanika Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public
Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Duke University Press, 2015).
38. Yasmin Saikia, Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering
1971 (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2011).
39. Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 112.
40. Karl J. Weintraub, ‘Autobiography and Historical Consciousness, Critical
Inquiry 1, no. 4 (1975): 829, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 1342851, last accessed on 8 February 2017.
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41. Sufia Kamal, Ekattorer Diary (Dhaka: Jagriti Prokashonee, 2007 (1989]).
42. A reference to Bongobondhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
43. Nilima Ibrahim, Ami Birangona Bolchhi (Dhaka: Jagriti Prokashoni, 2010
(1996]), p. 59.
44. Ibrahim, Ami Birangona Bolchhi, p. 36.
45. Read, for instance, Carine M. Mardorossian’s ‘Towards a New Feminist
Theory of Rape’, Signs 27, no. 3 (2002): 743-75.
46. This is what Naseer tells Reena when he comes to know of her experience
of rape during the war, a part of the third testimony in Ami Birangona
Bolchhi.
47. Shaheen Akhtar, Suraiya Begum, Hameeda Hossain, Sultana Kamal, and
Meghna Guhathakurta, eds, Narir Ekattor O Juddhoporoborti Kothyokahini
(Dhaka: Ain-O-Salish Kendra, 2006), p. 132.
48. Ali Riaz in his work on the politics of Islam in Bangladesh writes in the
context of the elections of 2001 in Bangladesh of the unprecedented violence against minorities. While Hindus were the overwhelming majority among victims of rape, murder, and other forms of persecution, Buddhists and Christians also featured. Women referred to their ‘loss of honour’ in terms of the loss of their nakphul/nose-ring. The right-wing BNP was the winner of the elections and Khaleda Zia came to power (Ali Riaz, God Willing: The Politics of Islamism in Bangladesh (Rowman and Littlefield,
2004]).
49. Later when Sheikh Hasina returned to power, she handed over three
cheques of 50,000 taka each to Masuda, Duljaan, and Elijaan.
50. Saikia, Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 15.
51. Saikia, Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 116.
52. Saikia, Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 115.
53. Saikia, Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 115.
54. Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz
and Its Realities, translated by Sidney Rosenfield and Stella P. Rosenfield
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 72.
55. Amery, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 70.
56. Jolekha is one of the women interviewed by Suraiya Begum of Ain-o-salish
Kendra and her testimony is included in Narir Ekattor. She belongs to the Khulna-Satkhira region of Bangladesh. The chapter is entitled “Jolekha: Dhorshoner Obhigyota O Uttorjibon’ (Jolekha: The Experience of Rape
and Life Thereafter).
57. I later realized that this was due to a few reasons which are closely con
nected with the experiences of post-war society in Bangladesh. As has been mentioned earlier, the reinstatement of alleged war criminals in public life and politics after the assassination of Sheikh Mujib also resulted in an obfuscation of history. The fact that even during the slain leader’s rule there had been fraudulent claims of compensation from the families
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of dubious freedom fighters, war-affected, and martyrs also muddied the waters. Most importantly in 1992 when a few women had been brought to Dhaka to testify in the Gono Adalot about their rape at the hands of the Pak army aided by their local collaborators, they were hardly aware of the symbolism of their act and had come mostly in the hope that they would be recompensed for their suffering in material terms. Unlike the heroines of Nilima Ibrahim’s Ami Birangona Bolchhi, they had no other hope of ever leading a comfortable life because their sheer poverty, the lack of anonymity in villages, lack of education, and exposure (most of them were already mothers in 1971) hardly offered any opportunity for them to rebuild their lives on the lines of a secure home, husband, and family. Needless to say they received no real remuneration and once the act of speaking in opposition to silence acquired monetary connotations, the credibility of the entire exercise took a beating, as did the methods used by many to make them speak. The politics of testimony is a complex one in Bangladesh and often the parameters of understanding keep changing with the swiftly changing
events of its forty-year-old history as a free country.
58. Akhtar et al., Narir Ekattor O Juddhoporoborti Kothyokahini, p. 152.
59. A kind of sweetmeat.
60. The word used by Priyobhashini was chandal. Originally it was used to
refer to low-caste Hindus who did the work of burning the dead. The brutish nature of their profession was supposed to make them capable of feeling only the rawest of emotions. A chandal’s anger is, therefore, almost barbaric and the expression in time began to be associated with people who had no control over their temper.
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3 Between “Pakistan’ and ‘Bangladesh’ Of Resistance, Violence, and Masculine Fantasies
It has been mentioned that the purpose of this work is to look at the
process of memorialization of the war of liberation of Bangladesh,
At the time of planning the research and the stage at which my reading was at the time, there was perhaps more intuition than comprehension behind this choice. Therefore, at this time when one undertakes to elucidate on the choice, a degree of retrospective logic is inevitable. With 1971, one is dealing with a history that has three primary sites of formation: Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. This excludes the determinants who exercised influence from beyond the borders and affected both the progress and the outcome, so lucidly captured by Raghavan’s book.1 His writing of the global history of 1971 offers a nuanced understanding of global politics offering us a narrative beyond personalities and their impact on the war.
The title draws on the fact that the struggles in the east wing of Pakistan over language and elements of culture culminated in the events
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of 1952, popularly called ‘Ekushey’ and continued even after the official recognition granted to Bengali in 1954 and in the constitution of 1956, and is popularly regarded as the first and most significant point of rupture in the politics of East Pakistan, which was otherwise dominated by the Muslim League. Writing in Essays on Ekushey: The Language Movement of 1952, Ghulam Sarwar Murshid installs this event as the foundational moment of Bengali liberation in the east.[2] The Bengali Renaissance of the nineteenth century had passed the Muslims by and pushed into an awkward position during the colonial rule–the middle classes were denied the heroism of having participated in large enough numbers in the anti-imperialist struggle. So, he argues, that Pakistan was not creatively prepared for’, culturally and politically. The Muslims had suffered victimhood during the Partition but were prudent in their politics in British India. The creative energy of a sacrificial myth’ was injected through Ekushey and its martyrs. Murshid draws this argument to a close with this observation: ‘Young men of another generation fought for the liberation of their soil in 1971 with their legacy in their bones in order to realise that destiny.[3] The Awami League sought legitimacy to represent the entire population of East Pakistan on the platform of language. Most of them having been Muslim Leaguers in the past, the change of their political vocabulary could perhaps be the subject of an interesting study. The expression ‘buried tongues’ should not be read as a foreword to their unearthing. It suggested itself as (a) a description of the points of rupture between the east and the west; (b) history of suppression of Bengali as a manifestation of postcolonial consolidation’ of the power of the state as well its desperation to manage heterogeneity; (c) the massacre of East Pakistanis by a military dictatorship in 1971 and the suppression of war crimes committed by the Pakistani army; (d) the silencing of the intelligentsia—the middle class which had articulated these demands–in mass killings across the country; (e) the war’s uncomfortable legacies of rape, war babies, armed civilians, collaborators, and so on that were sought to be concealed under the rhetoric of reconstruction and consolidation in both official narratives and popular imagination; and finally (f) the violent post-war events in Bangladeshi politics that buried the tongues of the powerful and of the powerless in fear and bewilderment. A look at the processes and politics of memorialization that are revealed in writing and speaking is presented. In fiction one can read both a continuation of this attempt at realism and a use of its limits in order to undermine the self-evident stability of real events and their representation. Such memorialization seeks to signify/
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symbolize events as much as they tend to culturally reproduce what they appear to be trying to understand and critique.
The affixation of ‘In’ to the rest of the title is primarily meant to engage with the complexities of dealing with the war of liberation as an Indian Bengali in Bangladesh. A very small incident shall illustrate my position. Waiting to collect my visa from the Bangladesh High Commission before my second visit, I found a white-haired gentleman in the lobby along with a younger man who kept him company. From his attire and the bits of conversation that I caught, it was clear that he was a Bangladeshi Muslim (my East Bengali ancestry perhaps helps me comprehend even dialects I have never heard before, if only in snatches and with a great deal of effort) and in the silence of the large room I became aware of his curiosity and eagerness to have a chat. The moment he caught my glance, he smiled, asked to see my papers (which I half reluctantly gave him) and began asking me questions which, as my years of solitary existence in Delhi had taught me, were personal in nature. When I told him that I was researching on their freedom movement, his face clouded. All he said was, “Those were difficult times. He was also from Sylhet he said, the place to which my ancestors belonged. When his younger companion asked me if it was possible to obtain passports of Indian nationality in Delhi without meeting the statutory requirements, and that he could easily do that for me in Bangladesh, the elderly person rebuked him saying that I was a respectable person and would not know such things! While we were leaving the High Commission having accomplished what we had come for, he sadly reminded me something I had said. ‘Don’t say it is our country, it is yours too. Why else would you be coming to work on something like this?”
In several East Bengali families whom I have had occasion to know in Assam and Meghalaya, stories of pre-Partition material splendour abound. Spared the debilitating physical violence and memories of their Punjabi counterparts, their narratives gather around loss of prosperity and land (equivalent to identity and prestige’). These, as far as I recall, were not supported by any nostalgia for inter-communal coexistence, and since all these families I refer to are middle-class Hindus, the rigid codes of caste and religious purity suggest themselves in the nature of their memories. The loss was evident also in the missing anecdotes of youthfulness of a generation whose formative years were spent in a struggle for livelihood and respectability that began after the Partition. The myths of self-made’ men were fed to growing children in the hope that they emulate. It was with a mixture of amusement and pride that I
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received these stories, unable to imagine such a glorious past for myself and perfectly bemused when, before my last visit to Bangladesh, a twenty-something niece asked me to get her a bit of soil from Sylhet. Questions of identity/identification are layered and the title signals that these questions lie in the interstices of this work though they will only be intermittently visible. My near-ignorance of Bangla language and literature has continued to haunt the years of my youth and my position as a Bengali in Assam (given the historical tryst between these languages and communities) and turned my thoughts towards Bangladesh rather than (the more Indian) West Bengal to try and confront questions of identity inherited as they influence and interact with one’s perception of the world and the questions that one asks of it. Whenever I visited the country I did not return with a feeling of belonging, yet I could not deny the affinity. I was received hospitably as a researcher from India and I could see that all those who spoke about those times expected understanding and empathy in return. It was almost like a pact they presumed was made, especially since I spoke their language.
The preceding elucidation is in place because in trying to understand and, therefore, critique the process of memorialization of the war in Bangladesh, we shall partially be focussing on the interpretive acts of victims and/or authors when faced with something they had never encountered in their lives. Needless to say, this will require consideration of their cognitive status as actors, victims, and witnesses of the glory and the horror of war. We shall see how they draw on already available frames of understanding even as they try and cope in different ways with the newness of their experience. We have seen that in the last chapter with respect to the women memoirists and the testimonies of women who were victims of sexual violence in the way that they respond to their losses. In this chapter memoirs of combatant and non-combatant men and testimonies of male victims of violence shall be examined. This I argue is a part of the legacy of the war as much as the official and visible forms of memorialization. In responding to their memories and the process of bringing them into the public domain, they perform acts which later become the collective memory of the war given the genre to which they belong. An analytical focus in Chapters 2 and 3 on responses of actors/victims who are also witnesses may help us keep sight of the effects of genocide, war, and violence in general without
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undermining those who resisted oppression with all their being. While most of these narratives (this is true of memoirs more than testimonies) are tethered to nationalism as the legitimating framework, for us in a different time in history to critically understand the afterlife of war, temper our reading of heroic narratives, and-as Dominick La Capra writes of Holocaust testimonies—’work through’ traces of hatred, violence, love, sacrifice, mistrust, cold blooded killing, failure to recognize the humanity of the enemy [4] to create the possibility of an ethical memory of the war and the birth of a new nation, rather than glibly assume that the latter in time shall compensate for the former. As the archives of war experiences tell us, compensatory stories often fail to account for ‘buried tongues, and if we are to ever move towards better comprehension of the history of the subcontinent without being in thrall of the past, and imagine/construct an inclusive politics between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, an analysis of what and how we remember gains in significance.
Remembering War, Re-membering Victory: Of Men, Memories, and Those Unforgettable Women
Before we begin our section on the memoirs of combatants and noncombatants as they lived through the war, it will be pertinent to turn our attention to a memorial essay written by Hasan Azizul Haq in Bijoyer Muhurto: 1971, which was published in 1994 to commemorate the moment of victory as people remember it more than two decades after the event. Predictably most essays recollect their emotions on 16 December 1971 and the genre varies in content in as much as the authors range from writers, freedom fighters, soldiers, politicians, and intellectuals. If a schematization were to be made of the theme of these articles, one could say that they range between joy of victory, sadness for loved ones who are lost, and a sense of weightlessness after days lived in fear under the shadow of death. In all these essays the enemy is not visible except as the news of surrender. It is in this light that the account of Hasan Azizul Haq gains in importance. His piece ‘Ananteir Anubhav: Bijoyer Muhurto’ records the retreat of Pakistani soldiers past where he lived and locates the acknowledgement of defeat in their gait, expression, and gestures. The fear of death is vivid in his description of the sounds of the enemy receding, the sounds made by machines, this time not of rattling guns or heavy boots moving in unison. The complexity of the experience is made evident from the fact that while towards the beginning of the
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essay he uses expressions such as ‘mad dogs’ and ‘cornered rats’ smashed into a pulp to describe the Pakistani soldiers the nature of the descriptions undergoes a subtle change as the essay progresses. The piece opens with the following observation:
In the year 1971 on the 7th of December, the moon wasn’t up in the sky. That is why when the sun went down a thick darkness descended almost immediately. A black fog too blended with it. Standing near the gate of Bajralal College in the thick cold darkness I saw the first of the vans covered with tarpaulin pass, like a gigantic animal, carrying the Pakistani soldiers. It was moving from Jessore to Khulna. The vehicle was a pitch murkier than the darkness–thus only the silhouette was visible. The ground was shaking and the place where I stood on this side of the station also quivered. By the time the angry echo of the first van changing gears left me, the next van arrived. Then, the third. Then came the fourth, fifth, sixth one after the other.”[5]
Haq’s sensuous description filled with cacophonous sounds and darkness sketches for us a felt moment of the war. Then the bombing by the Indian planes begins and as one drops close to where Haq was stationed, his fear is a sharp counterpoint to the images of cheering people in the city of Dhaka who come out on their terraces and streets to catch a glimpse of the fighter planes.
There! Just in a moment the oil tank will burst into pieces and rise towards the sky and a huge sea of fire will swallow me. For a short while I shall be entering a world of incredible heat, inexpressible pain, crushed scattered ashes and filled with the odour of burnt flesh and blood. Just for a moment for once part of that world no numbness will linger. Immediately I heard another sound of a plane–they had returned in pairs.[6]
In deep fear he imagines a moment of annihilation. In Haq’s description there is no pain of personal loss as in Jahanara Imam’s essay in the same anthology, nor is the sadness of Sufia Kamal at the death of a young girl by a freak bullet and anxiety for the safety of her daughters in India a part of his text. Kader Siddiqui’s factual account of the build-up to Niazi’s surrender is reminiscent of his role much like his memoirs, Abdul Gaffar Choudhury (a noted journalist, editor of the newspaper Joy Bangla, which was published from Calcutta during the war) writes of his 15 December visit to an abandoned Pakistani bunker guarded by Sikh soldiers where he comes across naked women with injured faces,
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breasts, thighs, and hands. Some of them had been covered with turbans that the Sikh soldiers had removed for them. Deeply disturbed by this sight, Choudhury turns these women into a symbol of their own suffering and that of the nation: ‘It was as if these abducted, raped Bengali women were the dumb cry of an entire nation.[7] It is a moment which anticipates the processes that lie beneath the formation of a nation state; tormented by the sight of the woman, Gaffar Choudhury hears the dumb cry of an entire nation. The sexual violence is displaced even as it is acknowledged in all sincerity. It reminds us of Michael Billig writing in his Banal Nationalism when he remarks on the aura that attends the idea of nationhood in our times. He says: ‘The rape of the motherland is far worse than the rape of the mother; the death of the nation is the ultimate tragedy beyond the death of flesh and blood.[8] However, Choudhury’s interpretive comfort is breached when as a mark of disoriented sympathy and awkwardness he asks a woman her name. She responds by saying: ‘They haven’t given me any name. They only raped me and everyday made me read the kalma. What will you gain if I tell you what my name was before I came here?”[9]
When he returns to Calcutta again, a Sikh taxi driver refuses to take money for the fare from him and shouting ‘Joi Bangla’ disappears into the night. Choudhury concludes his piece by saying: ‘Calcutta in the night of 16th December. Dim stars were still flickering in the sky:[10] The contrast of these chance meetings is unmistakeable. In this commemorative act, the witness records his pain and disorientation over a scene that (he begins his narration by saying) he had never witnessed before and hopes to never see again in his life. This is followed by a heart-warming gesture of humanity in an alien land. The witness is caught between these moments in his essay which he significantly entitles “They haven’t given me a name … only everyday … made me read the kalma! The dim stars flickering in the distance shift the scene away from this confusion. This is not a tale of homecoming or one that equates freedom with 16 December 1971. By choosing to talk about a woman who wishes to surrender to anonymity on the eve of victory, one who responds that those who raped her had given her no name and, therefore, she had none, he inscribes a meaning on the 16th that moves away from the happiness/sadness paradigm to remember with what disquiet certain women in a free country were looking at a future after the war. The stars help him (almost two decades after the war) to retain the ambiguity of his memories. By installing a memory of sexual violence in the text, he opens up the discourse of what victory in war meant to Bangladesh and
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whether it can be seen in isolation from the orgy of violence that it had left in its wake.
Hasan Azizul Haq, as I have stated earlier, begins with an image of tired, dishevelled soldiers making their way out of Jessore to Khulna. For him, the moment of victory was conveyed by Pakistani soldiers walking as if drunk, in unbuttoned shirts, barefoot, and crushed under the weight of their weapons, presumably towards Khulna. And the olive-coloured jeeps of the Indian army were zooming past his watch-post in high spirits; it was at that moment that he recognized victory. However, it is the note on which he concludes his article that brings to culmination the implications that it holds for the witnessing of war and violence. It may be seen as slightly incongruous to talk of the futility of war in the context of 1971 when one is considering literature that emerged from Bangladesh. While one may be left with such an aftertaste when one encounters the pain and suffering in fictional and non-fictional accounts, one is more likely to encounter narratives that place violence, destruction, and loss within the intelligible response of retaliation. As he winds up his piece, Haq observes that in the presence of the Indian army, the activity of freedom fighters, and the sight of thousands of those that had abandoned their homes returning, the signs of the victory became visible much before 16 December 1971.
When the war ended I went to see what the front looked like. No one had removed the corpses of the Pakistani soldiers–in a huge field leading up to the pucca road, in the slope, in the yards of the homes, in verandas, under the trees, inside the bunkers hundreds of dead were rotting beside dogs, goats and buffaloes. Once I had seen this I was convinced that we had won [11]
Any note of triumph is invisible. While in the first part of his essay Haq had resorted to similes in order to describe machines, the enemy, and its recoil, he concludes with a realistic description of the dead soldiers away from their homes, where they would only be dead bodies without a name. One can read a note of irony that penetrates the words: Once I had seen this I was convinced that we had won. Unlike Yasmin Saikia who locates a transformative possibility in the perpetrator recognizing the humanity of the enemy (albeit years after the war, as memories that haunt and trouble),[12] Haq’s interpretive act is greater in complexity. One is tempted to say so because in this seemingly dispassionate description of what he witnesses (human and animal corpses
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cohabiting), victory arrives as a confirmation of information rather than an epiphany or release or for that matter, joy. As a secondary witness we are compelled to take note of human waste, as our mind goes back to what he had said of life in the middle of his piece, that his taste of victory lay in the bare fact of his having beaten death to the post in a war. The image with which he concludes moves from his epithets of ‘mad dogs and frightened rats to the disturbing starkness of the spectacle-to those silent carcasses of the perpetrators. Haq’s portrayal cannot enter the discourse of any sentimental ‘hope for humanity’ but in the intricacy of his response while narrating the moment of victory there is an awareness that two decades after the war, the present and the future are bound to seep into the recollection and victory will have acquired connotations of the aftermath of the war.
This chapter does not seek only to highlight the differences between the memoirs of male combatants and non-combatants. Though that is an important facet of this section, one of the tasks of this work is to examine the implication of what memoirists’ record as their memories of the war and the task that they undertake to interpret the past for us. This is not the method of the historian but neither is it completely distanced from the motivations of objective’ chroniclers of the past.[13] In doing this we shall probably be able to appreciate the function of gender in the appropriations of a certain genre, and also reckon with the legacy of a just war’ as it is memorialized in Bangladesh, put to the service of nationalistic discourses and in some ways also interrogating it. Though still a prickly subject in Bangladesh, one cannot avoid talking about the aftermath of violence (as common people took up arms to survive, avenge oppression, and liberate their nation) and the arguments of inevitability (that there were killings of Urdu speakers some of whom had collaborated with Pakistani soldiers and also of Bengalis who had turned hostile to the cause of Bangladesh) that threaten(ed) to transform social spaces decisively in many disturbing ways. The memoirs that I consider in the second and the third chapters are canonical works of remembrance of the war and ‘liberation. Their gendered division will allow for reflection on the roles in which the war found men and women, their reception of the event (for violence is a complex text), and how in writing of the foundational moment of Bangladesh they demonstrate negotiations with their memories in the context of the present.
We shall begin this section with non-combatant memoirs and the three works that shall be considered in some detail are those of Nirmalendu Goon, Jatin Sarkar, Anisuzzaman, and then, briefly, Hasan Azizul Haq.
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Interweaving the Poet and the Nation: Nirmalendu Goon and Atmokatha 1971 The text Atmokatha 1971 intertwines the poet Nirmalendu Goon’s destiny’ (he uses the term more than once in recounting how he came to compose this work) as a poet with the irrepressible march of his country towards freedom. The narrative performs such a task as well in adhering to a motif of a journey in which one goes from one place to another and encounters people, offering us a glimpse into easily forgotten personalities and aspects of the memories of the war. In the process we see intermeshed not only the evolution of the nation but also the surfacing of the poet, the chosen one who witnessed the birth of his beloved nation. Hunted by local ‘Biharis’ in Dhaka during the army crackdown as a ‘Hindu Maulana’ because of his flowing beard, he flees from one place to another and is witness to violence and destruction in his travels. It is perhaps of significance to us, this attempt at memorialization, this urgency and moral duty to bear witness to the founding moments of Bangladesh, and the crucial narrative choices that in turn help us understand the processes that are not ordinarily visible in the way that monuments and memorials to the war and liberation are. National myth-making is a continuous process in that it has the capacity to influence present events, as heroes are made and unmade. However, in more than one way it is crucially different from the memoirs of women. Whether it is Nirmalendu Goon, Jatin Sarkar, Anisuzzaman, or the military memoirs of Siddiq Saliq, Kader Siddiqui, and the like they all have in common the fact that personal history is securely bound with the nation’s formation in the narration whereas in women’s accounts personal struggle and losses during wartime find place in the narrative. The nation’s history in public events is recorded by suggestion rather than explication in the latter. In accounts by men, the major events of the day appear in almost all male memoirs making them political and historical documents of a kind different, one would say, from the ones wrought by women. These are where the world of action and impact meet and often the action takes precedence. So while men create, women suffer, aid, and survive-it will be clear in the following pages how this often becomes the dominant narrative of wars in general.
It is not easy to take one’s bearings in the literature consequent on a war like the one for Bangladesh. It is clear that most leaders of the Awami League had been part of the Muslim League and amenable to the Partition of 1947, and their attempts to argue that they were not
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responsible for the disintegration of Pakistan is ideologically coherent. With the overwhelming minority support that they received in the fateful elections of 1970, two things became clear. Their position on secularism had convinced the Hindus and other minority groups to throw in their lot with the Awami League and at the same time they would have to ensure that this was not seen as a dilution of Islam in a region where the growth of resistance politics had been attendant on questions of language and economy rather than religion.[14]
Goon devotes a major part of his work towards establishing that it was actually Bongobondhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who was responsible for the declaration of independence and General Zia had made it on his behalf. Writing in 2008, he evokes the authority of the eyewitness, which gives his memoir its testimonial quality. His memoir proceeds by means of incidents, vignettes of people encountered during the war, poems on ‘freedom’ and ‘war’, and anecdotes. Significantly, like the memoirs of the women considered in the last chapter, this text is also nationalist in nature. It is almost hagiographic in tone when it comes to Bongobondhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and does not fall too short of casting him as the messiah of the people. This he does with the apology that the new generation, having grown up in a climate of distorted historiography, needs to be told the truth about the father of the nation. He not only seeks to establish beyond doubt that the declaration of independence was made by Mujib but also that the announcement made from Kalurghat in Chittagong on 27 March 1971 spread like fire because it was announced on behalf of the Sheikh. The fatherhood of the declaration was brought under a cloud after Ziaur Rahman’s BNP tried to construct the legitimacy of its politics on Zia’s role in the freedom movement as a fierce soldier and exceptional organizer of men at a time when Mujib was lodged in a jail in Pakistan away from the ravaged country. In the acutely vulnerable polity of Bangladesh, still contending with the fissures of history and the afterlife of the liberation, the poet Goon feels called upon to enunciate the founding ideals of democracy and secularism to a generation that glibly associates the writing of history with party propaganda; in the process he ends up crediting an idea to an individual (Mujib) and perpetuating the personality cult that seems to blight politics in the postcolonies. The ambiguity of the representation is embedded in the ambiguity of the genre. Goon’s meta-textual confessional in the chapter ‘My autobiography and the story of the birth of Bangladesh’ is worth being quoted:
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After the composition of these serialised chapters I have noticed that unlike my last autobiographical work this hasn’t moved obeying the chronology of time and dates. Its type and character seem to be different. I can barely keep up with its pace. So I have settled at the understanding that like a straw surrenders itself to the turbulent waters, I will entrust myself to the time that was 1971, a time that is at once tumultuous and insane; horrifying and beautiful. A time that belonged to the individual and the people. I will set sail in the black and greying boat of memory. The song of the departed Samar Das comes to mind: ‘Pick, pick the anchor up/the time is come! Wherever my unanchored boat of love takes me, like Behula I will surge ahead. I know that the corpse of the dream that I carry in my boat, like Behula’s husband, is dear to me, my Bangladesh.[16]
The lack of chronological clarity is attributed to the quality of the material and the madness of the time that was 1971. He is aware that his memoir progressively becomes one with the story of liberation but he cannot and hence will not separate them. While earlier we have talked about the inseparability of the personality cult and desire for democracy in the writings of Goon, we arrive here at another paradox. He confesses elsewhere in the work that whether it is his prose or poetry he is a writer of autobiographical persuasion, and as we read his account of the war, though he might not have been a direct soldier of the liberation, the nation seems to have been created through him as well; as a witness, therefore, he recreates history in writing it. Conversely, in writing an autobiographical account pegged as an alternative history of the war, he surrenders himself; and the image that we get is that of history writing itself. In this lies the legitimacy of his personal account as well as a dramatization of the complicity/embedding of the witness in the event which she/he remembers and describes.[17]
However, in the reference to Behula there is talk of death, albeit not in a direct manner. The boat that he travels in is black and greying and like Behula he carries the corpse of his beloved Bangladesh. In the preceding chapters I have mentioned how the afterlife of the war and liberation of Bangladesh in its violence determined its processes of memorialization making recall not just a reflection of/on the present but a narrative that wants to transform the future by constructing an authoritative account that will be generally acceptable at the same time. Goon’s effort needs to be read in this light. In ordinary social/public space, the poet enjoys a degree of latitude. The style that Goon adopts make the text a convivial one by setting up a dialogue with his readers (remember that this work was an episodic one that appeared as a
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series of articles in a magazine). He includes letters by the progeny of freedom fighters, letters written to him by eye witnesses, and conversations that throw light on hidden aspects (the Jinjira massacre, for example, which he believes was devastating and one in which thousands, predominantly Hindus, were killed by the Pakistan army, and which has been largely forgotten in mainstream historiography). In the process, Goon’s work bypasses the rigours of historiography and pushes the borders of the autobiographical genre, at the same time using its conventions to write of a self that constitutes the founding ideals of the nation, a poetic self that experienced the struggle and liberation of Bangladesh as an epiphany. Therefore, the mention of the corpse of Bangladesh is significant. Goon evokes mythology here, likening his effort to that of Behula.[18] The journey is Goon’s but the burden that he carries is the revival of the nation told in symbolic terms. The dead and the forgotten are, therefore, raised to the memory of the living in the pages of his Atmokotha 1971. So it is not surprising that Goon should write in the chapter ‘Ten months of ’71’ that the autobiographical mode is superior to history in its ability to represent the past with greater accuracy.
In mapping the range of Goon’s memoir, I shall refer to two important moments in his text which I think are important in shifting the discourse from ‘authenticity’ to acts of interpretation.[19] In Jinjira he is forced to abandon his hideout in the masjid when someone whispers into his ear that a few people who had taken shelter there had come to know that he was a Hindu. As he tries to escape from the advancing Pakistani soldiers, he comes upon a vacant house. Near the kitchen there stood a scaffold with wood generously strewn around it. He gets inside and constructs a fortress around himself with the logs of wood available. He is stuck by its uncanny resemblance to a pyre. At night when he hears the sound of boots, he prepares to die but in the morning is awakened by people crying in the house. In this house a young woman recognizes him and is clearly thrilled at this meeting with her beloved poet. In an intense scene the woman (her name is Shubha) offers him water and his thoughts as he left her home are recalled almost four decades later in his memoir thus:
I do not know if Shubha had gazed at my receding form. Perhaps she did. Perhaps she did not. It seemed to me that she had wafted in like the warm winds of March afternoon to lighten the burden of crimes of the Pakistani soldiers. For a brief moment it seemed to me that the barbarism of the army wasn’t true, Operation Searchlight wasn’t true, the
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Jinjira-Shubhadya-Kalindi genocide wasn’t true, Yahya and Tikka Khan wasn’t true, Bongobondu’s arrest wasn’t true. The only thing that was true was Shubha.[ 20]
Shubha appears several times in the text after this incident. The author romances the nation and the woman as both gradually acquire a mystique in the text. When we deal with the memoirs of combatants later in this chapter, we come across a similar motif in Mahbub Alam’s Guerrilla Theke Shommukh Juddhe with the refrain about the woman with the neck of a swan. In both texts the narration ends with the memory of sensuousness, of beauty, of a gendered vision of permanence, and of things worth fighting for. The retention of these images in memories of war make the knowledge of human cruelty bearable in the masculine imagination even as it allows us a glimpse into the gendered universe of war and its memories, and certainly by extension, into the work of memorialization.
Jatin Sarkar’s Pakistaneir Jonmomrityu Dorshon, another significant memoir of 1971, turns on a productive ambiguity.[21] ‘Dorshon’ in this context could translate as ‘witnessing’ or ‘philosophy. So the author undertakes to write of his witnessing of the birth and death of Pakistan. However, the text is intended to be the philosophy of its birth and death. A work of great significance that provides insight into the modes of living, thoughts, and perceptions of the rural populace, it is a compendium of life in Bangladesh beginning with the end of the freedom movement in India, the Partition of 1947, and finally ending with the birth of a third nation. This autobiographical work captures the changing rhythms of communal life situated away from the centres of high politics and yet inevitably transformed by those events. In fact by locating freedom in a discourse that begins with the Partition of India when he was all of eleven years old, his work offers a perspective different from most memoirists who make March 1971 or the elections of 1970 the springboard. The history of Bangladesh does not begin in 1971 any more than the histories of India and Pakistan begin in 1947.
Indeed the focus of the work appears to be to inform the reader about the communitarian ways of living of the Hindus and the Muslims in East Bengal (the village Netrakona is treated as a microcosm) and how the slogan of the 1940s Ladke lenge Pakistan’ split the cultural life along markers of difference such as lungi’ and ‘dhoti’ and ‘cow slaughter’ and ‘cow worship? Sarkar argues that these differences, which had been culturally integrated into the insulated patterns of life of the peasants
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and separated the rigidly caste-conscious Hindus from the god-fearing Muslims, suddenly acquired a threatening symbolism that led to farreaching consequences in the perception of the minority Hindus. What it also brought in the wake of the awareness of differences was the realization among the Muslims that a clean break from Hindu India would lead to a space where they could assert their identity and pursue their goals unfettered by competition from the oppressive caste Hindus who in terms of education and social standing exceeded them as far as Bengal was concerned.
Sarkar dismisses the Partition of 1947 as nothing but the outcome of the naked greed of wily upper-class politicians. While the exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan had started immediately after Partition, the riots of 1950 hastened the outflow and according to Sarkar, those who had not migrated in their desperation had started to display extraterritorial sympathies wishfully looking to India as a saviour and a promised land.[22] He writes also of the ignominy associated with the persecution of the ‘Biharis’ both before and after the Liberation War, his life as a refugee in India during the war with his son and wife still in East Pakistan. Kanan Sarkar, his wife, is forced to convert to Islam to save their lives. He ends his’historical memoir’ by referring to his life which had been a witness to the end of British rule, the birth of Pakistan, and its acutely felt death, only to be followed by, as he says, the return of the ghosts of Pakistan’ in independent Bangladesh. In an engaging, irreverent tone Sarkar bypasses “personalities’ and ‘heroes’ and uses the autobiographical mode to construct a people’s history of Bangladesh, making his village the microcosm of a larger reality. Implicit in his work is a critique of mainstream historiography.
None of these narratives are about personal loss, in the way that Ekattorer Dinguli or Ekattorer Smriti are. We do not see here the grief and mourning and the interpretive acts that attend violence and bereavement, a loss not natural but as in the case of the women in the previous chapter, unnatural, and for a cause. As we have mentioned before, it is cognized as a sacrifice made for the nation, and as their works memorialize the lives forfeited in the cause of liberation, they become acts of mourning and are a belated burial of the dead whose bodies were never recovered nor dignified with rituals. Indeed, as we have seen and will see in due course, if the texts of the women seek to present an authentic’ picture of the Liberation War with the hindsight of post-war anarchy, by individuating the loss they also draw attention to the ways in which they tried to come to terms with it. However, in the narratives of Goon,
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Sarkar, and Anisuzzaman, what comes to the fore is a self which tells the story of the nation (and the events leading up to the formation of a new state) and weaves the personal element into those spaces, so much so that the birth of Bangladesh appears like a prophecy fulfilled and the new national identity becomes a mode of self-renewal. Jatin Sarkar’s life spans two epochs, Pakistan’s creation and dismemberment. Both his and Goon’s texts dramatize the inseparability of the individual from the communal/social/national while the texts of the women treat those events as a backdrop. This does not mean that in the latter these events are subsumed in the cause of the personal; their narratives metonymically memorialize, perhaps more in the way that an epitaph or a headstone stands in relation to the dead.
Narrating the Nation: Amar Ekattor and the
Birth of Bangladesh
In moving from the accounts of Jatin Sarkar and Nirmalendu Goon to that of Anisuzzaman, we are travelling to a different territory not only in the place that he occupies from which he writes but also in the nature of the journey that culminates in the birth of a new nation. He is an intellectual and activist close to the corridors of power though his stance is that of a foot soldier. In the fight for freedom at the political and diplomatic levels, the self that we glimpse is that of a detached intellectual, unwilling to be ‘entangled’ in power games (he turns down a request of the prime minister-in-exile Tajuddin Ahmad to visit Dhaka after the war is over) and yet working tirelessly to turn Bangladesh into a reality. Interestingly, Goon and Sarkar look at the disintegration of Pakistan as inevitable, even something of a self-fulfilling prophecy and certainly as an end that satisfies their moral universe, unable to accept the religious basis inter alia) of the Partition of 1947. Anisuzzaman looks at increasingly vociferous demands for freedom in East Pakistan with deep misgiving. His anxiety is significant in that his work Amar Ekattor wonders whether a second division can undo the legacy of 1947, the implications of which had still not been fully grasped in Pakistan. This is in contrast to the voices emerging from Bangladesh mentioned so far. They mostly share the same denouement, the achievement of freedom. As I have mentioned earlier, it will become clear in the way that the discourses in these texts are framed that they seek to not only understand the events of the past from the vantage ground of the present and record the authentic’ voices therein and their sacrifices, pain, and suffering; in
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the light of the post-war years of anarchy, these voices also fashion themselves as the harbingers of a transformative future. With such a burden they travel backwards to 1947 as a twin tale of possibility (the formation of a Muslim nation away from Hindu domination) and perfidy (of the West Pakistani landed ruling establishment emerging as a neo-imperial power) eventually replicating the colonial discourse of foreign oppression’ and ‘native resistance. However, this statement needs to be qualified; the political discourse that emerged from East Pakistan beginning from 1948 and climaxing in the Liberation War was not continuous or clearly oppositional since the legacy of having fought for Pakistan was a matter of pride for even those leaders who spurned the Muslim League in search of a new ideology that could speak to the aspiration of the people smarting under what was perceived to be a systematic undermining of their mother tongue and, in the process, their identity. It is in this context that Anisuzzaman’s questioning of the revolutionary rhetoric of deliverance and freedom is noteworthy. He goes on to write that he is still unable to appreciate the meaning of 1947 and how far it reflected historical compulsions. One finds it necessary to highlight this moment in Anisuzzaman’s text not because of any leftover fantasy of undivided Bengal.[23] or India for that matter but in recognition of a pattern in his text: even as he describes his 1971 in terms of what he witnessed and did towards the liberation (a narrative that begins and ends in the same year), there is a process that goes further back in time (1947 and beyond) in order to make sense not only of 1971 but what it means to be a Bangladeshi in 1997 (a witness to the murder and mayhem perpetrated by army officers and soldiers looking for a catharsis in revolution), the year in which his work had appeared. Most of these works emerge from a complex intertwining of three different spaces (1947, 1971, and post-war changes till the end of military rule with Ershad’s regime in 1991) and not necessarily in a clear chronological order. Ghulam Sarwar Murshid’s argument seems apposite here even if we reject its teleological underpinnings. If nations need to construct a past of myths, legends, and heroes in history to people their symbolic world, the resistance against British rule in undivided India and the Pakistan movement would both be open to contestation. Thus 1952 and 1971 acquire mythic proportions, two points of reference that must retain their purity if the founding ideals (or more correctly the raison d’être) of the Bangladeshi state are to be preserved. With the rehabilitation of the collaborators and the Jamaat-e-Islami in politics during Ziaur Rahman’s rule, which came to a bloody end in 1981, it was as if the loss, pain, suffering, and the
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memories of the war attained a plenitude of meaning, and grief had to be made public and political (which is what happens mostly in the narratives of women).[24] It did not help that Zia himself was a war hero and his usurpation of power fed into an alternative discourse of nationalism, where Bangladesh was again in danger and could only be rescued by ‘work [25] (a military ethic as opposed to rhetoric of democracy?) and not sloganeering or politics. It is perhaps not wide off the mark to say that critical research into the freedom movement is still a less-visited terrain in Bangladesh. It is in this light that this work needs to be read. While in the memoir of Mushtari Shafi we glimpse the ideological, political, and prejudicial compulsions under which refugee politicians, intellectuals, and cultural activists worked in India, the work without apportioning clear responsibility indulges in insinuations as a device to circumvent uncomfortable claims.[26] Little wonder then that in the preface to the first edition written in 1986, Shafi refers to the enveloping sadness in the nation, the despair, and the distortion of history in Bangladesh while those responsible remain malignant ‘forces’; in the preface to the fifth edition written in 2005, she laments the general indifference of a generation to history. In Anisuzzaman love for the country manifests not in an excess of emotion, or a self-righteousness that often emerges, and disturbingly so, from other tales of sacrifice but as homesickness experienced in another land. War appears in its functional aspect most of the time involving travel, wording of press releases, and negotiation with the Indian government for support. As an actor/witness he is reminded of Erich Maria Remarque’s cult novel and feels that he is joining those characters lost in the dark of the night and the dense fog like those fleeing from Nazi persecution during the Second World War. This is what Anisuzzaman records:
In the crowd I saw a girl-her image is still clear in my mind. Wearing a cheap blue saree the young maiden walked with slow steps. Her co-travellers would soon leave her behind; a new group would catch up with her and move ahead as well. Under her achol was an infant-wonder if it had been born in the way! Her neck was tilted to the right. No tears in her eyes, no words. She was moving unhurriedly in search of safetywhatever else she may lack in the world, she did not lack time.[27]
The image of the woman as he drove past in his Volkswagen nudged by guilt at his journey in comfort stands out in his text. It is a moment and a face that have remained etched in his mind; even as he writes he recalls it. The second instance that he recalls (which he did not witness
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but had heard from a friend) involved an incident in a refugee camp. The relief goods that would reach the camp were always inadequate. Mothers would have to stand in queue with their children for milk and not all would receive it. One day after the queue had been formed, the person in charge announced that due to the shortage only those in utter need would be given milk. As one woman reached out for her share a commotion arose and someone said that since she was still weaning the infant she could feed him breast milk and, therefore, should not be given any. The man hesitated. The girl looked at him for a moment. Then unbuttoned her blouse and bared her breasts, he could judge for himself now what the truth was. At the end of the narration Anisuzzaman writes: ‘I am still hounded by the memories of that incident that I had heard from Ashok.[ 28] We may recall the response of Jahanara Imam when she hears about the experiences of Motahar Saheb, who had gone looking for a missing relative and on returning home was unable to sleep, and takes the same sedative that she had advised him to.
Though unintended perhaps, a photograph of Sheikh Mujib at his historic 7 March 1971 rally is juxtaposed with a picture on the next page of Indira Gandhi at a refugee camp, a pamphlet and a poster published by the Bangladesh Liberation Council of Intelligentsia, of an all-party meeting, and of the demonstration against Yahya’s mock trial of Mujib, and so on. Standing as pictorial reminders of the political battle waged by those whose basic needs were taken care of in exile, it provides a stark contrast and perhaps a measure of unconscious irony. We are reminded that they are history’s actors, photographed people who will find their way into museums, books, and such other archives of memory, who in traditional narratives will find a resting place. The two incidents mentioned above require interpretation, their place in the memory (and memorialization of the war is not self-evident. The purpose here is not to posit a people’s history in opposition to the public events attendant on nation making and freedom. I am interested, as discussed in the last chapter on the memoirs and testimonies of women, in the interpretive tools available and choices made when these witnesses/actors/victims are faced with scenes and situations they have never seen nor anticipated in their lives. And then there are narratorial choices in the genre of the memoir and testimonies that not only deepen our understanding of the effects of war and violence but at the same time also raise interesting questions about the way these are represented in memory while one is simultaneously living out the everyday. In the case of Bangladesh this every day after the war, and more so since 1975, presented conceptual
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challenges of a different kind. All these works (written after the mid- 1980s), almost fifteen years after the event, respond to the interim and upon reading-even if they eschew direct references to the plummeting of the heroic destiny of the new nation-appear to communicate in subtle ways the actual conditions of their production.
In Nirmalendu Goon’s text discussed earlier he is witness to a man’s skull being blown off; like a snail without its shell, his soft brain was visible; but people had changed, he observes, and none stopped to help or save him. He reflects on the loss of humanity of human beings fleeing in terror and asks whether witnessing the Jinjira massacre had changed him and others like him so much that they left a woman grieving over her decapitated husband (who could still have been saved) and ran for their lives. It continues to haunt him and with the image of ‘Shubha, it returns in the present as memories that constitute for the secondary witness like us important points of entry into a text that chart along with the journey to liberation the moral questions that war poses. The strangely unstable meanings of being human that war and violence bring to the fore unsettle both Anisuzzaman and Goon, making their texts interventions in the legacy of war even as they both partake of the relief of freedom.
Anisuzzaman writes an otherwise spare, composed, matter-of-fact account of his days during the war in a reportorial style. The struggle waged by non-combatants in the cause of the nation is rehabilitated through this text into the discourse of the war. Indeed 1971 was recognized as a war of liberation and not insurgency because of the political and diplomatic actions that followed declaration of war. In this masculine world of activity, the materialization of the women discussed earlier is not reflected upon nor sought to be explained, and is merely recorded; but Anisuzzaman writes that these two images of the two women pursue him into the present as well. One woman with a child, dragging her feet in search of shelter and another with her breast exposed give rise in Amar Ekattor to things which cannot be forgotten. Earlier the author compares the exodus to that of the Second World War and we encounter, like we did in the last chapter, a reference to the Holocaust, Anisuzzaman passes by the woman of the first incident in his car and dwells on her even as he writes about it almost a couple of decades later. He risks exposing his moral culpability in the sense that he allows himself the indulgence of deliberately watching and following her move ments and later including her in this work of his as a memory of the war. It is almost as if while writing he pauses and looks at her all over again.
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He does this without stopping to provide her succour when she needed it, a classic situation in which a witness of modern suffering finds herself. It is in the telling and remembering of these two incidents that the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurred.[29] In the second instance he narrates an incident graphically even though he was not present when it occurred. While they appear as description of events, as I have mentioned earlier the status of these memories and the way he writes about them are clearly different from the time he writes, for instance, about his meetings with Tajuddin or Haksar in Indira Gandhi’s office. We are here reminded of Nirmalendu Goon’s witnessing of the blown-off skull of a man while on the run and the deep sense of guilt that he feels even as he writes his account in 2008 for not having stopped to help him. These moments in the text coexist with actions that may be clearly perceived as constitutive of the lore of nationalism.
War’s obsession with corpses in the search of inflicting maximum damage on the enemy appears again and again in the writings of Hasan Azizul Haq. In the first section of this chapter, we encountered his description of dead Pakistani soldiers in a commemorative article that he wrote about the war. In his random pieces collated in Ekattor: Kortole Chhinnomatha (and first published in 1995), death appears in a different form. Earlier we had drawn attention to the realistic description of lifeless bodies of the perpetrator described dispassionately and yielding a strong irony of being a victor who surveys the spectacle of those who were sent to their deserved’ deaths. In the above text Haq describes bodies of victims floating in water. It is a slightly longish extract, which I have translated and cited below. Haq is standing beside the river watching the clamour of men, women, and children trying to flee from the attack of Pakistani soldiers and their collaborators.
At that very moment as the waves rose and fell I sighted the corpses advancing towards the Bay of Bengal. Uncountable dead bodies descended down the terrible current from the north to the south. They came dancing along-infinite, indistinguishable, in a confused mass. They are on the crest of the wave, in the trough; they rollick down the slope of the waves in sport, as if alive. Entangled, they make geometric shapes with each other, separate and scatter. They are indescribable; they are only bodies, bodies of human beings. Dancing, in an arrogant posture they will move southward, further and further; with their long oars the boatmen will separate the teeming pyramids of these corpses that will gather from time to time. They will ride the current in Baleshwar to the channel of Haringhati. Finally they will reach the Bay of Bengal. That is
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when I saw for the first time that the corpses of women float on their bellies and those of men on their backs.[30]
This lyrical description is certainly out of sync with the ghastliness of the scene, the clamour of the living and the movement of dead men and women. While others talk of the progress of the war, Haq brings into his work the unprecedented images that war gave rise to. The difference between the three memoirs discussed above lies in the fact that while Goon, Sarkar, and Anisuzzaman led a nomadic existence in the nine months of the war in search of a safe refuge, Haq stayed at home in East Pakistan for the most part and hence experienced the time of the violent days differently. These images/moments in the texts (including the others discussed in this section) escape from the interpretation of the war of liberation as merely a cause-effect phenomenon, the narration of which is merely a task of repetition. The violent lyricism of the above description is memory’s trick, which may transform things in the imagination with the passage of time. The more horrific they are, the more one struggles to represent and interpret them and as a writer of fiction, he can employ tools which allow him to frame the sight in a narrative form of this kind without mitigating its horror. Therefore, even at the level of style, the borders between genres are blurred and such a constant negotiation allows the author(s) to access the past. In the discussion that has appeared in the chapter so far, a case may be made for the gendered witnessing of war, the representation of its suffering and horrors. In the following section men writing about the waging of combat will be added to the memories of 1971 and we shall be able to appreciate the multilayered meanings of remembering the war and the creation of Bangladesh.
Guerrilla Memoirs
The transformative acts of memory and recall reveal themselves in the accounts of those who took up arms and birthed the new nation. In turning to their accounts in this chapter where we discuss male authors we explore the dynamics that emerge when juxtaposed with the section on civilian writings on the war and with the preceding chapter on memoirs and testimonies of women. This alerts us to the similarities and disjuncture in interpretation when faced with a situation like war, which in precipitating a crisis demands a response. It finds men and women in different differentiated social spaces. In this section on combatant
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memoirs, we move to those who are more commonly understood to be agents and focus on their interpretive acts when placed in the context of the unprecedented. The first part shall discuss voluntary combatants/ guerrilla accounts followed by military memoirs. Joshua S. Goldstein’s War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa provides a point of departure for the texts that shall be analysed here. He argues:
Male soldiers can better motivate themselves for combat if they can compartmentalize combat in their belief systems and identities. They can endure, and commit terrible acts because the context is exceptional and temporary. They have a place to return to or at least die trying to protect-a place called home or normal or peacetime. In drawing this sharp dichotomy of hellish combat from normal life, cultures find gender categories readily available as an organising device. Normal life becomes feminized and combat masculinised.[31]
This draws our attention to the fact that though war is sought to be explained as a state of emergency, its ambiguities are sustained and even justified by pre-existent gender categories. Goldstein’s work is directed at examining why women have been effectively kept out of combat roles for ages when there is no biological constraint upon their participation. One of the claims he makes in the course of the work is that the exclusion of women is designed to exploit their labour during wartime, which is critical to the survival of the war system. The concern of this chapter, however, is to explicate how the imagination of war by combatant and non-combatant men tends to intermesh in remarkable ways, with notions of gender providing the bridge.
A War Hero in Post-war Bangladesh: Kader Siddiqui and Swadhinota ’71
The photographs included in Kader Siddiqui’s two volumes of Swadhinota ’71 conjure up their own account of the war. Given the context of the controversy surrounding him, his construction of an image that responds to the nuances of the war and changes in post-war discourses suggests an attempt to renegotiate identity while presenting some facts as self-evident and inalienable. Tiger Siddiqui, as he was fondly called, for his legendary exploits during the war of liberation, in the second volume begins his narration with a series of photographs that
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create and confirm the myth of the war hero. We see him shaking hands with brigadiers and generals from India in camaraderie, alighting from helicopters, addressing hugely attended public rallies, and holding the microphone for Sheikh Mujib after his return from captivity in Pakistan, to whom he surrenders his weapon in a grand voluntary gesture. And finally in a photograph with Bongobondhu smoking his pipe seated by him, Siddiqui is seen speaking to a massive gathering of the people. These are preceded by pictures of coffins of a few freedom fighters, the Mukti Bahini blowing up a bridge and the by-now-familiar one of Lieutenant Gen. A.A.K. Niazi signing the document of the surrender of the Pakistani forces beside Lieutenant Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora.[32] In his first volume, however, the preface talks of the neglect of freedom fighters, the obfuscation of the true account of the war and the rise to power of those who know nothing about the sweat, toil, and blood that went into the making of Bangladesh. In the first chapter of this book, I have mentioned that to my mind the militarization of the common man during the war and the surfeit of weapons circulating in the public domain was one of the most significant consequences of the war. The faceless guerrilla or the renegade Bengali soldier of the erstwhile Pakistani army who did not attain martyrdom and became the citizen of a new nation had to return to the everyday and the politics of promises and rhetoric, and had to effect a re-evaluation of what had happened. In this reinterpretation of his circumstances and relationship with post-war realities are embedded, at the level of discourses, a memorialization of the past as in the case of Tiger Siddiqui. Readers of his works will juxtapose his words and self-image(s) with the visuals of a war hero in sunglasses, hat, and battle fatigues (which form part of the captioned pictorial narrative that finds its way into the memoirs) a far cry away from the images encountered in films and stories of the lungi- and vest-clad Bengali guerrillas.
While the history of the Liberation War in Bangladesh draws its legitimacy from the register of retaliatory violence as a result of the genocide perpetrated by the Pakistani forces, Siddiqui’s account buys into stereotypical notions of the glory of war and its hyper-masculinity.[33] To put it succinctly, his reconstruction of events in 1985 is to be read as an account ‘from the line of fire! His chronological narrative, almost a blow by blow account, clearly aspires to be read as a true account where his reputation attests the facts (from memory) he marshals, and when his notoriety for his vigilantism4 comes in the way, the photographs and unfazed faith in the morality of his actions are to redeem his version. However, his stance betrays an ambiguity that lurks in some works
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in the genre of the voluntary combatant memoir. On the one hand, the need for popular legitimation controls the narrative, as in a guerrilla account. It is made clear in various anecdotes that are recorded in Siddiqui’s text, where he seems, at one level, to design an encounter to win for the Mukti Bahini the acceptance of the masses and at another to shape the narration of it in such a way that the reader withdraws her ethical judgement of his methods once his intention is revealed. In the style of narration he adopts is to build up an incident and employ tools of surprise and suspense till he shows his hand, whether it is while in a battle or more frequently while meting out punishment. The reader is filled in on Kader Siddiqui’s process of thinking that led to a particular decision or another. Juxtaposed to each other are narratives of valour and leadership in combat and the simple, unsophisticated moral tale of justice. Within the genre of combatant memoirs, in the practice of recording the exploits of a warrior then lies a difference between a military memoir (which we shall have occasion to look into shortly) and that of a volunteer or conscript. With the former the use of violence is backed by legal legitimacy which is expected to also gleam with obvious moral legitimacy; in the latter (which is a spontaneous call to arms for alleviation of the current order of things) a self-consciousness about the methods used is apparent, not those which target the enemy who is clearly now bereft of humanity, but those used to silence detractors or instil discipline. This is not to suggest that in Siddiqui’s memoirs there is an ethical stance on violent methods, but the need for justification and the casting of what may be easily construed as vigilante righteousness within the narrative of a higher and simpler form of justice than that allowed by the state betrays the embarrassment of a first-timer in a war, so to speak. In our reading of different genres in which the war has been memorialized and the dissimilarities within the same genre, we encounter different interpretations of the phenomenon of (unprecedented) war and the various ways in which people try to cope with it. There is in all these appropriations of the past a strong element of retrospective understanding, inevitably perhaps, even as they wish to tell the story as it happened.
One of these incidents was at the recruitment of cadres for Mukti Bahini. Kader Siddiqui and his companions sent word around that fighters would be chosen at an appropriate time and place. While the requirement was for around 20 men, around 2,000 turned up. The eligibility of some of these aspirants was tested by subjecting them to caning since the ability to withstand pain manfully was one of the ethics of
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combat. In the absence of time, proper training, and regimen employed in the army which are supposed to make men of boys by disciplining their bodies to prepare them for the hard life of the soldier, such unsophisticated methods gain legitimacy. However, there is another aspect to this which I wish to highlight. Siddiqui narrates the incident of a young man who admittedly surprised him. While he was being caned, this man (his name was Shamsu) responded by saying that it would not matter to him even if the army shot at him, thus throwing a challenge at his recruiters. Siddiqui tells him, with such an attitude he could never be drafted and that he would be shot at the very moment. Simulating disappointment, Kader walks towards his companions and melodramatically announces that he had no right to join the war since he had missed such a simple target. He steals a glance at where he had fired, satisfied that he had hit exactly the point he had aimed to. He walks towards Shamsu and checks his heart rate. It was perfectly still. He then feigns a sigh and tells the fearless man that since the bullet missed him he can join the force. All the while of course it was a ruse meant only to test the claim of someone who was being chosen to fight for his country. The nuances of Siddiqui’s test of ability (though problematic) is less striking (methods of more sophisticated training in the army are no less brutal) than the subterfuge in narration. In the nationalistic memoir of a war hero who fought valiantly against oppressors, we glimpse the need of an author to organize his material in such a way that the structure moves from strategies, glory, and sacrifice in war to becoming a vehicle of both affirmation and redemption, necessitated by wartime and post-war conditions,
Another incident shall buttress the point I wish to make here. The contingent led by Kader Siddiqui had reached Araipara. Without a radio in their possession they were unable to listen to the progress of the war and the events in the rest of East Pakistan which was being broadcast on All India Radio and the clandestine radio Swadhin Bangla Betar of Bangladesh. Therefore, an emissary was sent to the shops nearby for the temporary loan of a radio. The shopkeeper in question sent the boy back assuring him that the radio would be sent in a short while. Angry at being insulted when the transistor arrived, he flung it away with all his might and it was damaged. Armed with gallons of kerosene the offender’s shop was doused thoroughly while the owners of the adjoining shops were asked to remove their goods, the Mukti Bahini unwilling to cause collateral damage. As they went about their job, some elders in the crowd that had gathered begged that the retribution be reduced to a heavy fine. Siddiqui tells the reader that all this while he had been
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waiting for this turn of events; it was something he had foreseen, for he too was aware that the other adjoining shops could catch fire in the process. This was the moment he seized upon, as his memoir says, and he benevolently pretended to agree, bowing to the will of the people. Those gathered were visibly relieved. Some suggested that the fine be 25,000 taka or more, while some said it should not exceed 5,000. Kader Siddiqui requested that they have faith in his justice and that the matter be left to him. As the narration goes, he again acted as if in deep thought. Then to the astonished audience he declared that the fine would be no more than 5 taka. This, as he tells us, demonstrated to the crowd that the freedom fighters did not desire money. It went a long way, he argues, to establish in the minds of the common people the ethics of the freedom fighters and give them the moral legitimacy to solicit the support of the people. Such gestures are coherent within the universe of guerrilla warfare as the writings of Ernesto Che Guevara and Mao Zedong remind us. Che argues that the guerrilla is a social reformer and a critical thrust of his work is to win the masses over to his side. The methods employed towards this end are justified to the extent that the desired end is achieved. In a pragmatic assessment of the means available, Che suggests that a controlled use of violence (of an exemplary nature) sometimes becomes necessary. While one appreciates the grave odds against which guerrilla warfare takes place and the compelling reasons for such strategies, my attempt in this book is to look underneath these discourses of strategies and tactics aimed towards sustaining a battle against a powerful enemy. While I am aware of the threat of annihilation under which the war of 1971 was fought by men like Kader Siddiqui, it is worthwhile to read these texts in the light of the post-war history of Bangladesh and try and see how assumptions of masculinity and strategies of warfare may be interlinked, even in the context of just war. This is not to conflate all kinds of warfare but illustrate the gendered nature of all warfare. The tension that undercuts the myth of the war hero will be evident in anecdotes that will be referred to here and form part of his two-volume memoirs, even though the justness of this war may be a defensible proposition. I would like to argue that this tension is sustained by the dialectic (in the text) of the progress of the war-both chronologically and in terms of victories won after setbacks-and the parallel text of dispensation of justice to erring fighters, cowards, collaborators, dacoits, reluctant, and cautious masses, thus tethering the cause of freedom to that of an exceptional leader, the one who enthrals the masses with the spectacle of his courage, benevolence, love, and integrity. To draw attention to the process
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of this transformation is to become aware of the disparate constituents that went into the creation of Bangladesh, elements other than the deep aspirations of the Bengali masses. Kader Siddiqui’s Swadhinota ’71 takes us from March 1971 to January 1972 (the last chapter entitled ‘The Heralding of New Chapter’), and almost fifteen years after the war tries to remain faithful to dates, places, and names though there is no mention of his ever having kept a diary. Siddiqui, arguably, constructs an image emerging from his wartime life in response to not only his memories of the war which ended in victory. The subsequent events and the structure of his works reveal a shuttling between the necessity of telling a true account of the war in a Bangladesh now deficient in courage and truth (as the introduction to the first volume perceives it) and the need to cast it in a language that would give instrumental violence a wide moral berth. In another incident he orders the execution of a dacoit who had not only plundered people but also raped a few women who are asked to testify against him. A few days later Siddiqui’s recruits capture a band of policemen who had been collaborating with the Pakistani army and one of them meets with a similar fate. Siddiqui takes us through the process of decision-making (he sits under a tree alone and ruminates on the just punishment merited by the man) and after much agonizing reaches the conclusion that his offence is deserving of death. Every judgement of his is greeted with popular appreciation and much fanfare. Some are caned, some fined, and some sentenced to death by gunshot. The transformation of Tiger Bahini (Kader Siddiqui’s unit of the Mukti Bahini) from a guerrilla force to one that assumed judicial and law enforcement functions ensured that it became a law unto itself, its mode of operation both repressive and hegemonic. It might be worthwhile to recall that the first incident was one in which the Bahini had felt slighted on being refused a radio and the simple purpose of retribution was to create terror. In war’s clear delineation of friends and enemies, this man had erred. In the vacuum created by the absence of a legal law enforcer (having declared independence, the Pakistani government and army had been transformed into occupant forces), Kader Siddiqui plays out his paradoxical fantasy of a benevolent dictator whose power nevertheless flows from the people who love and fear him at the same time. Seen in another light, the mode in which he casts himself could also be seen as an implicit critique of post-war self-rule in Bangladesh. By 1986 the top political and military leadership of the war had been eliminated and General Ershad had ascended to power. It was also in this year that Jahanara Imam’s Ekattorer Dinguli
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appeared. In our discussion of male non-combatant memoirs (primarily those of Jatin Sarkar, Nirmalendu Goon, and Anisuzzaman), we have seen how the motif of journey permeates the text. As the characters move from one place to another (Goon and Anisuzzaman) or from their childhood to the East Pakistan of March 1971 and beyond (Jatin Sarkar), their narratives merge with that of the nation, and the birth of Bangladesh is felt as a self-renewal, almost a rebirth in a free country, These texts move effortlessly between the self and the nation, as history suffuses the individual. Not so in Swadhinota ’71. Having fought in the war there is a strong sense of having brought Bangladesh into existence, of having given birth to it. Towards the end of the second volume (both appeared in quick succession, almost within two months of each other), Kader Siddiqui sadly recollects how within two days of the creation of Bangladesh, a warrant for his arrest was issued for having outraged the law of the land. In a sentimental reflection characteristic of the tone of his works that blend hyper-masculinity and aggression with the naivety of righteousness and virtue, Siddiqui—who admits to authorizing the killing of four non-Bengali ‘miscreants’ in full view of people and journalists during the first public meeting organized by the freedom fighters after the war in Dhaka-interprets opposition to this act in the following manner:
Only two days after the liberation a warrant for my arrest was issued by the Bangladesh government, thus successfully creating a sensation but failing to do anything new. It appears that their grouse against me was that I had taken law into my own hands. Like so many patriots of the past I was also labelled a law breaker. Like them I too had become a victim of machinations of politics. In a free Bangladesh too, earned with the sacrifice of lakhs of people, the palace intrigues remained unchanged.[35]
The entire observation could have been dismissed as self-pity were it not for the fact that in claiming to give us an authentic account of the war it also becomes a part of the heroic narrative of nationalism. The hunger, toil, tireless journeying, gunshot wounds, and threats to life braved by the guerrilla combatants such as Siddiqui shall remain a part of war memories and by extension that of the history of the nation. It positions itself as a ‘minority discourse, a critique of power and post-war politics at the time at which it was written (1986). As a war memoir it does not dwell on the horrors of war nor for long on why it became necessary
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but more on the formation of Mukti Bahini in Tangail, their exploits, methods, and a conscious attempt to reinterpret a vigilante past.[36]
In holocaust memoirs the survivors speak/write/inscribe their experiences in the paradigm of an event that was wholly unique, unheard of, and even unimaginable in history. There is a strong feeling that what had happened would be dismissed as fabulous, too unlike anything known that could be believed.[37] In the secondary witnesses it has created complex emotions such as D.G. Myers who in his article ‘Responsible for Every Single Pain: Holocaust Literature and the Ethics of Interpretation argues that the work of a critic of Holocaust literature is not toʻunmask the interests behind a Holocaust text but in the nature of Geoffrey Hartman, put ethics before interpretation. Dominick La Capra locates ’empathy’ as a category of response of those who write the history of the Holocaust. Since the war of secession in East Pakistan was preceded by a brutal genocide in which the targets were primarily intellectuals, Hindus, and supporters of the Awami League, it was seen, justifiably, as a retaliation, which was ethically in order and necessary for survival. In one sense, therefore, combatant memoirs of just war occupy a space of moral clarity. That is why narration/recall may be seen in critical terms as restorative. However, there are moments in all texts where the struggle for self-determination and victory in war narrated from a post-war time appear as compensatory.
In the work of memorialization it is difficult to treat the memoir of a Kader Siddiqui in the same category as that of a Jahanara Imam. And even before we raise questions of gender and genre in representation, the secondary witness is placed in an awkward position where her response to Swadhinota ’71 appears to be different (perhaps decidedly less empathetic) than that of Ekattorer Dinguli or for that matter Atmokotha 1971. It will be clear to the reader that different terms of analyses have been applied to authors dealing with varying situations and responsibilities.
To come to Swadhinota ’71 or other (especially voluntary) combatant memoirs with a settled aversion to war and violence in all its forms does not mean that one can wish away the fact that in the world today ideas of recourse to violence as a response to oppression are still relevant. Conversely, one cannot ignore the fact that language, methods, and emotions of war whether of the unjust or just variety can bear striking similarity depending on one’s position/location. In focusing on the individual, Kader Siddiqui’s use of the genre, in addition to its value as an account of the war, foregrounds the entangled discourses that lie within the work of memorialization in Bangladesh today.
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As the analyses of the following texts will bear out, masculinity and war are deeply intertwined. The masculine imagination of war is a complex and gendered one which, in its pragmatic assessments, knows it must function by controlling mental territories as much as physical. Even where women do appear as other than victims, for instance, as lyrical possibilities in the works of Mahbub Alam and Nirmalendu Goon, in the midst of destruction, it only serves to underline the basic thrust of the second and third chapters–while war may have been an exceptional occurrence and thus place human actors in situations without precedent, the tools used to represent it, think/write/talk about it are drawn from workaday realities and the sexual/social relationships implicated in it. Even moments of escape are ineluctably bound with the banal.
Guerrilla Theke Shommukh Juddhe
If one may begin with the dissimilarity between Swadhinota ’71 and Guerrilla Theke Shommukh Juddhe (hereafter Guerrilla) in the genre of the voluntary combatant memoir, what strikes one immediately is the narrative choice. While Siddiqui’s text in effect revolves around the protagonist (the author himself) even as it narrates the war, Alam while not moving away from it altogether tries to sketch for us a war that the masses fought and won. The work is born out of the field notes that he takes in his diary, neat and complete diagrams that lay out plans of attack, routes to be taken by the freedom fighters, and so on. Their journey, after being trained by Indian armed forces, takes them in search of hideouts from where they launch their attack on the enemy. Mahbub Alam, commander of his unit, recounts the war through anecdotes, painstaking description, and the day-to-day challenges that the guerrilla fighters had to encounter even when they were not engaged in an operation. In images of shared cigarettes, communal cooking, anecdotes of clashes with the enemy, the banter and bonhomie among the men we see what have become stock images of war, drawing mostly from screen portrayals of the World Wars.[38] The work progresses by an elaboration of his short crisp notes followed by their dates of recording, and are interspersed with accounts which he furnishes from memory having been unable to jot down all that needs to be said. Mahbub Alam foregrounds the role of the community and manages to, therefore, salvage a representation that talks of ordinary people who had been forced to take up arms if they were to avoid becoming silent victims of genocide.
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As in Kader Siddiqui’s memoir, Alam also turns an executor of Razakars along with his band after a public trial is held where the Razakars are given an opportunity to defend themselves. The men are punished according to the seriousness of their offence. They also perform the function of protection of people’s life and property albeit of only those whose stand is not inimical to the war. As Alam says in the beginning, since the very success of their operations depends on local informers and the goodwill of the people living in a particular area, such vigilante justice to save them from looting, intimidation, and attack by the enemy became a way of establishing a common bond with them. In an internally coherent arrangement, the unarmed common people gave them their allegiance not only out of love for their nation but also in return for protection from lawlessness and becoming soft targets.
Mahbub Alam refers more than once to the overwhelming support to the ‘Joi Bangla’ cause from Bengali people on this side of the border. This he puts down to the ‘freedom loving consciousness of freedom loving Bengalis. He argues that during the colonial rule, Bengalis irrespective of religion had contributed more to the cause of freedom than any other region. On more than one occasion he evokes homogeneous images of eternal Bengal, its women, and beauty. The Bengali nation is one, he says. It was merely divided on communal terms in 1947 for self-interest. This musing arrives in the text when a doctor in Siliguri in India refuses to charge a fee while treating the injured freedom fighters. Needless to say, this is a simplistic interpretation of the past, the Partition, and the role of Bengali Muslims and Hindus in the precipitation of Pakistan. The myth of undivided Bengal is a powerful one and as an explanatory framework is a convenient one to gloss over the legacy of a fragmented past. While it is difficult to encounter any mention of India in Kader Siddiqui’s text that does not have the word great prefixed to it (he receives help and recognition in India during the war and his work is published by a Calcutta publishing house), Alam may critically remark on the overbearing attitude of a few Indian army officers, but his interpretation of the events of 1947 and the role of Indian Bengalis in 1971 leaves a lot to be desired.
What stands out in Guerrilla is the recurring image of a woman whose name Alam does not know, a refugee woman who is identified throughout the text in sensuous terms as one with a neck as graceful as a swan’s. He makes several visits to Amaidighi near Siliguri in West Bengal to meet his friends and hoping to catch a glimpse of her on his days off from combat. He makes no attempt to speak to her and she remains as a romantic presence in the text. (In contrast, Siddiqui’s text
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is an overwhelmingly masculine universe where the only mention of women is in terms of anxiety for his mother and sister and a Razakar whom he sentences to death since he had allegedly raped two women.) In his preface to the first volume of Swadhinota ’71, Kader Siddiqui writes that though he has tried to faithfully record the war in his work, he will make no mention of the atrocities on women since it is one of the most painful aspects of the otherwise glorious Liberation War. His erasure is presented as a chosen silence and buys into the discourse of shame around wartime rape. However, women often appear in Alam’s work and impinge sensuously on him. The swan-like creature functions as a refrain in the text and is transformed into a muse, a symbol of all that freedom fighters have to protect and restore. While she does not become, as in Gaffar Choudhury’s account, the sign of a wounded Bangladesh, in the soft romanticism of Alam and the resolve that he makes to himself to fight till the end after he sees her care-ridden face, her function is unmistakeable. This image is in sharp contrast to another incident that happens when Alam is told to keep an eye on a Pakistani bunker from a treetop check-post. As he trains his tele-lens on the bunker, a horrifying scene swims into view. He witnesses a young woman, almost half-clad being dragged into the bunker by five or six soldiers and two lungi-clad men who appeared to be Razakars. As they reach the mouth of the bunker three men in black uniform appear from inside and put their arms around the girl. He screams to his junior Habib to inform the control room to start artillery fire, watching in impotent rage. They are confined to the branch of the tree that they had mounted and Alam interprets the situation in the following light, not without a touch of the dramatic:
We were captives on the topmost branch. Over there in the huge bunker was incarcerated the helpless girl. It occurs to me that in bunker after bunker this is the way the Pakistani army have confined the entire nation, not just the woman. On this side are we and on the other it’s them. In the middle Bangladesh is being raped. And none of us can do anything about it.39
In the first chapter we had referred to John Gotschall’s article ‘Explaining Wartime Rape, where he had explicated the various motives that underlie rape during war. The most common was to undermine the manhood of the enemy by exposing his inability to protect his women. Claudia Card emphasizes on how the cross-cultural symbolic meaning among men in patriarchies of rape as dominance40 sustains the culture
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of martial rape.[41] It is clear that Alam interprets this incident with the same understanding, almost in a moment of perfect communication, a smooth exchange of meaning between the men on both sides. By displacing the torture of the women onto the whole of the nation (we have come across a similar generalization with Abdul Gaffar Choudhury), Alam consigns the fact of rape to a familiar framework of understanding. It is with sheer clarity of purpose then that the Indian officer Captain Nanda under whose command Alam’s unit functioned tells him that it was not a coincidence that he had sent these Bengali freedom fighters to the observation post. It was to lead them to witness such violence on their people and especially women so that they may be filled with hatred for the enemy and burn with a desire for revenge. In a telling revelation of the gendered nature of war and the world view of those who participate in it, Captain Nanda says that while in peacetime soldiers have a reputation for scandal and unseemly sexual behaviour, it was understandable given the fact that they led such disorderly lives. But such conduct according to him is unpardonable in war; he uses the expression haraam[42] and asserts that God will not brook such sins. The morality of war that Nanda invokes (he even claims religious sanction for it) does not permit the follies of peacetime. Thus, it appears that such a humiliation should not be forgotten. The significance of the incident circulates among soldiers of all sides in the conflict as the individual woman is either effaced or turned into a sign of something larger. The soft image of the swan-like woman and that of the woman in the bunker are energies behind the just war of liberation. So is the wife of a co-fighter who before one of their missions asks them to have a meal in her home. Alam again writes:
We could not stay for a meal. I tell her that. This time she removes the veil from her face. By the dim, soft light of the hurricane lamp one could see eternal Bengal’s dark, familiar feminine countenance. Unmindful, that woman fiddles with her achol, wrapping it round her finger.[43]
Otherwise restrained, and adopting a more subdued tone from the hyper-masculinity that we encounter in Siddiqui, Alam’s gendering of the image of the nation for which he goes to war and fights valiantly constitutes a noteworthy aspect of his work. The end of the war brings the return of his longing for the woman with the neck of a swan. A masculinity premised on assumptions of ideal, unchanging, sensuous womanhood provides moral currency to the violent methods of the guerrillas who put their lives and youth on the line for love of the nation,
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which may appear in several other forms ranging from the trust and belief of countrymen, sacrifice, narratives of heroism, and so on. What Alam’s account also brings to light is that apart from tales of women warriors who fought alongside men in 1971, there are very few moments either in the memoirs or testimonies encountered so far where existing interpretive tools of conceptions/notions of gender are seriously threatened or questioned even when human beings confront the unprecedented or resist oppression. However, this observation needs to be qualified We shall visit that terrain when we draw connections between the second chapter and the memoirs and commemorative pieces discussed in this chapter in the concluding section. This account, spare and detailed in its description of the progress of the war, is a classic of memorial literature of 1971. When we examine O.V. Vijayan’s The Infinity of Grace in the final chapter we will allow ourselves to confront the inferences that may be drawn from the commonalities they exhibit.
Military Accounts
This may at best be treated as a woefully inadequate subsection in the general discussion that has been undertaken in the preceding sections. What it also does is to access military memoirs of the war of 1971 written by Indian and Pakistani soldiers, under the persuasion that though not in conformity with the rest of the structure of this work where we have mostly accessed Bangladeshi accounts, it is worthwhile to read them to understand forces that the memory and nation-making project in Bangladesh encountered. Also, and importantly, it provides an insight into how those who are drafted by the state to use legitimate violence against citizens/enemies/miscreants remember the war. Due to the dearth of memoirs written by Bengali military combatants (those in the Pakistani army who turned hostile and joined the war of liberation), there shall be a focus on commemorative pieces, which are abundant. One reason for this lack is perhaps the fact that many of those military and political leaders who led the revolt of the masses were consumed by the violent afterlife of the war. Military intrigues and conspiracies (against which the politics of an independent Bengali nation was posited by the six points of Mujib) returned to haunt Bangladesh. A reading of Anthony Mascarenhas’s A Legacy of Blood suggests that those officers who executed Mujib and his family had all done it to punish his hubris. Nationalism guided their actions and they sincerely believed that the purity of their intent was guaranteed by Islam. Major Rashid and Major
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Farook who hatched the plan both believed that what they were undertaking was sacred duty.14 The war of secession began in East Pakistan under the military regime of Yahya Khan, which was preceded by Ayub Khan’s. In the psychological space of 1971 names such as Niazi, Rao Farman Ali, Tikka Khan, and so on appear with clockwork regularity. From the gallery of secondary witnessing they appear to have led history by the hand; later in some of their memoirs, however, they return as tellers of truth, to use a pun. It is necessary that posterity knows what freally happened so that mistakes may not be repeated. The organization and the waging of war in a modern state, the decision making process, and so on being such a closely guarded secret, its aura of mystery ensures that it generates a readership beyond its immediate fraternity. Of course the nature of what one ought to learn from history (or understand as history) depends on where one stands. To include an account of perpetrators when we have so far been focussing exclusively on Bangladeshi accounts may be seen as a necessary aberration offering us a view of the reasons why building up of a moral community against war and organized violence has not been an easy task. When Siddiq Salik in his memoirs of the war published in 1977 describes the night of 25 March of the fateful year as an eyewitness, this is what he remembers having seen:
I watched the harrowing sight from the verandah for four hours. The prominent feature of this gory night was the flames shooting to the sky. At times mournful clouds of smoke accompanied the blaze but soon they were overwhelmed by the flaming fire trying to lick at the stars. The light of the moon and the glow of the stars paled before this man-made furnace.[45]
The next morning he does see corpses but refutes later claims of ‘mountains of bodies. The reference above is obviously to Dhaka burning. Salik tells us of the mournful clouds of smoke, and the fact that the blaze outshone the light of the moon and the glow of the stars’ when a vicious battle raged. In writing about 1971, he seeks to appear neutral. For instance, he tells us about a Major Malik who while peeling an orange in the officer’s mess the day after the crackdown cheerfully remarked that the Bengalis had been sorted out for a generation’ and notes the sheer poverty of East Pakistan compared to the west on the day he had landed there. However, the poetic burst of the lines quoted above can only be read as wilful equivocation. This is not to suggest that
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gory description of the dead solely constitutes witnessing. Nevertheless, the above observation in this book that he sentimentally dedicates to The memory of United Pakistan’ is representative of his entire work–the “harrowing nine months in Bangladesh are either replaced with linguistic subterfuge or the politics and progress of the war as the culmination of tactical blunders.
A Peculiar Encounter: A Pakistani Military Memoir and the Bangladeshi Historian
We now turn to Rao Farman Ali Khan’s account of the war of 1971. As would be familiar to those acquainted with the major actors of the war, he was a military officer put in charge of non-military administration and earned notoriety in the annals of Bangladeshi history for his alleged role in the killing of intellectuals two days before the surrender of the Pakistani forces on 16 December. There are several accounts of the genocidal military action that talk about the discovery of his diary after the war which seem to hint at such a possibility since it contained a list of people many of whom were murdered on 14 December.[46] In our discussion, we shall focus on the Bengali translation of his work (‘How Pakistan Got Divided’). Published in Bangladesh as ‘Bangladesher Jonmo, with a lengthy foreword by Muntasir Mamun (a well-known historian in Bangladesh), the politics of the translation of the title is worth noting. While the English original refuses to use the word ‘Bangladesh’ and emphasizes on the division of Pakistan, the translation reverses that omission by putting the accent on the birth of Bangladesh. However, it is the relation between the text and the preface that is a fascinating study in criticism of what wishes to be seen as a historical document. To schematize, Muntasir Mamun’s foreword is related to Ali’s work in two ways. It is the relationship between two opposed visions of the past. To Mamun shall be attributed in the reading of this text the position of a victim and eventual victor and to Ali that of the perpetrator and the loser. It is complicated by the fact that Pakistan not only perpetrated war but a brutal and indiscriminate military crackdown and, therefore, it is likely that the reader shall be disposed to treat Ali’s account with a degree of suspicion. Mamun points why the decision to translate this text was a carefully considered process. With the distortion of history that has been at the heart of Bangladesh’s problems ever since its inception, to introduce into the public domain a text of this genre with the claims that it makes could have led to further obfuscation. Mamun points out
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(threadbare) the truths, half-truths, and lies of Rao Farman Ali Khan, invoking the readers’ memory of the past rather than archival sources. Muntasir Mamun’s work as a historian had taken him to Pakistan to investigate the perpetrators’ perspective and what they thought of the war after almost three decades. Philosophically positioned as an attempt to inaugurate a dialogue between the perpetrator and the victim on the lines of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, the work Shei Shob Pakistani (which would translate as ‘All Those Pakistanis) was born in 1999 out of interviews with prominent Pakistanis civilians (including journalists and activists) and military officers who would have memories of the war, baving lived through it. The state of denial of the military and political establishment was still evident. It was India and the machinations of West and East Pakistani politicians that led to the division of the country. And history had not changed for them. It only appeared to have been rendered irrelevant. What was clear, however, was the fact that most military officers were still fuming under the ignominy of defeat. To re-evaluate the events of 25 March let alone that of the rest of 1971 was not something that preoccupied them, except for a couple of respondents.[47] Indeed most were willing to talk because they were eager to record their versions and absolve themselves.
In Farman Ali’s text all issues make an appearance. However, the conclusions drawn are those which would make one wonder about what histories, if any, are taught to the young recruits in military academies.[48] Early in life Bengal for him became associated with clerks in colonial service, sorcery (since people who went there would never return), and hunger (perhaps because of the famines that had hit the region) and it is with these prejudices that he first went there as a military officer. He returned several times and in gauging the rise of secessionist tendencies in East Pakistan his understanding was that a few instances of isolated grievances of exploitation would not have divided the nation had it not been for the vested interests of politicians and unworthy military officers. The idea of responsibility that is posited when the history of modern genocide is talked about or matters such as war and its excesses seems utterly incompatible with the discourse of liability in the language of military memoirs. Since most of these accounts are written after the authors have professionally retired from the armed forces (Muntasir Mamun suggests in his preface that it often becomes a respectable post-retirement trade) it should perhaps be obvious that a critical or transformative understanding of violence and war is generally not one of the motivations of the practitioners of this genre.
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With the rehabilitation of right-wing forces that had worked against the disintegration of Pakistan during General Zia’s rule in 1977 began a process of a counter-narrative to the Awami League’s narrative of the birth of Bangladesh which had reflected the aspirations of the majority of the people including most non-Urdu speaking minorities. Its accommodative overtures towards the Jamaat-e-Islami (which was supposed to have supplied cadres to the Al Badr and Al Shams militia and headed some notorious Peace Committees formed during the war and now being tried by the War Crimes Tribunal) and its increasingly belligerent stance towards an India which it saw as an overbearing neighbour and the introduction of the debate as to who was actually responsible for the declaration of independence on 26 March were only some of the many issues. Consequently an obfuscation of the clear progression of disillusionment, provocation, and revolt, which formed part of the dominant nationalist narrative, was effected. As has been mentioned in the first chapter, the intelligentsia in Bangladesh had been the target of military action throughout the war but particularly during the action on 25 March and 14 December just prior to the surrender of the Pakistani army
In the very beginning of his work in the preface) Farman Ali outlines the limitations of his position and genre. He writes:
A soldier is always unfairly accused of being insensitive and incapable of feeling. That description however is invalid for a pure soldier. On the battlefield he sacrifices his life and takes that of others. From this gamble he does not derive joy nor does he cherish those memories, he cannot narrate the past like a storyteller or a writer of fiction. Intellectuals and academics, indifferent to the pain, depth and colour of wounds can describe incidents enthusiastically and startle us. The fate of a soldier and the suffering inside him does not stir them and detached from it they derive pleasure from their analyses. But a soldier cannot conduct himself like an intellectual or an academic.[49]
And that is why it is his misfortune, writes Rao Farman Ali, that his name has been dragged into the unfinished debates of 1971. And it is with a sense of accountability to his beloved Pakistan that was established in 1947 that he was moved to contest the disfiguring of history and provide an authentic eyewitness account of the disintegration of Pakistan. The method he employs to this effect is equivalent to one man’s word against another. Lieutenant General Niazi’s ‘revelatory’ account, The Betrayal of East Pakistan (1998), follows the same method.
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In chapter 13, which is entitled ‘Engineered Debacle, he makes the claim (with an insider’s knowledge) that the conspiracy of the birth of Bangladesh was hatched in West Pakistan. The war was lost according to the script designed by Yahya and Bhutto for untrammelled supremacy over West Pakistan. The war of liberation of Bangladesh then becomes merely a well-executed drama and the violence, rape, and massacre of innocents just an evolution of the plot. In fact the entire text builds towards that thesis, where soldiers such as Niazi become mere pawns’ in the hands of self-seeking leaders. His obsessive invocation of the Quran and God’s judgement to which he owes true allegiance reminds one of Farman Ali’s refuge in Islam in the face of confronting the past from the perspective of a perpetrator nation. They certainly do not contribute to the deepening of our understanding of the afterlife of 1971. Like Niazi’s text, Ali’s is replete with insinuations, gossip, and unsubstantiated rumours and they raise serious questions of responsibility. (One of them, for instance, is the allegation in Farman Ali’s text that the 1970 elections in East Pakistan were funded by India, which Mamun urgently refutes. This he does not by pointing to any authoritative archive but to the reader’s memories of those troubled times.) What it also does is question the permeability of knowledge produced by different genres in which the past is recalled. The relationship(s) between the readership of different texts and genres purporting to provide an authentic version of 1971 is a curious one. At one level there is the question of perspective/ location (which we often divide into rubrics such as victim, perpetrator, and so on) and at another is that of genre and gender, which of course is a complex dialogue between the author, text, and reader. While there might be very persuasive similarities across these denominations, their understanding of history and their memories of similar events may differ in essentials. And this difference is applicable not only to the victim/ aggressor divide, but also across gender and genre.
What is the conversation that a historian like Muntasir Mamun may set up with works such as Bangladesher Jonmo or The Betrayal of East Pakistan? How indeed do these texts speak to us? And if one of the motivations of this research is to encourage critical thinking about how different genres access memories of violence and war and how they respond to events that disrupt people’s known modes of living, then military accounts cannot be ignored. Muntasir Mamun drives home the point that while it is contentious to place a work like this in the public domain (its translation would mean a wider audience), it is important that Bangladeshis are aware of the way the war of liberation has been
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represented to the people in Pakistan and the world. It also becomes illustrative of its own genre and the establishment (the military) which enables such an experience. Needless to say, it is not only ‘illustrative’ but also instrumental in helping us understand uses to which different kinds of writing may be put and their value in the projects of memorialization of 1971. Autobiographical pieces written by Bangladeshi military combatants have often been pressed to the service of creating an archive of 1971 and to serve as documents of the violence and genocidal military action beginning on 25 March. Having been eyewitnesses to the progress of the war, their accounts form a crucial part of the archives. In reading them we encounter the morality of self-defence, a self which comprises the individual, personal relationships, family, community, region, and nation. The strong conviction of having fought a just war, details of inhuman torture borne by those military officers taken captive, the softening of hierarchy among superior and subordinate in the face of death and annihilation, and men pursuing the lights of freedom and justice all culminate in the discourse created by the recollection of the past. It is the past of glory and sacrifice and its sanctity is guarded by loss and victory achieved often with the maximum price. Official figures put the deaths in the war at close to three million out of a population of around seventy million in East Pakistan as the number that did not live to see the red sun of Bangladesh. They are all called martyrs in the country, they are one with those who fought the enemy and laid down their lives. Needless to assert then that the language of martyrdom forms a major motif of memorialization. This imparts a kind of positivity to deaths (which occurred at random as part of Operation Searchlight and later throughout the war where civilians would flee from one place to another or cross the border to India to escape repression, rape, and death) trying to make room for the trauma of those who survived them in the history of nationalist struggle. Moreover, this being a war that was fought by the commoners more than those in the armed forces, it is difficult to ascertain the numbers of casualties in battle and victims of repression. The perpetrators of 1971 have never acknowledged responsibility for genocide. Officially it still remains a war with secessionist forces abetted by an enemy’ neighbour and an attempt to save the legacy of 1947,[50] to save that feeling that General Niazi in his memoir claims to have had when India was partitioned: ‘All of us packed our belongings, happy and joyous to move to our beloved country, newly created by the efforts of our Quaid-e-Azam.[51] And this is where we encounter a problem. In the
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initiative by civil society to bring war criminals to book, there lies the predicament of existence of diverse moral communities. The establishment of the legitimacy or the efficacy of this demand would rely on a sense that the need for such a process is ‘self-evident’ and not only to the country which was subjected to such violence. India and the government of Bangladesh-in-exile by negotiating the surrender and offering safe passage to the 192 purported war criminals put an end to the war. However, the afterlife of these events has forced a rethinking of the past. And if a war crimes tribunal is to fulfil an ethical function it is of crucial importance that the urgency of this demand be translatable and acceptable to a larger moral community. The non-fictional accounts of the past that have been the subject of these chapters while responding to their own specific circumstances, also in terms of their genre and positioning, function as an archive of violence and war and the nature of memories that they create and circulate. The narratives of soldiers and officers who had reneged on their vow of allegiance to the Pakistani army and joined the war of liberation are those of courage, love, and risks. Unlike their voluntary armed counterparts they do not appear to be queasy about methods employed, legitimate methods of war, and though they fight on more visible grounds (of oppression and genocide) it is rarely that one comes across accounts such as that of Major (Retd) Rafiqul Islam who was honoured after the war with the title of ‘Bir Uttam, the highest award of gallantry conferred on warriors after the war. In his essay entitled ‘Those Weren’t Times of Tears, Only War’ in Bijoyer Muhurto, Rafiqul Islam writes:
The madness of war and destruction had ceased in all battlefields. Bangladesh had been freed from the catastrophe of genocide. All this was long back in the past—22 years—more than the lifespan of freedom fighters lost along the way. Almost all signs have been obliterated. On the pile of ruins of the war have appeared slums, streets and cities. Somewhere beside the tomb of an anonymous freedom fighter grows weeds and wild flowers-in neglect and lack of care. In the canvas of memories lying below the layers of recent memories is the past.[52]
He finishes with the following images, which are not usual in military accounts that often describe violent events within the logic of war. For instance, in the narration of a victory in battle, the accent tends to be more on the strategies and methods rather than what was lost. This is not to suggest that there is no mourning for dead or injured soldiers but the pragmatics of war gains importance in a situation in which men fight
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with their lives on the line. Therefore, when the passions have tapered, Islam describes the moment of victory in the following manner:
Twenty two years ago those were just two weeks in a December like this. Fierce war was raging across Bangladesh. Devastation, clamour, cries of pain, and the silence and stillness of death. Crumbling streets, trenches, bunkers–the relentless sound of the machine gun, the huge explosions from tanks and mortars. The battle cries of the allied army, the restless, and disturbed tread of fighters, smells of gunpowder in the air and the easy presence of death in the smoke and dust of the explosions. The screams of wounded soldiers and the death of warriors. The time was for war, not for tears. The purpose was clear. No one shed a tear for any one, to kill the murderous Pakistani soldiers even at the cost of their lives was what ruled our minds … from the pain, annihilation, sadness of the past we would be freed and entrusted to a victorious future. That is what happened. The battlefield turned silent. Weighed down by memories, tired and weary the fighters return home–and history is created.[53]
One is reminded of Benjamin’s image of the angel of history in the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus. The debris of the past accumulates; one should think that those in the present would like to stay awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed:[54] After all the past, present, and future, as Benjamin says, are not merely connected as a chain of events. It was, therefore, the dream of the revolutionaries to embrace the future (‘freed and entrusted to a victorious future’) says Islam. So it was the dream of the people and those who occupied the corridors of power. The storm of progress’ has not been able to clear the wreckage! As the soldiers return home ‘history is created’ (soldiers create history, or so military combatant Islam would say); as they return they are weighed down by memories, the same soldiers who in fighting the just war’ had no time for tears, their only purpose being to avenge exploitation, injustice, and murder. For all that they had lost, and would certainly continue to lose, mourning would have to wait for a time to come. But the angel’s back is turned towards the future. The soldiers unaware of the future, in the words of the author, create history. And twenty-two years later find themselves dead beside weeds and wild flowers. Progress has made streets and cities grow over the past. Beneath the transformed landscape lie the trenches, bunkers, and crumbling pavements and it was a December like this, recalls the author. Benjamin’s angel of history seems to be perched on these images of devastation. The rest of
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Rafiqul Islam’s essay is a description of the build-up to freedom from the November 1971 through Belunia, Chittagong, and so on. His battalion was still fighting in Bhatiari when the news of surrender reached them in the form of a Pakistani soldier waving a white flag from a bridge. There was more weariness than jubilation then. However, in the mind’s eye the victory is represented as a memory that is ‘bright’ and ‘undimmed! It is understandable that the tragic denouement of the post-war years should have retained the ambiguous images of victory and mutated them into those of glory and joy. Rafiqul Islam’s interpretation of the ‘moment of victory’ in this commemorative piece stands apart from most of the other accounts of military combatants in Bangladesh. Through them run the twin motifs of sadness and joy, loss and glory, and the hope of a future that shall be compensatory and healing. One case in point is the commemorative piece by Lieutenant Colonel (Retd) Abu Usman Choudhury entitled Bedona O’ Anandeir Din’ (‘Days of Pain and Joy’). Caught in a web of intrigue amid power games in the army, his entire narrative is about his suspicious posting to Calcutta when he was creditably leading his unit Sector 8 of the EPR in battle. The joy of victory is overshadowed by his inability to fight for his nation, his pain at being incapacitated by his own chief. In tales of torture by the enemy we have a graphic, detailed, and painstaking description of the pain inflicted on the bodies of military captives. They not only serve as evidence of the suffering experienced on behalf of the nation but also ‘expose the inhumanity of the enemy. In the account of Kazi Ali Ashraf (“Karagarer Dingulo’ [‘Those Days of Imprisonment’]), which forms part of the anthology 1971: Bhoyaboho Abhigyata (‘Fearful Experiences’), freedom meant release from prison and from the enemy at whose mercy their lives had been placed during incarceration. What is noteworthy is the touching faith in both accounts that it is Allah who saves their lives, a faith that enables them to withstand violence and uncertainty. K.M. Shafiullah (writing in the same volume of essays) had walked after a battle unrecognized, covered in mud, in full view of the Pakistani soldiers; he attributed his miraculous escape to the luck brought by the miniature Koran that hung from his neck as a pendant. He walked for 200 yards clutching at the dangling Koran, praying that Allah give him a weapon so that he does not die unarmed, felled by enemy bullets. Common to most military combatant accounts is a description of the progress of war and it is perhaps not a coincidence that ambushes, battles, and so on, are described in great detail and each major decisive offensive and territory regained is noted with alacrity in Bangladeshi accounts. The Indian
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accounts are also rich in detail of the slow but sure progress towards triumph. (In the Pakistani accounts, the accent is more on the rationale behind the military action and a refutation of charges in an attempt to absolve one of responsibility.)
From the sources available, as discussed earlier, it would perhaps not be too much to claim that in the task of memorialization of the war and the responsibility of secondary witnesses (irrespective of location, though conclusions may not always be compatible) to understand, critique, and rethink the past, military memoirs serve as an important reminder of the fact that in our attempt to initiate thinking on an ethical and critical memory of war there are dissonant voices, those that make us aware that the task is not an easy one, there are layers of meanings which disturb us. They tell us how deeply coexistent in the idea of war are strains of belligerence and its critique.
Reading the War(s) Embedded in War: Living with What One Remembers
Violent events and mass suffering of the kind exemplified in wars and massacres, revolutions and counterrevolutions, plagues and earthquakes always seem to have stimulated the outpouring of what may be termed as a ‘factually insistent narrative…. It is almost as if violent eventsperceived as aberrations or ruptures in the cultural continuum-demand their retelling, their narration, back into traditions and structures they would otherwise defy. At the same time, however, there appears to be a contradictory impulse on the part of the writers to preserve in narrative the very discontinuity that gives events their violent character that is so effectively neutralised in narrative rendering. [55]
In his thought-provoking work on the reception of the Holocaust, its interpretation, and memorialization, James E. Young strikes a cautionary note for our reading of violent events in the past. Beginning with the First World War, through the Holocaust, and the Second World War the need to bear witness to mass suffering survives up to the present. In addition to the genres of fiction and non-fiction, mechanical and technological means such as the photograph and the audio visual media have hoped to render effectively moments of rupture in the lived reality of a people and culture. The ability of a genre to contain and disseminate traumatic events continues to disturb writers, witnesses, and scholars, particularly after the nature of human reality that
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was fashioned in Auschwitz. As late as 2006 in an introduction to an anthology of journal articles on The Humanities of Testimony, Geoffrey Hartman ponders:
Can fiction’s force (or subtlety) avoid a stylization that falsifies the event; might it, in our day and through purely secular means, preserve a disastrous yet human truthtransmit it, that is, with greater effect than the ‘memorious’ (to use that Borgesian word) effort of the historian? Is poetry, to revert to Aristotelian language, more philosophical’ than history?[56]
Like him, this work cannot provide a conclusive answer to that question. Nevertheless, this question shall lurk in the backdrop when we consider the various genres that have assisted memory in recalling the events of 1971. In the two following chapters that will deal with works of fiction, the ramifications of these questions shall be explored. The purpose further is to examine how the work of memorialization has been recorded, written, and created in Bangladesh—the work of memory in ensuring that while individuals who suffered might cope with what they saw, understood, and learnt in 1971, the nation as a whole does not forget the genocide, the violence, and aftermath of war.[57]
Most of the scholars whose works have been referred to might have general observations to make about the relationship of genocide, war, and violence with testimonial writing and oral testimonies but they all draw their conclusions from the specific nature of the material that they have chosen to study, which is the Holocaust. Primo Levi in his The Drowned and the Saved has distinguished between the violence of the lager and that of war, which we have referred to in the first chapter. When we apply leads provided by scholars of the genocide of Jews to 1971, we have to take into account the following. I may have referred to these ideas earlier but it would be worthwhile to bring them together now for our consideration.
1.
The stories of the heroic patriotism of ordinary Bengalis forms a major element of post-war identity and, therefore, the discontinuity’ of the violence (referred to above by James E. Young) that hit unsuspecting men and women often gets subsumed in the cause of national myth-making. For instance, in the memoirs the cause and effect relationship between the experience of inhumanity and the cause of liberation threatens to neutralize the impact that description of death, loss, and suffering otherwise exert.
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2. This is not to suggest that we are unmoved by the spectacles of men and women fleeing from their homesteads, people returning to their burnt and devastated homes after the war, instances of looting by not only the enemy but by neighbours and acquaintances, testimonies of about men, women, and children being lined up and shot. However, the public anger at the displacement, loss, and suffering in the aftermath of the war was seen in a few instances to degenerate into an appetite for vigilante justice against ‘Biharis’ and Razakars. The uses to which memories of the war and violence could be put (and was put in some instances) as the position of the Bengalis changed from victims to the citizens of a newly formed nation, alert us to need for an ethical understanding of terms such as human’ and ‘inhuman
3. As we shall see in a few instances of testimonies of male civilians that shall be discussed, the line between constructing a’history from below’ by foregrounding the testimonies of those who had suffered torture and pain at the hands of the enemy and turning them into exhibits that stand for the ‘inhumanity’ of the perpetrator is indeed a thin one. The problem that confronts the work of memorialization of an event such as the war of 1971 is how to make space for the anguish and suffering, memories of sexual violence and torture, and most significantly the ‘useless’ loss of lives to wartime excesses in the memorialization of 1971, how to map and remember loss in a narrative of affirmation. ‘Facts can be questioned by other ‘facts, which appear as hard and persuasive. The paradox is intensified by the fact that due to the coups and military regime that succeeded the assassination of Mujib, the instability of the dominant narrative of struggle and freedom is conspicuous. In the construction of Bangladeshi nationalism, in the absence of a period of consolidation of the official interpretation in the early years, the question of the legacy of independence remains an open one. The use of the genre of testimony needs to be critically examined so that its deep and necessary association with restoring the victim to language and the community is not violated. The instances we have discussed in the second chapter of Roison and Masuda being ‘lured’ to Dhaka to testify for rape against war criminals in the mock public trial serve as a grim reminder of how pain and suffering may be appropriated into larger discourses of justice and memorialization.
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4. This is why a testimony such as that of Firdausi Priyobhashini’s
presents such a problem. One way in which she sets up a dialogue with her trauma is by narrating her value to history as a witness to the birth of Bangladesh. Nor are we valorizing the ‘experience of rape as compared to other forms of trauma. What is significant is that her testimony while attesting to the ‘ungovernability’ (Wendy S. Hesford’s application of Ulrich Baer’s term which refers to a text’s interpretive instability) of trauma demonstrates its place in a narration that includes her past and present. This, I would argue, is a compelling aspect of her interpretation of what happened to her. For the secondary witness it is difficult to grasp her experience or wartime rape without reference to her life. This interpretive effort, which allows us to partially decode her text (verbal), alerts us to the responsibilities and possibilities of the memorial process. That it is a testimony to the crime of rape warfare is only to highlight its evidentiary quality. When Annette Wieviorka speaks of testimony as transmitting the subtle and indispensable truth of an epoch and of an experience 58 while referring to the historian’s discomfiture when confronted with trauma, it puts Priyobhashini’s narrative in perspective. In her story we glimpse an aesthetic need to achieve coherence in the dimming plenitude of an unstable past. Moreover, her testimony is radically unstable in its narrative form and at times is of a stream of consciousness’ quality. This I would argue can be perceived as a lack if one approaches testimonies only to gain a clearer view of the past. Firdausi Priyobhashini’s testimony and the questions that it raises has important lessons for the testimonial/memorial project in Bangladesh. Her appropriation of the form reminds us that the process of healing will/does not miraculously arrive at the end of an inclusive writing of history but is concomitant with it.
5. Several of testimonies that we have discussed so far are nation
alistic in nature, beginning and ending with the war, from oppression to freedom, preserving a teleology. With the notable exception of Ekattorer Smriti, the anxieties and contradictions of post-war Bangladeshi society are not overtly referred to, though most of the prefaces refer us to the rumblings within each text that connect the duration’ in the Bergsonian sense) of those memories to the aftermath of the war. While most of the scholarship in the West on non-fictional testimonials deal with
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the experiences of concentration camps and the build-up to the incarceration of the Jews, it is not possible to detach the genocidal military action, its victims and witnesses from the processes that led to the birth of Bangladesh. The testimonies of victims of rape are also a case in point. Like James E. Young then, we must remain conscious that while we look at the violence of 1971 in its proper context we do not lose sight of the fact that they are both factual narratives of trauma, even as their collection, publication, and preservation persists in the uncertain space between the writing of history and the construction of nationalism’s myths, symbols, and silences.
The Case of Oral Testimonies: Gendered Retellings
We shall now turn our attention to the oral testimonies of men. The corresponding section in the second chapter according to the structure that has been adopted is that of the testimonies of women who were raped during the war. There are of course testimonies available to us of women who suffered torture or lost their loved ones. However, the choice of victims of sexual violence was to highlight the reality that while torture and terrorizing of the civilian population may be a common strategy of occupant forces in modern warfare, wartime rape reminds us of the gendered nature of conflict and military action. As I have demonstrated in the section on combatant memoirs, the violated unprotected woman serves as a guiding star of retaliatory action/revenge for freedom fighters and spurs them on to acts of heroism! Also it is my contention that in the memorialization of genocide and violent conflicts, sexual violence/ rape is one of the recurring themes that fail to be adequately woven into the nationalist narrative of a freedom won with great sacrifice. In our discussion of Ami Birangona Bolchhi and Narir Ekattor, we see the complex self-understanding of women as ‘birangonas, casualties not only of sexual violence by the enemy but also that of patriarchal intolerance in a free country and unwitting victims of the nation building process.
This brief discussion of male testimonies of violence is interesting insofar as the structure in which they appear leads us to a few presumptions of historiography. In the suggestively entitled History from Below by Sukumar Biswas, it is clear the testimonies are meant to be seen as history itself, an alternative to the personality cult that has been the preoccupation of mainstream history. The testimonies of those actors and victims which are excluded from official memory find their way into this book
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and this is declared in the preface to be the informing vision behind this endeavour. The questions to the male respondents begin with ‘What do you know about the general elections of 1970 and subsequent events?’ or ‘What did you hear about the attack of the Pak military on the 25th of March, 1971?’ while women are asked the more simple What were you doing in 1971′ or ‘What are your memories of 1971:[59] Having thus anchored the memories of the male respondents in the general elections of 1970 where Mujib’s Awami League had acquired a majority but had not been allowed to form the government in Pakistan, the interviewer sets the terms of the testimony. In the course of the responses (Amulya Chandra Roy, Baharuddin Khan, Abdul Mannan Sarker, among others), the secondary witness (the researcher/interviewer in these cases) intervenes with questions and clarifications, for instance, ‘Where was this brickfield located:’, which imparts a sense of specificity to accounts of atrocities and torture. Or for that matter leading questions intended to cast some light on the obfuscation of post-war years of anarchy such as What was the impression of the Mukti Bahini among the masses in those days:’ to which almost all the respondents would give an encomiastic response.
There are questions about the 7 March speech of Bongobondhu and the war collaborators of the area in which the respondents lived. In between the subject would be asked to provide a description of violent personal memories whether as a captive of the Pakistani army, as a victim, or a witness to the suffering of a loved one. Appearing in the frame of the questions that are articulated and directed at the respondents, the stories of torture or suffering in the case of men are clearly subjected to the project of the interviewer, which is to extract maximum information about the past. And even though the preface critiques ruling-class history, the approach to the trauma and memories of the ‘inhumanity of the enemy in the testimonies may be a writing of history from below, of those forgotten in the annals of time but the form and content of the knowledge that emerges from the interaction of the secondary witness and the victim is commensurate with ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ accounts that puts the suffering of the individual in the service of recording the nation’s birth. While the actors change, the thrust of the nationalist narrative of the war remains the same and as discussed earlier memories of wartime experiences function as ‘evidence, this time of the sacrifice not of the ruling classes’ but of the common man.
Tormenting 1971: An Account of Pakistan Army’s Atrocities during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 is a compilation of testimonies of victims at the initiative of the ‘Nirmul Committee, which was formed
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in order to bring war criminals and collaborators to trial in 1992. Spearheaded by Jahanara Imam, the author of Ekattorer Dinguli, its formation coincided with the end of military rule and the restoration of democracy in 1991. In raising the question of justice, it sought to establish a narrative continuity of freedom with responsibility to the dead and the living that the war created in its wake. The purpose of the collection of testimonies was not only to create an archive of the nine months of the war but also to bring the offenders to trial if only for symbolic purposes. It is here that the comparison with the Holocaust is often drawn making it a point of reference for any such project undertaken by a democratic, civilized’ state. Predictably, therefore, the focus is on the crimes committed, and as the editor Shahriar Kabir writes in his introduction that the magnitude of the genocide and the suffering imposed on Bangladeshis has not even begun to be understood by the international community. The book is divided into two sections. The first records testimonies much in the line of History from Below, except for the fact that it is uninterrupted by questions posed by the interviewer. The second provides descriptions of the numerous mass graves in Bangladesh. (It might be of interest to the reader that the memorial constructed at the killing fields of Mirpur showcases in little glass boxes on pedestals a handful of loose earth brought from such sites from all over the country.) In post-war Bangladesh, Kabir writes, the decorated freedom fighters were seen to shield collaborators, and war criminals were made members/coalition partners of national parties such as the BNP of General Zia. In this book written in 1999, it becomes clear that members of civil society involved in collating these testimonies associate any realistic possibility of such a closure with the Awami League regime. As a result, the past and its meaning remains a contested terrain in Bangladesh.
It seems worth a thought that sexual violence and rape though deemed war crimes have an uneasy relationship with ‘evidence and ‘proof’ as also narratives of nationalism because of the other discourses of honour, shame, and social taboos that accompany it. On the other hand, physical violence (mostly encountered by men as the testimonies demonstrate) is amenable to it. It seems certainly a cold point to make but in our reading of the process of memorialization in Bangladesh it is a tragic irony that the death and loss of loved ones, their incapacitated lives due to torture and the trauma of victimhood, or the fact of having been witness to horrible sights could not but bear the burden of proof in a country where bloody power struggles in the name of nationalism did not allow the implications of 1971 to settle for almost two decades. In
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the construction of Bangladeshi nationalism, the tension between secularism and the place of religion in the public sphere, the memorialization of the war of liberation becomes a symbolic reminder of the conflicts at the heart of such a process and throws us back to the unsettled history of the Partition of 1947.
If the introduction confirms the fact that the collection of testimonies is seen by the ‘Nirmul Committee’ as a means to bringing war criminals to trial more than humanizing the statistics of the dead, the tormented, and the raped, or unfolding a process of healing by connecting the victims to the language in which they can confront/articulate/express their trauma, the table of contents takes it further. The testimonies are entitled in a way that is significant. Some of them are: ‘I was put in a gunny bag and kept in the scorching sun, ‘One day they forced me to lie on a slab of ice, ‘They pressed burning cigarettes on my throat, ‘They broke ribs beating with iron rods, ‘The Pakistanis used to enjoy every day after unleashing torture on us, ‘I had to run for a mile behind a truck with a rope tied round my neck, and so on. The value of the above is clear in its ability to establish the barbarity of not just the Pakistanis but the Razakars, Al Badr, and Al Shams in terrorizing both the civilians as well as the combatants that they took captive. The crux of the testimony is to record violence. To read them through their titles is to approach their pain through the spectacle, those moments in their life when they became victims. Their association with the project of justice years after they had suffered the pain means that they become aware of their value to history as victims. As both History from Below and Tormenting 1971 remind us, the reception of testimony shall be determined not in the context of their original setting in the past but in its ability to address the discourses of the present. Methods which encourage identification with the pain of the victim are as problematic as those that homogenize suffering and try to shape its radical uncertainty into (however) justifiable ends of justice’ or try to awaken a new generation to the memories and past that condition the nation (space) that they inhabit.
Creating a Collective Memory: Archive as Legacy An interesting a substantial departure is made in eyewitness accounts of the war collected by students at the initiative of the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka. Starting in 2005, it has engaged students across the country to locate people with memories of the war living in their midst and write it in the form of short essays, the best of which are selected
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for publication and prizes. All the handwritten essays are typed and stored in the archives of the museum. The name and age of the narrator, the identity of the interviewer, and the place is also mentioned in the published versions of the essay. It is received not as direct testimony but is imparted form and structure by the listener. It also admits accounts that may involve people the respondent knew. While the testimonies of History from Below are translated into an often stilted English, which does not reveal any conscious/careful narratorial choice about the mode of translation, it sometimes has the effect of shifting our attention to the lack of rigour in the rendition. All the more so since the effort is clearly directed towards making the oral histories of trauma available to a wider audience. However, the accounts of witnesses in the project of the Museum, appearing in narrative form, confined to the experience with the knowledge of the context presumed in the pact between the narrator, the listener, and the reader, are an archive with a difference. Taking history out of textbooks to the lived world and imbuing it with life was the intent of this enterprise, as also to counter the general indifference to history among the youth.[61] The formation of a children’s archive of violent events and their encounter with the memories and pain of people they have known is significant.
It is interesting how the dynamics of the testimony changes when the listener is a child. In the oral testimonies of History from Below, the tension between a certain idea (ideology) of history represented by the interviewer, the individual respondent (his memories now summoned to testify), and the image of community’ as represented by the listener is palpable. In the accounts of children, in a retelling of eyewitness accounts the pain and suffering of people impinge upon us powerfully. While testimonies of men often tend to exhibit a sense of bravado or brave resilience in the face of threat to life and body, in children’s accounts elements of storytelling are more visible, it being one of the principal ways in which they remember and understand. That they also reproduce/rewrite these testimonies in anecdotal form is noteworthy. Typically most of the accounts begin with the incident and end with it. For instance, one begins thus:
It was almost midnight when a few Hindi speaking soldiers screamedYoung men of Bangladesh! Stand up and mount the truck one by one. You have to go for your training. We all complied and sat in the truck, Two truckloads of young men moved towards some unknown destination. Morning came, the afternoon rolled by and dusk descended on us.[62]
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The testimony of Sattar Biswas is also similar in the way it begins:
August 1971. Near Pangsha police station under the district of Rajbari, the Pakistani soldiers had attacked Borbongram market. They were burning the shops and had also shot a few people. News spread across the village. Madman Makim had just settled down to have his meal. When he heard about the military he took a little fried gum in the gamchha round his neck and chewing on his food he ran towards them. What a thing to do! Villagers were fleeing in fear of the soldiers and Makim headed towards them! After all Madman Makim was a human being, not beasts like those Pakistanis.
Makim was slaughtered and his body chopped into pieces. Only his severed head with his eyes gouged out was discovered along with his gamchha (thin cotton towel). A sixteen-year-old Nazmun Nahar Mishu winds up his essay on the eyewitness account in the following manner when he describes the scene where Makim’s mother Mariam rushed out on hearing of her son’s death:
All she found were scattered signs of the fire, red marks of boots, corpses torn asunder, Makim’s gamchha and the red, calm water of the river. The frantic search has yielded nothing till today but the eyeless head of her son. The water of the river has been fed by her tears. Mariam has turned blind. Still the water runs constantly. Mariam still weeps for her son, the gamchha clutched at her breast.
The description of the gory incident finds narrative form in the above manner in the imagination of the sixteen-year-old boy. The lurid details are emphasized and the grief of a blinded woman who lost her son to the bestial Pakistani soldiers is represented in a manner that oscillates between sympathy for the victim and the conventions of tragic melodrama. One reason for which I chose to highlight this testimony is to underline the fact that even in this worthwhile exercise of connecting the progeny to the experiences of trauma that underscores the cost of war and the price of freedom in Bangladesh, the responsibility of the nature of knowledge imparted and its reception looms large. To me it appears that the need to provide a visually horrific account of a terrible incident raises as many questions as it answers.63 In bequeathing violent memories to secondary witnesses while the immediacy of the narrative is preserved and the locus of the community is made more visible, these implications need to be contended with.
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Wendy S. Hesford interrogates the response of the secondary witness in receiving the representations of the trauma of rape warfare. She limits her discussion to the Western First World academic responses to human rights abuses and war crimes. In collating the documentaries The Sky: A Silent Witness and Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women, a photo testimonial project by Melanie Friend, and an article on rape and pornography by Catherine MacKinnon, Hesford problematizes the very concept of transnational witnessing. In the article ‘Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering, she asks after Caren Kaplan, and I quote: To what degree are testimonial subjects romanticised as transnational artifacts?[64]
This question about the ethics of secondary witnessing is a pressing one. Perhaps a degree of voyeurism is inevitable today. One is aware that in the context of Bangladesh in our attempt to understand the function of narratives of valour’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘pain, suffering, and ‘loss of honour’ in the memorialization of the past, one is apt to appear detached from the lived realities of those one is referring to. The self-positioning (to use Hesford’s expression) of much of our academic preoccupations haunts this work as well. In a country that seeks to cultivate the image of a modern, futuristic, Muslim nation and at the same time come to terms with the unresolved legacies of its formation, a critical analysis of the way 1971 has been interpreted, appropriated, and represented in fiction and non-fiction will certainly be seen emerging from a certain location (India) and hence itself a compromised artifact. This work certainly cannot transcend history and milieu; the objective is to signal that our involvement and investment in 1971 is a transnational one.
Notes and References
1. Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh
(New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2013).
2. Syed Manzoorul Islam, ed., Essays on Ekushey: The Language Movement,
1952 (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1994).
3. Islam, Essays on Ekushey, p. 24.
4. Yasmin Saikia in her article ‘Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistan Army,
Violence and Memories of 1971, tries to trace the emergence of the human from the abyss of violence. She meets those who fought the war of 1971 and notes the bravado with which some officers recount the number of Bengalis and Hindus they had killed. In contrast she poses the narrative of Mohammad who located his memories within the discourse of the loss of insaniyat (humanity) and resigns from the army after the war
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(Yasmin Saikia, ‘Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistan Army, Violence and Memories of 1971, in Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan edited by
Naveeda Khan (New Delhi: Routledge 2010), pp. 177–209.).
5. Hasan Azizul Haq, Bijoyer Muhurto: 1971 (Dhaka: Bhorer Kagoj Prokashoni, 1994), p.54.
6. Haq, Bijoyer Muhurto: 1971, p.55.
7. Abdul Gaffar Choudhury, In Rashid Haider, ed., 1971: Bhoyabobo
Abhigyata (Dhaka: Sahitya Prokash, 2007 (1989]).
8. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London and New Delhi: SAGE
Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1995), p. 4.
9. Haider, Bhoyaboho Abhigyata, p. 36.
10. Haider, Bhoyaboho Abhigyata, p. 37.
11. Haq, Bijoyer Muhurto: 1971, p. 61.
12. Yasmin Saikia’s article cited earlier argues: “The perpetrator’s ability to
acknowledge the violence committed against another human being is the biggest statement of all’ (Saikia, ‘Listening to the Enemy’, p. 202). This is the story that national history shall forget. The perpetrator owes his own status as a human being to the victim. While the emotive force of her argument is strongly felt, the very fact that 1971 is a forgotten chapter in Pakistan (Saikia observes on her visit) persuades us that the process of healing has so far been unilateral and the perpetrator’s account of being witness to his own barbarity is in the context of Bangladesh) more of a curiosity than symptomatic of a more general need for reconciliation.
13. Here I would go with the objections of Dominick La Capra to the argu
ments of Hayden White. In adopting an interdisciplinary approach it is important to be aware the places where disciplines diverge as much as the fact that increasingly methodological approaches across fields of inquiry in humanities converge. In the final chapter this is discussed at length taking a cue from Derrida’s meditations of fiction and testimony.
14. What was perhaps one of the ambiguities that worked for the move
ment was the fact that Urdu had been designated the true language of Muslims in a Muslim state, and given the history of undivided Bengal, the cultural icons of Bengal were Hindus as well as Muslims and the existing iconography that pervaded the consciousness of the literate people was not communal. This easy translatability’ of artists from one religion to another provided an intellectual thrust to the movement that gave it a sense of complexity. In a sense, therefore, Nirmalendu Goon, a Hindu poet in Bangladesh, represents the same cultural continuity and self-image of a secular public sphere. For a more detailed account of the transformations of the cultural sphere of Bengali Muslims from their mistrust of Bengali Hindu authors post-Partition to the acceptance of Bengali’ authors irrespective of religion, see Ghulam Morshed, Muktijuddho O Tarpor: Ekti Nirdoliyo Itihas (Prothoma: Dhaka, 2010).
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15. The traumatic years are documented in Anthony Mascarenhas’s two jour
nalistic works The Rape of Bangladesh and A Legacy of Blood. The latter (published in 1986), which takes as its point of departure the planning and execution of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and winds up with the brutal assassination of General Zia, is told in the style of a political thriller and as a tale of the theme of crime, retribution, and punishment.
16. Nirmalendu Goon, Atmokatha 1971 (Dhaka: Banglaprokash, 2008), p. 22.
17. Refer to Dominick La Capra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001).
18. Behula’s story is an central one in Bengali mythology. Merchant Chand
Saodagar’s youngest son was Lakhinder who was married to Behula. As a result of a curse on the father by the snake goddess Manasa, Chand loses all his sons. Since the merchant was forewarned of the threat to his son’s life by snakebite, he built an almost impregnable fortress for his son. However, Goddess Manasa had her way. On the death of her husband, Behula travelled on a boat with her husband’s body to the abode of gods and by her devotion succeeded in restoring to life not only her husband but his brothers as well. Often evoked to extol the heroism of the Bengali woman, it is a work of penance that she does for the sins of others and by the purity of her intent resuscitates her beloved. In Anisul Hoque’s Maa an impossible mourning for the martyred son cannot secure his return but her suffering is elevated in nationalist iconography.
19. The second moment shall be explored in a later section.
20. Goon, Atmokatha 1971, p. 168.
21. Jatin Sarkar, Pakistaneir Jonmomrityu Dorshon, 2nd ed. (Dhaka: Jatiya
Sahitya Prokash, 2008).
22. The allusion here is to Tanvir Mokammel’s documentary Swapnabhumi
(The Promised Land), which charts the life of the Urdu-speaking ‘Bihari’ community living in the Geneva Camp in Mirpur, Dhaka. Divested of voting rights and dreaming of repatriation to Pakistan after 1971, an entire generation lived its lives in the subhuman conditions of the camp, while their progeny fight now to be recognized as legitimate citizens of Bangladesh. Integration into the mainstream has not been easy for a community branded as collaborators during the Liberation War and also as part of armed militias raised by the Pakistani army. However, the problem of their identity goes back to the Partition of India, as many of them were refugees from violent riots in Bihar that were purportedly in retaliation to the riots that followed Jinnah’s call for Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946. In Bengali-dominated East Pakistan, however, they were often seen as stooges of the Urdu-speaking Punjabi ruling elite and were targets of intermittent violence in addition to being aggressors. While the minority Hindus were often understood to have an attachment to India (then the enemy state), the Urdu speakers were largely perceived as closer to West
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Pakistan (an impression which was encouraged when they were preferred in factories and other places which had non-Bengali owners). As Jatin Sarkar argues, in the case of Hindus, the allegation was not unjustified since the minority exodus was in huge numbers. However, the questioning of their patriotism is a classic case of mistaking the symptom for the disease, in that in post-Partition Pakistan their dilemma of identity was
never resolved.
23. As is the tone of Nitish Sengupta in his work on the division of Bengal
(Nitish Sengupta, Bengal Divided: The Unmaking of a nation (1905–1971)
[New Delhi: Viking (Penguin), 2007].
24. Panna Kaiser, whose husband Shahidullah Kaiser was one if those who
were killed in the murders of intellectuals that took place in Dhaka on 14 December 1971, builds her work around her husband, their meeting, their love and marriage, and finally his disappearance. Her post-war life is lived around his absence, her deep indebtedness to him, and search for justice.
25. Marcus Franda writes of Zia’s assessment that’work’ was the only solution
to Bangladesh’s problems. The building of roads, canals, and embankments on a large scale was undertaken during this period. The language of development was a strong feature of his rule (Marcus Franda, ‘Ziaur Rahman and Bangladeshi Nationalism, Economic and Political Weekly 16, nos 10/12 (1981]: 358, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/4369609, last accessed on 10 February 2017).
26. Begum Mushtari Shafi, Swadhinota Amar Rokto Jhora Din (Dhaka:
Anupam Prokashonee, 2006 (1989]).
27. Anisuzzaman, Amar Ekattor (Dhaka: Sahitya Prokash, 1997), p.53.
28. Anisuzzaman, Amar Ekattor, p. 88.
29. Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal of Experience; the
Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,
Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 1–23.
30. Haq, Bijoyer Muhurto: 1971, p. 13.
31. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System
and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 23.
32. This picture has found the pride of place in nationalist iconography, a
moment that appears in most combatant memoirs in writing as well as
visually, as also in memorials to the war.
33. In an article entitled ‘Two World Wars and the Myth of the War
Experience, George L. Mosse looks at the works that came out of the two wars and argues that the fundamental difference between the two was that while the First World War generated the Myth of the War Experience, the Second saw a dissipation of most of those myths. Parts of those myths were the spirit of 1914, the manliness of the soldier, the cult of the fallen soldier, and the ideal of camaraderie in the face of fear. The reason such
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myths flourished after the first Great War ‘was because it was an unprecedented event and people then had no memory of war’ (my emphasis) and its effects were also visible on post-war politics. In a post-war world, this myth disguised the tragedy of the war’making it easier to cope with the memory of life in the trenches’ (George L. Mosse, ‘Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience, Journal of Contemporary History 21, no. 4 (1986): 491-513, 494, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/260583, last accessed on 10 February 2017). It would be interesting to apply this logic to the war of 1971. While most authors of non-fictional personal accounts refer to the Second World War by invoking the Holocaust they only refer to the horrors of the war in terms of victimhood and the clear parallel that is being drawn is that of brutal repression and extermination. That is where the comparison ends. It is true that Bangladeshis too had no memory of war even though some (especially the educated ones) did have a world of reference. War here was both a manifestation of dissent and revenge, One may argue that by reason of being unprecedented and just at the same time it acquired a moral overtone and elements of the aforesaid myth of the war experience, and the brutalization of life of combatants whether military or
non-military is subsumed later in the cause of nationalism.
34. His name is also associated with post-war violence on Urdu speakers after
the establishment of the state and as one reads his memoirs one becomes aware of how Bangladesh had several homegrown challenges in the way of establishment of a viable modern state with a redefined sense of itself as not a victim/or the bearer of a politics of subversion but as an arbiter of its own destiny
35. Kader Siddiqui, Swadhinota ’71, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1997
[1985]), p. 307
36. Kader Siddiqui later went on to be elected as a member of parliament in
Bangladesh having formed a party of which he became the president.
37. Primo Levi writing in The Drowned and the Saved says that the enormity’
and hence the non-credibility of the crimes of the Nazis was keenly felt by the victims as well as the oppressors. While the Nazis plotted to eliminate even the last witness of those crimes and destroy all evidence, the victims
felt that to bear witness was almost the only thing worth living for.
38. What quickly comes to mind are films such as The Longest Day, Das Boot,
Where Eagles Dare, Enemy at the Gates, The Great Escape, and the like,
39. Mahbub Alam, Guerrilla Theke Shommukh Juddhe, p. 230.
40. Claudia Card, ‘Rape as a Weapon of War’, Hypatia 11, no. 4 (1996): 5-18,
11, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810388, last accessed on
10 February 2017
41. In her article Card analyses the use of rape as an instrument of waging
war, advocating militarizing women and maintaining independent female military organizations. While she is aware that this might be seen as
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belligerence, she argues that if individual women can be taught self-defence, there is no reason why communities cannot be. Her interesting solution towards changing the symbolic significance of rape is to consider transsexual surgery of offenders as a punishment. By thus turning rapists into unnatural women, the idea of the phallus can be critiqued. She calls this a ‘fantasy, acknowledging that such a remedy would have no takers unless women have the power to wage war. While her fantasy might be brilliant and amusing at the same time, her words on wartime rape are pertinent to our purpose: Rape symbolizes who is dominant by forcibly, dramatically removing the most elementary controls anyone could be presumed to want: controls over one’s intimate bodily contacts with others. By way of the rules of patriarchies, such contacts, however forced, can also have consequences for the
future identities of survivors (Card, ‘Rape as a Weapon of War’: 11).
42. A term for that which is forbidden by religion.
43. Alam, Guerrilla Theke Shommukh Juddhe, p. 384.
44. Interestingly by 2010 the meaning of their actions had completely changed
and they had been charged by the state and given capital punishment for their act of treason
45. Siddiq Salik, Witness to Surrender (Dhaka: The University Press Limited,
1997), p. 76.
46. Rao Farman Ali has since disowned responsibility and in his memoir clari
fied that the list was of those people against whom complaints had been
made to the civil administration during the war.
47. Asghar Khan, for instance, as his interview with Muntasir Mamun sug
gests (Muntasir Mamun, Shei Shob Pakistani (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2009).
48. Such instances are not the preserve of Pakistanis alone. For instance,
in Brigadier Jagdev Singh’s Dismemberment of Pakistan: 1971 Indo-Pak War, the author (Indian), who has fought in the war for the liberation of Bangladesh, is far from sympathetic to the cause of those people he has gone to war for. This is what Brigadier Singh has to say about Bengalis and the Partition of India in 1947: ‘The adventure course which the Bengalis had adopted for themselves in 1947, on the basis of thin arguments, false and contrived sentiments, a religious fervor fomented to a frenzy by selfseeking mullahs (Brig. Jagdev Singh, Dismemberment of Pakistan: 1971 Indo-Pak War, (South Asia Books, 1988), p. 240). He also laments referring to Indian soldiers that not even a small memorial was erected for those who sacrificed their lives on the behalf of Bengalis in 1971.
49. Rao Farman Ali, Bangladesher Jonmo, translated by Shah Ahmad Reza
(Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2009 (1996]), p. 2.
50. The Hamoodur Rehman Commission while looking into the debacle of
1971 does acknowledge isolated acts of indiscipline on the part of the Pakistani army but remains within the same basic premises.
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51. A.A.K. Niazi, The Betrayal of East Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 129.
52. Haq, Bijoyer Muhurto, p. 72.
53. Haq, Bijoyer Muhurto, p. 78.
54. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History, in his
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 2007 (1969]), pp. 253-64.
55. James E. Young, ‘Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Re-reading
Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs, New Literary History 18, no. 2 (1997): 403-23, 404, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/468737, last accessed
on 10 February 2017
56. Geoffrey Hartman, “The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction,
Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 249-60, 259, doi 10.1215/03335372 2005-002, last accessed on 10 February 2017.
57. As I have mentioned earlier this strain is an important constituent in this
Muslim-majority nation, which at the moment of its founding chose language and culture to mark itself as different from its enemy West Pakistan
in the transformation of its resistance from regionalism’ to’nationalism
58. Anne Wieviorka, ‘The Witness in History, translated by Jared Stark,
Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 385-97, 396, doi 10.1215/03335372 2005-004, last accessed on 10 February 2017
59. Some of them are also asked about the number of children they had. All
of them were questioned about sexual violence. While this was perhaps aimed at making them testify about an aspect of the war that they would be reluctant to share fearing conservative reprisals, the presumption of the researcher/interviewer illustrates the limitations of a testimonial project engaged in gathering evidence. Such a project looks at the agency of a victim from the point of view of her/his role in providing an unmediated account of the past.
60. This statement should not be taken to mean that men do not face violence
of a sexual nature. For instance, even during the war of 1971 Hindu and Muslim men were asked to remove their lower clothing so that their religious identity could be detected. These methods were employed in 1947 during the riots and are reported up to the present day.
61. Mofidul Haque, one of the trustees of the Museum who has been com
mitted to an active retention of the past in the youth, told this to me in the
course of the interview which was recorded in January 2010.
62. This is an extract from the testimony of Gokul Chandra Das which is part
of the little booklets published by the Liberation War Museum. Collection
No. 6 (interviewer and compiler: Anju Ara Zaman).
63. In her article ‘Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the
Spectacle of Distant Suffering, Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 105-44, Wendy S. Hesford asks whether violent representations are necessary for the construction of identification and sympathy. It is a difficult question
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to answer if one believes that the best way to resist violence is to make the witness identify with the plight of the victim. However, Holocaust writing and historiography have raised doubts about the ability of the secondary witness to ever place herself in the position of the victim. Not only is that seen as impossible it is undesirable as well.
64. Hesford, ‘Documenting Violations!
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4
The Aesthetic of Freedom
Fiction of and in Times of Siege
On 26 March 1971, the day after the genocidal military action in Dhaka and other parts of East Pakistan, President Yahya
Khan broadcast a speech to the nation in which he declared his intention to ban all political activities in the country. Among Mujib’s and his party’s acts of treason’ are the insult to the Pakistani flag and defilement of the photograph of the Father of the Nation (a reference to Mohammad Ali Jinnah) apart from the subversion of the peaceful transfer of power to democratically elected representatives. He congratulates the armed forces of Pakistan who in the face of grave provocation’ and insults have shown admirable restraint; the ‘solidarity and integrity of the country has been threatened by these ‘enemies of Pakistan. Without referring to the spectacular violence that had erupted on the previous night in the distant theatre of the east of the country, the president referred to a grave crisis’ during which Pakistanis would have to behave as ‘reasonable citizens. It is in this speech that Yahya Khan illustrates
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how a state at the same moment that it exerts complete control over the life and death of its citizens also abandons them. The order to ban all political activities’?) and the ironical declaration of emergency and martial law is followed by the terror of death that lurks in the plea that people (here the target being the West Pakistanis because the east is already in the realm of ‘necropolitics’ in the sense invoked by Achille Mbembe in his eponymous article) behave as ‘reasonable citizens. What is clearly spelt out is the form of the audacity of the secessionist Bengalis with the reference to the flag and the photograph, visible, easyto-conjure images of the nation under threat; not the form of the state’s loss of ‘restraint.
On 28 December 1974, barely eight months before Sheikh Mujib was assassinated, in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems of poverty, famine, corruption, lawlessness, and rumours of disgruntled military officers planning to strike against him, he announced a ‘state of emergency’ which led to the suspension of the rights allowed to citizens by the constitution. Powers henceforth would flow from the president and Mujib lost no time in getting himself installed in that office. The rationale for such a move in his words was ‘to uproot the remnants of imperialistic power from the national and social life’; he was forced to bring about this radical change in order to fulfil the basic purpose of the constitution—the establishment of a republic for toiling, labouring masses, he said. To this end on 24 February 1975, all political parties were banned by a presidential decree and the formation of one national party, the BKSAL was announced, which invited people of all political hues to contribute to the development of the country. He referred to this as a second revolution. The continuation of the vocabulary of a leader of the oppressed (“imperialistic power’, ‘second revolution’) sought to characterizse the aftermath of the liberation’ as a continuing struggle against anti-liberation forces, while he was seeking a mandate for what was fait accompli.
The above illustration of the omissions of political wartime and war-like speech is an attempt to outline the discourses of power which commemorative literature about 1971 (whether celebratory or critical in intent) addresses. The speech of Yahya Khan is a classic case of linguistic subterfuge of a military dictatorship even as it sanctioned spectacular violence. In a newly independent nation, the totalitarian move of the head of state of a modern democracy takes citizens to the brink of an experience from which they are no longer able to tell the difference between the former and the latter.
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Conceiving and Interpreting the Silences of War Narratives: 1971 in Fiction In the interim, between a military dictatorship and a democrat mass leader’s emergency, lay the war. As will be clear from the trajectory thus far, the focus on the non-fictional accounts of victims, combatants, and survivors is a wish to move away from peddling in numbers as the marker of the truth of war and a determination of the extent of violence to interpretation as an integral component of the memorialization of 1971.[5] Such an approach shall also provide a space for the consideration of trauma as well as the blind spots of nationalism. To consider literature as a ‘site of memory’ and to tap into its ethical potential will take us to the discourses that inform memorialization and offer a critique of statist versions of nationalism. It is true that the figure of three million dead and two hundred thousand raped has sensational value in the ‘hyperreal'[6] world that we inhabit; and it is this that studies such as Sarmila Bose’s Dead Reckoning: Memories of the War of 1971 are enamoured of.[7] In Chapters 2 and 3 we focussed on the memoirs and testimonies of women and men in different roles of survivors, victims, and combatants.[8] We turned our attention to the way in which an unprecedented situation in their lives is interpreted. As the ‘true’ accounts attain narrative form, they are subject to an element of fictionalizing as literary construction (so James E. Young argues) necessarily intervenes between the experience and its narration. This anxiety is tumescent in writing about violent events where (especially in representations of the Holocaust) the ‘testamentary character’ is sought to be put beyond scepticism. In his article Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Reading Holocaust Memoirs and Diaries, Young suggests that the difference between fiction and testimony needs to be maintained:
It is to recognize the difference between narrative that fabricates its authenticity as part of its fiction and that which attempts to salvage, however tenuously, an authentic empirical connection between text, writer, and experience.[9]
Fiction is characterized by an absence of the autobiographical pact’ he says. The relationship between the two shall be closely dealt with in the final chapter. As the diarists and memoirists interpret the events from within or with the assistance of hindsight, these also become part of the way we as readers receive the events.
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So while the construction of memory sites may be commensurate with the politics of a dominant social group, the fact is they are perceived as recognition of pain/acknowledgement of the ‘sacrifice’ or of those who are lost (which need not always be through death as the victims of wartime rape remind us) and those who grieve. However, the spring of popular interest in such cultural spaces changes over time. Surely, whether it is the museum at the site of the killing fields of Mirpur, the sculpted forms that commemorate the students of Dhaka University who were killed during the army crackdown on 25 March 1971, or for that matter the small nondescript memorial to the students of the Jagannath Hall, they have changed over time. The memorial at the killing fields at Rayerbazar serves today as a makeshift shelter for slum dwellers with half-clad children milling around. On my way to Mirpur, the sight of the Geneva camp with ‘Bihari’ faces looking out of windows may have functioned as a romantic image of history’s traces for an outsider like me were it not for my awareness of the dirt, the denuded land on which it stood and the buffaloes grazing and defecating focussed my thoughts on whether the rickshaw-puller would be able to manoeuvre me safely out of there.
It needs to be remembered that when we talk of commemorative forms an event such as 1971 takes in fiction, it is juxtaposed with not only memoirs/diaries or testimonies, but the genre of history (which Pierre Nora calls a kind of modern ‘lieux de memoire’), memorials, and monuments. This is to locate literature between ‘memory’ and ‘history Indeed in the current insistence among those working to memorialize the war of liberation on authentic’ representation may be seen as a direct derivation of an anxiety regarding the forgetfulness of the populace. This indifference (brought on, we may add, by several factors other than distortion/ignorance of history) may elevate the geographical’absurdity’ of post-1947 Pakistan as the most critical reason for its dissolution from which other forms of disgruntlement (economic and linguistic, primarily) emerged. Such a narrativization is selective, whether in the service of accuracy, coherence, or ideology. To the fast-fading generation of survivor-witnesses of 1971 and their progeny such a narrative closure may seem as an abdication of responsibility, a withdrawal of the ’empathy’ (in the sense used by Dominick La Capra), and the recognition that the trauma of a violent past seeks. As is evident from Adorno’s ‘Can One Write Music after Auschwitz?’ and the obscenity’ of writing poetry after the ‘Holocaust’ (Agamben critiques the use of the term to designate the horrors of the Nazi state establishing the anti-Semitic
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origins of its usage), the idea that literature/art could more than ever ill afford idealizing the realm of culture was forcefully felt. Clifton Spargo, writing on the relevance of representation in the context of the Holocaust, mentions Joseph Brodsky’s Nobel acceptance speech where he cites American Mark Strand’s witticism that responded to Adorno by saying: And how can you eat lunch:[10] The sacralization of the Holocaust as a discontinuous event in Adorno is opposed by Brodsky’s seemingly naive belief in the continuity of culture as a critique of political’structures of injustice:[11] While the first reminds us of the traditional cognates truth’ and ‘beauty and the equally familiar scepticism associated with them, the latter suggests that in spite of the failure of culture to attenuate human cruelty as represented by the gas chambers (one could add the events of 25 March and 14 December 1971), it constitutes the only space, Spargo seems to argue, where the affective dimension of history may be recorded. In spite/because of Auschwitz the chemist Levi lived and wrote; the tragic end to his life, as that of several other survivor-authors, in suicide makes the significance his memoirs, nonfiction, and fiction attain the stature of what Pierre Nora would have called a ‘lieux de memoire’ of life after the Holocaust. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, combatants, survivors, and witnesses wrote memoirs, letters, diaries, or gave oral testimonies. The genre of fiction was found convenient to record the way in which eyewitnesses looked at the war as we shall see in the following section. Anwar Pasha’s novel may not be an aesthetic delight but one may ponder as to why this work needed a fictitious protagonist and narrative. Is it because as Allan H. Pasco believes that literature provides a space for reflection/reaction and thus a’fresh perception of history’ which Pasha must have believed 1971 necessitated:[12]
The rise of post-structuralist and deconstructive methods in their rejection of facile and not-so-facile positivist theories of representation of the past did respond to a critical need of the post-war world. One does not mean to suggest even for a moment that the relevance of that form of questioning and/or its textual strategies have served its time. However, like all theories which nurse the hubris of having found the key to explaining the phenomena/objects of knowledge that confronts them, it did not refer enough in its days of vogue to its own temporality. The powerful explanatory potential of such methodology continues to inform humanities, albeit now with a recognition of the simultaneous currency of frameworks that do not nurse the same doubt about representability. Spargo makes a reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus as a
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case in point. We could cite Sadat Hasan Manto’s fictive representation of the Partition. In studying violent events of history (and here we have the example of the Holocaust as well as the Partition, which is closer to the context that we are considering here) anti-foundationalist critiques appear to coexist with the choice/compulsion of victims, survivors, and secondary witnesses to tell their story in culturally available forms with varying motives and degrees of trust or expectation in the nature of reception.
In the context of Bangladesh we are confronted with genocidal killings across the country by the Pakistani military and/or its collaborators. It was followed by and coincided with what is known as the war of liberation’ in Bangladeshi history. The nature of this war has been referred to elsewhere including the military intervention of India bringing on an early end to it. So in the memorialization of 1971 there is a curious paradox. The memories of terror, of death, rape, and torture may be secured to that of the war fought and won against oppression in a way that shall validate a subsuming of the former in the latter. However, seen in the light of the anarchic post-war realities, reprisals, and vigilante justice to name a few, the coupling of the moment of glory and victory with mourning for the victims of the raw violence of the state—the death of non-combatant civilians from whom a terrible revenge was exacted for insubordination and war-results in a responsibility for the task of memorialization that remains inadequately conceived. The references to the Holocaust in memoirs and fiction help men and women in nonfictional and fictional accounts to interpret their situation and find an analogue for their experience of pain and degradation. The events themselves are far from identical and yet the imaginative leap is made. For the secondary witness, post-Holocaust writing alerts one to the challenge posed to literature by violence; in this chapter where we consider fiction we not only approach how authors respond to human brutality but we also interrogate how these works place themselves within the narrative of freedom and liberation. As in the memoirs and testimonies, the way in which a unique event is received and interpreted (by the author and her/his characters in fiction) constitutes a critical aspect of this work. If literature is a memorial form it is this that is memorialized; in the ‘age of extremes’ this is how it sets itself apart as a cultural practice and discharges its historical function.
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Intra-war Fiction and the Alchemy of Hope
In this section we shall consider two works of fiction which were written during the war. This will serve as a transitional division.[14] When we refer to war literature in Bangladesh and the intertwining of narratives of violence and liberation, we are essentially in the realm of post-war fiction. When we refer to memorialization as the ground where the contestation is acute due to what is perceived as a threat to the founding principles of Bangladesh, we do so from the constructions of the present. When we discuss Shoukat Ousmane’s Jahannam Hoite Bidai and Anwar Pasha’s Rifle, Bread, Women[15] our interpretation confronts the imaginative parameters of writers who were writing from within the war and without the hindsight of the either the liberation or the years that followed.
For instance, when Shoukat Ousmane chose to call his novella Jahannam Hoite Bidai, which could be translated as ‘Exit From Hell, he could scarcely have imagined that a lot of writers would have chosen the same term to characterize Bangladesh after the war. Anwar Pasha was killed by the local militia Al Badr on 14 December 1971, two days before the surrender of the Pakistani forces; the last lines of his novel read:
The old life came to an end on the night of the 25th. Ah-let that be true. New men, new friends and a new dawn. How far were they? Couldn’t be very far. There was nothing to fear. It was a matter of this one night. It will be over.[16]
It is a message of hope. Ironically his Rifles, Bread, Women, an incisive critique of a land under military occupation, could very well have been the title of a few short stories of Imdadul Hoque Milon set in post-liberation Bangladesh. Or for that matter, it would not be far away from the themes of Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Milir Haathe Sten Gun’ or ‘Hangover. War and irony, as Paul Fussell put in a different context, indeed seem to be deeply connected. Shaukat Ousmane’s protagonist, Ghazi Rahman, a headmaster of a school which is credited in Pakistan with encouraging secessionist tendencies in the realm of ideas, is on the run after 25 March 1971. The narrative is as much his eyewitness account of the horrors in Bangladesh as of the way people cope with living in the silence and noise of terror. He is unable to sleep and this is how the brutalization of a land and its
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people is represented in his imagination. Ghazi Rahman sights a dead and burnt family lying in each other’s arms:
A Muslim family. They have met an end like Hindus in an Islamic country. Only because they wanted to uproot sectarianism forever. That is why such punishment, such an extreme penalty. Such catastrophic images are common. It is as if such pieces of human beings are traversing the air of Bangladesh like nomadic glowworms. Slices of eyes, hands and feet, parts of breasts and thighs, pieces of chests … the sight hasn’t been spared. How can sleep come:[17]
Descriptions of horrific spectacles are not uncommon in commemorative literature too. More often than not they are an attempt to document the brutality of the Pakistani army. However, read in conjunction with the victory or the post-war anarchy, they often acquire significance within a narrative of sacrifice for the nation, albeit a cause which is sometimes seen as betrayed. It is within the same logic that victims of rape appear in official discourse as both ‘war heroines’ and women/citizens whose identities need to be kept a secret for them to get on with their normal lives. As we have seen in Chapter 2, where we discussed testimonies of rape, the appellation ‘birangona’, for those who accept this characterization, does not mean an integration into the social network. The reverse of ostracism often comes into play where the women conceptualize life after the war as a struggle, a crusade against an inimical social order engineered to forget their trauma. In Ousmane’s text there is a clear opposition between the atrocities of the enemy and the grief or resistance of a considerably weaker but intrepid populace. The simple courage and minds of the peasants and their unquestioning acceptance of clichés leads them to stunning acts of resistance. Ghazi Rahman is impressed but unable to imitate these faceless men of Bengal who come alive during his life as a fugitive. He has been prevailed upon by his friends to leave for India to save his life. Deemed an intellectual and hence unfit to survive (also without necessary skills to escape detection), he is sent by them with an escort to cross the border. Sitting in a village waiting for a boat to arrive and talking to its peasant population, he is told the story of how the people of Azimganj with only sticks and stones for arms had killed and buried fifteen ‘Punjabi’ soldiers armed with sophisticated weapons. It left sixty-five villagers dead and around two hundred injured. Rahman feels a strong pang of guilt; his love for the nation is unlike that of the
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unlettered. He would if he could slay the enemy and liberate his motherland; since he cannot, he now exits from hell.
A constant in Ousmane’s strong visual detailing of the atrocities is his inability to experience wholeness in what he sees. Ghazi Rahman’s boat, in his reverie, transforms into a gondola and he imagines himself in Venice as his destination comes closer. In his journey through the land all he can see are fragmented body parts and in the evocation of a disaster that is all consuming, Ousmane writes of ‘a leg severed from below the lower abdomen, a tender head adorning the end of a skewer and wonders what form of sculpture they are of this technological age. Ghazi Rahman hallucinates that he is running and out of breath and panting:
… strange emporium. Only pieces of the bodies of men, women, children and the young hang from the hook. There is no fullness anywhere. Thighs, breasts, torsos … the butchers are chopping and hanging them.[18]
In the devastating images that hell affords, scraps remain of what was once human. In this dreamlike state Rahman is told by a young man that these are all sculptures. He is hemmed in by strangers and in menacing voices they direct him to become a butcher. And in a moment of vulnerability that is not ordinarily glimpsed in post-war fiction, the threatened headmaster runs for his life when he is told that here there is no golden mean. Here you are either a butcher or meat. All other doors are closed. Terrified, he urges the boatman to pull his oars faster with all his strength, he feels they are close on his heels. In a land where wreckage piles incessantly, Ousmane brings us close to the core of despair (remember, there is no victory to relieve this nightmare yet), to a hell where there is no escape from becoming a executioner if one is to survive, if only as an animal.
In this, Ousmane appears to reach, through the inept bewilderment of Ghazi Rahman, the latter’s claustrophobia and his troubled escape (which he knows is a form of desertion) a representation of the war as it rages and a form of distinctly unheroic love for the nation. In the letter that he writes to his student’s wife whose brother is dead in the warshe is unaware of her own bereavement-he writes of the Mukti Bahini and the sanctity of its resolve to free the country. He tells her, continuing his deeply sentimental letter, that these selfless young men shall show the right path to posterity to eternity. Towards the end of the novella Rahman, walking towards the border, feels a sense of release. We see the
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war through the eyes of an apologetic non-combatant. His last words, as he walks towards his destination, are “Joi Bangla’ but they sound in our ears as a protest against his own irrelevance in the scheme of things. His awareness of the sky and the smell of the lush greenery now throw into sharp relief the noise he has left behind. Ousmane not only conjures the hell that was Bangladesh in 1971, but through the trope of entrapment he writes what it must have meant to be living in such a time. This work, therefore, would be a useful juxtaposition to tales of exemplary courage in the war which often ends up willy-nilly eclipsing the horrors of violence, the moral problems of just war that cannot be explained away by citing its inevitability, and valorizing commemorative narratives that merge seamlessly with official, often instrumental motives.
If Ghazi Rahman feels asphyxiated in his homeland of 1971 though he has been constantly changing his addresses, Anwar Pasha’s protagonist, Sudipta Shaheen, firmly planted in Dhaka moves towards hopefulness within the city. Sudipta, who had migrated to Pakistan from Calcutta after the Partition of 1947, had to use his Arabic name to make a career in the new country. ‘Sudipta’ became a Hindu hangover which could not have given him the job as a teacher of English literature in Dhaka University that he now has. Parts of Rifles, Bread, Women are straightforward lessons in history. The translator’s dedication reads: ‘To those who are for an early, truly secular, socialist Bangladesh. In this prefatorial rhetoric in most of the literature on 1971 that emerges out of Bangladesh, we catch a glimpse of posterity’s need to fix the fluid meanings of the past into a recognizable image of the Bangladesh which shall bespeak its legitimacy. In terms of content the novel could be divided into a mirror of the carnage in Dhaka, mourning for those lost, and an exposition on the reasons why the liberation of East Pakistan is a moral necessity. By placing a protagonist who cannot imagine himself except as ‘Sudipta’ though he is a Muslim, Pasha opposes the syncretism of the Bengalis to the fascism of their oppressors and the narrative may be cited as a well-argued case of cultural nationalism. It is obvious that even as writers choose the fictional form and the modes of exploration of events it offers, from Anwar Pasha in 1971 to Anisul Hoque in 2003, they are acutely aware of the documentary’ status of their works. This brings us to the crux of the problem posed by Lawrence Langer in the context of the Holocaust. In his work The Age of Atrocity in the context of the Holocaust he articulates a fundamental paradox that literature in the light of twentieth-century experiences will have to reflect/refract. Paraphrased, Langer’s problem is this: How is it that literature while
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remaining an honest account of the inhuman debris’ of history shall yet retain a trace of the human?
Anwar Pasha’s text gains in significance as a document’ of the genocidal military action since it has been received as an eyewitness account; the description of the attack on the university and the murder of students and professors told through the eyes of an insider (Pasha was a professor of Bengali in the University of Dhaka) has found resonance in the commemorative acts of the future authors. However, the fact that Pasha himself became a victim of what he documented, as if his death attested the truth of his records, makes his work more a testamentary account than ‘fiction. Pasha’s description of the murder of the wellknown artist Abdullah Mansur’s children, his madness and death, his wife’s confinement in the army cantonment, and her subsequent revenge by transforming herself into a suicide bomber are instances imaginatively rendered. As the translator’s introduction says, this novel is not about the progress of the war and hence cannot be seen as ‘Liberation War’ fiction. Nevertheless, having been written during the war, both the novels affirm the legitimacy of the retaliation of the Bengalis. Pasha’s text in its evocation of fear, death, gory images of slaughter, and the constant interior monologue of the protagonist, who, even as he perceives, constructs the oppressive past, makes Pakistan seem a ‘fantastic lie. Rifles, Bread, Women makes a strong case for a free Bangladesh, not a nation of slaves and concubines:[19] However, the often sentimental images of Bengali patriotism, the concluding piece where he believes that the wealth of love and affection’ of united Bengalis will make them ‘invincible and the hatred of Punjabis’ as lacking in culture and hence susceptible to brute emotions is a flight of fancy that would have been a form of escape from the terror of the present. In the task of memorialization, Rifles, Bread, Women in spite of its naiveté in understanding the nature of war, violence, and its afterlife will remain a text emotionally critical in the framework of Bangladeshi nationalism/public remembrance and historically relevant. Both Ousmane and Pasha bear witness to life in Bangladesh after 25 March 1971. The former records the effect of war in its capacity to reduce a world one knew to fragments. And to Ousmane nothing is whole anymore. He has to leave the land he loves to be able to breathe again, a land reeking of corpses. To the other, 25 March 1971 meant the death of Pakistan. From here there was no return. Pasha visualizes a new beginning, a Bengal of patriotic Bengalis free from the rampaging army of holy Pakistan? Both are examples of literature being called upon in our times to bear testimony. In their
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disparate readings of their times is dramatized the early strains of war literature in Bangladesh.
In the context of our study, Bangladesh, a postcolonial state with few resources of its own in 1971, was largely dependent on foreign aid for reconstruction. In addition to economic and infrastructural commitments in the post-war period, the legitimacy of the dominant group which is installed in power is emotional; while victory might have generated a sense of invincibility, it soon belongs to the realm of rhetoric; so the sovereign power inherits a power structure which was challenged with ‘revolutionary politics’ and retains control over what‘zoe’ and ‘bios:20 In the vulnerability of bios’ in a new nation precipitated by war resides the possibility of the erasure of the difference between a democratic and totalitarian power. The ‘state of exception’ becomes a constant. Agamben’s study, which emerged from the Holocaust, therefore has explanatory potential for post-war life in Bangladesh.
Limits of Nationalist Narratives: Inassimilable Suffering and War
This brings us to a few works set in post-war Bangladesh. When I discuss Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ works I shall juxtapose them with An Accidental Death, positioned within the war. My choice has been influenced by the fact that without directly referring to the war they represent it not only as an event to be interpreted but a condition to be coped with. These narratives remember the war not by description of the terror or the gore and glory but by evoking the traumatic emptiness of the lives of the characters when it recedes, their inability to recognize themselves or comprehend their roles which had been so clearly defined in the war. In Muhammad Zafar Iqbal’s Aakash Bariye Dao, Amin is confronted with the terrifying sameness of human motives after the war; in Akhtaruzzaman Elias Milir Haathe Sten Gun, the writer takes the story forward by means of a madman’s fantasies of saving the moon from the enemy. Elias in his stories unrelentingly explores the waras-insanity theme. The triumph of good over evil, a core theme of 1971, can be lent credence in post-war Bangladesh as either a madman’s fantasy or an anti-depressant for a credulous young woman. Hangover
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brings young men of different communities (Hindu,’Bihari, and Bengali Muslim) together on a drunken evening; in their alcohol-induced gregariousness the violence of the legacy of the war builds up gradually. The political project of war monuments and memorials in its search for the ‘common’ and ‘instinctive’ linkage with public memory silences the way ‘freedom’ had been experienced by the marginalized; in Samarjit’s ageing father’s tomfoolery and nostalgia for life before the Partition (1947) we glimpse how differing interpretations of monumental events can be as traumatizing as the events themselves. The pluralist’s dream of coexistence of difference’ confronts the majoritarian claim to the legacy of the Liberation War; for now the sulkers can at best survive the ascendancy of ‘good’ over ‘evil.
Custodial Torture and the Trauma of Remembering in Aakash Bariye Dao One of the several recurrent motifs of post-war fiction is that of the freedom fighter in custody of the Pakistani army. Writers painstakingly evoke graphic details of torture and these are presented as images running in the minds of the men even as the Bangladesh which they had fought for, whatever their motives had been, begins to turn to dust. Many, unable to reconcile to the mundane realities of everyday living, the experience of the ordinary, and the ugliness of destruction and perhaps also a diminishing of the glory to which they felt entitled, become criminals, hijacking and extorting and becoming symptoms of the order they had helped create in a sense. The equation in the fiction we have been referring to the equation of brutalization suffered during the war (needless to say the accent is often more on the endurance of suffering and the vicious sadism of the military) and the general purposelessness and discontent among the young men is an important point of entry into the memorialization of war in fiction. The representation of the violence done to a nation’s youth performs at least two functions in the aftermath of the war: (a) it nourishes narratives of freedom at the cost of great suffering hence enhancing the moral superiority of the victors; and (b) it simultaneously highlights the trauma at the heart of nationalistic stories of the liberation of 1971. A natural corollary of such vivid descriptions of persecution (embedded in narratives of sacrifice’) is to treat the later turn of events after the war as the general corruption of the great dream of liberated Bangladesh, the land of unfulfilled possibilities, and a tragic lust for the spoils of power. Such an account, one
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may argue, cannot adequately take into account the psychosomatic effects of being primary witnesses to war and its debilitating violence. Surely the political crisis in post-war Bangladesh (its literary descriptions bring to mind Hamlet’s Denmark where the ‘prostitution of power had made the world itself seem to him a ‘sterile promontory/a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours’) did precipitate a kind of cynicism that fed casual acts of criminality. However, it is arguable that the transformation from victims’ to’aggressors’ (and back and forth in a war) illuminates for the reader a moral universe which may explain the corresponding confusion or overlapping of heroic valour and criminality. It may be persuasively posed that this understanding amounts to a justification of the acts of excesses of the young men in liberated Bangladesh. At the risk of invoking such a reading, one may suggest that a simply critical or ironic treatment of the afterlife of 1971 may divert an examination of not only the impact of organized violence as suggested earlier but also an appreciation of the ways in which 1971 is remembered today in Bangladesh. In castigating unhealthy human ambition and traumatic memories of violence, the changing emotions of switching from victims to such narratives (as shall be discussed later) may verily keep the purity of the original nationalistic sentiment intact to be revived later in a friendlier ambience. What happens as a result also is the postponement of the critical act of re-evaluating the history of the nation in the light of changing experiences.
Muhammad Zafar Iqbal’s novella Aakash Bariye Dao traces the story of Amin, a dreaded guerrilla fighter in the war. Following a close shave with death when he was captured by the enemy, Amin believes himself invincible and carries out daring operations thereafter, inflicting maximum damage. He still recalls the blood, raw wounds, thirst, and fever of the days of torture by the army. Buried under a mound of bodies, he escapes luckily unhurt and is mistakenly thrown into the river as dead. That was 1971. He returns to find most of his childhood playmates killed. Post war, having joined the university in Dhaka, he retains his friendship with other such men (students) who are now, so to speak, part-time criminals. He witnesses their transgressions which range from extortion to hold-ups, abducting women as favours to their lustful, thwarted companions, gambling, and occasionally murder. Amin observes with a sense of stasis, neither succumbing nor protesting. He tries to save his MIT-bound friend Babul from being consumed by the memories of his past and the nihilistic air of contemporary Bangladesh. As Amin reflects, he sees in his friend
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what he might easily become. Babul dies, beaten to death by a mob when he had tried another hijacking to finance his airfare to America, which he believed was his last hope of salvation. Amin fears that his life will end similarly like a stray dog’s or he may someday put a gun to his head. In the narrative the disease of the mind, the fear of annihilation, and indifference to life find expression in an incurable ailment that afflicts his throat and the doctor’s verdict that he would not live for more than two years. His coldness towards life alters itself in that knowledge as he asks his mother to provide money for a journey across Bangladesh.
During his travels to Cox’s Bazaar and the Chittagong hills, Amin savours the beauty of the country, spurns all conversation with strangers, and jealously guards his solitude. His days pass peacefully and we witness his desire to live in such pristine lands and a soulful regret that he had not been born from the womb of the tribal women who live in these spaces far removed from the world of the city. The indulgences of his thoughts reveal themselves in the language that has moved away from documenting his life in Dhaka. And just when the reader believes that the theme of the text replete with such enervating images of excess and cruelty is moving towards a reintegration of elemental man (rediscovered in his impending death) with nature, Amin feels a sudden urge to go back home. Changing his plans for much more extensive travelling, he returns just in time to rescue his beautiful classmate Jasmine from his friends who had planned to abduct her. The girl ends up falling in love with him and insists on getting married in spite of the fact that he would not live for long. He resists but finally relents drawn to her in passion. As the day of their wedding advances, a strange fear grips Amin’s brother Tipu who follows him around. Tipu is reluctant to take part in the preparations for the wedding as his anxiety increases. On the night before the wedding Tipu comes home late at night to the admonitions of his mother. Unable to eat, he asks his mother about Amin and finds out that he has been confined to his room, saying that he is unwell and refusing dinner. The novella climaxes as Tipu bounds up the stairs, breaks open the door of his brother’s room only to find him immobile in bed in an awkward position and the bottle of pills for his insomnia emptied of its contents. Amin ends his life, dying not like his friend Babul, nor by a gun but by lulling himself to an eternal sleep.
Aakash Bariye Dao charts the death of two young men both disturbed by what was happening to them after the war. Amin tries to protect
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Babul who tormented by his own capitulation tries to drink himself to forgetfulness (he also has painful memories of his elder brother, whom he had worshipped, being shot because Babul had joined the Mukti Bahini and when he returns victorious he hears accounts of how his brother had begged for mercy from the Pakistani army, which fills him with shame and ignominy) and yet is complicit in his own destruction. With the death of Babul, Amin suddenly feels a terrible loneliness which he fails to overcome. They had been joined in a strange friendship of guilt, fear, and sadness unlike their other friends who wallowed in the perverse. Symbolically interpreted, if Babul’s death is seen as swinging in the uneasy zone of being seen as just deserts for his actions and an occasional sacrifice that a system that results from a violent revolution must make to ‘purify itself, Amin’s case is more complex. Zafar Iqbal teases us with the possibility of a narrative of spiritual regeneration or perhaps an escape initiated by his ecstatic acknowledgement of the beauty of the landscape of Bandorbon. Shortly and suddenly something propels him towards Dhaka where he meets his end. In withholding a ‘natural death (in which we may include death by a fatal disease) to Amin, the author memorializes the traumatic traces of the war. Under the circumstances marriage would have signified a neat denouement leading to a sentimental resolution of the narrative in an effort to bypass the excessive violence of the world in which Amin has lived in the past few years. The starkness of the conclusion is even stronger because as long as Babul was alive Amin appeared in control, fighting the demons of his own in the form of his friend. If human rationality expresses itself in being able to demarcate the past and present with an eye on the future and the knowledge that profit depends on the capacity to prioritize (I refer here to the economy of memories and emotions), then Amin seemed to have a better chance of survival. The fact that he takes his own life, repudiating the possibility of a couple of years of conjugal fulfilment, is perhaps his penance. In a nation that offers compromise to its youth in lieu of soured dreams of freedom after the war, a nation whose youth are victims and perfidious heroes at the same time, Amin’s conscious inglorious act (he clearly is no longer the brave warrior) is deeply inserted in the very culture of violence that it critiques. Aakash Bariye Dao in its representation of neurosis explores the dark underside of emancipatory narratives. Finally, this post-war story of a defeated former guerrilla is a counterpoint to the abundant stories of masculine valour sustained by the rhetoric of war and unable to plumb the depths of the violent legacies it leaves behind.
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Beyond Clear Territories: The Margins of Madness This section shall focus on two short stories of Elias set in post-war Bangladesh while briefly referring to one other that charts the time of the war.
In the literature from Bangladesh it is impossible to separate the war of liberation from its aftermath. The’too much history’ I refer to in Chapter 1 is a phrase that describes this unique predicament. This is not the same as saying that an element of presentism shall inevitably enter written texts that appear more than a decade after the event. It is also different from the commonplace that due to psychological and political reasons, both memoirs and literary works’ concerning violent upheavals make their appearance very slowly and self consciously. In this, writing about the war in Bangladesh departs from what has entered our cultural space as ‘war literature, emanating from the Western world. Authors write with the consciousness of suffering, liberation, hope, and the fallibility of heroes and a tragic sense of things falling apart. With the end of Ershad’s reign, writing on the war began to shape into the genre that it is now perceived to be with scores of books on ‘Muktijuddho’ being showcased permanently in bookstalls at the annual book fair. Held to coincide with the celebrations of ‘Ekushey’ (21 February) or the Language Movement of 1952 when the whole country wears a festive look, its space in the national imaginary is critical. As will be elucidated later, the fact that works began to appear in due course to celebrate the heroism of the Bengali people, to commemorate the patriotism of the war generation cannot be interpreted only as a belated manifestation of the real. True that it is difficult to aggressively pin down what is accented in a story, whether it is a restorative notion of a consequential death or a lurking note of loss that returns unbidden. This work nevertheless draws its sustenance from a view that post-Holocaust literature, war literature, or literature of other brutalizing historical events will surely, in part, have to draw its legitimacy from its stake in a treatment of violence that is critical of its own justifiability.
Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s short story ‘Milir Haathe Sten Gun’ is set in post-war Bangladesh.[21] As the narrative opens, two anomalous presences infiltrate the story: Abbas Pagla,[22] a madman who stands in the rain yelling back at the thunder, and a television set which Mili’s (one of the protagonists) brother Rana brings home one day from who knows where, informs the narratorial voice. Mili tries to knit together the sounds that Abbas emits and make some sense of them; she cannot help but feel
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that there lies some secret in the madman’s language, that his words are a window to some unrevealed truth. She is fascinated by him while her brother is exasperated and abuses him incessantly, promising to teach him a lesson for having spoilt his evening the day before. Elias quietly and methodically places on the counter of our imagination the images of disorder. The scene moves back to the day before. Rana’s bedroom is shared by him and his father, Ashraf Ali, who at that moment had no option but to stand on the verandah and watch the turbid sunset while his son and his friends noisily installed the television in the room. Abbas had walked into the house, first asked the father for a Sten gun and finding no response barged into Rana’s room and demanded the gun from him.Rana had fought in the war. Like many other young men he had not surrendered his weapon. Some were armed by state politicians and heavyweights and turned into bodyguards and personal security officers.[23] Some of those who were not co-opted into the system often ran private gangs that carried out hijackings, kidnappings, and also acted as pimps. Such groups often depended on their proximity to some resourceful local power broker to maintain their terror. In the course of Elias’s story Rana not only brings home a television but, we are told, is filling up their modest lower-middle-class home with valuables. Towards the end we see him driving a Volkswagen home. The effect of his actions, the nature of which is unrevealed in the course of the story, is visible in the father’s suppressed disdain and fear, the mother’s thrill at the sudden, inexplicable prosperity which makes her turn her labours to Rana, and at the same time her unquiet nights when he comes home late and drunk.
In contrast Abbas talks of nothing but the world of the sky and the moon. Abbas, a schoolteacher before he joined the war, has lost his sanity since his return; now the enemy wants to occupy the moon and all he needs is a Sten gun and he will fight them alone, he needs no order for final assault or reinforcements. Abbas Pagla’s language is of war; its images are of combat. It is as if his being has been rent by the violence he has witnessed, as if war has infused his speech and mind, colonizing both imagination and reality. To Mili he is the pied piper, a man who can see the extraordinary. She is the only character in the story that lends credence to his language, takes to his phantoms with childlike trust. She believes he can save the world if only someone will understand.
Abbas Pagla in the story becomes the symbol of the deluded idealist, the would-be (misunderstood) Messiah unable to communicate with the world. Time has rendered his vocabulary and gestures (once seen as heroic) to the realm of madness.
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One afternoon Abbas Pagla finds in Mili a willing listener. With the rest of the family all out on work or errands, she sits on the threshold and he on the only chair on the verandah.[24] He tells her of the enemy camp in sight on the moon.
‘Do you understand? On the west of the moon, -Abbas Pagla shuts his eyes and tries to ascertain the direction-‘if you can fly for a few miles from the hilly range at a forty-five degree angle, you will find a river, a huge river:
‘What is the river’s name?’ Mili doesn’t cower in fear from Abbas though she has asked an untimely question. To her it is crucial that she learns its name. ‘Can’t tell you the name! He isn’t perturbed’.
Why should a river have a name? Now that the fuckers have reached, the bastards will name it. They will give it a name, mark it, make accounts, seize and document it, get a mutation done-the bastards think it’s their property, that it belongs to their bloody fathers and grandfathers-don’t you see they have taken their position on both sides of the river? Those dung-heaps have soiled the water-air-earth-fire-rocks here; now they have carried their filth to the moon.[25]
Mili listens enchanted as Abbas lowers his voice to tell her what the real problem was. He brings his chair closer. Those sonofabitches’ have enhanced the gravitation of the moon; too many people with too many weapons! Now, like the animals in our world, those on the moon will never be able to fly again. Why, says Abbas Pagla, if only Mili would reduce her weight by fifty pounds or so, he would bet his life that she could also easily soar into the open sky!If only they would give him a Sten gun, the moon could be saved. However, in the psychiatry ward, unable to see the sky (Mili had noted when she paid him a clandestine visit) Abbas Pagla is cured; as he shyly informs Mili, he has come to request Rana to secure a job for him; self-consciously, he repeats that he is alright now. And when Mili, mistaken, hands him Rana’s Sten gun, he is surprised and hurt. That light in his eyes, the burning coal in his skull that her fingers had always trembled in the hope of touching, had all grown cold. Elias’s story closes with the gun still in her hands as she stands on the terrace and watches Abbas fade away–in the daylight all the men become one, indistinguishable like her brother’s friends. The haze makes her feel that they have finally taken over the moon; she can see nothing anymore. And Mili, Abbas’s willing deputy, flaps her legs to fly. The weapon of war looms large in this story. It acquires a presence separate from the liberation of the country from forces of repression and
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now trains its power to inflict death upon its own citizens. In a Bangladesh hit by incipient political intrigues, famines, and the spectre of authoritarianism (BKSAL, Mujib’s move to transform the state into a one-party democracy, and his murder followed by the regimes of General Zia and Ershad), the language of crushing the enemy’ had lingered for too long a time on the lips of men; the same Sten gun (one of the most common and effective arms used in the 1971 war) had turned its wielders from heroes to violent, fearsome young men. In Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s dystopic vision of post-war Bangladesh, it is only a madman who can talk of waging a lonely battle against armies poised for a cruel takeover of the moon with any moral authority; the only follower he has is Mili and she, as the narrative informs us, has after all, since childhood had a slightly tenuous link with reality. And after all, they were only talking of the moon.
Elias does not suggest that the war itself had been a hollow one. In his story ‘An Accidental Death, Mobarak Ali’s son Bulu has been killed by the Pakistani army but not before he destroyed an enemy jeep carrying soldiers. Bulu’s mother cannot mourn aloud because the army has set up a camp very close to their house and their lives would be imperilled if the reason for the young man’s disappearance was revealed. The woman next door, in contrast, can give vent to the fullness of her grief because her son Shahjahan (and Bulu’s friend) has just died a ‘normal’ death; mourning duties will be paid as the chairman (Shahjahan’s father) has been permitted by the captain in charge of the camp to bury his son. However, as it transpires, the soldiers stop them on the way to the cemetery; they are unaware of the captain’s order. The pallbearers turn back and try to take a detour but the difficult path stalls them. The corpse teeters dangerously now and then. The father, the chairman, is stung by the humiliation of his son’s corpse, and anxious that if the captain’s three-hour deadline expires his son may not get a burial at all. Shahjahan had wanted to go to the war with Bulu but he had not been allowed to; it is not his mother that he sought in his delirium but his childhood playmate Bulu. As the war transforms the significance of living and dying in Bangladesh, Bulu’s violent death seems preferable to Shahjahan’s. Ironically, Mobarak Ali, a traumatized, bereaved father, stung by the desecration of his neighbour’s grief by the occupant army, begins to stop people he knows and like the ancient mariner compulsively tells them all of the heroic death of his son who was deprived of an Islamic burial. In Mobarak Ali’s defiant narration of the encounter we see a father’s refusal to accept the denial of humanity to his son in the form of a proper burial, awakened by the ignominious wartime natural death and last rites of a youth of his son’s
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age whom he has just consigned to dust. To call his son’s death’accidental’ out of fear, which he had done so far, would be to err in his mourning duties as a father; when confronted with the anomalous, Mobarak Ali’s interpretation and commemoration of his son’s sacrifice is in continuum with his son’s act of resistance. Indeed this story, different from the ones set in the aftermath of the war, suggests that Akhtaruzzaman Elias, without belittling the necessity of resistance is able to complicate our understanding of the legacies of war and its memorialization in culture and thus negotiate with ways of imagining the nation.
In ‘Milir Haathe Sten Gun’ and ‘Hangover’, he refuses to compensate the despair of the present with an idealization of the past as a few authors do. We shall have occasion to refer to them in due course. A newborn state as a result of a violent war, catastrophic destruction, and loss of life and limb with barely formed institutions of control and organs of power was threatened with annihilation by the same forces that had brought it into existence. In ‘Hangover’ Elias enters a different terrain. The sense of menace and bewilderment as things spin out of control hangs onto the tale unrelentingly. Three young men arrive at Samarjit’s house and we become aware that they are occasional visitors. At the time of their visit Amritlal, Samarjit’s father, is also at home. Of the three, Farook is a sort of leader, connected to some powerful local goons, a breed that post-war Bangladesh appeared to be infested with. Iftekhar is a ‘Bihari’ (which in Bangladesh denotes Urdu speakers; his ancestors were from Lucknow), and Jafar, who had fought in the war[,26] is an excitable new recruit devoted to the Party and apt to see all dissenters as enemies of freedom. He is young and plays second fiddle to Farook who is obviously his senior in the organization. (Their ‘apolitical body exists to weed out corruption from the system and is looking for office space.) He cannot bear the thought that his boss can move around with a ‘Bihari’ and has been irritable ever since Iftekhar had attached himself to them. In them we have four characters with different memories of a time, separated in their experiences though all citizens of a newly liberated country. Samarjit, a Hindu, and Iftekhar, not joined in intimate friendship though equated by history after 1947 in Pakistan, find themselves waiting on the mercy of the types of Farook and Jafar. They have come for a drinking session to Samarjit’s house, now decaying and almost a hundred years old. It has been damaged in the nine months of the war. He keeps expensive liquor and from the way that Farook has treated his ‘Bihari’ friend all day, making him pay for food, alcohol, and an expensive book of pornographic illustrations, we
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cannot but establish a connection here between Rana and his friends in ‘Milir Haathe Sten Gun. After a war fought and won against oppression and injustice, nationalist rhetoric is sharply undercut in the mellifluous drunken voice of Iftekhar who sings Bahadur Shah Zafar’s Do gaz zameen bhi naa mili kuu-e yaar mein,[27] he has lost his house, his brother’s hardware shop, and his bank job, possibly on account of his being a ‘Bihari:[28] Samarjit tries to stifle the images that rack him as he takes his sips of Scotch. Their lives as refugees on the run, carrying his grandmother in the rain, running blindly right and left in the darkness, and the fear of death, being turned away by whom they looked to for protection-it all ended in his ears in a deafening clamour.
That also was 1971. Now these patriots threaten him to let their house to their cause. Amritlal’s stern refusal has humiliated them and they try to cajole, pester, and threaten their friend with consequences that shall be beyond their control. The old part of the city is reluctant to change, they say. No one refuses plum rents in new Dhaka.
As their inability to comprehend the present or countenance a future increases, they find refuge in the past. What Elias does is to map the processes embedded in the ways in which people and communities, in being confronted with the unprecedented, respond and give rise to complex identities and identifications, which then remain as elements that seek expression in the space of a nation. Iftekhar cannot but hark back to stories of Barabankva in Lucknow, his kinship with nawabs and the nobility and cousins in London and Paris–things he has not seen-his nostalgia taking him back to India, an identity they were brought to reject in favour of Pakistan. In the case of Samarjit, he hears his father’s talk of an idyllic past, one of material prosperity and influence, of feudal days when upper-caste Hindu landowners entertained nawabs and were driven in phaetons by the local Muslim peasantry. The story ends with the friends having left and an intoxicated Amritlal sporting among the madhobi creepers, singing blissfully in the moonlight. The narrator says: ‘Amritlal’s ears were becoming young again. But Samarjit’s ears were plastered with thick paper. Who would remove the plaster?[29] Amritlal’s investment in a past of splendour affords respite even at the peril of becoming ridiculous. His memories are a composite of orally transmitted family legend and his own childhood. His anger at kids trying to take over his home of remembrances is, however inconsequential, a protest against the present. On the contrary his son remembers nothing but agonizing images; he had heard stories of his aristocratic ancestors but now his abjection was complete. All he can do is fumble, apologize
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about his father’s conduct, and mutter about his plans to bring his grandmother, mother, and sister back from India after he has repaired the house. Samarjit has a ‘hangover. Every time he drinks, he cannot help it he says, as his friends leave the house in barely concealed hostility after the expensive Scotch is over.
In the brittleness of this ethereal scene and the suspension of the danger and uncertainty that looms large over this house, in the cheerlessness of Mili’s home in spite of its growing wealth, and in Iftekhar’s drunken anxiety for his mother, wondering whether he should have sent her to Calcutta, reside the memories that remain on the margins of national consciousness. Men like Samarjit, Amritlal, and Iftekhar cannot seem to write themselves into a narrative of nationalist resurgence or slide into the crevices of a ‘new beginning. ‘Hangover, the title, then assumes symbolic property. It spreads its toxin to all the characters in the story. The war is over, the enemies have left. But the Farooks and Jafars still have a hangover. It infiltrates the minds of the characters who find themselves on the margins as well. The fact that Elias should persistently use a metaphor which suggests drunkenness a nation unsteady on its feet?) and its uncomfortable trace (the hangover which suggests the nature of memories that skulk, are not easily consigned to the past, which return and disrupt but lack clarity) hints towards a cruel dichotomy that time has drawn between these men. Like the weapon in ‘Milir Haathe Sten Gun, here alcohol functions as both corruption and escape. In postliberation Bangladesh metaphors become symptoms.
While we shall have occasion to critically look at fiction that treats the theme of deceit and loss with a strong awareness that the possibility of a fresh journey has been thwarted, Elias’s story ‘Hangover’ explores how people remain in the prison-house of their memories. And how, in the memorialization of a war that led to the formation of Bangladesh, some narratives slip away awaiting acknowledgement of their pain.
Fiction and the Birangona: Testifying to Crimes without Witnesses Certainly when we talk of rape and the (in)visibility of victims, it is a phenomenon not peculiar to Bangladesh. Indeed the Partition of 1947 and the discourses that emerged surrounding the repatriation of
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women in India and Pakistan have been closely and creditably followed in Menon and Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries and Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence.[30] In her work on wartime rape in Vietnam that resulted in Ideologies of Forgetting, Gina Marie Weaver explores the elision of reference to rape not only in American public culture but in Vietnam too, where it was perpetrated. [31] In the anthology entitled Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, Sondra Hale draws our attention to ‘rape as both a marker and eraser of difference in the civil war in Sudan.[32] One way of numbing the implications of this is to cover up the failure of the native government (freed from foreign yoke and hence free to pursue its destiny) with patchy sociological arguments. The question of wartime rapes in Bangladesh gains urgency in the wake of the preparations for the trial of war criminals, one of the pre-election promises of the secular nationalist party, the Awami League.[33] As has been already outlined in Chapter 2, in the section on the testimonies of victims of rape, accounts of sexual violation in 1971 remain in search of an archive. While a beginning has been made after the end of the military regime, works like Narir Ekattor O Juddhoporoborti Kahini only underline the psycho-social and political complexities that accompany breaking the silence around such experiences. Nayanika Mookherjee alerts us to the uses that the ‘war heroine’ is made to serve when a newspaper article sensationalizes her traumatic past in an expose meant to highlight the subhuman conditions of a certain hospital for the mentally ill.[34] Scholars such as Mookherjee and Rubaiyat Hossain debate the politics of the visibility of birangonas. As the latter argues, the figure of three million dead and two hundred thousand raped may have entered public vocabulary but official history might as well consider such a war crime non-existent. My interest while informed by their study is slightly different; it is to examine what the representations of the raped women means for the memorialization of 1971. While there is a growing feeling that the war crimes trial will hold no more than exemplary value, it will bring into the public space history and memories. Shaheen Akhtar’s Talaash despairs of the availability of witnesses as survivors of sexual violation are steadily passing into oblivion hastening the movement of public culture to forgetfulness. This movement towards forgetting is of a piece with the failure/reluctance of the state to either effect a rehabilitation or manage healing of trauma. The conferring of the highest honour of Bangladesh posthumously to Indira Gandhi came at an opportune moment when the government was moving towards
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initiation of justice for the victims of 1971, which has received international media attention. In the face of international pressure, it was India that had ensured the safety of the 192 prisoners of war allowing them safe passage to Pakistan, thus shaping the scope of justice for the future and for all practical purposes confining the prosecution to war collaborators.
It is easy to characterize 1971 as a moral tale. It will belong to a narrative of creation consequent on destruction, a nation born out of heroism, suffering, and devastation; the fact that the combatants who fought for their nation were often non-military gives it the status of a genuine resistance as opposed to state-organized ones. With the first few convictions and two executions by the War Crimes Tribunal at hand, the elisions and limitations of the process of memorialization need to be revisited. In moving to literature as an ethical’memorial site’ (as I will attempt to demonstrate through my arguments and discussion of texts) one aspect of a cultural critique of an utopia where one may be absolved of one’s history is sought to be undertaken. Is the suffering of the victims of 1971 ameliorated, in some measure, by the current actions of the tribunal? Does justice imply a sense of catharsis, and if we reply in the affirmative, whose catharsis is being achieved in Bangladesh? These, needless to say, are not intended as rhetorical questions.
Helena Khan’s short story ‘Virangana’ explores the gap between the meaning and the implication of the term ‘virangana’ (birangona) through Rehana, a woman who is a victim of wartime rape. This ironic treatment does not separate the two functions that the term performs, unlike a few women in Chapter 2 in the section on testimonies where some are seen to accept the ‘meaning and aggressively question the implication’ and accept the term as a source of strength. In a telling image Rehana soliloquizes: ‘Rehana had heard that a pearl studded seat of honour had been prepared for her. But how many had the courage to sit on that seat? The glaring black copper of shame and distress would tarnish the glittering gold of honour 35 If Rehana in this story appears to perceive the rhetorical trickery the term comes to stand for in society, Rizia Rahman’s ‘What Price Honour’ is set in post-war Bangladesh and makes a woman’s honour the tool of political criticism. Halimun had preserved her’honour’ from soldiers in 1971; she had defended herself against the advances of Shamsher, the contractor, only to lose her honour’ when fighting over a pot of rice with a twelve-year-old boy during the floods (which had destroyed all the crops). They not only lose the pot but her only sari comes unstuck and she stands dumbfounded and naked in
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the water. Maddened with hunger she finally decides to take up ‘residence in the marketplace'[36] but not before Ramiz, the twelve-year-old tells her:
What honour? Once you leaped into the flames to escape the soldiers. At that time you had food in your stomach. So honour had some meaning then. You have nothing to eat now and yet you speak of honour? Go, hang yourself, you whore![37]
The predominant social understanding of rape, whether in peace or in times of war, is as ‘loss of honour: While the same paternalist sense of ‘honour’ is sought to be restored through ‘birangona, all it achieves in Helena Khan’s story is the silence of Rehana, a silence that accepts insinuations as the price of a fragile anonymity. Rizia Rahman’s juxtaposition of sexual violence and hunger as ‘loss of honour’ is aimed at a more general critique of the failure of the post-liberation state putting its inhabitants in a position where certainties of words and things (such as the meaning of honour’) are threatened.
As we move on to Shaheen Akhtar’s work, we are in the realm of a more comprehensive attempt to examine the existential problems that lie at the heart of the aftermath of wartime rape in Bangladesh.
Searching for a Post-war Life: Shaheen Akhtar’s War Heroine Shaheen Akhtar’s novel Talaash puts rape at the centre of both wartime and post-war experiences in Bangladesh. Through the life of Mariam, fondly called Mary by her family, Akhtar’s real protagonist in the novel is the overwhelming patriarchal structure which marks her out from her adolescence, causes the war, and turns her and women like her into cruel sport for the army in 1971 and for the society after the liberation of the country. In more ways than one Talaash is a very bleak novel, severely unlike the heroic narratives of Anisul Hoque and Selina Hossain. In its ironic, sometimes satiric tone Akhtar’s stance is more of probing the limits of the nationalistic discourses than the commemoration of the war. However, in reaching out to the silences that underlie the task of national reconstruction, and indeed the memorialization of the past, her work re-members the war, albeit in the minds of those who had to be effaced so that the paternity of freedom could be traced to the heroic Bengali race. It is in sharp contrast to a novel like Shoukat Ousmane’s Dui Sainik which also makes sexual
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violence inflicted by the Pakistani army its theme.[38] In it a Bengali well-wisher of Pakistan takes it upon himself to honour the saviours of Islam as guests in his home. His wife and two young daughters are employed to cook a sumptuous dinner for the party of soldiers. The action of the short novella centres on the preparation of the meal and the conversation of the homesick drunken officers. Its predictable conclusion comes when the man’s daughters are raped and taken away by the two intoxicated officers and their men. While this is one of the few novels that talk about wartime rape, Ousmane’s description of the women, their youth, and sensuousness are as much part of the author’s male gaze as it is a hint to the reader of the inevitable. In effect, the narrative sexualizes the two city-bred women much before they become victims of the army. While Ousmane makes an attempt to etch for us the vulnerability of the women, Dui Sainik will perhaps be remembered more as a morality tale of how the life of a toady ends in tragedy in the amoral logic of war.
The woman who comes looking for Mariam in Talaash twenty-eight years after the war is Mukti, who was born on 25 March 1971. She tries to put together fragmented memories and stories of those who were known to Miriam. She investigates, seeks to gather corroborative evidence and by placing them in the context of a narrative discovers that the credibility of her story is threatened and insecure. In the manner of most researchers she is compelled by her need to construct an account of the past that does not leak, an account that shall reinstate the birangona’ at the core of the war, coax the inheritors of the legacy of independent Bangladesh into recognizing how it is that freedom was achieved and at what cost the war was fought and won. In my synopsis I have referred to the hubris of the researcher in referring to Yasmin Saikia’s question: “How do we reach beyond the stories into the silences they hide?’ Talaash is clearly despairing of such a possibility. In the end when Miriam sails away from her city of sorrows’9 in a boat of her dreams and the weight of being dead lifts from the novel, it half believes in and half mocks its own denouement.
Mariam/Mary in Talaash, like her namesake, is a virgin mother. To be accurate, she conceives twice but never becomes a mother since her children remain unborn. Their fathers (Mary’s lovers) are unwilling to take responsibility for them. One is maddened by the overtures of politics and the other of poetry. Her affair with Abed Jahangir comes to an end in early 1971 when she is impregnated by him. Abed has no time for domestic bliss now; his thoughts are of war, he is a leader of men in
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the university and Mary merely the dead weight of the past. As Akhtar acerbically records:
On the one hand the nation, on the other, the woman. From both has been stripped the superfluous garment that had covered them for so long. Two bodies are blossoming in front of him in a fever of lust. It is as if there is no peace anywhere. All day and night his body became his sole associate. It is this omnipresent body that finds expression on the bed, the highway, everywhere. In due course he detaches his body from Miriam and merges it with his mind again in the world outside. This world stretches for 55 thousand miles and has limitless possibilities. Here a few words and signs such as the bright red sun in the heart of the deep green, the golden map of Bengal, the national song and freedom are so alluring![40]
On the night of the army crackdown in Dhaka, Mariam bleeds and loses her child. Ramiz Shaikh, who has been peeping at her from a window in the top floor of the house of Haji Saheb (a notoriously powerful Razakar whose task in 1971 was to procure food and women for the Pakistani army cantonment) for many days now, comes to her rescue in the dark and revives her. Mariam has sent her brother Mantu home fearing for his safety. She leaves for home with others who are fleeing to a safer location after the 25th and reaches ‘Swargadham’, a deserted structure whose erstwhile inhabitants had clearly been Hindus. She is tormented as an unattached woman of doubtful morals and encounters the hostility of women whose futures are no more secure than hers. In a surprising turn of events Ramiz Shaikh turns up and takes it upon himself to protect her since he has saved her life. Mary does not protest. Both are forced to leave the refuge when the men who had savoured Mary’s nearness in spite of their wives, thwarted by Ramiz Shaikh’s appearance, also join in casting aspersions on the unlikely couple on the scene. Before long Mary reaches another village with her escort (who carries a gun and has served ten years in prison for having murdered his wife) who at night is forced to stand guard with the other volunteers, and his rifle snatched away by a teenager keen to join the war. In a drunken state Shaikh tells his audience about his exploits as a Razakar’s aide; they chase him at night where he is picked up by collaborators on the prowl and taken to the army cantonment as a Mukti Bahini soldier. The juvenile who had decamped with his weapon has been already captured and the five villagers (saboteurs to the Pakistani soldiers) are killed instantly. Simultaneously Mariam is also taken captive and
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brought to the same camp as Anuradha, Tuki, Shyamoli, Shobharani, Bindubala, and others. After days of torture Ramiz Shaikh is killed in an attempt to escape. Mariam watches the scene from the window of the school building where the soldiers are camping. In the course of nine months, she meets Major Ishtiaque who does not rape her when he comes to know that other soldiers have preceded him. He slaps her in fury and leaves but she is touched by the kindness of the man who had wanted to talk to her. After the war she recovers in the rehabilitation centre at Dhaka. She flees marriage to the mute and lustful son of her uncle and starts living in a women’s hostel, several of whose inmates were ‘birangonas. The park close to the hostel had, in the dark of the night, become a mating ground where the women would, according to Akhtar, ironically effect the same integration with the society that was denied to them in daylight. This is where Mary meets Mumtaz who offers to marry her. It is a marriage doomed to fail for neither she nor her husband can quieten the ghosts of the past. In the loneliness of her home the companions of her days in the army camp visit her dreams, and her husband drowns his anxiety of her identity being discovered in alcohol. He returns to the unattached sexual pleasures of Ramana Park. She is not broken when their relationship begins to fester; she had not married out of love but to try and taste the security of a life led by ‘normal’ women. Meanwhile her former lover Abed Jahangir is a well-placed businessman in Dhaka now and married to the daughter of a Punjabi who had owned this business and had turned his daughter and commerce over to Abed before he fled to West Pakistan. Abed is stunned when Mary surfaces in his office looking for a job and plots to turn her over to the police. Her brother has been long dead in the war and her mother, who had come to Dhaka to stay with her, has also left. Towards the end of the novel Mary, now past fifty, lives in her home with Tuki, one of the captives of the camp whom she meets at the mock trial of war criminals in Dhaka (1992) and who has lived with her since. In the interim she has had an affair with Abed Sameer, a budding poet who implores her to teach him to make love; she conceives but is compelled to abort for which Sameer arranges the money, and as she had anticipated, he then disappears. Meanwhile Jahangir’s wife has left him; he meets Mary, asks her for forgiveness, gets her a job in a travel agency and promises marriage. He promptly retracts his offer, however, when his wife and son return with the return of military regime in Bangladesh. A Hindu boy, Debashish, who is in love with his male friend who has left for Germany starts frequenting the agency. He
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is saving money to buy a ticket to visit his lover. When he learns of his friend’s marriage, he turns to Mary, his only confidante in the city, and starts living with her. In another twist to her life, the neighbours, led by Haji Saheb’s son, force Debashish to convert and wed Mary so that the locality may be saved from immorality. Needless to say, her second husband, a homosexual and much younger to her, quietly exits when he finds a partner and probably shelter elsewhere.
Talaash is a significant work in the context of commemorating the nation’s past in Bangladesh. It confounds linearity in time in narration as well as experience of time. War emerges as a significant event in the novel as it exposes the nature of masculinity that has sustained it through ages. At times the narrator seems to be casting herself in the role of Sanjaya, the one who had narrated the progress of the war to the blind Dhritarashtra in the Mahabharata. The disquiet that witnesses to what 1971 also meant shall disappear is acutely felt and even secondary witnesses like Mukti find coherence slipping out of their hands. In the question and answer pattern of one of the interviews cited by Akhtar in the novel, the tyranny of accuracy is felt by not only the researcher but the victim as well. There are things that Mariam has forgotten. There are details that in the frenzy of terror she now implants on places and people they might not belong to, she is not quite sure and the urgency to remember is obvious. These are fodder to the Dead Reckoning camp of Sarmila Bose and other deniers of what happened in the nine months of 1971 in East Pakistan. More importantly, if witnesses (who are also victims of rape) cannot remember or continue to dwindle, the process of the trial of war criminals might result in a nation that acknowledges the spectacular violence of the army, its own suffering and desperate retaliation, and subsumes rape in the general archives of violence and a ground for the legitimacy of secession. The trial will then be of limited symbolic value, for justice in its prosecution of war collaborators and the need for exemplary punishment might result in a premature euphoria of a closure and of having discharged one’s responsibility to history, however well meaning it might be. The ‘minoritization’ experienced by Mujib’s birangonas in Bangladesh is succinctly summed up by Tuki in the following lines:
Life is stranger than a film. Should she believe it or not? If she does then where does she stand? A country where birangonas are denied burial and graves will now bring war criminals to trial! She shouldn’t have let Mukti record her testimony for two years in the first place.[41]
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In a sense, in the narratives of history, fiction, and testimony there is continuity in the remembering of oppression. Written after the war these works are part of a process by which the nation constructs its legitimacy, a democratic government comes to represent self rule in a sense that was different from Pakistan. It is the attempt to define this past that is forever in question; the failing currency of the Awami League, the massacre in 1975, the military regime and radicalization of religion, and the constantly changing lists of freedom fighters and Razakars could not be seen as a continuation of the bare life[42] of citizens under a postPartition Punjabi-dominated Pakistani politics. The legacy of the Language Movement and that of the war of liberation fought against a powerful opponent had to be renewed and elevated to the status of a ritual; national identity is never a settled process and Bangladesh, because of its size and its relationship with its moment of birth, reminds us of the fact.
To the counters that ‘inclusive politics’ (still associated with the Awami League) places on the table, Shaheen Akhtar’s text poses a problem. In the marginal life led by Mariam in the heart of the capital, a city where the nation is made and remade again and again, the continuity of the narrative that a ‘resurgent nation wants to effect in the twenty-first century (with post-1975 standing for the Dark Ages) demands an emplotting that cannot accommodate what Mary or Anuradha or perhaps Tuki’s life stands for-a different script and interpretation of the war. Akhtar, therefore, gives Anuradha a prophetic value; during the war, confined to the barracks, talking to her largely illiterate and impatient companions of Anne Frank, she keeps her ears to the wall to trace the passing seasons and writes an invisible diary in her mind. Her statements like, ‘It isn’t alcohol that intoxicates men; war is his biggest intoxication,[43] or that a free country will look upon their suffering not as an atrocity but as a loss of honour and either hide them or send them to brothels, annoys those women in the camp who wish to believe that the end of the war will be a homecoming and live in that hope. Anuradha stuns Mariam by telling her that if she chooses to leave for Pakistan with Major Ishtiaque it will not be her betrayal of her homeland but her revenge on it. Mariam attempts such a form of vengeance after the war but fails. The women rescued from the cantonments and camps across Bangladesh become objects of curiosity. When the ‘violated mothers and sisters’ descend from the plane of rhetoric and threaten to walk among free men and women in a free country, the need for their silencing is keenly felt. The emotions felt by Mary are clearly in sharp contrast to the pieces in the anthology Bijoyer Muhurto that has been discussed in Chapter 3
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or the mourning of mothers like Imam and Safia Begum who hope against hope that their sons shall return:
That day when General Niazi was signing on the document of surrender, under the effect of medicines Mariam was in a trance; she had entered a place called Shalimar Bagh in the city of Lahore. She walks with bare feet on the carpet of green grass in Lahore, lingers astonished by the fountain and admires the soft beauty of the trees stretched out in a line. But she cannot see any woman in tight salwar-kameez with a dupatta hanging like a noose around her neck anywhere. The sight reassures her and leaving a door open for the future, she turns over and goes back to sleep.[ 44]
Akhtar’s images are sometimes desultory and her attempts at metonymical representation appear to pack in too many details in a single instance. But for the moment we are not concerned with the literary merit of her effort. The scene of surrender is a famous photographic moment of history. It is a sign and evidence, in legends about the war, of the victory of good over evil. It finds its place in the sculptures commemorating the war in the heart of the city near the University of Dhaka. The war has come to an end and so has the uncertainty of life and limb in a nation under siege. To the document (of history) represented by the surrender, which is now an archival truth, is posed the insubstantiality of the trance and the dream of Mariam, raped and wounded during the war and abandoned by history/memory to her reveries. Major Ishatiaque’s stories of a city of gold, mansions, and gardens turns Lahore (an enemy’ territory) into the only place to which she can escape. The woman who is missing in the land of her dreams is the major’s wife who used to write to him during the war to fight for the integrity of Pakistan and not be ensnared by the dark Bengali enchantress from whose spell there is no release. This flight from history, short-lived as it is, is the only way Mariam can receive the present. And her experience cannot be part of the self-image of a victorious nation. As Shobharani tells Mukti, victory’ or ‘freedom was not easily comprehended by the birangonas whose sole purpose in the months of confinement had been to survive the war the end to which would mean an end to their unremitting torture. As the women in Talaash bear witness, imagining a future becomes a mere trope to make the present bearable.
On the day of Sheikh Mujib’s death, Mariam recalls having felt a perilous sense of freedom. Till then the sewing machines that had been gifted to the rehabilitation centre to make women self-dependent, the
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tailoring business she had begun with her mother, and the minimal livelihood that they earned had in a strange way tied him to her. This man who had visited them after the war and called them his mothers had given them a name. Now’as his body lay sprawled on the staircase, she felt released by her puppet master. Thus far she had keenly felt each pull of the strings that tied him to her. When Mukti puts the bits of the story together, she is struck by the uncanny reversal of the Sheikh’s speech of 7 March 1971, which has been referred to earlier. He had said of the enemy’We will starve them of food; we will finish them on water:[45] An activist fighting for the rights of prostitutes in contemporary Bangladesh tells her that almost three decades after the war with Mujib’s party in power this slogan could equally apply to these women who had been ravaged by the war. The ruling authority had cut off power and water supply to the brothels and had clamped down on prospective clients. Read in conjunction with the earlier paraphrase of the events of Mariam’s life, her sudden desire to meet Anuradha surprises Mukti. She has a simple question for the only one she knew who could see far ahead in time: How will her life conclude? Mariam, Mukti, and the author now look for a place to drop anchor.
Meanwhile, Anuradha, the wise prophet, becomes Radharani after the war and dies an alcoholic in a colony of prostitutes. Mary’s search is for Anuradha or the knowledge/vision of a closure. Tuki’s desire to testify in a public trial remains unfulfilled. She joins Mariam on her journey by boat. Their only companions are the poultry they had raised. The boatman sensing something amiss abandons them on the sixth day of the journey. The water grows heavy.
On the seventh day Tuki and Mariam leave the narrow limits of human prediction behind. At that very moment they see Anuradha waving a white handkerchief from a beach and beckoning them. Mariam has shed the solemnity of the dead and appears exultant. If they had advanced further they would perhaps have met Mantu and Ramiz Shaikh…. In the sky of the earth the sun is setting. Behind Tuki is the land they have left behind and in the reddening horizon it is flowing like the hair on her head. Anuradha, looking in that direction, says: Oh how beautiful our country is! Tuki’s achol slips from her face-Yes the country for which we gave our blood.[46]
The answer to Mary’s question does not lie in the land, water, air, or the people that she knows. And Tuki’s desire to testify shall be fulfilled
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out of the hearing of the audience she desired. One wonders whether it lies in self-annihilation or the impatience of the secondary witness to wind up her scattered narrative. Whatever be it, Akhtar ends the novel in despondency. The separated companions meet again with none to listen and recognize their trauma/suffering.[47] Mukti’s search for meaning lands her in the serpentine alleys of memories and history. There is no official record of her subjects, indeed they may disappear without a trace. There are doors she cannot enter, like the ‘Bihari’ woman she meets in her hunt for birangonas, a prostitute who had been gang-raped by Bengali men in 1972 and who suddenly vanishes. She discovers that while torture and the subsequent struggle for existence has dimmed the remembrance of the women, the clues one provides leads to another and then another while some in 1999 are already untraceable. They are no more than a flash in the memories of those who shared the smell of blood and death with them in the camps. In the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, as I have mentioned in Chapter 1, the contribution of women is a mere footnote.
The national memorial at Savar only mentions martyrs. As the fiction and memoirs I have discussed suggest, while there may be a place for mourning mothers and combatant women in the memorialization of the nation’s birth, it is as if in combating the more granulated threat posed by ‘anti-democratic, non-secular’ forces, the patriarchal violence and order of things that sanctioned the exploitation, legitimized a certain version of Islam over others, suggested repression and war as its solution, and in independent Bangladesh continued the suffering of the victims of rape/sexual torture has escaped due scrutiny and critique in the written accounts as well as the national memorial process. Mukti’s anxiety as a secondary witness is clearly Akhtar’s too. Their conclusion that though the war might have resulted in an explosion of violence against women their victimization has been continued by old patterns of domination in a new country, their perception of the inseparability of gendered structures and revolutionary politics, and the meaning of justice today for women like Mary, Anuradha, or Tuki who suffered/witnessed the war/ liberation but are either silenced, dead, or tormented are all unfamiliar ingredients in the nationalistic narrative of Bangladesh. In depicting the war as an interregnum/episode in human life of which there is a before and after, Akhtar replaces the predominant motif of sacrifice in post-war fiction with what it means to have experienced victimhood in its depths. Unlike the angelic stature that the wounded hero/guerrilla of Humayun Ahmed’s Aguner Poroshmoni achieves as the novel reaches its end, Mary turns fifty in Bangladesh incessantly running for cover.
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Eroticizing Wartime/Post-war Rape: The Short Fiction of Imdadul Hoque Milon A very different kind of commemorative fiction may be attributed to Imdadul Hoque Milon (an author of immense mass appeal) who also writes of rape in the context of the war. His stories also deal with Razakars/collaborators (“Razakar Tantra, ‘Lokta Razakar Chhilo’), post-war violence (‘Baloker Abhimaan, ‘Nirapotta Hoi, and ‘Shesh Porber Shuru”), and even war babies (‘Ekjonaa’). He exploits the titillation associated with violence of a sexual and physical nature (without irony) while advocating the need of a second uprising. The sentimental morality that war gives rise to, the questionable despair, and the theme of cleansing in Milon demonstrate how in fiction too an author may require an ‘enemy’ or an ‘other’ to critique the putrefaction of ideals, which is the stuff of his narrative>Milon’s eroticization of wartime rape and its thematic submergence in a larger critique mimetically represents the forgetting that patriarchal, nationalistic discourse perpetuates. In his fictional memorialization Milon articulates an important stance–the deep conservatism that revolutionary politics may veil. In ‘Kalo Ghoda’ we have the widowed Hindu trader Ratanlal and his mute daughter Kali.[48] The chairman of the peace committee of the area is a Razakar and drafts one of the employees (Barek) of Ratanlal’s into his service during the war. The ageing potbellied chairman lusts after Kali and is led by Barek to her house when her father is away in his shop. She is raped brutally by him and it is Milon’s reading of the act of penetration before she eventually commits suicide in the river that is worth noting, After Kali is overpowered, the narrator writes: ‘Slowly Kali let go. She then realises that there is an intense feeling of pleasure in this thing. Kali had never tasted such gratification in her life:[49] This is followed by Kali’s thoughts: ‘This man with a bloated belly left in the sixteen/seventeenyear-old body of Kali, an intense pleasure, an intense pain [50] An irony that cannot fail to strike the reader is that Kali’s silence in the story (a consequence of her inability to speak) is not only due to a denial of her agency in the form of the experience of rape and her response of selfannihilation but also a denial of her right to articulate her understanding of what had happened to her. In Milon’s portrayal of a mute victim it appears that any (albeit slick) symbolism attempted is undercut by his understanding of his female character’s experience of rape as pleasurable. So much so that her anger, disgust, and revulsion against her own body and the meaning of her eventual suicide (intended as tragic and
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later in the narrative meant to serve as fuel to the freedom fighters’ rage against the chairman) has to contend with a moment in the text where, even if for a brief fleeting moment, we are told that Kali (who prostrates herself and cries in silent ignominy and appears to the narrator in that scene as goddess Kali incarnate) enjoyed her surrender. In writing of the effects of rape (and in this case wartime rape, though not by the soldiers) and the horrifying aspects of the complicity of the collaborators, Milon’s interpretation of the incident mitigates the violence of rape and makes the victim’s pain and the warriors’ vengefulness more a reaction to received notions of the experience of rape than the sheer trauma of the particular incident. What this fictional representation of a victim of rape achieves is the projection of sexual pleasure onto the lack of consent’ and can find a parallel only with the gendered and sexualized discourses in nationalism and its notions of heroism and sacrifice.
In the story entitled ‘Mahajuddho, again of a Hindu couple, Babua and Alta, we have a fictional representation of post-war rape by miscreants who having laid their hands on a few weapons were looking for trouble. The boredom of the youth after the war and a hypermasculinity sustained by guns appear as recurrent themes in Milon’s work. Having looted the cashbox of a wealthy local trader, they chance upon Babua’s wife in the wee hours of the morning and rape her. Alta, long believed to be infertile by her and others, is impregnated and tells herself that since she was not responsible for what had happened, she will keep the child. In fact she is seen to embrace her impending motherhood in secret and derives pleasure from the fact that her womb is empty no longer. She, however, hides the fact of rape from her husband and when she breaks the news of her pregnancy to him he is devastated. Alta is not aware that the doctor in the city had told Babua that he would never be able to father a child biologically. He had hidden the fact from his wife and under the pressure of the knowledge had withdrawn from her and started spending long hours at his teashop. The narrative ends with Babua abusing and assaulting his wife and finally turning her out. She lay writhing in agony and crying in the courtyard, her pain (says the narrator) pricked with the fragile happiness of the life inside her womb. In the representation of post-war brutalization of life in Bangladesh, we have Babua’s inability to procreate, his withdrawal, and his wife’s sense of guilt enforced by her ignorance of the problem. Into this space come a few young men looking for trouble, still coping with the war’s hangover. Alta is gang raped; Milon attempts to represent the woman’s body in pain. However, the pleasure that the woman in this story derives from
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the revelation of her fertility and fruitfulness willy-nilly transforms the rapists into a form of deux ex machina? It distributes the focus between the rape and Babua’s violence on the one hand and Alta’s (however shortlived) sense of affirmation (her interpretation of the rape) brought on by the knowledge of her fecundity. Needless to say, the prior discussion of Shaheen Akhtar’s Talaash in keeping Mariam at the centre of the novel is able to offer a more nuanced critique of the specific nature of the reality of rape and its ramifications.
In his significant article ‘Two World Wars and the Myth of the World Experience, George L. Mosse argues that the most significant difference between the First and the Second World War was the myth of the war experience. Since the first was an unprecedented’ episode in the lives and affairs of men and women they had to domesticate the experience in terms of their political and cultural life and it was reflected in literary and artistic perceptions. He goes on to say: ‘The spirit of 1914, so different from the numbness and threat of execution which actually kept many soldiers fighting served as one post-war bridge between the horror and the glory of war:[51] This transformation was observable more in dissatisfied nations than in ones that were satisfied and served crucial needs when transition was difficult in the post-war world. The myth was created by the volunteers who had joined the war effort moved by traditional associations of camaraderie, ideals, and manliness with the soldier. If the chapter on combatant men is anything to go by (Chapter 3) the argument appears to be extendable to describe the war in 1971. We have mentioned earlier how understanding the nature of violence and its affect’ became a core moral and analytical debt that literature has been discharging ever since the end of the war in 1945. References to the Holocaust occur in different genres that treat the war of liberation’ and the demand for a trial of war criminals has been a constant theme of memorialization ever since Jahanara Imam’s Gono Adalot held the controversial mock trial of 1992, the year after the fall of the military regime of Ershad. However, in the following section we shall treat two works which in their idealization of the war and participation in the cult of heroism seems to draw from similar stories about the war that Mosse was referring to as circulating in the public domain after 1914. This highlights the fact that in the cultural remembrance of the war through fiction different strains are visible. Both the works discussed below were
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written in 2003 and if one compares them with those written during the war, one becomes aware of how the temporal element infiltrates symbolizations of the past.[52]
Nationalism’s Folklore: The Heroic Mother Selina Hossain’s novel is about the patriotism of a mother who, though she has never experienced the nation’ except through her son’s involvement in the affairs of the village and Bongobondhu’s speech of 7 March, instinctively knows her role in the war. Anisul Hoque’s Maa is about Safia Begum and her son, Azad; it is a self-proclaimed docu-novel’, which in his representation of a caregiving mother’s resolve, insubordination, and mourning constitutes a model of ethics for a nation. Placed in the context of the post-war history of Bangladesh (the distortion of the legacy of the war post 1975) and memories in the public domain, the immense popularity of these novels (both ran into several reprints) is illustrative perhaps of the propensity during prosperity for narratives where suffering is affirmative. The violence in these texts is implied as necessary to war. What we also glimpse here is a clear intersection of the gendered myth-making of war. If Jahanara Imam, Basanti Guhathakurta, and Mushtari Shafi are heroic women known through their memoirs, Anisul Hoque and Selina Hossain create their fictional analogues. However, in the following critique of these images, we explore the elisions and contradictions of memorializing war in fiction.
Hangor Nodi Grenade When Kader and Hafiz from Buri’s village come to seek her blessings to join the war, her reaction in the context of the discussion in this chapter is an important one:
She lovingly caresses them on their head and back. At this moment they are resplendent like the light of the God. Curiosity peeps in: Are angels like this? Are they so luminous? To her a strange smell seems to emanate from their bodies, an unearthly one. The bewitching smell is maddening. She brings their hands close to her nose and sniffs hard. No the aroma isn’t arrested in any specific place, it is everywhere.[53]
Written in 2003, this novel has a very thin plot. The simple narrative revolves around Buri, of village Haldi, a woman who has led a common,
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unexceptional life till the war began. Married to Gafoor, her uncle’s son, who has two sons by his dead first wife, Buri unenthusiastically settles into domestic life. She does not complain about the impending drudgery or about her husband’s age. Selina Hossain gives the reader a glimpse of a rich inner life, a gay abandon that her mother and brother had feared was dangerous for a woman. She nurtures a deep desire to plumb the mysterious world beyond the village but her circumstances keep her tied to her roots. As if in preparation for the climax, Hossain makes Buri an intriguing character. In the context of other women around her, tied to the land, home, and hearth, made petty by the smallness of their preoccupations, Buri has a wildness of spirit, detached from the worldliness of her milieu. With her stepsons, Salim and Kalim, she shares a warm and easy relationship. Whenever Gafoor takes her along with him for fishing at dawn, he notes how completely transformed she is-gay, coy, and unusually responsive to his sexual advances, which in the household she appears to merely tolerate. However, a few years into her marriage she feels the aching need for a child of her own, to savour her fertility, believing that by giving birth she would get rid of her sadness at the futility of her dreams and her vague but vaulting imagination. Thus start her visits to the shrine of a holy man until she attains her heart’s desire. Royees is born to Buri and Gafoor but it does not take them long to discover that not only is their son unable to hear or speak, he is also impeded in his mental faculties.
Buri oscillates between love, anger, and despair for her son. The narrative gathers steam with the onset of the war. Gafoor is dead and Salim has taken over the role of the provider. However, he gradually becomes the centre of building up resistance in the village against the Pakistani army, goes into hiding, and then joins the war. Kalim is picked up from home on suspected links with the Mukti Bahini and is killed. The catastrophe leaves few families in the village unaffected. The novel climaxes when the two freedom fighters mentioned at the beginning of this section attack the army camp in the village and seek protection from Buri. The enemy soldiers are close on their scent. Buri hides them, gives a sleeping Royees their rifle, and when the army is at the door pushes her unsuspecting son towards them. The four bloodhounds, convinced that they have found their target, grab him, thanking Buri. Royees is immediately shot dead under the very tree of blackberries that his brother Kalim had planted.
The narrative raises many problematic issues, all of which cannot be discussed here.[54] We shall, therefore, confine ourselves to the place that
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‘freedom’ comes to occupy in the course of the story. Since Buri is the lever around which the story turns, it is here that the contradictions of the nationalist discourse become most evident. War acquires a religious presence; those touched by it, in Buri’s mind, are aglow with its fire. She not only thinks that poor Bengali peasant lads joining the war are angels, to her senses they emit an ethereal fragrance. As it transpires, we are hardly shown the transition in Buri’s political consciousness. To her, the voice of Sheikh Mujib delivering his 7th March speech has an electrifying effect.[55] Buri watches with bated breath as the village changes; finally something momentous is about to happen. It is no wonder that Buri should give birth to Royees; the symbolism is unmistakeable. It is almost as if Royees only externalizes the deep lack of fulfilment in her life, the compromise she has struck. While Hossain perhaps intended Hangor Nodi Grenade as a moral tale of a mother’s sacrifice and a hint towards the agency of a simple peasant woman in the masculine world of war, motherhood does not appear to me to be the crux of this novel as it is in Anisul Hoque’s Maa, a work that will be taken up in a following section. What materializes as the essential strand in this text’s commemoration of the war is the emergence of Buri’s particular understanding of nationalist sentiment and her own feelings, which is of significance to us. To make our point clearer, the following section where Buri leans beside a sleeping Royees before turning him over to the enemy may be quoted:
Buri bent down over his mouth. Yes, it is the same smell. It is the same smell given out by the bodies of Kader and Hafiz the day they left home to join the Muktibahini. Now it hung over Royees’ mouth. Buri doesn’t know who they are that now stand radiant and shining beside her. Buri can hear the divine voice. It tells her that the time has come. It seems now that each moment is advancing towards her.”
Buri’s sensuous apprehension of the world outside, her physical response to phenomena, has been impressed upon the reader since the novel’s opening paragraphs. When her friend Jalil takes her to the station as a child, she senses a strange smell. Her father’s death at an early age makes no difference to her rich solitude as she loiters around the fields, filling her frock with paddy, swimming in the pond, and talking to the stars in the sky. Buri’s knowledge of the world is through the senses, and as we understand in the instances quoted above, the scent given out by the bodies of men willing/about to die for the nation is, in the scheme of
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things, a common, unlettered peasant woman’s sensuous apprehension of the nation and national feeling, the discourses of which are framed either in cities or by men. This spontaneity/immediacy of love then seeks power to change one’s destiny and thus employs the only instrument at one’s disposal (her handicapped son) to perform that labour of love. The violence of this act of Buri’s is also supposed to be seen as restorative. It cancels her son’s uselessness and by subsuming this act in the register of sacrifice, grants it the angelic quality that Buri or the author Selina Hossain perceives in it. Unconsciously, therefore, the novel creates a space where, arguably, a subaltern’ nationalism finds expression. Interestingly, this narrative may be cited as almost a ‘case study of the permeability across social boundaries of the language of empowerment that nationalism often has. In taking account of its’exclusionary origins Anthony D. Marx does anticipate the critique one can subject Hossain’s choice of plot to, since certainly a Royees alive could not have belonged to the Liberation War narrative of Haldi village.[57] While Hossain examines the aspect of gendered experience of war in the novel, she quite unproblematically sacrifices her disabled son for the nation, thus unwittingly affirming Marx’s thesis.
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In Anisul Hoque, one of the most popular chroniclers of 1971 in fiction, we find a preoccupation with female characters—women who constitute in their life stories and actions a defiance of the (patriarchal) forces that seek to fix the meaning of their place/role in their social milieu. Both his Janani Shahashini and Bir Protikeir Khoje are cases in point.[58] While the former narrates a popular wartime legend of a woman who poisoned a camp of Pakistani soldiers in which she had been confined, the latter undertakes a search for Kariman Beowa, a woman who had fought alongside men during the war. In this section, we consider texts which are cast in a clear nationalistic mould and (as their prefaces suggest) pitch themselves as bearers of the spirit of the Liberation War! As has been mentioned earlier, this phrase in Bangladesh is likely to suggest a secular-nationalist agenda, a position that is often officially appropriated by the Awami League and attributed to the plural vision of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
In this dialogue/debate set up between memory, history, and fiction in Bangladesh, Maa occupies a critical place. Reprinted for the twentyseventh time in January 2009, this work has a noteworthy career. It tells
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the true story of Safia Begum, martyr Azad’s mother, and is dedicated by Hoque to ‘To the mothers of all those who laid down their lives for Bangladesh. After the first edition was published in February 2003, a second revised edition appeared just a couple of months later, in April. In both editions Hoque insists that it is a work of fiction. Before I met the author in 2009 in Dhaka I had read an e-book version of his first edition. During the interview he referred to a ‘flaw’ in the original version which he said he had tried to rectify subsequently. I had let it pass, unaware at that time of the existence of a second edition. When I later read the edited version after my second visit to the country in 2010, it raised some serious questions about the relationship between a work of fiction admittedly inspired’ by real events and the task of memorializing a nation’s past. In the specific case of Bangladesh the idea of sovereignty is inseparably bound with the war and its legacies. The preface to the amended second edition reveals that the author had come across three people after the publication who (according to him) added substantially to his knowledge about those days in the lives of the mother and son and hence the obligation to present a more complete description of those times. In this section we shall examine not only the import of such a move but also the nature of the changes and its impact on Maa.[59]
Maa tries to knit together a story from the reminiscences of people connected to the war of 1971. The first scene of the novel, where a number of freedom fighters are trooping towards the graveyard, has a symbolic resonance. The pallbearers and those that follow are carrying Azad’s mother on her last journey, fourteen years after the war. It is a collective memorial service, as much for the mother as for the war and the liberation of 1971. Jahanara Imam is also present in Anisul Hoque’s batch of pilgrims headed for the funeral. Hoque’s technique is to reconstruct a coherent narrative from recollections shared with him by those who are witnesses, either to the war of 1971 or the extraordinary life story of a woman and in a few cases to both. In this he introduces imaginary conversations and incidents. While these often have the effect of enlivening bits of detail for the reader, they offer insights into the author’s interpretation of his role in the history of his nation. In his concluding section (numbered 48) and appearing as part of the narrative, Hoque writes:
Thirty-one years after Azad was taken prisoner, seventeen years after his mother was buried, a little known writer on another 30th of August begins the impossible task of completing Azad’s unfinished task: to tell
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the world about his mother, to write her biography. Azad had written to his mother that if he ever earns fame and greatness he would write about her; he would inscribe the story of her life…. Today Jahanara Imam is no more but her Ekattorer Dinguli remains; several freedom fighters are still alive, some aren’t, freedom lingers, Bangladesh lives, wonder whether this is the country of their dreams…[60]
This section in the second edition appears as a separate segment entitled ‘Conclusion’ after the narrative has ended. Writing as he does as the inheritor of a responsibility, suggesting that his work doubles as fiction and biography, it gives rise to the issues which led him to fit into the text ‘facts’ he had excluded. Before we go into the ramifications of Hoque’s undertaking a brief familiarization with the novel is perhaps in order.
Anisul Hoque’s Maa is the story, as mentioned earlier, of Safia Begum and her son, Azad. Azad was born a year before 1947 and with the independence of India imminent, he was christened Azad, which means ‘liberated. After the Partition Yunus Choudhury, his father, an engineer, was prevailed upon by his wife Safia to leave for East Pakistan where they belonged. In Dhaka Yunus Choudhury turned his hand to business which brought a meteoric change in his fortunes making him one of the richest notables of the eastern wing. Attributing his success to the destiny of his wife, he purchases all his property in her name. We are told that it was she who had helped him financially to complete his studies and had also provided the initial capital to start his business. She is shown to be humble and generous, the Bengali stereotype of a hospitable woman whose sole happiness is to cook and feed delicacies to guests, an aspect that even in completely changed circumstances shall draw hordes of people, especially her son’s friends to her home. Everything changes when she learns of her husband’s intention to marry again. To her his decision though allowed by religion (Islam permits polygamy, and Yunus Choudhury in a fit of drunkenness reminds her that he can do it not just twice but four times) is a morally reprehensible one and she leaves his home never to return. Her warning to him when she discovers his numerous dalliances is to mend his ways else she will not only leave with Azad but he would never see his face again, is one that she executes literally. In spite of being coaxed, threatened, attacked, and reduced to penury, Safia Begum, in a pre-1971 Bangladesh, inimical to a woman raising a child on her own, fights a lonely, resolute battle where her only resource is the jewellery given to her by her parents during her marriage
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to Azad’s father. This work tries to fathom her struggle, Hoque working (as his preface says) to pay a son’s tribute to his mother, merging the mother with her mourning. In the altered version of the novel, he makes an attempt to accommodate the grief of those mothers whose sons were also picked up by the Pakistani army in Dhaka on that fateful day, trying to gain a larger legitimacy for his work. It is a strand that we shall have to follow in a later discussion.
Part of the narrative takes us through her steely resolve as she fights a personal battle for her dignity. Midway though the lives of Azad, his cousins, friends, and mother become intertwined with the war. Safia Begum, as the caregiver in a family that comprises not only of her sons but her dead sister’s children who have been abandoned by their father, finds herself not only sheltering guerrillas but also letting them store arms and ammunition. When Azad, the only raison d’être of her existence, asks for her permission to join his friends in war, she lets him go. Constructed through the memories of the people who lived and knew her, Anisul Hoque composes a work that is part history, part biography, and part fiction. The foundation of this text that merges these criss-crossed genres is personal memory and considering the swift and substantial editing it was subjected to within months of its publication, it is clear that in Bangladesh it entered into a dialogue with history and memory and the argument was settled not entirely in favour of fiction’ which is what Maa claims it is. Azad and his friends Jewel and Bashar and a brother-in-law, who are picked up from Azad’s Mogbazar home, are lost to the war; two of his cousins Togor and Zayed are seriously wounded during the army’s raid. The story of Safia Begum’s life becomes the stuff of heroic legend when she asks her son to withstand the torture and not betray his friends thus repudiating the army’s offer to spare Azad’s life if he would become an informer.[61] Till the time of her death, she looks after her sister’s children, sleeps on the floor since her son in his days of terrible persecution had been denied a bed, and gives up eating rice. The last time that she had seen her son (when he was in custody) he had told her that he was hungry and felt like having rice. When Safia Begum · came to the police station carrying the homemade food the following day, the inmates had been herded to some unspecified location. She would never see her son again.
War has historically shown a predilection to forms of spiritualism. Jay Winter, writing about the Great War, showed how not only combatants but those at home and mourning the dead including leading public figures, promoted and sought refuge in the other-worldly to cope with their
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trauma. The creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, who had lost his son, his brother, and brother-in-law during the war, began to cultivate an interest in spirit photography. He attended séances with his wife and in his lectures the ultra rationalist’ author exhibited a turn to full-time evangelism. By 1918 thirteen mothers had written to him about their communication with their fallen sons[62] Oliver Lodge, the man who had been conferred knighthood for his work which helped to create the electric spark for the internal combustion engine, lost his son Raymond, an engineer posted in Ypres. What followed was a series of séances whereby the Lodges could communicate with their dead son, and construct details of Raymond’s continued life in imaginary ‘Summerland. The details of this supernatural odyssey’ were published as Raymond, which became a bestseller during the war.[63] One way of coping with personal loss in war is to imagine the continued development and growth of those lives which were brutally cut short:[64] In Anisul Hoque’s Maa companions of Safia Begum’s last journey were offered such a reassurance, the cemetery-a place where the dead and the living have come together to mourn her passing away:
The shrunken body was lowered into the grave, Zayed is asked to pour the first bit of earth into it, he is dazed and unable to move, someone picks up a fistful of earth and puts it in Zayed’s palm, separates his fingers, so that it may fall into the grave. Then one freedom fighter after another repeats the ritual; suddenly from the cloudless bright sky rain starts to descend. Just then a strangely sweet fragrance hits their olfactory organs and when they look up they can only see a tiny severed cloud. Rain and sunshine at the same time is not an uncommon occurrence in Bengal … but every freedom fighter has a feeling today that this heady scent, this heavenly shower has some other meaning; they sense that their fellow fighters, their dead friends have returned to join the train of pallbearers at the moment…. Bachhu will regret years into the future the fact that at that magical moment he didn’t turn back, if he had he would have seen each of his lost friends again after fourteen years … [65]
In our consideration of the memorialization of war in Bangladesh and the way people remember a violent time that also led to a positive denouement of birth, albeit one that again left its own brutal trace on the lives of people, Hoque’s interpretation is significant. Unlike the illustrations of the responses of Conan Doyle and Oliver Lodge to their personal bereavement, Maa can be seen as an attempt to tell the story of
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not only the ones who were martyred and the ones who mourned, but also those who returned without their companions to everyday living. The work offers us a glimpse into the way the world of urban guerrillas was sustained by their mothers (Rumi and Azad are dominant figures and their mothers have to let go of them/let them go before they can join the war against a cruel enemy); due to the nature of the war for Bangladesh the separation between the home and the front was blurred and correspondingly the role of caregivers differed. They often found themselves at the heart of the conflict and decisions that were thrust upon them. It is, therefore, not difficult to encounter moments in the text where the nation and mother become one.
Retold from impressions, Anisul Hoque’attempts to write a fictional biography of a woman who chose her posthumous identity (which she desired should be inscribed on her epitaph)—Martyr Azad’s Mother’. We have discussed in the chapter on memoirs and testimonies the gendered nature of war. In Gender and Nation Nira Yuval-Davis outlines the discourses around women and their wartime roles. In her chapter on Gendered Militaries, Gendered Wars’ she articulates the differences between first- and third-world feminists on a simple equation of women with anti-militarism and pacifism. The latter according to Yuval-Davis justifiably argue against the description of all militarism as violent, which amounts to denying the right of the oppressed people to armed struggles which are sometimes nationalistic in nature. We have drawn attention to the roles of Jahanara Imam and Safia Begum whom their sons recognize as the bedrock of their strength as they voluntarily participate in guerrilla warfare. The world of combat is still overwhelmingly masculine. [66] However, as we have seen, the image of the martial mother/sacrificing mother when seen in conjunction with just war’ or a discourse of war against oppression’ becomes a means in post-war Bangladesh to invest nationalism with a strong emotional content and merge seamlessly into a patriotic reverence for the motherland. That Anisul Hoque’s story of the heroic mother in Safia Begum, who prioritized her maternal identity over all others, should recall patriarchal images of ideal womanhood is an inescapable paradox.
It is important at this stage to take into account the changes that Anisul Hoque introduced into his novel after the publication of his first edition. It is a curious case where a novelist revises a novel to give it a greater sense of completion. The primary materials that go into this work are interviews, Azad’s letters to his mother, and a few memoirs and documents which he cites at the end of his second edition. What
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had been ‘missing in the original version (it is strange to be talking of versions by the same author for a work of fiction!) were the reminiscences of Azad’s friends, ace cricketer Syed Ashraful Hoque, Ibrahim Saber, and his cousin Togor. They do not add substantially to the nature of the content. Togor was also present on the day of the army’s raid and was injured along with Zayed. Syed Ashraful Hoque was a Mukti Bahini sympathizer and a frequent visitor to Azad’s Mogbazar home. Ibrahim Saber recalls the suspicious movement of a few men near Azad’s house the day before the crackdown and how his friend had casually brushed aside his fears. Significant entries are the events of 7 March, the day of Mujib’s historic speech, jingoistic slogans, and inspirational poems. Anisul Hoque also informs us of the non-partisan patriotism of these young men. We get the images of guerrilla Badiul Alam reading Camus’ The Outsider, the grieving mothers of Jewel and Bashar (all of whom were picked up from Azad’s house and never came back). The other additions are in the form of titbits that are all part of the author’s desire to represent the war as a mass movement in which urban, English-speaking middle-class youth played a secularizing role. The largest segments are culled from the memories of Ashraful Hoque and fairly non-controversial details of the war which freely circulate in the public domain. The seriousness with which 7 March is treated has been referred to earlier. There is also mention of the progress of the war as more guerrillas replaced the ones who were killed and while the first edition had been building towards the capture of Azad and his friends on 30 August 1971 as its central event, the second edition diffuses the dramatic tension by references to other young fighters in the Mukti Bahini who, through their brave exploits, took the war to its logical conclusion. On reading the second edition, 30 August appears to be not the climax of the novel as it was with the first edition but an episode in the narrative of the war of liberation of Bangladesh. Maa in its revised edition articulates the dilemma of the writer memorializing the war in negotiating with the claims of the dead and the living who have been witnesses to war and the formation of a new state. As the reader will recall, Nirmalendu Goon had incorporated fragments of letters written to him by readers as they read his serialized Atmokatha 1971 into the main narrative structure of his work, writing what appears, at times, a consultative account where the memories of strangers enter the text and lodge themselves there. In a similar fashion, one might argue, Anisul Hoque has composed his docu-novel integrating claims of fiction’ with claims of reality, precipitating a work that is indicative of the critical
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role of the discursive space of war-memorialization in the shaping of identities in Bangladesh.
The preceding discussion has focused on elements to show the way in which the war has been remembered in literature. While it is true that in a semi-literate postcolonial nation like Bangladesh literature constitutes a limited critical potential when it comes to memorialization of its moment of birth, as every annual book fair commemorating the Language Movement reminds us, literature about the war cannot but be a prolegomena to exploring the curious and contested nature of Bangladeshi/ Bengali nationalism. Like Holocaust literature or for that matter any writing that emerges out of the modern experience of violence either in the form of genocide or war, the survivors seek to bear witness and the progeny are compelled to excavate the traumatic nature of what their fathers and mothers saw and lived through. A partial result of such a journey into one’s memories and the stories one has heard is a distinctive recounting of the graphic qualities of the horror, the effects of torture, and the ubiquity of death. The images thus produced become cultural capital and are apt to be deployed, appropriated, and recycled into larger discourses of state-making. While with Talaash we moved away from the nature of victimhood and its relevance in a post-war world, we are nevertheless still with a novelist who shows us a form of suffering that cannot be cited as an example of the ‘inhumanity of the enemy’ without muddying the waters between a free and captive Bangladesh.
The Living Dead and the Muted Survivor: Simile of Loss in ‘Naamheen Gotraheen’ In Hasan Azizul Haq’s story ‘Naamheen Gotraheen,
mentioned in the introductory section, we move to a man passing through a dark and silent city. One could argue that Huq’s story is a dramatization of how an eyewitness to violence necessarily becomes involved in the process of unearthing evidence of it; also, as one looks at the war of 1971 from the vantage point of another country as a quintessential secondary witness, the man without an identity in this narrative allows us to explore how history in a sense creates memory (to be sure, it is not the sole progenitor) and is unsettled by it, especially when it comes to events that are often termed as instances of unprecedented human cruelty.
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In the course of the story, a few exchanges of words take place in the silence of the setting. When he asks for tea in Bengali in a shop after he alights from the train, he is answered in Urdu.[67] In the darkness he perceives a few men. One of them is clearly a captive and his tormentors ask him, again in Urdu, if he is a Hindu. The man answers in the negative. He is then asked if he is a Joi Bangla’ which, in the language of the occupant army, was a way of asking if one was a freedom fighter. All their subsequent queries are met with silence. While one of the eight or ten men want to shoot him, another changes the form of torture by hanging the man upside down on a terrace and thrashing him headlong into the ground. In the silence of the ghostly city the language of fear and the language of aggression can be said to be visual in its impact. James Dawes writing in his Introduction to The Language of War writes of war in Walt Whitman’s Beat! Beat! Drums’ as an’apocalyptic noise that threatens the possible end to language:68 In the muteness of the places through which Huq’s protagonist walks we find this effect made visible in the way the citizens of a sovereign nation are hushed by its own army. So when Whitman says that future generations shall never know the ‘inside of war’ since the best language can do is to‘mime violence, it surely strikes a cautionary note for the debates about how to comprehend 1971 in Bangladesh. In the course of his seemingly unending walk Huq’s protagonist climbs a staircase which now seems to him like a tunnel; the walls are wet and the clamminess of the setting is intensified for the reader when he repeatedly calls out a name-Asit-a Hindu name it appears. A strange woman barely parts the doors and tells him that no one of that name is known to her, they are recent occupants of the house and she is not aware if any person of that name ever lived there.The man’s memories of the city do not tally with the present. As far as he recalls the street was never so shorn of trees, the shop which sold signboards is nowhere to be seen; the doctor of homoeopathy who used to sit under a glittering sign too was no longer visible. It is as if his memory is as sharp as the visibility of change, he even remembers that the doctor would sit facing the north and on the chairs would sit some old men with newspapers covering their noses. He cannot, however, remember why he is here on such a night. The images of ordinary actions and sights of the past, like simply shaving or healthy young women descending from the valley with small feet, now strike him like lightning. As the reader becomes aware the city is teeming with lanes and dark corners. He appears to know his way; but if one way of belonging to a place is by hearing your name being called out by people or encountering
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the familiar, then this man is surely a stranger here. His tortuous trail leads him to a house whose occupants have changed.
In this way through rows and rows of closed shops, empty, deserted streets, innumerable alleys and secret nooks and corners–which having coiled and twisted into the darkness now seem to be turning like labyrinths, constantly curling, bereft of humans and noise–through such paths he crawled on his way like a centipede.[69]
Huq’s passages are those of memory. Even as history is being made it is cold, the man is wearing a tweed coat and we may surmise that it is closer to the winter and, therefore, to the time when the war shall end and Bangladesh will come into being) its processes merge with the nameless man’s journey (he is neither a Muslim, nor a Hindu, nor is he a ‘Bihari’ and so could be any of these). People have left, some have occupied empty houses they discovered on the run and many shall never leave again. The moaning sound of a woman that he hears coming from an army jeep reminds him of the time when he had almost been buried under a collapsed wall, the earth that had got into his nose and made it difficult for him to breathe. The insubstantiality of his memories of a different time will be threatened by the concrete nature of the transformation of the cityscape at night, though they are clearly etched in his consciousness and he clearly struggles to find adequate images through which to record such an experience. To bear witness to an event like this is also to testify to the fact that the former patterns of life are perhaps lost forever. No wonder then that the man should feel that the dusty road that stretches before him travels into the heart of terror![70] The man is surprised that the moon has risen.
The city in the moonlight seems to him like one that has been dug out from the bowels of the earth; ruins of a time long past. He mounts the verandah of another house and softly calls: ‘Mamata! He scours the rooms, the kitchen and the bathroom, and calls the younger son (the narrator does not reveal whose son, or who is the woman the man searches for): ‘Shobhan! He reaches the courtyard and suddenly stumbles against an old rusted spade. The ‘Nameless Casteless [71] man takes off his coat, shirt, and tie and begins to dig in frenzy. He first finds a ribcage, smells it and puts it aside. His excavation yields him skeletons of a hand, the socket of a knee and so on. At one point he hits upon the small structure of a hand and says: Well done, Shobhan. The man then finds a hip bone and a skull. He stares into where the eyes had been, and then at the teeth
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and says: Mamata. The man, no more than a shadow in the city now, puts the skull aside and starts digging with greater fervour.
The man remains unnamed. Nothing except his garments are described for us. Nor do we discover his relationship with those whose skulls and bones he exhumes. The way he passes undisturbed through the city sometimes makes one wonder if he is only an apparition after all. Not once is the war referred to in the story except the oblique reference to ‘Joi Bangla? However, it has altered the city, its people are invisible, and its inhabitants no longer the same. The byzantine twists and turns he takes may be likened to a search for meaning (perhaps the reason for which he is walking solitary through the night), which finds time itself in a treacherous humour. His excitement when he locates the bones and skulls of two people he obviously knows (he believes that the remains are theirs) is eerie. Finally in the city he has found the familiar. These is evidence of not only what the enemy has perpetrated or what the man has lost (we do not know exactly who they are) but a wartime prophecy of the role that survivors shall find themselves fulfilling. The thoroughfares that lead to the past, one of liberation, terror, and suffering, are needless to say, far from mapped. What is more important is the historically/ personally significant yet morbidly passionate pursuit of evidence; of the extent of what had really happened (the man continues to dig when the story ends) and by identifying the dead and changes wrought by time/ history trying to reassure oneself of one’s place in the world. And yet the digging is more than a search for verification. It is a metaphor for the relationship between the lost, the dead, and the living. While we have mentioned before a sceptical Whitman’s take on the adequacy of language to represent violence, this does not mean that the war remains unknowable. In fact, ‘Naamheen Gotraheen’ from inside the war presents an allegorical anticipation of the future. After the war people will know their cities and villages from their memories of a pattern of life disrupted by violence. The conclusion presents an image of exhumation, an action that posterity will be preoccupied with. However, the nuance of the image is one that narcissistic images of nationalism shall find hard to live down. It is, therefore, a process that is an important adjunct to fashioning an ethical remembrance of the war and fiction allows us to glimpse the processes involved in the formation of Bangladesh, which cannot be reduced to a logical arrangement of events mostly precipitated by political actors in the national and international firmament. The relevance of fiction as a memorial form lies in its ability to capitalize on the ambiguities of representation.
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Notes and References
1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated
by Danielle Heller Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
2. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics, Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11-40.
3. West Pakistan was supposed to have perpetuated colonial rule in the east
by seeking to devalue its language and culture and by destroying its economy. However, the reference to the imperialists within could equally be a reference to the collaborative Islamists, the section of the Awami League, and the army believed to be close to America or the Maoists purportedly backed by China.
4. As the inclusion of Krishak Sramik’ implies, Mujib was trying to secure
for the nationalist party the platform of representing the peasants and labourers. With disillusion growing among the people and the Maoist parties already talking of an armed insurrection to fulfil the unfinished task of the ‘liberation’ by which they meant emancipation of the working classes, Mujib reacted by asserting the sovereign power of the state to change the mode of rule citing a national crisis. It is another matter that within a few months of the disbanding of opposition he was brutally murdered at his 32
Dhanmondi residence.
5. It is clearly difficult to divide the dead into casualties of war, the crack
down, and ethnic clashes as Sisson and Rose suggest in War and Secession (Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (California: University of California Press, 1990]). The actual number dead once divided between the three categories and ethnic groups changes its colour as statistics. However, the work of Sisson and Rose, which is clearly more critical of India than the perpetrator, looks at the war from an internationalist perspective and international relations. While it makes the claim that the casualties were wildly exaggerated’ and the foreign press was gullible’ there is no discussion of the charge of genocide’ nor the nature of the violence that the Pakistani army was held responsible for (albeit in a markedly different sense) by its own administration. I refer to the Hamoodur Rehman Commission. The perspective of the victims is merely reduced to numbers and facts and fails to provide us with an understanding of the magnitude of 1971.
6. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria
Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
7. Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War
(Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2011). For a repudiation of her earlier work on the lines of Dead Reckoning, read Nayanika Mookherjee’s ‘Skewing the History of Rape in 1971: A Prescription for Reconciliation?, in Forum 1,
no. 2 (2006) published by The Daily Star.
8. These roles may not always have been mutually exclusive.
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9. James E. Young, ‘Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Re-reading
Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs, New Literary History 18, no. 2 (1997): 403–23, 412, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/468737, last accessed on 10 February 2017
10. Clifton R. Spargo and Robert Ehrenreich, eds, After Representation? The
Holocaust Literature and Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey Rutgers
University Press, 2010).
11. Brodsky was more familiar with the Soviet gulag and finds the German
lager comparable in terms of the atrocity perpetrated in both.
12. Pasco’s scholarship pertains to eighteenth-century France (Allan H. Pasco,
‘Literature as Historical Archive, New Literary History 35, no. 3 (2004):
373-94).
13. Sarmila Bose in her Dead Reckoning glibly dismisses the comparison. In
my opinion the analogy drawn is mostly intuitive and partly political. However, I do not agree with her impassioned outburst when she says that such careless references are an insult to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust as well as casualties of the 1971 conflict’ (Bose, Dead Reckoning, p. 183). One strongly suspects that she is rejecting the comparison merely because she believes that the Jews suffered much more than the victims of this war where she blithely confounds victims and perpetrators. Let it suffice for the moment to say that the strategies by which the suffering of victims/ survivors of violent events is represented need to be examined with more nuanced notions of credibility.
14. I refer to this section as specifically transitional because it is intended as a
window to the rest of the discussion. Because of the temporal and spatial distance of these texts from the others (having been written during the war and in an East Pakistan still under occupant forces) they will, perhaps by implication more than anything else, offer us a perspective on works written after a lapse of more than a decade and their relationship with memory and history.
15. Shaukat Ousmane, Jahannam Hoite Bidai (Dhaka: Shomoy Prokashon,
2009 (1971]); Anwar Pasha, Rifles, Bread, Women, translated by Kabir
Chowdhury (Dhaka: Adorn Publications, 2008).
16. Pasha, Rifles, Bread, Women, p. 216.
17. Ousmane, Jahannam Hoite Bidai, p. 24.
18. Ousmane, Jahannam Hoite Bidai, p. 71.
19. Pasha, Rifles, Bread, Women, p. 95.
20. Agamben examines the distinction between zoe’ (biological existence) and
‘bios’ (a political existence involving thought, action, and so on) made by philosophers such as Aristotle and Arendt. He comes to the conclusion that we can no longer operate with the classical division since control over bare life is the hidden norm of modern bio-politics. Thus the borders between exception state of emergency where our rights are suspended and the sovereign has complete control over bare life) and norm (when we
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recognize, erroneously perhaps, that the sovereign will is a reflection of our political existence) are blurred (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998]).
21. Akhtaruzzaman Elias, ‘Milir Haathe Sten Gun, in Muktijuddher Galpa,
edited by Moni Haider (Dhaka: Kothaprokash, 2009).
22. ‘Pagla’ is the Bengali colloquial word for ‘mad.
23. The notorious Rokkhi Bahini was formed under Mujib’s patronage in order
to act as an armour against the machinations of the army, whose intentions
he was never convinced of, given his experiences as a politician in Pakistan.
24. Later this incident leads to Abbas being sent to the psychiatry ward of PG
Hospital. Mili’s brother Rana is angry that his sister has been ‘insulted’, pulls a few strings and gets him admitted. In spite of her stout denial of any ‘insult, Rana is outraged.
25. Elias, Milir Haathe Sten Gun, p.52.
26. When Jafar flings his patriotism in the face of Iftekhar, since he has fought
in the war, saying: ‘I did not leave the country to drink and speak at meetings, Farook, his senior and leader in the Party thought: ‘Bloody son of a pig! Showing off that you had gone to the front? If leaders have to go to the front who’ll organize? Mastans like you, showing off with newly sprouted pubic hair?” (Akhtaruzzaman Elias, ‘Hangover’, in Niaz Zaman, ed., 1971 and After: Selected Stories (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2007
(2001), pp. 120-47), p. 128]).
27. Roughly translated, There was no space for my grave in the lands of my friend. The quoted line is part of a ghazal, the concluding couplet of which reads: Kitnaa hai badnaseeb Zafar’ dafn key liye/Do gaz zamin bhi na mili kuu-eyaar mein, believed to have been composed by the exiled Mughal emperor in Rangoon after the failed revolt of 1857.
28. Throughout the story the role of Urdu speakers in the war as collaborators
hangs in the air increasing Iftekhar’s diffidence. Needless to say, Jafar keeps making snide remarks about ‘Bihari’ preoccupations in the nine months of
1971.
29. Elias,’Hangover’, p. 146.
30. Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s
Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2007 (1998]); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998).
31. Gina Marie Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (New
York: SUNY Press, 2010).
32. Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, eds, Gender, War and Militarism: Feminist
Perspectives (California: Praeger, 2010).
33. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party BNP has been characterized by scholars
as a religious nationalist party. It has a broad alliance with right-wing Islamic parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Islamic Oikya Jote, and others.
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The political rehabilitation of collaborators, some of them associated with the Jamaat, which happened during the rule of Major Zia (as mentioned elsewhere), has divided the political firmament of Bangladesh into two
with the Islamist parties constituting a limited but steady force.
34. She traces Champa, the woman whose story had been published in a local
newspaper and discovers that the reporter had not even met the woman and has based his report (replete with details of her sexual violation) on a report of a human rights organization MBS.
35. Helena Khan, ‘Virangana, in Niaz Zaman, ed., 1971 and After: Selected
Stories (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2001), p. 118.
36. A euphemism in common parlance, which means becoming a prostitute.
37. Rizia Rahman, ‘What Price Honour?, in Galpa: Short Stories by Women
from Bangladesh, edited by Firdous Azim and Niaz Zaman (New Delhi: Stanza, 2007), p. 89.
38. Showkat Ousmane, Dui Sainik (Dhaka: Student Ways, 2003).
39. It is the title of an Intizar Hussain story that deals with the memories of
the war of 1971.
40. Shaheen Akhtar, Talaash (Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2008 [2004]), p. 19.
41. Akhtar, Talaash, p. 251.
42. Agamben, Homo Sacer.
43. Akhtar, Talaash, p. 104.
44. Akhtar, Talaash, p. 133.
45. It is supposed to have meant that the supply of food to the cantonment be
stopped and the difficult terrain of East Pakistan with its numerous water bodies would hasten the defeat of the occupant army if such a situation
would arise.
46. Akhtar, Talaash, p. 256.
47. Akhtar’s novel suffers from a crowding of incidents, allusions, images, and
metaphors. One could perhaps say that the lack of control of the protagonist over her life and choices is to be reflected at the level of form. However, the name Mary and the allusion to the myth of creation both Christian and Islamic in the journey of the boat for six days and the meeting with Anuradha on the seventh, a meeting that ends in a sort of a rebirth of the three characters as they regain their youth again and become as they were before the war is suggestive but appears egregious. There are other such
instances too in Talaash.
48. Imadul Hoque Milon,’Kalo Ghoda, in his Muktijuddher Upanyas Samagra
(Dhaka: Ananya, 1993), pp. 259-318.
49. Milon,’Kalo Ghoda, p. 299.
50. Milon, Kalo Ghoda, p. 300.
51. George L. Mosse, ‘Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience,
Journal of Contemporary History 21, no. 4 (1986): 491-513,492, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/260583, last accessed on 10 February 2017
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52. There are interesting similarities between Anwar Pasha and Anisul Hoque’s
amended version of Maa as both often seem to be setting before the reader a dossier of information about the reasons why 1971 was inevitable (Rifles,
Bread, Women) and the events that led to 25 March 1971 (Maa).
53. Selina Hossain, Hangor Nodi Grenade (Dhaka: Ananya, 2010 [2003]),
p. 91.
54. In contemporary times it would rankle in our minds in the context of
the rights of the handicapped and the cruelty of the act of sacrificing her ‘useless’ son for the cause of the nation. As the author herself told me, during her interaction with students in Delhi she was critiqued sharply by students unable to comprehend, as she saw it, the real message’ behind the story.
55. It is important to mention here the centrality of this speech in the con
sciousness of Bangladeshi people. Its most rhetorically charged lines—”This time the battle is for our freedom! This time the battle is for our independence!-have found its way into historical accounts, memoirs, and fiction alike. This, as mentioned in Chapter 2 in greater detail in the section that deals with Nirmalendu Goon’s memoir, has been the secular nationalists’ gauntlet against a perceived falsification of history perpetrated by the right-wing effort to install General Ziaur Rahman’s speech at Kalurghat Radio station as the ‘real declaration of independence. This is seen, in hindsight, as a direct conflict with the ethos of the freedom struggle, and a concession to reactionary Islamist forces in the country, a section of which had actively collaborated with the Pakistan military regime. That this may seem very close to an Awami League position on history is one of the complexities of Bangladeshi politics. To collapse this entirely with such a characterization would be reductive. Our modern tryst with party politics and its appetite to co-opt public discourses into official ones awakens us to the daily experience of the banal in the language of politics.
56. Hossain, Hangor Nodi Grenade, p. 108.
57. Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
58. I have chosen, however, to focus on Maa because in its complex and uneasy
relationship with memory, history, and reception (one may argue that the novel is populist) it becomes an index of the zeitgeist, so to speak. While it would be easy to raise aesthetic questions about genre, inter alia, Hoque’s work provides us with an unique opportunity to appreciate how a certain image of femininity is consciously constructed to displace an airless notion of woman-as-victim. Whether it achieves what it sets out to do is contentious. I would argue that in the idealization of woman-as-mother and conscious agent of her own actions is an uncomplicated one in Maa. The rewriting that it attempts in calling itself a docu-novel clearly excludes images of women and war that would unsettle the edifice. In Maa, women
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appear as love interests, mothers, wives, or caregivers. This is in tandem
with his other works.
59. Maa, in this context shall refer to the first version. Wherever I shall refer to
the second I shall specifically indicate it to be so. This is not to be seen as a preference for the original but an attempt to be faithful to the trajectory of my reading. The second edition when read simultaneously was a novel
significantly different from the first.
60. Anisul Hoque, Maa (Dhaka: Shomoy Prokashon, 2009 [2003]), p. 153.
The 30th of August was the day that Azad left and never returned; it was also the day when Safia Begum breathed her last. The reference to Azad having written of his desire to write about his mother is culled from one of the letters he had written to her from Karachi in West Pakistan where he had lived for around four years as a student.
61. This aspect has been discussed in a different context in Chapter 2 as part of
Ekattorer Dinguli, Jahanara Imam’s memoir which was published in 1986, the year after Safia Begum’s death. The text, a classic of the war of 1971, lists this conversation between Azad and his mother.
62. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in Modern
Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1995]), p. 59.
63. The claims in Raymond were severely critiqued as not only inflated but a
pandering to the occult, as Winter documents.
64. Winter, Sites of Memory, p. 62.
65. Hoque, Maa, p. 8.
66. Yuval-Davis records the vicissitudes of the argument that one way of
changing the way wars are conducted is to draft women into its structure.
67. The language is what we recognize in India as Hindi. However, all non
Bengalis from the Hindi belt (including Biharis) who migrated in or after
1947 are designated in common parlance as Urdu speakers in Bangladesh.
68. James Dawes, The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from
the Civil War through the Second World War (Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 2002), p. 6.
69. Hasan Azizul Haq, Namheen Gotraheen’ (Dhaka: Sahityo Prokash, 2006
(1976), pp. 22-3).
70. Huq, Namheen Gotraheen, p. 24.
71. The title is adapted from an English translation of the story by Niaz Zaman and Shabnam Nadiya, which was part of the anthology 1971 and After: Selected Stories.
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5 “Strange Meeting Of Genres, Memories, and Truths
If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does this have on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness’: the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, the un-Heimlich terror of the space or race of the Other; the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait insight of institutions; the quality of justice, the common sense of injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the people.
-Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration!
otably, in negotiating with the language of war and the story of its afterlife, we have encountered time and again the ambivalence of texts of all genres in their appropriation of nationalism. This uncertainty is clearly constitutive of the discourse,
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which has been culturally produced and reproduced through history. The restlessness that we perceive underlying official and popular narratives about the war of 1971—the stories of valour, sacrifice, suffering, shame, and revenge-are a sign of a work that is always in progress and riddled with heavy contradictions. In this section, as we move on to fiction from Pakistan, a few from India, and the recent works of Tahmima Anam, a diasporic author from Bangladesh, we veer away from native accounts to approach the memories of war from a transnational perspective. The brutalization of the everyday in Pakistan, visible in recent years, the military dictatorships in both countries, the emergency declared by Indira Gandhi within years of winning the war, the deepening rhetoric of right-wing Hinduism today, the tumultuous aftermath of the war in Bangladesh, the war crimes trials and execution of Razakars, and the spectre of fundamentalist/militant Islamism are often linked by authors to 1971, 1947, and beyond. This compulsive return reminds us of the heterogeneity of the sites of the formation of history and the supplementary nature of these stories of violence and suffering. This chapter has been conceived as a dialogue of voices that reach out to the other, encounter limits, and yet express an ethical need for engagement.
To be sure, the chapters between have been segregated as testimonial and literary narratives—that testimony and fiction are separate genres is beyond refutation. In narrating 1971 the complexities of genre become evident as the unprecedented and the unfamiliar are sought to be represented. In the previous chapter, we came across the curious case of Anisul Hoque’s novel Maa, where the content, characters, and epilogue were amended/revised in order that it becomes more representative of the memories of the people of that time. Conversely, when we encounter the testimony of Firdausi Priyobhashini, we are alerted to the narrative aspects of her testimony; the fact that she feels the need to frame it like a story with a beginning, middle, and an end in spite of the fact that in the process of narration she anticipates, postpones, and lingers–all moves central to literary fiction as well. It is also crucial that she treats her need to tell a story as central to her self-creation after the traumatic experience of wartime rape. And as Shaheen Akhtar, who recorded her testimony before I did, also recognized, it is intriguing that the method of interpretation applied to Priyobhashini’s narrative is akin to a literary work,
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When Nilima Ibrahim accumulates the testimonies of ‘birangonas’ in her well-known text Ami Birangona Bolchhi, she conceals the names of the women, and in trying to provide a reader-friendly shape to the narratives, she rewrites them as life stories, where rape in the war sets the narrative into motion. When combined with fictional names, they appear to blur the gap between fiction and testimony. Several years later when Yasmin Saikia or Nayanika Mookherjee records the statements of victims and perpetrators, she withholds the names and identities of women who were raped and men in the Pakistani army who committed war crimes. Thus, the story is told under a fictional signature, a subterfuge, and a need that it be read as someone else’s story while drawing on the reader to legitimize the truth-telling quality of the testimonies. These are the more obvious manifestations of the overlapping between fiction and testimony; in a literature of violence often aspiring to be a memorial form, testimony sometimes dresses itself as ‘fiction, unable to part with the truth’ in any other genre, inviting upon itself the charge of a lie.
At the same time, as the extreme case of Wilkomirski’s Fragments? has demonstrated, ‘fiction, encumbered by its proximity to perjury, may wish to escape the limitation of its genre by packaging itself as testimony. If testimony is really the genre of the ‘age of atrocity’ (Lawrence Langer’s term),[3] we need to reconfigure the values of fiction and testimony, not by rendering them indistinguishable but by disturbing the notions of difference that encourage us to make that distinction. The representational problems posed by trauma and the telling of events one has never seen in one’s life, it has been argued, makes fiction a genre that allows the witness/author to utilize its as if in various productive ways. The works of Anwar Pasha and Shoukat Ousmane written during the war are representative examples. By giving their eyewitness accounts/ testimonials a home in fiction, these works and the ones cited earlier bring to us the possibility that such experience may have a ‘literary quality. The mode(s) of analysis adopted for texts here will hopefully suggest that to read testimonies in terms of only their testamentary value or to confine fictional texts to literary criticism is to limit our responses to the effects of war, state-imposed repression, and re-workings of genre forged in the crucible of such conflict. Derrida confronts this problem in his Demeure: Fiction and Testimony.[4] Offering a reading of Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death, which he locates in the realm of testimony that behaves like fiction and often reads like one, he examines the relation between the literary, testimonial subject, and her death. This piece both conceals
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and insinuates its testimonial nature: ‘I remember a young man, though Derrida drawing on autobiographical information on Blanchot suspects that the narrator, the young man, and the author are one and the same. However, Blanchot’s text repudiates any totalizing interpretation. Derrida begins with the trace of fiction in testimony in order to then suggest that fiction may partake of the evidentiary genre. The European juridical tradition insists on the separation of testimony and literature, ‘especially what in literature presents itself as fiction, simulation or simulacra? For Derrida, if testimony were proof, ‘information, certainty, archive and if it did not include the possibility that it may be a perjury or lie then it would cease to be testimony altogether. Derrida argues:
In order to remain testimony, it must allow itself to be haunted. It must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, the possibility at least of literature.
Further, since the structure of testimony includes temporality (in that sentences must be framed, arranged, and uttered) and these sentences must be repeatable and technically reproducible, the unity of the instant is destroyed and its singularity compromised. That testimony cannot re-present the instant, the originary experience, or the ones it speaks for has been iterated not only by Derrida but also Primo Levi? and Agamben. When we encounter the testimonies of the war of 1971 of murder, torture, and rape, we are aware that due to the language and narrative form in which it reaches us, we treat them as exemplary narratives, as instances of violence, without dwelling on the ‘uniqueness of their experience. For what testimony shares with us as knowledge is also given to us as other than an indivisible experience of being a witness. In Derrida’s analysis of Blanchot’s essay, the latter writes (in third person) of his encounter with death (in the year 1944), when he is spared the imminent by what can be termed a miraculous turn of events. The firing squad retreats because, as the Russian (who had turned over to the side of the Nazis) says, they are Russians, not Germans. While other houses and farms burn, the young man’s house is searched, a manuscript confiscated but the chateau itself is spared, perhaps because it is a chateau, a symbol of the wealth and power of its inhabitant. The young man (Blanchot) believes he lives a life he no longer possesses, and thus arise questions about the status of this autobiographical text. Told in a manner of fiction, yet not quite, Blanchot utilizes the fictional form to talk about his life
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during the war (the dates and historical references are traces of testimony, but these again are undecidable markers) and to intervene in the criticism of the life and role of writers during Nazi occupation, a part of his life that was shrouded in silence. In confounding rigid borders of fiction and testimony, Derrida makes a significant intervention. While one retains the productive differences between the two genres, the fact that they each appropriate conventions of the other in order to make meaning needs to be addressed. In Derrida’s text, Blanchot, in occupying the complex testimonial position when death is imminent yet deferred and in feeling that he is dead already and hence immortal, exemplifies the aporia of the autobiographical subject who escapes being divested of his life by an agent outside him. In this sense Blanchot is both a survivor and a witness albeit one who looks upon himself as already dead and thus (un)able to testify.
In the memorialization of 1971 in Bangladesh, where the work of history has been to defend the legacy of the war, testimonies and literature have been critical to the articulation of a space where memories of a violent time appear. In their ‘literariness, texts such as Jahanara Iman’s Ekattorer Dinguli become more than an argument for a nationalism based on the suffering of the war. The interpretive acts drawn from the cognitive crisis that the year brought also provide an insight into the hierarchy of memories that discourses of identity prefer. In this pecking order of suffering that nationalistic discourses create, Shaheen Akhtar’s novel Talaash succeeds in foregrounding the memories of the war and its aftermath for sexually violated women in a way that testimonies (introduced with generous editorial intervention) do not, capturing the experience, the memory of it, and the meaning and implications of being a’birangona’ in Bangladesh. It is suggestive that a novel such as The Good Muslim, which confronts the conflict of ideas of self, society, and nation creditably, situates Pia (raped during wartime and impregnated) only in the context of the Gono Adalot of 1992, where she testifies. Her life in the interim remains a silence. She disappears in 1972 and resurfaces in 1992, her absence necessitated by the structure of the novel, perhaps involuntarily becoming an index of the post-war marginalization of victims of wartime rape ensured by the patriarchal discourses of nationalism. As we have discussed in an earlier chapter, the remembering of the ‘war of liberation’ in Bangladesh has focused interest on literature, including fiction, as testimony. In that light Derrida’s reading of Blanchot’s text does not offer solutions but problematizes our reading of both testimony and fiction. This is not to collapse ‘non-fictional testimony and fiction. Derrida’s endeavour is pragmatic in the sense that
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it takes stock of the reading strategies that we bring to bear on genres that assume a straightforward relation to truth. Testimonies provided or shared with the reader under a fictional name (whereby rape victims seek to escape social ostracism) depend on the listener/reader to authenticate the testimonial truth in them. While the expression’unexperienced experience’ (critical to Derrida’s reading of death and Blanchot’s work) may apply to the survivor of war and torture, the same cannot be said of victims of rape/wartime rape. While a near death experience in war may be narrativized as pain, annihilation, and/or escape and glory, exhibiting the ‘fracturing of time, flooding of victims’ cognitive structures, and the impossibility of keeping the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction intact’ (central to trauma according to Jessica Murray’),[9] in certain societies victims of rape are made altogether invisible. To say that their silence testifies would be disingenuous. Thus, the lines between fiction and testimony may be ruptured not only because an experience’ is unrepresentable[10] or that the use of language itself disturbs the uniqueness’ of the pain. It also is not only because the moment testimony is treated as proof it has already passed into another structure. It is due to the reality that Auschwitz has alerted us to, the spectre that it might be impossible to bear witness because the real witnesses did not return alive from the camps. It is also because testimony may be a socially hazardous form with an ability to disrupt notions of ‘normalcy, a person’s relationship with the everyday, and the politics of self and community. Therefore, though one says that the limits of fiction and testimony are undecidable, one refrains from saying testimony is ‘fiction. It would be empirically and philosophically untrue. For if we are to categorically assert the reverse (that fiction is testimony) then there is no fiction, and thus not only “fiction’ as we know it through history but testimony itself becomes redundant. It is this disturbance that the sections into which the chapters have been divided retain.
The Fictions of Testimony: Conflicting Transnational Memories and the Researcher
When Sarmila Bose critiques the partisan accounts of 1971 early in her ‘Introduction’ entitled ‘Memories in Conflict, the reader (especially one researching on the memories of the war) pricks up her ears. [11] It is
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true that a consolidated work on the way 1971 has been remembered in Bangladesh and Pakistan (more so in English) has been long arriving. While Sisson and Rose did put together a scholarly version of events, it was one which, in claiming to put the ‘facts’ in order, outlined a notion of responsibility without elaborating its moral and ethical dimensions; war and secession are related to the evidence the work produces in a way that leads it to emphasize the powerful influence of historical context in the way Pakistan and India approached the crisis. The differences between structures of decision-making bodies’ in the two states, a ‘hard’ democratic India and a ‘soft’ authoritarian Pakistan, the ad hoc manner of functioning of the latter, and its failure to read the needs of a polycentric international system’ as indeed the anxiety of the Pakistani military to deny its enemy what it believed it wanted rather than reach an accommodation in its domestic politics are all ranged as the reasons that resulted in the escalation of the conflicts. The authors’ observations are pertinent and rooted deep in the discipline of international relations and the fissures and interpretations therein that precipitated 1971. Their primary data is gleaned from interviews with key political leaders, their advisors, and associates. Such a methodology arises from an understanding that powerful human actors determine the course of history and an objective analysis of their actions and the alternatives available to them can illuminate our understanding of the past. In its preference for high politics, however, it is likely that we may receive an event disinfected from its implications in the world that common humanity’ inhabits. Sisson and Rose discuss human intentions under a predominantly institutional/ disciplinary perspective. In doing so, human costs are inevitably subsumed under categories of inter-state relations. Whether one likes it or not ‘Bangladesh’in their work appears more like a precipitate rather than a nation consciously willed by its people as most nationalist narratives wish to be seen. This contention is unexceptionable. The point that one is trying to make here is that in our understanding modern violence and war accounts such as these give events a life of their own; immersed in the world of ‘high politics, the invisibility of the men and women who executed orders and decisions or bore their brunt and after the catastrophe had to return to the everydayness of living (but with memories in need of catharsis) appears internally coherent in war and secession.
Bose uses the description Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War’ and one expects it would fall into one of the gaps that scholarship on 1971 has left unexplored except in native accounts. It was General Niazi’s wisdom that seemed to have guided her: ‘Early in the study, after interviewing
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General Niazi, I mentioned to him that I was trying to write about 1971 without emotion. “No keep the emotion,” he had said, “your writing will be the better for it.” Over the years I have come round to agreeing with that view:[12] There is no doubt that Bose writes a passionate account, albeit one that is thin in its interpretation of history. In one stroke she fells the argument of discrimination’ made by Bengali nationalists in the Pakistan period, preferring the term disparity, stereotyping Bengalis as habitually lazy, cantankerous, negative, and hyperbolic.
Bose uses her sources indiscriminately, and her references could have been dismissed as whimsical were they not of a clear pattern. So while she cites Anthony Mascarenhas to corroborate her charge of Bengali violence against ‘Biharis, she dismisses his other observations on the army excesses and genocidal action, which were part of his famous Sunday Times article and later the book The Rape of Bangladesh,[13] raising the doubt that most of it was only rumour regurgitated as eyewitness account. While her bias will be obvious to anyone who reads the work, it is her methods of looking at ‘evidence that fills one with disquiet. If Bose had wanted to write a nuanced account from the point of view of perpetrators, it would probably have been a significant work, since most of the sources on 1971 in Pakistan are military accounts, and one is often led to believe that it matters little to succeeding generations there how is it that the present Pakistan emerged from the rubble of the past. Instead she has written a disturbing book which is deeply partisan. The mass killings of Hindu refugees at Chuknagar during 1971 is sought to be dismissed as ‘sheer banditry:[14] Obviously the local Bengali Awami League politician who seeks recognition of this massacre of Hindus (primarily) in official nationalist history because of its horrible implications cannot (in Bose’s scheme of things) be honoured with a response since his uncle was a well-known Razakar and had probably led the military to Chuknagar! People who testify tell her of ‘Bihari military’ while her sources in the Pakistani army remember nothing of such an incident.
The matter rests, it seems, for Bose then suggests with a sudden tone of moral righteousness that it is in the interest of the army to investigate the band of twenty-five, thirty men’ behind the genocide which brought a nation and its army ‘lasting disgrace!
She uses the word ‘memories’ to set the tone of her research; she uses them opportunistically, sometimes as ‘alternative history and sometimes as ‘motivated recall’ depending on who her respondent is. Second, the prominence of oral sources in current research is critical to the ‘affective dimension which traditional historiography cannot address. Bose
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is clearly wanting in such awareness, and the fact that she claims early that she’sympathizes’ with her victims will surely disturb those who are acquainted with the discourses of ‘secondary witnessing in the study of violence and war. Her use of Jahanara Imam’s classic Ekattorer Dinguli is a case in point. The way in which she uses the title ‘Ballad of a Tragic Hero’ to discuss Rumi’s place in the nationalist imaginary is disingenuous. The argument stripped to its bare essentials is this: that Rumi and his friends should have known more about guerrilla warfare than expose themselves to a crackdown by not being more careful in choosing their hideouts, that they had morally erred in killing civilians in their attack on military targets. Bose’s summing up of the horrible torture of suspects by the military is revealing: ‘Custodial violence is a curse that is endemic all over South Asia and infected both sides of the conflict in 1971:15 My consideration of this text in Chapter 2 will hopefully suggest that Jahanara Imam’s memoir is more complex in its memorialization of the war than Bose’s casual reference would have the reader believe.
The failure/refusal to deal with the connotative or affective dimensions of words plagues the book’s findings. In her final chapter, ‘Words and Numbers: Memories and Monstrous Fables, she observes: “The Pakistan Army is constantly referred to in Bangladeshi literature as an “occupying force” or “hanadar bahini” (invading force, raiders). This is a mindless representation of reality. In 1971 East Pakistan was a province of Pakistan, a country created in 1947 as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims:[16] The analogies and figurative expressions used in order to denote the enemy’ was clearly a search for a language that would be adequate to express the sense of injury and fear as the horrors of the military crackdown and excesses of war became known. The anger at the memory of helplessness is also articulated in the words that wish to be seen as descriptive. The entire edifice of Bose’s work rests on her attempt to discredit the official figures of the dead and the raped. Therefore, the search for truth’ leads her to a foregone conclusion, a denouement which was visible from the very beginning of the work, namely, that the numbers are exaggerated and Bangladeshi accounts are more often than not ‘monstrous fables. Yet when Bose says that analogies with the Holocaust ‘are an obvious attempt to benefit from the association with the horrors of Nazi Germany’ and ‘an insult to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, [17] we are saddened by a cynicism which seems to stem from as much impatience with victims’ accounts as the desire to exonerate the ‘men in uniform’ who eventually lost the war. One wonders what’benefit
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would accrue to the survivors and witnesses from comparisons with the fate of Jews in Hitler’s Germany. One needs to appreciate that the horrors of Auschwitz are so much part of our vocabulary of violence and experience of the inhuman’ that summoning it has become almost inescapable. While one questions it, it is important not to sacralize the lager, as Geoffrey Hartman persuasively argues in his article on fiction and the Holocaust. Especially when its use appears directed more at incredulity and suspicion about narratives/testimonies of violence emerging from another context. It is worthwhile to examine the framework of the analogy; but it is amusing that Bose draws in the Holocaust arbitrarily towards the end of the book only to suggest that the real victims of 1971 would feel slighted by the reference.
Tracking the ‘Perpetrator’: A Note on Fiction from Pakistan
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way to find one’s identity again.[18]
Crucial to the continuing relevance of studies of war/violent events such as the Partition in humanities is the fact that while its reasons, methods, and effect are often contrary to any moral view of the universe, it is also looked upon as an event from which one may learn. It remains, paradoxically, however immoral it was, an exemplary occurrence with a self-evident value for imagining a just human society, and ways of ‘living well together’, a notion that Priya Kumar in her work on ‘secularism’ repeatedly invokes, after Derrida. Such a past thought through is expected to act as a deterrence; for surely if one remembered one’s mother in the gas chamber, would one trust the reason of the rifle again? (The catastrophe of the Partition of 1947 with its throbbing memories was unable to free the military dictatorship from the reason of the rifle on 25 March 1971.19) Thus, the ethical task of culture in remembering and working through’ violence springs from a belief in the critical, therapeutic, and transformational power of knowing one’s past. While we have dealt at length with the inheritances of 1971 in Bangladesh, it was also a year which finally came to West Pakistan with the news of defeat and loss of the territory of the East Pakistan. If war/victory
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gradually became the fount of testimonies, poetry, plays, fiction, films, and music in Bangladesh, in Pakistan it generated denial and confusion. As the historical/memorial work undertaken by Muntasir Mamun demonstrates, for the discourse of reconciliation to address the traumas of the war, memories of perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ require a consensual space. While public discourse in Bangladesh is reluctant to take stock of rape and ethnic violence as embedded in the discourses that led to and emerged from the nine months of anomie, Pakistani authors (with the exception of Husain and until a few recent attempts) have evaded the relevance of the secession of East Pakistan, the tragedy of the military crackdown, and the turning of the state against its people for understanding Pakistani notions of identity.
One rationalization of the works juxtaposed in this chapter would be that since after the intervention of India the war turned tripartite, the witnesses (separated by what they saw) lie across the three countries. However, it is again Veena Das’s[20] reading of pain (via Wittgenstein and Manto) and its application to the study of the physical and sexual violence of the Partition and its memories that appealed to me.
Where is my pain? In touching you to point out the location of that pain, has my pointing finger–there it is—found your body, which my pain (our pain) can inhabit, at least for that moment when I close my eyes and touch your hand? And if the language for the inexpressibility of pain is always falling short of my need for its plenitude, then is this not the sense of disappointment that human beings have with themselves and the language that is given to them? But also, does the whole task of becoming human, even of becoming perversely human, not involve a response (even if this is rage) to the sense of loss when language seems to fail? Wittgenstein’s example of my pain inhabiting your body seems to me to suggest either the intuition that the representation of shared pain exists in the imagination but cannot be translated into concrete ways that could be put into the world—in which case, one would say that language is hooked rather inadequately to the world of pain–or, alternately, that the experience of pain cries out for this response of the possibility that my pain could reside in your body and that the philosophical grammar of pain is an answer to that call.[21]
By appropriating Veena Das’s formulation for the juxtaposition of narratives from Bangladesh and Pakistan and a solitary one from India, we are aware that the task of confronting the effects of war exists at multiple loci-individual, familial, social, national, and international and
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these are simultaneous and interdependent categories. At a time when the witnesses to the war—the raped, the tortured, the missing, the refugees, and the killed as also the perpetrators-are either ageing or lost, acknowledgement of pain threatens to become an academic exercise. Apart from Intizar Husain, very few authors made early attempts at a critical understanding of the conflict and its meanings. A good starting point to begin our discussion of the ‘memory’ of 1971 in fiction from Pakistan is Muhammad Umar Memon’s article written in 1983 and entitled ‘Pakistani Urdu Creative Writing on National Disintegration: The Case of Bangladesh [22] Arguing that due to the historical exposure of Urdu to significant movements in literature originating indigenously and in the West, its position as not only the most used language in Pakistan but also one in which lies the most significant tradition of socially aware writing, Memon concludes that writing in the language may be read as an index to how the event of 1971 has been received in Pakistan. Therefore, the paucity of works that deal with the theme of national disintegration is significant, spelling silence/indifference. Summing up the short story “Ghar Angan’ by Parvin Sarvar (1973), which builds up a narrative that appears ideologically submerged in official propaganda in its treatment of the theme of secession, Memon writes:
For long most West Pakistanis have prided themselves in their selfimposed role as the saviour of East Pakistan. To them, East Pakistan was plagued by sloth, lethargy, and exposed to natural disaster with a regularity that defied imagination. They saw East Pakistan as more of a liability than an asset for Pakistan. Not only did its economy have to be kept alive with more and more West Pakistani capital, but its people had to be assisted with gifts of food, clothing, and money from West Pakistan in times of cyclone and famine. In return for these favours, West Pakistanis somehow felt they had the right to decide what was best for East Pakistan. It is thus difficult to understand why East Pakistan, instead of being grateful, rebelled against an essentially benign rule. But if rebel it did, this then must be attributed to Hindu intrigue and conspiracy at the behest of India.[23]
Memon comments on the astonishingly meagre creative output about the events of 1971. It is intriguing that it was the issue of the thousands of POWs languishing in India after the war that reverberated more visibly in public discourse, and it appears to the critic that indeed had India’s intervention not been part of the memory of the conflict, 1971 would have become a matter of general indifference.
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The Resilient Mourner: Intizar Husain’s ‘Basti’ and Short Stories on Pakistan’s Dismemberment
How is it that 1971 appears in the fiction of Intizar Husain, a writer given more to dramatizing the effects of historical events on his characters than the event itself? First we shall account for the signs through which we realize that the specific catastrophe is given place in memory. Except for ‘A Letter from India, where we have an Indian Qurban Ali writing to his nephew in Karachi about the deaths in East Pakistan, we are in the familiar Husain terrain of spectral presences, of the refusal to call things by their name so to speak. Typically, therefore, Qurban Ali could be writing from anywhere in India and the letter ends with his name and the date according to both the Roman and the Islamic calendar. There is no address, though he talks of the graves of ancestors, the old, crumbling mansion, and the har-singar tree. In ‘Sorrow City’ we have three men, two of whom claim that they are dead and one begins by saying he is lost. When the first among the three is asked, ‘How did you die?’ he answers:
She was a dark woman with a red bindiya…. Her hair reached her waist, and a dark man accompanied her…. Undress her! Seeing the naked sword in my hand, the young man trembled with fear. Reluctantly then, his hands moved towards his sister’s sari and his dark complexioned sister screamed and covered her face with both hands …[24]
The bindiya (‘teep’ to the Bengalis), which is both a mark of the Hindu-Muslim coexistence in Bengal before the Partition of 1947 and a telltale sign of the Hinduized Bengali Muslim, the dark complexion, and the sari all evoke the stereotype of a Bengali woman, though she has no name. The executor of violence (in this case the first man who is narrating the circumstances of his death) notices these details of unfamiliarity about the woman before he compels her brother (again, ‘a dark man’) to strip her naked. In ‘Prisoner(s)’ Javed, who has returned to West Pakistan from the East, informs his friend Anwar of Rashid’s death and the strange normalcy of it in times such as these. Javed says:
Over there we came to be estranged from old familiar ways of death. That is why we felt so strange when Rashid died …. Rashid’s death was perhaps the last conventional death in that country.[25]
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To Anwar’s question as to whether Rashid had died in Rajshahi, Javed answers that he had died, miraculously, in his bed in Dhaka.
Husain’s conception of the work of memorialization as evidenced in the narratives that shall be discussed is symbolized in the act of tending the graves of those who are lost, an act that is not only a debtin-memory but also a testimony to one’s own existence (which, for the author, lies in one’s awareness of one’s links with the past), one that was ruptured (again) in the war of 1971, and the loss of meaning. He had attempted to cast the Partition of 1947 in the economy of the Islamic experience of hijrat, sought to separate violence from the experience of newness in Pakistan.[26] It was a sensuous feeling that even the loss of purity in times to come has not diminished. Zakir in Husain’s novel Basti[27] reminisces:
But still that one day, my first day in this land, should always shine in my memory. But with this thought some neighbouring days were illumined too and gathered around that day. A constellation of illumined days came together. When Pakistan was still all new, when the sky of Pakistan was fresh like the sky of Rupnagar, and the earth was not yet soiled. In those days how the caravans arrived from their long long journeys!
Zakir, one would do well to remember, is a teacher of history. In the ‘Introduction’ that Muhammad Umar Memon provides to the novel, he lauds the appositeness of the characterization, for the protagonist not only bemoans the war-infected age which stops ‘our pain from becoming memory’ but also remarks on the impossibility of objectivity when it comes to the history of one’s own people. That is how the novelist imagines Zakir as the keeper of memories, tethered to the past. In the final days of the war of 1971, he feels a deep urge to visit his father’s grave. Reading the protagonist within the Shi’ite world view of transformative suffering, Memon dismisses the critiques of the political apathy of Zakir in the crisis that Pakistan faced. To him the terms of critique of a work should be immanent in the work itself, especially in the case of an author such as Intizar Husain. To demand a presentist political morality of Husain extrinsic to his world view which stresses passivity as a legitimate response to the degradation of the world outside is to ignore the aesthetics of the text. Basti begins in the pre-1947 idylls of Rupnagar (where Hindus and Muslims coexisted) and ends in dismembered Pakistan twenty-four years later. If the newness of Pakistan was felt sensuously as a possibility (problematic to critics such
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as Alok Bhalla), it quickly fades, as hearts shrink and doors are closed to shelter seekers. The anomie of the outside’ impinges on the world of the cafe ‘Shiraz, where Zakir and his friends Afzal and Irfan meet often and are witness to the changing winds of time in the form of their perpetually agitated, politically committed acquaintances Salamat and Ajmal. Meanwhile Zakir’s father, Maulana Sahib, dies in grief at what was happening to his country; his life’s lessons are oystered in the lines meant for his friend:
Khwaja Sahib, a hundred and twenty four thousand prophets were sent into this world. Did it change? No it didn’t. So if prophets could not change this world, do you think these brats could? Yes Maulana, you spoke the truth. The world cannot change[ 28]
This is the truth that Zakir too has extracted from life, if we are to acquiesce to Memon’s interpretation of the text. He argues for greater sensitivity towards crucial religious concepts that appear in Husain’s work.
Arguably, when it comes to the Partition of 1947, it is the Islamic concept of hijrat’ that Husain explores to make sense of the experience of being in a new country while coming to terms with a traumatic past. In an interview with the author, Alok Bhalla, disturbed by the implication of this need to restore what is necessarily bewildering to a significant’ experience, tells him:
I suspect that for those who were caught in the carnage your analysis that the Holocaust and the migrations of the past were familiar part of the archetypal history of the Indian subcontinent would not offer any consolation. They would not understand if you told them that the loss of their homes or the massacre of their families was necessary sacrifices in another hijrat.[29]
Indeed if we are to accept Memon’s argument that the Partition had become inalienable then Husain does not seem to be positing a scandalous proposition. However, Bhalla’s critique of a literary attempt to narrativize and sublimate ‘useless suffering [30] cannot be wished away by Memon’s impatience with critics/critiques that can see nothing but violence as the memory of the Partition. Zakir’s excitement in a new land in this context cannot be separated from Manto’s stories (‘Open
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It’, ‘Cold Meat’, ‘The Dog of Tetwal’, and ‘Toba Tek Singh’ to name a few well-known ones) searingly etched onto our literary memories of the anomie of 1947. There are events in history where human destruction and trauma overwhelm narrativization across genres. Agamben lucidly articulated this through his work Remnants of Auschwitz,[31] where he discusses the testimonies of witnesses/survivors, and in the process explores a few questions of our times which appear to transcend their specific context. Husain’s need to find redemptive meaning in ‘Pakistan’ is expressed in Zakir’s nostalgia, the memory of the beginning that refuses to be overwhelmed. This is replaced in 1971 with a withdrawal; in the world of Basti the repression followed by a war of secession in East Pakistan appears, as Memon captures in a memorable phrase, in feerie half lights. The effects appear in the form of ‘Crush India’ posters, anxiety over his childhood sweetheart Sabirah’s family in India, mother and siblings who had left for the east of the country after the Partition; after the surrender, the effects are visible through an entry in Zakir’s diary about the West Pakistanis who had fled to Nepal from Bangladesh to escape the wrath of the Bengalis. In an interview with Asif Farrukhi in 2005, Husain speaks of Basti as an attempt to come to terms with the failure of the two-nation theory, understood in the popular domain as a foundational principle of Pakistani national identity. This attempt, one can safely argue, is not in the nature of an interrogation. Zakir meets the news of political upheavals, strife on the streets of Lahore, and propaganda about the war with the following: ‘If something happened to this city how could I bear it? I want to remember my sorrows. If a city is destroyed, the sufferings of those who lived there are forgotten at the same time:[32] The only two responses that he can think of are to visit his father’s grave (the first of his own to die in the new country) and to write a letter to Sabirah. The first act is in the nature of a memorial service, an act that flies in the face of the degraded deaths when ‘masters are cruel, where a normal death is met with incredulity; the second seeks to resume an abandoned conversation with Sabirah in India.[33] As Muhammad Umar Memon’s discussion of the reception of Basti in Urdu criticism informs us, Husain’s nostalgia and ambivalence in the face of the collapse of Pakistan has been severely critiqued by his peers. (However, my interpretation distances itself from critics who demanded that a measure of resolute protest or perhaps a degree of heroism should have informed his novel at a time when national pride had been compromised in the surrender and subsequent imprisonment of prisoners of war in India. I view Husain through the prism of the founding of Bangladesh, which
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as I have argued was a critical moment in the history of South Asia.) Moreover, his satiric characterization of the revolutionary Salamat, who turns from an impassioned supporter of Bengali freedom to preaching Islam, is an expression of his scepticism, certainly a movement from his sensuous excitement (the promise of a new beginning which he had hoped would be a remnant of the political surgery of Partition) on his first day in Pakistan in 1947. This is where we come to a crucial aspect of Husain’s work. His suspicion of the language of political emancipation may indeed be read as a form of resistance (Memon argues that this is typically Shi’ite as opposed to Sunni pragmatism), but it is clear that when it comes to taking stock of violence done in the name of the people and the nation as was the case in 1971 Husain would rather introspect than condemn. This surely is a telling reversal of the propensity of states’ responses to condemn rather than introspect when confronted with violence in society. As the history of the Bangladeshi ‘war of liberation’ reminds us, as Muntasir Mamun’s Shei Shob Pakistani[34] demonstrates, most of the Pakistanis who lived through the war did not really seem to know what was going on in the East and those who did largely condoned the military dictatorship’s action against Indian mischief.[35] The war appeared on the mindscapes of the Pakistanis in the form of slogans and posters of (as we have mentioned) ‘Crush India’; it was a war against India, the arch enemy and the humiliation which even someone like Zakir feels on the defeat, the lack of heroes which he seems to mourn in his diary by invoking the leaders of 1857, bleach Bengali resistance out of existence. That is why the choice of such a form for his novel is not incommensurate with reality but symptomatic of how a ‘writer from his location interprets 1971. This will become clearer when we examine the import of stories such as Sorrow City, ‘Those Who Are Lost’, and ‘Prisoner(s)
In’Prisoner(s)’ Husain comes closest to anchoring the events of 1971 in an identifiable time and place. Written in 1981 (two years after the publication of Basti) it is set in Lahore. The sum of the narrative is a meeting between two friends—Javed, who has just escaped from East Pakistan, and Anwar, who stayed on in the west. To Javed’s query as to what had been happening in Lahore and the west of the country when he was away, Anwar replies: Compared to what you saw over there, nothing whatsoever happened here’; he then goes on to add: “Actually nothing happened here from the outside. Whatever occurred had its sources within [36] Then like the zombies of Sorrow City’ they begin to count the dead and the modes in which they had been put to death. In
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Husain’s world’unjust death'[37] does not stand on ceremony by according identity to its victims. Occasionally there are insinuations (Imran Miyan in A Letter from India, Sabirah’s mother and her family in Basti, and the ones who fled to Nepal-including Javed in the current narrative and the man from Gaya in ‘Sorrow City’—are clearly non-Bengalis; the dark woman with the bindiya and sari and her brother mentioned earlier are a rare instance of the visibility of the other’) and Husain prefers death as a trope to talk about the separation of the east over an examination of the causes. Therein lies an aspect of fiction emerging from Pakistan that we need to take note of. While the majority of works emerging from Bangladesh that we have discussed so far are commemorative of the war of 1971, writers of fiction in Pakistan have often psychologized the violence, turning the mind of the characters into a theatre of the war. I read this as one of the tactics through which the relevance of that year for notions of Pakistani identity has been resurrected in the genre of fiction. Husain’s reference to Dhaka where the brutalities of March happened (and other cities in the east, for instance, there is occasional mention of Rajshahi) is as a place from where West Pakistanis have fled, where loved ones have gone missing (Zakir’s mother is anxious for news of her sister, Sabirah’s mother) and gradually the references to the peril in which westerners were in the east remain no longer oblique. Violence as it enters the world of ‘Prisoner(s)’ offers an insight into the forms of recall of 1971 in the imagination of authors from Pakistan. In the above section, we have discussed the conversation between the friends where they referred to things happening inside. One is reminded of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,[38] where on his visit to Brussels to secure a job that will take him to Congo, Marlow meets a doctor who seeks permission to measure his crania before he leaves for Africa. To a question by Marlow as to whether his earlier subjects have met him on their return for his experiment to progress, the doctor says, ‘Oh I never see them … and moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.[39] The reference here is to changes wrought by prolonged exposure to the dark continent at a metaphoric and literal level. A very fine line exists between memorialization of affect(s)’ left behind by catastrophic events in history and the uneasy impression left behind in literature that what truly lies in the domain of politics has been ‘misappropriated for a meditation on human nature.
In ‘Sorrow City’ we grapple with the problem of the perpetrator and moral death. When Husain tells Alok Bhalla that he had not wanted to blame either the military or the
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than to delve into the significance of what had happened, it appears morally tenable; however, to refer to Bangladesh only in terms of the violence brings another charge upon Husain. Admittedly, the confusion of Zakir in Basti is the bewilderment of the author who had by then realized that the moral and aesthetic purchase of ‘migration’ that he had hoped Pakistanis would capitalize on after 1947 had not materialized. One would recall Muhammad Umar Memon’s critique of the Progressives who could see nothing but violence as the meaning of the Partition. He is severe on authors who seek to set the balance straight by holding both Hindus and Muslims on the same scale as perpetrators. One wonders whether Husain (albeit to a different effect and purpose) is not guilty of the same ‘misdemeanour’. His short fictions (be it ‘A Letter from India, ‘The Lost Ones, ‘Prisoner(s)’, and ‘Sorrow City’) are intimations of violent deaths rendered meaningless. While most images and information are of the loss of non-Bengali lives (except the way ‘Sorrow City’ begins) the generalization of the effects of violence forecloses the possibility of a historical interpretation of 1971 in his fiction. At a time when sovereign power over ‘bare life’40 was at its most visible, Husain’s fictional strategy when seen in the light of the memorialization of what Bangladesh calls its ‘war of liberation’ remains that of a tragic viewpoint uncomfortably close to fatalism. Loss of memory haunts his ‘A Letter from India, and in Husain’s universe it is the awareness of one’s personal and communitarian genealogy that is the marker of one’s humanity. Loss of this memory is equivalent to death, when the living are transformed into the walking dead. Husain’s perception of the Partition (theloss of Rupnagar) as the originary moment of rupture in the subcontinent precipitates a mode of reading that dramatizes its own inability to exorcise that traumatic event.
This brings us to two short stories of Husain written after the formation of Bangladesh, both appearing in 1973. Both “The Lost Ones’ and “Sorrow City’ have unnamed characters. In the former it is clear that the four men are fugitives from persecution-one is described as a man with a bag, another with a beard, the third with a wounded head, and the fourth a young man. They suddenly realize in terror that one of them is missing though none can remember his face or name. A barking dog alerts them to the possibility that their companion might have fallen behind the group. A search reveals nothing. In fear they seize upon the idea that the one who is counting might have forgotten to include himself. As they play this eerie game, the reader becomes aware that it is they who are the lost ones. In an abyss of doubt, unable to remember the past,
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they discover that the only way in which they may be assured of their ‘being’ is through the testimony of the other. At one point, the bearded man upbraids the wounded man. He says:
Be thankful, friend. At least you have got three men to bear witness to your being. Just think of those who really were but ceased to be because there weren’t enough men around to testify to their being. [41]
The expression there weren’t enough men around raises the image of mass deaths, but Husain leaves the zone ambiguous. To forget is the lot of men shorn of their roots and this loss of memory is equivalent to death. The terror of annihilation of identity in the missing ones in the above narrative and in the living dead of ‘Sorrow City’ is acute. Perhaps Husain is persuaded that by highlighting the moral inheritance of rape and murder in the war he is pointing towards the ethical task of history. He thus makes an inescapable point. However, the over-reliance on effect generalizes the violence and makes it foreseeable. Ceteris paribus, 1971 was bound to happen.
It is true that in 1971, from the aftermath of the general elections of 1970 to the formation of Bangladesh, non-Bengali Muslims (“Biharis/ Urdu speakers, as we have mentioned) were also victims of gratuitous and retaliatory violence. To refuse to explore the ways in which people became victims’ and the absence of images of what Anwar simply calls there’ (East Pakistan) except in terms of the deaths of those known may have been brought on by the larger question that torments him, which Zakir articulates (“Yar, was it good that Pakistan was created?’). Indeed what is the form of discourse that will accommodate Husain’s nostalgia for the ‘Rupnagar’ of his childhood (Basti) where the har-singar tree guards the graves of his ancestors (‘A Letter from India’), where there will always be others to testify to one’s being (“The Lost Ones’)? Which form of political belonging will acknowledge the illumination of the first days in Pakistan at the same time. It is no surprise that while 1971 does appear in his fiction where he explores the notion of culpability (“Sorrow City’ which is the final Husain work that we shall discuss), it leads to 1947 (a perspective that authors from Bangladesh, as I have mentioned before, evade). Basti, with a teacher of history as its protagonist, asks the painful question as given earlier but as in most of Husain’s writings about the ‘war of liberation, clearly there is only a faint connection with the world we encounter in the preceding chapters. Images of sorrow, death, and loss abound but they remain severed from each other. There are
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moments when the reader is struck by the implications of such a form of remembrance for the possibility of recognition’ and ‘reconciliation’ that torments the victims of violence in 1971; imprisoned in its memory of loss and failure Husain’s fiction posits the lack of a historical sense of self as the malaise confirmed by the dismemberment of the country. In the withdrawal from dialogue (Zakir), in the occasional appearance of history as nostalgia, the moral relevance of his mourning and endurance is more productive of ambiguity than a space where an ethics of existence’ (Priya Kumar’s term) may be imagined in the subcontinent.
‘Sorrow City’ (the original ‘Shehr-e-Afsos’ was written in 1973) is perhaps the most critical in Husain’s small corpus of works that appeared after the secession of Bangladesh that may be thematically connected with the war. As is evident from the stories that we have discussed thus far, it is the figure of the mourner that survives the overwhelming suffering of people cut off from their roots. In ‘Sorrow City’ one of the dead men narrates an encounter with an old man who emerges from a huge crowd that seemed to have sought shelter, where the hungry children cried, where the breasts of the mothers were completely dry, where elders sat with parched lips, and every face was wilted:[42] It is here that he meets the old man who directs him, ‘If you do not belong to them, then mourn. When he asks the reason why he should do so, he is told: ‘Because what happened before has happened once again, and what has happened once again will happen once more:[43] We have discussed in the preceding section that Husain does not interrogate 1971 as an event in itself; he picks up the strands that lead him to 1947. In this he does not historicize but looks for patterns which recur. Imran Miyan in ‘A Letter from India, who has fled from East Pakistan (he turns pale but reveals nothing when his uncle and aunt in India ask him what had happened to his family) is agonized by the fact that the people in his city (where he presumably spent his childhood) do not recognize him. It is possible that his bizarre arrival and sudden departure was hastened by the pain he felt on this account. This theme of becoming a stranger in a land one believed to be one’s own characterizes the almost surreal stories ‘Those Lost Ones’ and ‘Sorrow City. In the latter three dead men seek to establish the exact moment when they ceased to be. The narrative insinuates the identities of the victims; it is the perpetrators who have lost their self/identity. As we have mentioned in the beginning of this section, the reference to the bindiya, sari, and dark complexion completes the stereotype of a Bengali woman. When the first man (who is recounting the circumstances of his death) asks her brother (also a dark man/Bengali)
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to undress her, he refuses. The narrator then forces him to do so. But, as he tells his listeners now, that is not when he died. He lives on even though he is witness to the same’dark man’ avenge this on another burqa clad woman’ (Urdu-speaking?), when he asks the bearded old man who accompanies her (the woman’s father-in-law) to undress her. The old man addresses the victim-turned-aggressor as ‘Ai young man’ and ‘Beta’ (thus is clearly a non-Bengali) but is not spared the ignominy. A little later a ragged man parts the crowd and spits at him, whom he kills. The first man survives even when the same dark man compels him to undress his own daughter. He returns home and his wife asks him about their daughter; she seems surprised that he is alive. His father, however, is aghast that his son is alive and dies saying, ‘If you are alive then I must be dead. The moment of recognition arrives soon after when his wife spews venom at him saying: ‘O you, the son of your father and the father of my daughter whose honour has been defiled, you have died:[44] It is then that he realizes that he is dead.
The second man begins his story in a similar fashion by evoking the image of a woman with dishevelled hair, again dark, with the bindiya on her forehead partially erased’ and her sari torn to shreds, and with a bloated belly. One wonders if it is the same woman the first man had presumably raped. Images of violence appear as if on a screen while the second man dives into a similar pool of memories. The crazed woman shrieks when she looks at him and he recalls thinking: Arre she is the same girl whom I…[45] Believing he might be arrested, he runs away in fear and comes upon a land strewn with corpses. He then reaches an open ground where the dispossessed+6 have gathered. He is in ‘Sorrow City’ he is told. It is when he realizes that he is the one who is being spat at that he dies. The third man, unable to establish that he is missing, is sagely advised by his counterparts that he should assume that he is also dead since there is no place left to bury the dead in this land. The first man still carries his corpse (he has left his father’s body behind and thus failed to perform a son’s duty), the second has left his own corpse behind. The faces of the corpses are disfigured and uncannily there is no way to tell one from another. Husain appears to be suggesting that there is no evidence that separates the living from the dead.[ 47] While the dead have memory, they cannot provide evidence of what has happened. The tomb that separates the living and the dead in a culture of mourning (‘A Letter from India’) disappears in a time of war and turmoil as thousands lie unburied and many disappear without leaving a trace.[48] In his bleak post-war world of pessimism, Husain argues that one needs to testify to
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not merely the dead and missing but those who are alive; even the living cannot testify to their own existence in such a time of breach of faith. In calling their humanity into question (they have no identity or name except memories that assign them the roles of perpetrator and victim and the shared fact that their address is ‘Sorrow City’), Husain attempts to record/prophesize the fate of those memorably captured in the words of the second man: O honourable man, do you not know that no land ever embraces those who have been uprooted from their motherland:[49] It impinges more chillingly, when the third man laughs, saying: ‘When we left earlier we abandoned our forefathers’ graves. And this time round we have abandoned our corpses… I was wrong earlier. It was the same event repeated twice. Each time we came here with our disfigured faces and left the luminous ones behind.[50] It is a question which will tentatively again be articulated by Zakir in Basti when he asks if it was good that Pakistan was created. Clearly, for Husain the Partition of 1947 was what made 1971 inevitable. And yet, for Zakir, the memory of joy when he made his journey to become a citizen of Pakistan remains undiminished.
Husain feels it necessary that catastrophic events in human history be placed in an economy of meaning and assigned significance. While this was tenable post-1947, the occurrence of 1971 put such an argument in doubt. This time in what he writes about 1971, one assumes) he invokes both the meaninglessness and inevitability of violence. And yet he cannot but suggest (true to his search for significance) that 1971 is a consequence of the loss of moorings in and after the Partition. The argument that it is the same event repeated twice, the image of disfigured faces’ and the loss of ‘luminous ones’ subsumes 1971 in 1947,
In 1971 the world was a different one from the post-Second World War world of 1947; the causes of 1971 lay equally in the politics of the Punjabi military and bureaucratic elite, Bengali linguistic heritage, history, and aspiration, the majority/minority, and centre/province colonial dichotomies, economics, global politics, Cold War dynamics, and the Indian political climate, to name a few. Unable and reluctant to question Zakir’s ecstasy on his first day in Pakistan, Husain evades the politics of the formation of Bangladesh. While there was a semblance of hope in the tears and displacement in 1947, Bangladesh becomes only a tragic episode brought on by both unchanging human fate (the old man from Gaya in ‘Sorrow City’ says every land is cruel) and the perfidy of rulers of an uprooted people. While historians (such as Sana Aiyar, Asim Roy, and Ayesha Jalal) establish the culmination of 1971 as a consequence of colonial politics continued after the Partition by a dominant West Pakistan,
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or a conjuncture of global events and contingencies,[51] Husain’s short stories (‘A Letter from India, ‘Prisoner(s); ‘The Lost Ones’ and ‘Sorrow City’) capture the violence (and as we have mentioned earlier, in the first two narratives the victims appear to be West Pakistanis falling casualty to Bengali violence) without creating the context for the reader. One needs to acknowledge the fact that by his deep mourning for lost forms of communal living and his desire to consecrate memorials to it, he is able to posit a form of being that is troubled, at times condemned, by the past. However, in spite of the multilayered notion of the effects of violence on human character and being that is Husain’s achievement in ‘The Lost Ones’ and ‘Sorrow City, his conclusions take us away from an interpretation of the specific resonances of 1971 in/for Pakistan and Bangladesh that is an urgent burden of authors from both countries. The closest Husain comes to an acknowledgement of the political struggle in East Pakistan is in the ‘Prisoner(s): I shall refer in brief to the exchange that concludes the conversation between the two friends when Anwar tells Javed:
You … you must have seen worse things over there-didn’t you? Javed hesitated for a moment before answering ‘Yes, he said, in a voice full of sorrow, ‘You are right. But at least we knew why things were happening-we were aware at least of what was going on ..[.52]
It is clear that Husain finds a way not only to intimate that both Bengalis and Urdu speakers were targets of rape and murder but also in evading the context in favour of a religious and philosophical discourse on suffering commits to the view given earlier that what has happened has only recurred, it will happen again, and, therefore, one cannot do much but mourn. It is more comforting to Javed to know why things happened in East Pakistan than to be completely befuddled on his return to the west where stray deaths raise no eyebrows and people ask no questions. This narration in terms of the traces left by the event has its limitations when the facts/causes themselves are in dispute. The war of 1971 (encumbered by the history of military dictatorships in both Pakistan and Bangladesh) is yet to settle into those few basic assumptions that can then be treated as a point of departure. Intizar Husain would rather know what 1971 did to one’s self and beliefs and this introspection leads him to confront a lonely national pride, which he had hoped in 1947 will lead to a new aesthetics appropriate to a moral political order and peaceful Pakistan. One of the charges that Memon brings against the Progressives is the mystification of violence during
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the Partition; he lauds Husain for seeking to explore its significance.
The year 1971 for Husain is another event in the chain; the hope with which he had migrated to Karachi in 1947 has given way; as Qurban Ali says ‘the halo of the elders no longer protect me, and since the family has been divided and scattered across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the trust which, he on the edge of the grave’ wants to hand over to his nephew is a trust that can be held only in memory.[53] One of the images we retain is the dissolution of chronological awareness in the history teacher’s diary in Basti, the clash of history and memory in the genre of this journal of Zakir’s. Another is the letter Qurban Ali writes to his nephew in Karachi where the diagnostic narrative is of the loss of self/ identity when families scatter; for him the graves of the ancestors are therapeutic spaces where one may escape from one’s fate as a victim or perpetrator of an inherently unjust political order. Between the letter and the diary, encompassing witnessing and testimony in fiction, stands Husain’s appropriation of the events of 1971.
Mapmaking for the Future: The Acknowledgement of Complicity In the former section dealing with the works of Intizar Husain, we have come across a technique of talking about 1971 in fiction in Pakistan by dramatizing the effect of the events on the minds of characters. In Husain they are monads, struggling to interpret the dismemberment of the country, influenced certainly by the time in which they were writtenthey were post-war in an immediate sense. Nostalgic about a past of fraternal living not long gone by, Husain’s characters are lonely and disorientated by the tyranny of their own, as someone puts in ‘Sorrow City. This section focuses on recent works that reconstruct the relevance of 1971 for Pakistani national identity. In Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography the scene of conflict is the family. There is a double movement in that the novel contends with (a) the silence about the secession of Bangladesh that permeates public discourse and history in Pakistan (indeed the Pakistani army website still talks about glorious battles fought in that year); and (b) the meaning/consequences of confronting the guilt and complicity of preceding generations in enabling the war and hiding the truths about 1971. The central conflict of the work arises from two
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fundamentally different ways of relating to one’s past as an individual and as a nation. Karim, who wants to be a map-maker, would make Karachi accessible to all (and for him names of streets reflect history), not a city which honours only the memories of its “insiders’ by legitimizing their stories. Conversely, for Raheen it is the personal connection with her city, where the streets have no name but is known in terms of remembered and easily circulating images (a code often unfathomable to ‘outsiders’) such as the reference to a street as the one where ‘a boy had leapt an incredible leap Shamsie seems to suggest that hushed under the poetic rhythms of one’s own city are its forms of exclusion, its self-absorption making it impervious to the overtures and pain of those whom it does not recognize as its own. The visible offenders in the city of Karachi in the turmoil that led up to 1971 were the Bengali and the Muhajir; while the former was banished as a traitor, the latter needed to prove his fidelity. Published in 2002, more than three decades after the war, Kartography is at one level a love story of Karim and Raheen. Their idyllic childhood in Karachi, it appears, rests on a facade, the untold truth about how the lives of their parents changed in 1971. Karim is the son of Ali and Maheen (a Bengali raised in Karachi) and Raheen the daughter of Zafar and Yasmin, both of them Muhajirs. The foursome, friends in their youth, guard a terrible secret between them, one which tears their children apart when discovered. Zafar, engaged to Maheen, reneges on his promise to marry her after the war. Shamsie gives us wellmeaning characters caught in the whirl of a moment larger than them. As Zafar and Maheen try to hold their own, the former comes to blows with a friend over having a Bengali fiancé, is beaten up and avoided at social gatherings as the war raged elsewhere. Ali tells his friend:
This country’s turned rabid–the soldiers are raping the women, Zaf, raping them all over East Pakistan, and in the drawing rooms around Karachi people applaud this attempt to improve the genes of the Bengalis.[54]
When Shafiq (Zafar’s neighbour) brings the news of his brother Bilal’s death in East Pakistan (as we have seen in the third chapter, young Bengali men had turned into vigilantes attacking ‘Urdu speakers’ and Razakars) just after the surrender in a pink telegram’ he breaks down, accusing Zafar:
And then he rose up on his toes in fury and said, ‘How can you do it…. You are going to marry one of them. You are going to let her have your children. How?[55]
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To which, Zafar replies with words that return with the burden of history on them in the present:
How can I marry one of them? How can I let one of them bear my children? Think of it as a civic duty. I’ll be diluting her Bengali blood line [56]
(That is when they swap fiancées and Ali weds Maheen and Zafar settles for Yasmin. However, the ghosts of their choices hang upon them constantly. Karim and his family leave Karachi for London; his parents, no longer able to live together, eventually separate, with Maheen remarrying, becoming Mrs Ahmed, and settling in Boston.[57])
After the surrender, when his squash partner asks Zafar if he is happy now that the Bengalis have won, he equates the loss of half the country with the loss of Pakistan’s soul. This theme of moral transformation of a nation and its people because of the crimes committed in its name (when met with silence, fear, or approbation), the ‘affect’ of an event in history such as inability to hand power over to a democratically elected government and its logical denouement, the massacre and rapes that began on 25 March, appear to be critical to the authors’ interpretation of 1971. This is further demonstrated by Sorayya Khan’s Noor and Shehryar Fazli’s Invitation. In Shamsie’s Kartography Karim’s desire to be a cartographer is symbolic. His traumatic childhood and difficult entry into adulthood is drawn from the injustice done to his Bengali mother (signifying a larger betrayal in the political sphere) by a Muhajir (Zafar) who cannot ‘look the country in its eye’ if he fathers Bengali blood. For him, to know the name of a street (say, Khayaban-e-Jami) is to acknowledge its tangibility, its history, and reality; but to refer to it as the street with the dry cleaner’s shop'[58] is to personalize, to refuse to look beyond one’s own experience of a place, perhaps to escape the pain of remembering Karachi’s too much history. However, Karim’s desperate need to see the world, to travel out of the smallness of one’s immediate surroundings, arises from a deep fear of belonging. He collects maps of Karachi, counts its dead from whichever part of the world he is in, but unlike Raheen, does not wish to return, to live in the city. It is this aporia of his desire that is the crux of the movement in Kartography. Shamsie’s romance with Karachi is obvious and it often tears the plot away from its conflict, memories of 1971 that still resonate in the lives of the sartorially well turned out, well fed ‘burgers’ of Karachi. In creating a slide of the different modes of belonging to one’s bruised nation, the author metonymically creates
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a memorial to 1971. As in Husain we do not get to see the theatre of violence (East Pakistan/Bangladesh) but the novel establishes the need to revisit the Pakistan of 1971 to understand the Pakistan of today. The questions that arise and which must be posed at this stage are: What is an effective mode of witnessing a shameful, disturbing shared past? How can one be a witness to the other’s suffering when they are separated by polar opposite meanings of an event such as 1971: Between defeat’ and ‘liberation’ does Zafar’s letter to Maheen written after the war contribute to the critical need of recognition’ that can accommodate the silences of both history and memory?
The letter functions as a deux ex machina in the novel. It is a confessional as well as a document’ which is a secretion of history, left behind as one of the traces of what had happened. The function of this letter, unlike the memoirs and commemorative literature that we have discussed so far, is not to memorialize the event itself; by envisaging a future when the children will grow up and demand answers, Zafar (the offender) expresses a desire to work through the silence, to let his daughter know how 1971 has made him the man that he is. While this may be dismissed as a case of individual redemption, I would still like to submit this piece of writing to scrutiny of the field of discourses that construct Bangladesh’s ‘war of liberation. This is primarily because (as will be obvious from the preceding chapters) the memorialization of the war of 1971 in Bangladesh is critical to the definition of a Bangladeshi identity, a democracy with a Muslim majority in a globalizing world. The silence/ silencing of victims of wartime rape and the absence of an understanding of war that can smudge the line between victim and perpetrator can turn a just war into one that inflicts gratuitous violence on the enemy and alerts us to the political appropriation of suffering. For a Pakistani author such as Shamsie, 1971 is an episode Pakistanis would rather forget; the humiliation of surrender was felt even by the noncommittal Zakir in Husain. Zafar’s letter, therefore, marks the symbolic beginning of a dialogue and the fact that Maheen makes Karim and Raheen read it towards the end of Kartography will appear conveniently fortuitous but significant nevertheless.
Zafar writes asking Maheen to believe that what he said was not an expression of who he essentially is but just the words of a monster who sometimes lurks in the dark corners of his life. The letter written two years after the formation of Bangladesh is disturbed by the inability/ reluctance of Pakistanis to talk about it. The war of 1971 in Pakistan is a ‘four-line story, detached tales of bombing, sparring fighter planes in the
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sky, and the night sky lit with fires, watched with a whisky glass in hand or narrated over ‘tea and biscuits. Shamsie’s task in the novel is to tell a story that encounters life beyond the spectacle that the war was. It is as if the hush around the war, the muttering of discontent in Intizar Husain (who witnessed the Partition and the war of 1971) followed by the fear of loss of meaning and his embarrassed retreat from history is subjected to a searching question in Shamsie. Zafar asks:
What happens when you work so hard to forget a horror … the canker turns inwards and mutates into something else. In this city that we both love and claim-even though our families’ histories lie elsewhere, what will this canker become:[59]
Burying the dreams of a familiar Pakistan in the battlefields of 1971, the Pakistan which (Zafar argues) came into existence to safeguard the rights of a minority in fact abused that image. Hence, the anguished: ‘We should not have kept our name:[60] But then he wonders if it is possible to reclaim a name. The following extract may be read as a common motif in Fazli, Khan, Husain, and Shamsie, the dominant mode of return in these texts about the partition of Pakistan:
We tell ourselves it is possible to have acts without consequences. The finger squeezing the trigger becomes a thing apart from the bullet that speeds across the sands, which becomes a thing apart from the child looking down at the blood pumping out of his heart. And that child, that bullet, that finger, they become things way, way apart from our lives, here, in rooms we look upon our own sleeping children.[ 61]
Therein, Shamsie would say, lies the source of the present schizophrenia and the ability to live in denial surfaces. The dismemberment of Pakistan was, among other things, a moral failure. As oppressors and perpetrators, actions have their afterlife. This is dramatized in Sorayya Khan’s Noor. We return to what we began our discussion with, the fact that Kartography is about belonging to Karachi. It is significant that Karim, on his return to Karachi as an adult, calls himself a Bengali. Raheen is the daughter of Muhajirs. Shamsie argues for a form of belonging that works through a past of shame, crime, and hurt. The year 1971 appears critical to an understanding of Pakistan’s present.
In Yasmin Saikia’s Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 she refers to two Pakistani soldiers Amin and Alam (pseudonyms) whom she interviews during her stay there in 2004-5.
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While most of the combatants she interviewed responded to charges of rape and slaughter with expressions such as duty as commanded’,’I fought for my unit, ‘I was not in a position to question the orders of my superior officer, [62] and so on, the two in question demonstrate the relevance of Shamsie’s reading, Amin, the architect of mass killings of Bengalis in Santahar, meets Saikia’s questions of his role in the war of 1971 with: No one raped anyone. Those who complain about it were looking for trouble![63] This is contrasted with Colonel Nadir Ali who has brought himself to speak to his progeny about the excesses of the Pakistani army in the east. It is also juxtaposed with the confession of Mohammad, who testifies to losing his insaniyat’ in the east. Casting his action within the economy of the religious concept of ‘sin’ (gunah), he realizes his shared human condition with the victim. Recovering his insaniyat’ as a prisoner of war in India when confined with thirty-six other prisoners where they shared memories of their transgressions in the east, Saikia tells us of their realization that they had become tools in the war machine. We are reminded of Eichmann’s declaration that he may plead guilty before God but not before the law, for as it transpires he was only following orders. Agamben in his Remnants of Auschwitz responds to Eichmann’s offer in Arendt’s Report to hang himself in public to free young Germans from guilt, though he refuted the right of victims to legally prosecute him, saying: ‘The only possible explanation for this insistence is that, whereas assumption of moral guilt seemed ethically noble to the defendant, he was unwilling to assume any legal guilt. (Though ethically, legal guilt should have been less serious than moral guilt):[64] I do not mean to collapse Mohammad’s repentance with Eichmann’s. Both were willing tools of a system. It is clear that while Arendt’s transcription of Eichmann’s speech makes it sound like bluster, Yasmin Saikia listens to Mohammad (and a few others) with sympathy and writes with hope of his acknowledgement of his crime. The fact that in spite of his poverty he has resigned from the army after his return from India after the war is, according to Saikia, testimony to the triumph of the human capacity to acknowledge, suffer, and seek redemption in repentance and become human once again alongside the victims:[65] The restoration of humanity to the perpetrator, so argues Saikia, is a function of his own recognition of his capacity for inhumanity and forgiveness’ by the victims. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission has arguably had more symbolic value, as will the War Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh. As we have mentioned before, Bangladesh is not empowered to try Pakistani war criminals. One does not, for a moment, mean to suggest that legal prosecution of guilt
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is the only way to justice. Even if we grant that Mohammad’s becoming human’ may well be a cause of optimism for the future of humanity, impunity remains a core issue of the war of 1971, a concept that can only be understood in legal terms.[66] With the disappearance of sexual victims of the war, both in visibility and in death (I do not distinguish here between the identities of victims), we are forced to grapple with the following thought: While people such as Colonel Ali and Mohammad have confronted what Zafar calls the monster lurking within, it is empirically true that victims have always pressed more for justice than forgiveness. If the other is inalienable for the self to be then Saikia’s act of restoring humanity to the perpetrator-witness who testifies in the scheme of her text is a hasty one. It is a debt which is impossible to fulfil, as Levinas says, it is this debt that lies between the human and the inhuman’; it is impossible for the one to be without the other.[67] The larger question remains as to whether through these manifestations the human/ inhuman can ever be part of both our memory and history. When Zafar writes the letter to Maheen, he seeks a redemption which he receives. Ali in Noor and Mohammad and Colonel Ali in Saikia’s text also confront their trauma and seek absolution. However, the fact remains that the proper contextualization of 1971 can only happen with a political recognition of intertwined histories. That crimes committed go unaccounted for compel us to imagine alternate spaces of justice, be it the family, religion, or one’s relationship with one’s city/nation. Often discourses of reconciliation are premised and modelled on the very silence of the history/past one is critiquing. Bringing the Enemy Home: Repentance, Healing, and Sorayya Khan’s Noor The theme of guilt and healing occupies Sorayya Khan’s writing about the war:[ 68] While Maheen’s reading of the conflict in 1971 draws from the fact that she belongs to the city of Karachi in Kartography, Sajida is brought to West Pakistan by Ali, who served as an army officer during 1971. In her we have the stranger’, an enemy brought home. Like Saikia’s Mohammad, Ali quits the army and then becomes a property dealer. The dark-skinned and dark-eyed Sajida, five or six when she was adopted by Ali, had already lost her entire family to the devastating cyclone of 1970. (The disappointing West Pakistani response to the cataclysm and the activism of the Awami League in relief work was one of the factors which contributed to the East Pakistani disenchantment and turned the
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political tide decisively in favour of the regional Awami League of Sheikh Mujib. By then the more national parties such as the Muslim League and the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami were in decline in the east.) But the novel draws its title from Noor’, the daughter of Sajida and Hussein, who is presumably autistic (though the author never invokes the term) and has an uncanny gift. It is perhaps befitting that Khan should use magic realism to gain access to the pasts of both Sajida and Ali. It is veritably a past without witnesses, but on his return, both God and meat ‘was off limits. Noor has a gift for painting, for telling stories in uncanny colours. It is as if she can pluck out of the consciousnesses of people submerged images, memories, and parts of their self that remain captives of their present. When Noor starts painting the sea, dead fish, and boats, Sajida remembers how she had clung to the tree her parents had asked her to when the cyclone hit the coast. She also recalls how her younger brother (Mukhtiar) entrusted to her had been swept away. Meanwhile when his granddaughter begins to paint the military truck, the roads raised from the ground in long strings of narrow hills [69] which he had not seen anywhere but in East Pakistan when he was twenty-three, memories stumble out of what Khan calls Ali’s hidden cabinet. His job was to fetch girls at night for his superiors; on one such night when his senior, having raped a woman, opened the door and commanded that he do the same, he mounted her bruised body, and unable to penetrate, got off and disappeared. Ali had also participated in a massacre in Dhaka, and as Sajida realizes during her ‘father’s narration, she had been a witness to that incident. Fortuitously, he falls ill before the end of the war, picks Sajida up from the streets and flies her back home to his mother (Nanijaan) with him. Clearly, Ali’s adoption of Sajida had been a search for redemption; he organizes his life around her needs. His inability to imagine a life for her that excludes himself (Sorayya Khan views this act through an economy of love) secures for him, in the text, the empathy due to a benevolent father. Noor functions at one level as an allegory. The child is at the same time autistic and an interpreter of maladies. The author perhaps means to illustrate through Noor the dysfunctional nature of a nation burdened with an unacknowledged past; at the same time her precocious creativity is symbolic of the healing power of expression. Noor appears to argue for dialogue between the perpetrator (who according to Saikia is witness to his/her own loss of humanity) and the victim/ witness to violence who can also testify to the limits of the (in)human. By bringing the two together in the structure of the family Khan performs a well-intentioned but ultimately problematic operation.
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For one, the world outside does not enter Ali’s home, which is cut off from the outside, a glass menagerie of sorts. The drama of reconciliation that plays itself out in the following lines appears staged though seductive.
The final scene in the novel when Ali has unburdened himself about the massacre in front of Sajida and she is both pained and comforted by the full implication of the past that Noor has made her recover, Khan writes:
The moan, deep and immense, rose gradually. It began in Ali’s belly. It hurled out of his mouth and stretched wide like a dead buffalo’s…. Noor pulled free of her mother. She covered her perfectly sculpted, miniature ears with the heels of her beautiful hands. Still on the floor, Sajida leaned towards her father. Stretching, she locked her arms with his.[70]
The physicality of this scene is perhaps meant to convey its sincerity. Though the home Ali has made for his daughter is cordoned off from others (it is geographically the remotest sector in Islamabad), the perpetrator has returned ‘home’ and recalls his horrific past at a time when at least a semblance of his selfhood/masculinity has been restored in his image/role as the Father and Benefactor. The aggression of his days as an army officer has long disappeared, and it is in his vulnerability that his restoration lies. However, not only is he physically and psychologically out of enemy territory where as his mother says, ‘War is an animal, the reader quickly realizes that the scene above has its own omissions, For Ali cannot confess his crime against the woman (and the women he fetched in general as part of the war machine) to his daughter. Nor is Noor permitted access to his memory of the woman who is ripped and pried open, the implements used to do this, the scissors, pens, a metal ruler, speckled with blood lying to her side. The nib of the fountain pen was missing. She was shaved between her legs?[71] Thus Ali’s crime remains one without a witness and the final embrace disturbs with its implications. Noor, written to hint at the creative power of memories, even those of shame and pain which are a legacy of the war of 1971, places love at the core of the context. In effect it remains a tale of personal redemption and the need for closure, whose symbolic power is compromised when we consider the import of such a tale given the current political discourses constructed around the war in both countries. If Noor is a memorial to the necessity of remembrance and forgiveness when war/conflict is in question, it is to the limits of the perpetrators’ confession that Sorayya Khan inadvertently points in the narrative. In the end one is reminded of Jean Amery (the intellectual in Auschwitz)
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who prays that he may be allowed his resentment rather than a socially extorted forgiveness.
‘It’s Broken?’: Shehryar Fazli’s Karachi and the Loss of East Pakistan
The works we have discussed as part of this section are mostly set in Pakistan, erstwhile West Pakistan. As authors return to the year of the formation of Bangladesh and examine the consequences, they bypass the need to recognize/receive the other, except as a victim or spectral memory of a shared violent past, or contend with her history. This other who speaks in a language different from one’s own in the fiction we are referring to, often becomes an emblem of a collective moral failure. The threads of the second partition of the subcontinent lead beyond the war; it is significant that authors have sought to revive its memory in fiction. However, the terms of its re-appearance, as Fazli’s Invitation suggests, require critical vigilance. The lyricism of the concluding lines of Shehryar Fazli’s novel is a defining moment in our understanding of the work. He writes:
No, for me there was no silence. I had to get it out of me, all this knowledge of how things worked and how things happened. I felt the stories warm my face … I felt them dissolving away, too quickly, and sitting up now, I rocked back and forth reciting them frantically in a whisper like an actor about to take the stage. I needed someone. The girls near me kept singing, and singing beautifully.[72]
He had ended the penultimate paragraph with:
I was a man who could speak from knowledge and experience about history, a man who had been close to the events, who saw the big picture … I don’t know if I could have been called a fake, any more than a cultural attaché can be called a fake. I was the sculptor of two worlds, the meeting point of two cities.[73]
In an interview with the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, Fazli had expressed the desire that his novel be read not for its ‘topic’ but its story; that he had wanted to place Shahbaz Ghazanfar (the protagonist returning to the place of his birth after nineteen years) in the Karachi of 1970, one of the critical moments in Pakistani history, and watch the effects. The events in the novel are all set into motion by Shahbaz’s father’s refusal to return to Pakistan purportedly after an attempt to stage a coup
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with the support of the communists had failed. He sends his son from Paris to make sure that the family orchard is salvaged, that his sister’s (Mona Phuppi to Shahbaz) attempt to sell the property is foiled.
Doubtless, Shahbaz had been close to the ‘big picture! Throughout the narrative he yearns for it-from the moment he sends a bottle of Chivas Regal to a table of strangers at Hotel Agra, one of whom is Brigadier Alamgir, his father’s friend who later becomes his host. His knowledge and experience of history is limited to eavesdropping, proximity to the well-heeled Karachi elite, conversations with Alamgir (an aristocrat and power broker), occupying the room next to the Jamaate-Islami cadres, shaking the cold palm’ of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and glimpses of Apa (Alamgir’s elder sister) writing letters to world leaders such as Prince Nasser and Brezhnev. Shahbaz’s consciousness brings us a montage of characters and with each we feel on the verge of an insight only to be sacrificed by Fazli to a hazy big picture. When he refers to his compulsion toʻkeep talking, to stories warming his face, and to himself as the ‘meeting point of two cities, we realize that the self-critical tone has given way to the fact that Paris demands not the kind of involvement that Karachi did.
Karachi is the space of the coming of age of Shahbaz where he reaches an understanding of his troubled father and his refusal to ever return to Pakistan after a failed attempt to overthrow the regime. He also recognizes his own timidity and perfidy and his inability to escape from it. Thus when Dhaka falls, he is able to console his father who asks, ‘It’s broken?
There is, however, no credible transition that would lead one to believe that Shahbaz is indeed the sculptor of two worlds. He is in a sense ‘the meeting point of two cities’ but Fazli’s narratorial decision to make Paris and Karachi counterpoints to each other in the person of Shahbaz is only lazily integrated within the context of 1970 and 1971. Shahbaz’s only encounter with the troubled eastern wing of Pakistan is through the Bengali Ghulam Hussain and when he betrays the man, it fails to attain the allegorical stature that the author probably intends it to, since it is merely an interlude. Ghulam Hussain in Karachi comes across as a Bengali trying to survive in the city rather than Shahbaz’s window to another Pakistan hundreds of miles away; the conversation of Hussain’s friends sometimes veer around politics but they are desultory and do not conjure the energies of a changing society. For the rest his life in Karachi is like a noir’ film while France is full of women, a place where he is not part of the larger scheme of things, a land he decided would constitute Ghulam Hussain’s impossible dream. He makes a few
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overtures to understanding what the Bengali constituted in the west, he spins raucous anecdotes about Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan but his limit as a storyteller is the overemphasis on ambience and getting the tone right. In the end, Shahbaz remains an outsider; when Dhaka falls he is ‘miming despondency and talks about feelings better left unexposed. It is this resolution that gives his work its self-indulgent, sometimes flatulent tone and constitutes a metonymic reminder of the difficulty of remaining distant when confronted with histories and memories of the time. At a time when the cyclone in the east, the elections, the landslide victory of the Awami League, and the Pakistan People’s Party in the west presented a threat to the military regime in the form of democracy, Shahbaz’s narrative of (un)belonging fails to represent 1971 as a critical point in the history of the subcontinent and the abrupt reference to the fact that the Jamaat-e-Islami had carried out the killings in East Pakistan hangs uncomfortably in the novel in the end. This is characteristic of the technique employed in the novel to introduce history in flashes (the mystique around Bhutto’s arrival to the parties, for instance, or the news of his hanging that Shahbaz receives in France), which is clearly detached from the fret, fever, and trauma of those living the context in 1971.
There are times when it appears that Fazli is trying to understand the notion of responsibility for crimes committed by one’s own people in the name of the nation, like Shamsie. Towards the end of the novel with the events in East Pakistan taking shape, one of the Brigadier’s female guests alleges that what the army has been perpetrating in the eastern wing is a massacre. Another elderly lady responds: ‘It won’t last … they will get their Bangladesh:[74] It is how Brigadier Alamgir understands the situation that needs to be noted. He says:
“Then all the more reason to let all this go on … would you interfere in a birth just because a mother is feeling pangs? It will help their new country … if they ever get it. Just think if it wasn’t for the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre where would we be?’ He shook his head in those hard minute tremors, as if nobody had understood the lesson. “This—what they are going through now-is history. We’ve got to let it be a natural process…. Here’s the point. If we don’t let the army have its last bit of fun … we will have a beast on our hands, with a thousand heads and thousand arms, clawing at whatever it can. At us, in this part of the country. You want that? No. If you really want the army gone, this is how it happens[.75]
One must mention that the speaker of these lines is greeted by a largely ‘unsympathetic crowd. Their relevance here is not due to the
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explanatory value of these words and they are not meant to be seen as the true nature of violence. What is of interest to us is the reception of 1971 in the consciousness of the Karachi dwellers we encounter in the novel. At a time when the memorialization of the war in Bangladesh occupies a crucial space in the cultural and historical discourses in the country, it can perhaps be asserted that in Pakistan and India those monumental events are mostly frozen in military memoirs or reminiscences of retired bureaucrats. This is in contrast to the Partition of 1947 which has seen literary exploration and research that have put secondary witnesses in touch with its difficult legacy, a kind of knowledge that is still seeking to come to terms with the suspicion, betrayal, injury, and hurt on the one hand as also the ability of friendships to overwhelm traumatic memories linked to new ‘borders and boundaries. Invitation on the other hand brings in the theme of loss only through the mumbling of an expatriate in France.
In approaching a difficult time in history whose strands lead to three different nations with varying degrees of antagonisms between them, Fazli may be said to have made a beginning, nonetheless. His protagonist Shahbaz is on a journey of self-discovery. So when he makes another stray remark in the end—How do you condemn a man you carry with you:[76]—we return again to the theme of guilt that the opening quotes of this section address. His inability to remain silent’ (there are reasons we may assume, such as his father’s stubborn silence about his past and his life as an immigrant in France) costs Ghulam Hussain his freedom and seals his own culpability; indeed he cannot condemn the brigadier since the man is now part of his being. In a narrative, however, so decisively tethered to the protagonist, the Pakistan of 1970 and 1971 will be read more as his loss of innocence and the realization of his identity as a ‘sculptor of words’ and a junction of cities rather than a coming to terms with history and memories that continue to condition the present. The lyrical ending then stands in for the prevarication of Shahbaz, so close to ‘history’ yet unable to interpret it.
An Infinity of Suffering: Horror, Compassion, and War In the field of memorial discourses of the war of 1971, O.V. Vijayan’s The Infinity of Grace[77] makes an vital contribution. At this point it is necessary to mention that while it is true that literature from Pakistan
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and Bangladesh will be/have been dealt in/as separate sections, these categories are also to be treated as meditations on the war and suffering imposed by the state in a more general sense. A comparative method has surely been encouraged in this chapter, considering how divergent official histories emanating from the two countries on the event are; how nations may construct competing narratives on the same phenomenon. The sections may also be seen as interdependent. The fact that the site of the war was East Pakistan (there was aerial attack on the west) and it was mostly propaganda which was received as information by the populace (Zakir in Husain’s Basti talks of news on the radio repeatedly claiming that Pakistan is winning)[78] in the distant west leads to the fact that eye witness accounts, even in fictional form, abound in the east. This could be one reason why Pakistani accounts are more about the ramifications of the war than the period of anomie itself. War has been treated in this work as both a reminder of the control of the state over life and death of citizens/enemies and the legacy of war as national history/ memory. In the latter we are properly talking of the afterlife of the ‘event’ but as Veena Das writes of the tentacles of the event that anchor it to the everyday, we can safely suggest that the inheritance of the war is only manifest when it is has ceased to be. Human suffering (which is also divided into genders and political formations such as nations and states) is often initiated by the state in war and then sought to be appropriated as history of a people, recognizing some forms of hurt, delegitimizing others. Needless to say, death and torture of combatants, and the endurance of mothers are likely to be valued as stories to be told to the progeny. Rape never appears as a stable signifier, since it refuses to lend itself to compensatory retelling; war babies become the summary sign of enemy’ blood, eliding over the birangona’ argument as well as the fact that in the war of 1971 Urdu-speaking women were also victims of sexual violence.
The obvious social tendency to take stock of disaster in numbers then begins to appear as denigration of the pain of those marked by history. Accounts such as military memoirs, of Sisson and Rose, Yasmin Saikia, and Sarmila Bose (though my objection to her intent, method, and conclusion has been made clear) all highlight the ambiguity of India’s response and the atrocities committed by undercover soldiers in East Pakistan even before war was officially declared on 4 December 1971.
The Indian army website tells us that the Indian documents of the war are yet to be declassified; occasionally self-congratulatory military accounts appear, as do the images of emaciated refugees of East Pakistan in camps in West Bengal, Meghalaya, Assam, and Tripura.
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Vijayan introduces a war journalist into the scheme of things in his novel who is sent by his presumably left-wing newspaper in Delhi to Calcutta when the war appears imminent. As a journalist, Kunjunni is expected to provide a non-partisan account of the war and yet the way in which it is represented in the novel is a complex one. All his observations on war are about its sheer futility;[79] he is deeply critical of the Indian ruling establishment and its war-mongering ways; conversely, it is a perspective, some may argue, which a third party can afford. Nevertheless, I invoke his The Infinity of Grace for its conceptualization of the violence in/of war-juxtaposing the sorrow of war and its destruction with the death of Kunjunni’s daughter due to cancer, Vijayan’s narrative seeks to understand the nature of suffering through the lesson imparted by one’s guru. However, I will confine myself to an understanding of the legacy of the war that saw the second partition of the subcontinent.[80] To me the protagonist’s personal salvation needs to be placed in the context of his being a witness to the war and its victims. This war made a guest appearance in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, in a tragicomic treatment of violence and the eye-ailment (conjunctivitis) which was playfully named Joi Bangla’ since it attained epidemic proportions among the combatants. In Qurratulain Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mistål the war of liberation’ or the dismemberment of the country, and for her these are interchangeable counters, is the sign of humanity’s inability to learn lessons from the past. It is the sign of the greed, hubris, and folly of egotistical men; to Hyder pan-Islamism and nationalism had turned the Indian identity of landed Muslim gentry into a problem,
The syncretic past of the family of Zaman Chowdhuries of Dhaka who were Bengali Zamindars, Muslim Leaguers, and admirers of Jinnah and Tagore at the same time was rendered anachronistic by historical events that sought a linear definition of identity. Nawab Qamrul Zaman of Arjumand Manzil and his family are wiped out in the war of 1971. As in her River of Fire, Hyder juxtaposes the plurality of communities and their openness to multivocal identities in India’s past to the homogenizing discourses of nationalism and democracy. It is clear that for the author modern ideologies utilize the exuberance of youth and the compromise of age. She responds with her nostalgic construction of her memories of an inclusive multireligious past. Thus Comrade Rehan Ahmed, once a dreaded revolutionary in colonial Bengal, a staunch opponent of his Muslim Leaguer uncle Qamrul Zaman, now lives in the feudal Arjumand Manzil and is a powerful Awami League politician of independent Bangladesh. Hence the war is tragic for it
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signifies the end of the romance’ of Bengal, its ability to absorb complex affiliations, the inability of culture to prevent violence. In Hyder’s universe then, the serrations of anti-colonialism, postcolonial identity, and ideas of colonial modernity are historical forces that combine with human ambition and fears only to end in the futility of violence, be it the partition or the war.
Vijayan weaves this war into the personal life of a reporter from Kerala who is transformed by what he witnesses.
In Ranaghat, Bongao, Petropole, in interminable row upon row of bamboo huts, lived the Muslim fugitives from East Pakistan. And in the railway yards of Sialda, the Hindu refugees who had been put to flight twenty-five years ago and continued to stay in their makeshift tents. In tide after tide, the grim exodus. Thin, dark girls, savagely raped, bearing the blood and the wild seed of invasions within their bodies, girls from Pabna, from Tangail ..[ 82]
Rape as an inalienable part of invasions and women as the prize of conquest is a recurrent motif of Vijayan’s text. In fact the metaphor of violation and birth is repeated in the text. When Allah Bux, the old Bengali bartender at Arathun’s, the hotel at which Kunjunni puts up in Calcutta scoffs at new swanky hotels and their cabarets, the latter muses:
We have not grown enough to stop the violent dance that signifies the birth of nations. The men who sit in the crowd around the dancing girl are the swordsmen of the invasion. In the dissolution of Armenia and the sorrow of East Bengal, she of the naked limbs became the life that soothed, as in every age. Not only in sacked cities but also in the visions of the pious the invasions happened. Who was she dancing to now? Don’t you know me?[83]
The phrase “she of the naked limbs became the life that soothedbrings to light the sexualized nature of wars; Vijayan refers more than once to the seed’ and ‘sorrow’ of invasions, placing the birth of Bangladesh in the context of a highly sexualized language. Vijayan talks of a ‘savage covenant between enemy and enemy, a moment of perfect communication’ that we had pointed out in Chapter 3 between combatants on all sides; soldiers who understand what the war, after all, is really about. Since what follows is crucial to this anti-war novel from India, in its argument about the gratuitous pain inflicted (here Vijayan differs from Primo Levi
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who agrees that’wars are detestable’ but not gratuitous) one may quote this entire extract:
They were absorbed in the ancient lust of the destruction and emergence of nations-of those who had hunted and driven these women across the marshes of East Bengal, and the leaders of the resistance and the Indian soldiers who were preparing to liberate these women, all of these. War becomes a savage covenant between enemy and enemy. Senayor ubhayor madhye, between embattled armies, enemy and enemy watched the castrated male’s death throes. Awesome legions waited for just a glimpse of the nakedness of the ravished. The refugee camp lay with that heinous knowledge nestling at its heart.[84]
The author’s representation of the war of 1971 (for him it is just like all other wars in history) as pornography, as voyeurism, and delirium of death of the castrated male, in short, as a critique of the pleasure of war, impinges powerfully on the reader. The gendered and sexualized images of war that emerge from the three preceding chapters give us cause to believe that war is surely reducible to the self-destructive male urge to establish his virility in witnessing the enemy’s castration. The pain and suffering in this work, however, is sought to be sublimated in Kunjunni’s transformation. Like his friend Colonel Balachandran who understood the meaning of war when he stopped to tend lovingly to his dying sepoy Beliram in the battle of Chushul and then renounced the army (in his case, to escape the cycle of Karma),[85] the war reporter’s progression from doubt to faith stems from his interpretation of the war. Somewhere in the novel Kunjunni says that the war babies should be allowed to be born in Bangladesh to provide atonement’ for the acts committed in war and the consequences thereof. (We have referred earlier to the fact that the policy of the post-war Mujib government was to encourage adoption of war babies internationally so that Bangladesh should remain free of polluted blood.) In his travels across Calcutta Kunjunni encounters a Hindu Bengali policeman whose memories of the communal riots of Noakhali in 1946 (when Gandhi and Suhrawardy could calm rioters with great effort) makes him bitter about East Bengali Muslims now seeking protection from India, Kunjunni’s conversations with Polish and Russian reporters who mock him by asking, ‘Where is your wars” is followed by the strange incident at Pilkhana Gali in Bangladesh just before a grenade is lobbed at him when a young Hindu girl (believing he is a Hindu client) tells him a Muslim name only to arouse him. This only confirms his reading of the war as a manifestation of a collective urge for
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destruction. He is critical of the leaders of the revolution who journey to Dhaka to claim their victory’; he senses a hunt among thousands of men who chanced upon one emaciated man, a’Bihari Razakar’:
A patriot till yesterday, an extremist of united Pakistan’s patriotism. The thin man had himself been a hunter in the bastis of Dacca. Patriotism had metamorphosed around him. But he had not caused the transformation. Who was it that so clumsily welded countless principalities into a nation? Who then divided the nation in two? And who now sought to divide two in three[86]
The man is killed and then the enraged, excited crowd sets its sights upon his son as Kunjunni leaves the place. Vijayan’s work is an attempt to underscore the futility of violent human action to redress social and political injustice, hence the wide field of references which include the Maoist and Naxalite uprisings and the whole of world history. His exploration of the compassion of the guru and the glimpsing of the meaning of suffering is a composite response to the war and his own personal grief.
This chapter primarily intends to map the trajectory taken by (a) authors in Pakistan in their interpretation of the memory and history of the war; and (b) the work of Tahmima Anam who writes at a distance from the event, in English, and appears to place her novels not only in the fashioning of national discourses of identity but also in the current global anxieties regarding the place of religion in the public sphere. Vijayan’s novel also turns to spiritual and philosophical concepts central to religion to address the suffering of war. In highlighting the orgy of violence that sustains war Kunjunni writes:
In the dark nights, dreaming bird dreams … that night the 3rd of December, with absurd reasoning, Pakistan’s Air Force struck at Indian bases. In Calcutta, Indira Didi stood at the frontline of the festival and laughs at the many splendored fire-works. On the 4th of December, she declared war. [87]
By casting the war as meaningless, Vijayan means to foreground the suffering of people and the discourse of masculinity that sustains war and human cruelty. In this it is inevitable that the versions of the war told by aggressors and victims (represented by those who speak on their behalf) are equated. The lesson of compassion that war leaves in its wake is the only moral purchase of an ignoble enterprise. This is where
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The Infinity of Grace becomes problematic. Indeed it is Vijayan’s interpretation of war as the manifestation of lust that forces one to raise a critical point: How is the lesson of compassion to be imparted to the ‘savagely raped girls, the naked women who soothe warring soldiers and bear the seed of invasions’? Is it possible to have a political and social order that does not acknowledge their pain and loss solely in the form of an illustration? How, in an analysis such as Vijayan’s (which I acknowledge to be impressive), do we distinguish between symptom and critique? By a powerful depiction of the sexual economy of war, this work provides a perspective on the war of 1971. However, by glossing over the political and social dimensions of the creation of Bangladesh, it fails to account for the ways in which memories of the war are pressed into the service of creation of identities. One expects that Vijayan would argue that only a transformation from within can bring about changes in the realm of politics and ideas of freedom. However, as the tentative queries above will perhaps suggest, one remains disturbed with a point of view that is convinced of its own efficacy and persuaded of the profound folly of the other, especially in philosophies that promise alchemy and transcendence. The role of religion and spirituality in coping with the reality of war appears again in Anam’s second novel. This need, as is the case given here, again proves to be compelling, yet deeply problematic.
In the foreword that Shahdat Choudhury writes in the form of an address to Nasir Uddin Yusuf’s Ghum Nei[88] (Sleepless), he tells the author that he has written the ‘epitaph’ to the ‘war of liberation. The work, composed in 1984, which appeared in serialized form in Bichitra (a magazine) in the same year, was later published as a memoir. In the tone of melancholy that permeates, Yusuf begins by creating short inventories of the battles fought by those whom he knew in the year 1971 and the tone conveys the sense of an ending. Ostensibly, it mourns the ones who are lost and confronts the futility of their martyrdom. Written during Bangladesh’s continuing tryst with military dictatorship, the word epitaph’ is particularly significant because it hints not only at the possibility that the war, as it is in the memory of the freedom fighters and survivors, is now dead but also the inevitability of its commemoration.
The twenty-four years between 1947 and 1971 can be perceived as suspended between two utopias-Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both ciphers and symbols of a beginning, the promise of newness; after 1971 Intizar
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Husain, for instance, revisits his interpretation of the Partition as hijrat! For writers of war literature and history in Bangladesh the interim is represented as not the aftermath of 1947 but as an inexorable movement towards 1971. For West Pakistani rulers the only way to find its identity (like Darwish says) after the elections made Bengali rule imminent was violence—it is as if the meaning of Pakistan was to be found in denying impure Muslims with a language strongly influenced by the Hindu/ Indian remnants the right to state machinery; since Pakistan had to be saved, Urdu (ironically, another remnant of life in pre-1947 India) had to prevail. Omer Bartov writes:
From the earliest records of human civilization to our own century, people have been fascinated by the notion of remaking humanity-moulding individuals and societies in accordance with the laws of God or nature, history or science, into more perfect entities. But this quest for perfection has often been accompanied by an urge to unmake the present and erase the heritage of the past. Hence the path to Utopia is strewn with shattered edifices and mounds of corpses. Because by definition it must always remain a goal, Utopia engenders fantasies about a future whose imagined fabric draws heavily on myths about the past; fabricating a future earthly paradise is predicated on the imagery of a lost Garden of Eden. Such links between mythology and vision make for mechanisms of remembrance and prediction, fiction and representation, repression and categorization, which are at the core of humanity’s self-perception and sense of identity. [89]
Arguing that war, genocide, and violence in other forms have become constitutive of modern identity, Bartov writes that histories written solely from the perspective of the perpetrator or victim fail to represent the encounter, which is the source of the event. That tragic encounter in 1971 among coreligionists separated by miles and disparate histories and culture (indeed in pre-Partition India, arguably, the interface between ordinary Bengali and Punjabi/Sindhi Muslims would have been practically non-existent) was inked with prejudice, bewilderment, mistrust, and cultural stereotyping,
Ghum Nei may be a veritable symptom of the war narratives in Bangladesh after 1971. As it is assailed by doubt as to the meaning of martyrdom in the war, it is clear that it is not the memories of war itself that torment; on the contrary, they rejuvenate, they are recalled for the glory that they have come to stand for. The reasons for the persistence of this theme in post-war public sphere and culture have been discussed
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earlier. Second, here, while one combatant writes, the other testifies-to the death of 1971. Ironically, the work and the preface come to stand for the death of the meaning of war in the war itself and the likelihood that post-liberation political and cultural narratives have merely sought to usurp the place of suffering. Following Agamben’s problematization of the meaning of martyr, we may pose a further question that will allow us to anticipate few issues that will be implied in our subsequent discussion of Anam’s work. If martyrdom were indeed emulative/worthy of emulation and if the rhetoric of the state that all those who died in the nine months in ‘Bangladesh’ were martyrs (notwithstanding victims of Bengali violence and ethnic killings) is to be accepted then that would amount to conceding that the sacrifice had been for a cause. This cause had been rendered larger than the individuals wedded to it. Whether it is the narrative of the death of Jesus Christ or Imam Husain (Karbala), one could argue that the moral significance of these ‘events’ far outlived the personal tragedies that they represented. Similarly, the register of martyrdom also rationalizes the deaths of thousands of men/women/ children, which to all intents and purposes was unjust. Indeed the political discourse of the trial of war criminals draws its legitimacy from the clandestine killings and sexual violence that ensued in East Pakistan between March and December. Though the pain of unjust death has been sought to be assuaged through the attribution of martyrdom, the need to put a ‘closure on the wound of the past (violence in war and its aftermath) by bringing criminals to justice legalizes what was at the same time a discourse of ethics/morality. If we argue that those who were martyred led exemplary lives and chose their death, their deaths would, by that logic, be rendered banal by the application of law.
Tahmima Anam and the Rewriting of War’s Legacies While A Golden Age may be classified as memorial literature it cannot seamlessly be juxtaposed with literature/fiction written for a Bengali audience. Some of it has to do with the status of English readership in Bangladesh (A Golden Age was soon translated into Bengali). As Rahela Banu and Roland Sussex point out in their essay ‘English in Bangladesh after Independence: Dynamics of Policy and Practice’, unlike India where English becomes a symbol of ethnic neutrality, in Bangladesh it has never acquired the image of a lingua franca since an overwhelming majority are ethnically homogeneous and are speakers of the single national language. A Golden Age (an offshoot of the popular expression
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Shonar Bangla) takes as its material images of the war already circulating in Bengali accounts and transposes them into another language (used in both its literal and metaphoric sense). However, Anam includes a self-consciously eclectic mix of cosmopolitan references accessible to an upper-class diasporic author (such as Nina Simone and Cleopatra’) in Rehana’s character. Born after the war and living outside its borders, her writing of the novel is in her own words a ‘mode of belonging’ to her beautiful and bruised country. Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age and The Good Muslim are works determined by discourses both inside and outside Bangladesh and will be seen (however the writer might dislike straitjacketing) as emanating from a democratic Muslim majority nation in a region shaping and being shaped by global discourses on Islam. Her latest work Bones of Grace, explores the life of Zubaida, the war’s progeny.
Rewriting Wartime Motherhood: Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age A Golden Age begins with the story of a mother, Rehana, struggling to retain custody of her children (Maya and Sohail) after she is widowed and transforms into a more public role (again as a mother) in the theatre of war.[90] It is clear at this level that Anam capitalizes on a theme frequently encountered in memorial work on the war in Bangladesh. Whether it is the letters referred to in the first chapter, the memoirs of women/ mothers in the second, or the fiction that appears in the fourth chapter, motherhood has been a dominant memorial site where Bangladeshi nationalism has been constructed. We have sought to demonstrate that the texts thus mentioned are often inscribed with a memory of war more complex and traumatic than the discourse of supreme sacrifice in which they are apt to appear in a national narrative. When Anam introduces an Urdu-speaking Rehana raised among Calcutta’s aristocracy before the Partition of 1947 in her story of the war of liberation, the politics of her choice in a context of Bengali mothers in war-lore (Jahanara Imam, Basanti Guhathakurta, Mushtari Shafi, Azad’s mother in Maa, and Buri in Hangor Nodi Grenade) is significant. Her children read The Communist Manifesto, attend Nationalist Party meetings, are part of college elections, and debate the ‘finer points of resistance’ but she does not have the proper trappings of a revolutionary:[91]
The correct words though by now familiar to her, did not glide easily from her tongue: “comrade, ‘proletariat, ‘revolution. They were hard,
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precise words and did not capture Rehana’s ambiguous feelings about the country she had adopted. She spoke, with fluency, the Urdu of the enemy. She was unable to pretend, as she saw so many others doing, that she could replace her mixed tongue with a pure Bengali one, so that the Muslim salutation, As-Salaam Alaikum was replaced by the neutral Adaab, or even Nomoshkar, the Hindu greeting…. She could not give up her love for Urdu, its lyrical lilts, its double meanings, its furrowed heat. [92]
This is the only place where Anam foregrounds ethnicity (a fraught historical question in Bangladesh, the ‘Bihari’ question); her children belong to the time when the nation was being formed and do not encounter their ‘Bihari’ origin as a problem. Anam’s Rehana is a migrant from Calcutta following the Partition, therefore, only a half-Urdu, halfBengali speaker. She reads Ghalib with the same passion with which her daughter sings Tagore. This multiplicity of histories (first, a Muslim aristocrat in Hindu-dominated Calcutta, her marriage to Iqbal which brings her to Dhaka and where she is again a citizen in Muslim-majority Pakistan, a member of the Urdu-speaking minority but not quite so due to her ancestral history in Bengal) collides with her experience of gender when her children are taken away from her when Iqbal dies. She is also a mother on whom war makes its great demands; she responds by choosing her children.[93] Her terrible secret, the fact that she had stolen from a blind and aged suitor to build the house ‘Shona’ so that it would provide the income needed to keep her family of three together, casts her as a morally ambiguous hero, but a hero nevertheless. Her son Sohail becomes a guerrilla and her daughter Maya (after the rape and murder of her friend Sharmeen during the military crackdown) leaves for Calcutta and joins the war effort as a relief worker in the makeshift hospitals in India and writes subversive columns against the military regime of Pakistan. Rehana stays in Dhaka, shelters guerrillas in Shona, and hides arms and ammunition in her garden. She nurses a major in the renegade Bengali army who is seriously wounded in an operation, falls in love with him, and they have a brief, lone sexual encounter. Sohail forces her to rescue Sabeer (husband of Silvi, the girl he has loved since childhood); she successfully dissembles and pleads with her brother-inlaw Faiz, a top administrative functionary under martial law. However, he learns of her betrayal and she is forced to abandon her home and joins Maya in Calcutta, where she assists in caregiving to refugees and wounded guerrillas. In the largely simple narrative, Rehana returns with her children to Dhaka in November where Sohail has been assigned a
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special task by the Mukti Bahini. The operation succeeds but the army on the scent of the guerrillas reaches Rehana’s home. (It is certainly meant as an irony that Rehana should be reading Iqbal, Pakistan’s national poet, on the fateful night.) During the search the major is nabbed while fleeing and mistaken by the army to be Sohail; impressed with her chaste Urdu the officer-in-charge offers to spare them if they testify correctly. Rehana first denies it is her son but the colonel is suspicious; then taking a cue from the man she loves (who has been let on to the secret of the extent she can go for her children) she lies as they take him away. The final chapter of A Golden Age begins and ends on 16 December 1971, on the day the war ended. Rehana visits her husband’s grave, a ritual she has religiously followed, telling him the stories about herself and the children. Her son is due to come back, a return that will appear profoundly tragic in her second novel, The Good Muslim. Rehana is a witness to the day of victory and thus history’s chosen one.
The ambiguous feeling Rehana had for her country (Pakistan) appears to have been overcome in the fervour of liberation; deepened perhaps by the love of her children to preserve whom she sacrifices’ the major in a more morally complex sense than can be attributed to the other mythic mothers of the war’s memorial literature. The following extract is noteworthy:
The sky is pale and iridescent and today the war has ended, and today I will clutch my flag, hold my breath and wait for our son. I know what I have done.
This war that has taken so many sons has spared mine. This age that has burnt so many daughters has not burnt mine. I have not let it.[94]
Fed perhaps by her access to narratives during her doctoral research on the oral history of the Liberation War (an experience which made her believe that only a work of fiction could address the multiple histories within dominant versions) are Anam’s covert intertextual references to canonical memorial literature as she clearly draws from popular images of mothers during the war. Sohail’s character has resonances of Rumi and Azad while Rehana has clear similarities with Imam, Guhathakurta, and Safia Begum. The plot often resembles instances from memoirs and fiction so critical to the memory of the war in Bangladesh. Where Anam departs is that she destabilizes the nationalist image of the self-denying, ascetic Bengali woman and the conniving ‘Bihari. By writing a story
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that talks of loss (war crimes of rape and torture, genocide, massacre of Hindus, suffering guerrillas and mothers, and refugees) in war without valorizing it as ‘sacrifice’ which aspires to become a compensatory idea in memorial fiction, she attempts to deviate from more commonly encountered forms of belonging in post-war literature from Bangladesh. Anam refuses Rehana a morally cosy space, though one feels that the author is keen to cast her as an alternative hero. In the pure and sacralized story of liberation, we have a compassionate, courageous, lying, and wily ‘Bihari’/Bengali woman, who steals, deceives, makes love to a man whom she sends to his death for the sake of a greater love, and errs in her filial duty by refusing to rescue her brother-in-law, Faiz, from the guerrillas after the war. In this she provides a sharp contrast to the mother figures we know from the second and the fourth chapter.
Arguably, the ‘I have not let it’ of the final paragraph chooses a tone of audacity. Perhaps it is more good fortune than Rehana’s efforts in 1971 (a time that is significantly different from 1959 when the novel begins) that has kept the family together. To suggest otherwise would be to misrepresent the nine months of anomie in what was East Pakistan and ignore the combination of arbitrariness and method in victim selection in any form of war. A novel constructed from the memories of the war, A Golden Age affirms the credibility of the figure of the mother as hero in the war narrative. However, in its re-interpretation of popular versions of motherhood and her choice of Rehana’s identity in 1971, this work occupies a liminal space giving us a war novel where memory and history collide and human motives are reconfigured. Anam’s first novel thus registers its presence as memorial fiction through difference; Rehana’s reluctance to belong to a narrative that exalts her pain is offered to the reader as a heroic narrative, thus constituting a significant intervention in the genre.
War and Trauma: Religion as Therapy? The Good Muslim is a more complex novel. Set in the post-war period, it captures with dread, reminding us of the stories of Akhtaruzzaman Elias, the effects of war and illuminates the need of memorialnationalism to invest in stories of valour, sacrifice, love, and forgiveness, The narrative movement of time is symbolic. In what is seen in A Golden Age, flow of time is linear-suggesting the chronological time of history experienced as trauma but orientated towards a better future. This time of expectation (when, most Bengalis hoped, that Mujib the Messiah
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would set things right) was parodied later in Elias’a ‘Milir Haathe Sten Gun’ where the madman Abbas constantly talks of flying and in Mili we see the need to escape the changes after the war that she finds so difficult to comprehend. Mohammad Zafar Iqbal’s protagonist in Aakash Bariye Dao commits suicide. On his way back from the war, Sohail kills an old man who calls him ‘Beta? As he was coming home, he meets a mutilated Pia hiding in a bunker and gives her his address in Dhaka. Returning, he is no longer the charming, well-read, confident young man ready for a debate. When Rehana watches him get off a rickshaw in the market one day, walking over and punching a man violently on his face, she knows ‘that this man has done terrible things, that he has seen these terrible things and knows now that these are visions that have him pacing the hallway at night, the ones that leave his pillows wet and his mouth frozen stiffly, even as he tries to smile and act as if everything has gone back to normal.[95] So Rehana begins to read the Quran to him. For her the Book brings solace in distress, soothes her fears; it does not fulfil a moral need, she is not accountable to the Book. Secure in her instrumental approach to religious wisdom to the extent that she can turn to it for support, the Quran does not invade her being. Simple-minded in her interpretation she hopes her son will be healed and become himself’ once again. Time in this work oscillates between 1972 (immediately after the war) and 1984 (when the disturbing aftermath had become a permanent state of exception, the year of publication of Ghum Nei). The eschewing of linearity (a symbol of the disillusion with any emancipatory model) and the search for perspective (Maya’s coming to terms with her brother’s tragic, bewildering, but clearly for Anam, credible metamorphosis) in The Good Muslim brings war memories to the crux of the question of identity in Bangladesh. However, the time moves forward in 1985 with Sohail’s departure and Maya’s recognition of his pain, and then further to the mock trial of war criminals in a People’s Court held by ‘martyrmother’ Jahanara Imam in 1992.
Maya, who after the war is disturbed by its legacy-the women in rehabilitation camps, the children she helps abort so that the ‘birangonas’ may be birangonas-too recognizes the need for an anchor. When Sohail begins to talk to her about God who believes that he is good, she is almost seduced by the Book. But for her religion is what brought on the war in the first place, it is the Book that is at the root of conflict and she is too proud (she was a communist when the war began to let an event change the meter of who she is: Sohail (who used to read Ghalib, Rilke, Neruda, Goethe, and so on) always wanting to be a part of something
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larger than himself (beauty, war, and now, God) cannot live with the sterility of guilt. Like he used to in college debates, he must vanquish the opponent. He cringes when Maya calls his suffering shell shock, and we are reminded of Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway who cannot escape ‘madness’ (he is put in a sanatorium) and annihilation. Sohail was younger than Smith when he went to war. In 1977 he puts all his books into crates and burns them. To stop him Maya sings Tagore with all her strength. It stokes his fury, stirring memories. In the end her argument of the force of culture to heal a violent past argument is exposed for its self-absorption. When Silvi tells Sohail that “There is Only One, it answers to a need in him. Silvi, widowed during the war, marries Sohail and they establish a community on the first floor of the house where religious discourses are held and pious Muslims from all over the world congregate. It is as if Rehana’s son has finally found peace. He is now called Huzoor and is a member of an International Islamic Group called the Tabligh-i-Jamaat. Maya chooses to become a surgeon. She leaves home in 1977 after the burning of the books and returns only seven years later with the news of Silvi’s death (Silvi had taken to the Book in 1971, questioned the dismemberment of an Islamic country, and refused to recognize the necessity of war even when her husband Sabeer had died after being tortured by the West Pakistan army). Maya has always believed that it is Silvi who has snatched away the brother she had known and comprehended, and that he had turned to religion with a mixture of loss and love. There are two other things that need to be mentioned before we can examine the relevance of this work for the unfinished work of memorialization and justice in Bangladesh. After Maya’s homecoming in 1984, Rehana is diagnosed with cancer. With the doctors despairing of her chances of survival, Sohail, who had shown a philosophical acceptance of his mother’s disease, gathers men in a circle around her hospital bed and, as they chant, empties a little water from the well of Zamzam (the holy well in Mecca, considered a miracle as it never dries even after thousands of litres being consumed) into her mouth. He has come because Maya begged him not to let their mother die. As Anam’s plot would have it, a miracle is revealed and Rehana’s cancer retreats. She is cured. The other incident involves Zaid, Sohail’s son, who exhibits violent traits, hangs around the house fetching water for the women in purdah upstairs, steals, and lies. Sohail has decided he will not be sent to school because (as he tells Maya) he does not want his son to become him. As the boy’s life spins out of control, he is sent by Sohail (and Khadija, his companion after Silvi’s death) to a madrassa,
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He escapes from the violent headmaster there but is sent back. Maya cannot keep her promise to the child to send him to a school. When Maya learns from a woman who frequently visits Sohail’s congregation that the Zaid is possibly being sexually abused by the Huzoor there, she begs Sohail to save his son. Sohail says he will but displays little urgency; so Maya sets out. In her bid to smuggle the child out of the madrassa, the child is drowned in the river (there is a hint that he might have willingly embraced the water as a refuge) and dies. Maya is arrested ostensibly on kidnapping charges (but it transpires the real cause is that she has been writing incendiary pieces against the dictator in a newspaper) but gets bail when the judge learns of her past as a freedom fighter. Sohail visits the court; Maya knows that in trying to save Zaid she has become the instrument of his death. However, Sohail, before he tells her of his imminent departure to Saudi Arabia with Khadija, absolves her of her sin. The novel ends in 1992. Pia testifies at Jahanara Imam’s Gono Adalot (she has named her son, a war child, Sohail). Maya who is present there during the mock trial meets Pia (to whom she had once said at the rehab that her baby ‘is a bastard child, a vial of poison’), who had left their house in Dhaka where she had come to stay. (Sohail had wanted to marry her but the girl had disappeared, perhaps unable to shut out what Maya had told her; she was a birangona but wanted to give birth to the life inside her. That was the final time that the old life before 1971 flickered inside him.) Maya has named her daughter (with Joy, Sohail’s friend and a freedom fighter himself) Zubaida, after Zaid. In the context of this text, it is Pia’s son Sohail and Maya’s Zubaida who are memorials to the war and its afterlife in Bangladesh.
Clearly, Anam in The Good Muslim first posits religion and then examines it as fulfilling a lack in a post-war world.96 In the first chapter and in fiction we have identified the problem of integration of militarized young men into pre-war social roles. Sohail Haque was a young man of many talents (he read and recited poetry, debated, could calm crowds with his reasonable voice, was a connoisseur of music, and so on). After the war he blindly sought for a father, having lost him when he was a child, especially after he slaughters a man who now seems to him, a nothing man. A man who had done nothing. Walking home from the War like everyone else: [97] When Sohail kills him, he imagines all the terrible things that the war had taught him to imagine, including Pia in the barracks and why this man’s death is necessary. And to the man’s Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir Rahim he recites as he kills (or is it a voice that has been newly conjured in his mind:) God is Great, God is Great, God is
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Great. He shuns Rehana now for he believes that if she had introduced him to the Book earlier he would not have done what he did. Sohail’s need of the Book stems from the moment he discovers its ability to speak to the clamour in him; Rehana after the incident in the rickshaw reads the Quran to her son even as he initially rejects it, to soothe him. Unknowing, he will use it to save himself from himself; he tries to tell Maya that’he has found something, something that explains everything! The narrator tells us of a twinge in Maya’s heart as she listens to Sohail she feels the twinge of his yearning’ which she stubbornly shuts out. Not for her the need of a certainty, a path. Maya travels to the interiors of her country, rural Bangladesh (when she finally returns in 1984 she was in Rajshahi) and living amid sheer poverty and superstition helps to deliver babies. It is her way of seeking remission of her ‘sins’ when after the war she had helped abort the womb of women like Pia. She comes seeking her mother in Dhaka after Nazia, a peasant woman whom she had encouraged to break the social taboo of pregnant women bathing in the village pond, is ordered by the local mullah to receive one hundred and one lashes after the child is born with Down’s syndrome. Maya can do nothing to prevent the public humiliation and torture of Nazia. The conflict then in The Good Muslim is really between Sohail and Maya, and though Anam chooses to place religion at the heart of this book, it is a work that foregrounds the trauma of war; it is an examination of the options available in a post-war society to confront the meaning(s) of violence. So we do not hear in Sohail the reverberation of the gladness of victory (as we do in Bijoyer Muhurto, Swadhinota ’71, or Guerrilla Theke Shommukh Juddhe); we are immediately witness to the abyss he has fallen into and from which the Quran shall save him. Maya, of course has no moral burden till Zaid dies. She is troubled by what she sees in the villages of a ‘free’ country, and believes that the possibility of change lies in the world of social and political action. In a nation seeking to define its relationship with faith and modernity, the legacy of the war is the crux of interpretation of identity. Sohail’s retreat into the world of the Book is coexistent with the dictator’s use of religion in the public sphere. The Muktijoddha who is feted by Mujib himself withdraws from politics but not before he tells Maya ahead of burning his books that no good seems to have come out of it. Sohail is not like the cynical partying circuit of their old friends that Maya encounters on their return. He looks for a higher’ meaning, a form of being he had barely glimpsed when he went to war and fought for liberation but which turned him into a petty murderer. Religion now makes him impervious to his son’s
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childhood; Sohail withdraws from any fatherly intimacy with Zaid and finally banishes him to a madrassa that shall tame the voices in his head. His child dies and it is obvious that the only way Sohail can survive this is by interpreting it as God’s will.
We need to place the conflict between Maya and Sohail in the context of the themes discussed so far. Emanating from two apparently divergent modes of claiming the legacy of the war of 1971 and definitions of identity, Rehana accuses Maya of having pushed her brother away. For the mother, it need not have turned out in the way that it has if she had listened to him and acknowledged the validity of what he had to say, if she had given him her understanding, [98] It is an innocuous accusation that is deeply political. It amounts to saying that the spectre Islamic radicalization in society needs a broader framework of understanding, Is visibility of religion in the public sphere necessarily obscurantist? (My reading is that the author is ambivalent in her response to this problem.) Anam, by foregrounding Sohail’s deep need of the Book that speaks to his memories of violence and rape by offering him the possibility of a better life, appears to argue for a personal relationship with Islam/religion. At the same time his attachment to an elderly cleric, as a father figure after the war, is a response to trauma. This aspiration sustains him in his deep pessimism, fed no doubt by the state Bangladesh found itself in after the war, with more killings-Mujib, Tajuddin, Khaled Mosharraf all dead-Zia’s rule followed by Ershad’s, the political use of religion to contend with the narrative of the Awami League, and the fear of the hegemony of secular’ India. Anam places global discourses on Islamic identity in the context of the war of liberation of 1971 (unlike Pakistan, unlike India, and thus seeking to negotiate its likeness to a stable story to which Sohail’s Tabligh-i-Jamaat is an answer). The suggestion that it is the modern, non-religious, rational Maya (is she a reflection of Western secularism?) who may take on the dictator, deliver babies in regressive villages and make a bid alone to save her nephew from the hellish madrassa, who loves her brother yet cannot understand his needs is interesting. Allegorically, Anam at one level seems to be arguing for a dialogue with those who believe pan Islamism can deliver peace and those who shudder at the political manifestations of that religious uniformity. Anam envisages a movement away from dogmatic secularism, and when in the court following Zaid’s death Sohail tells her, ‘Only God can choose the hour of a man’s death, she quietly says, ‘I believe you'[99] Maya arrives at this recognition at great personal cost, inflicting loss upon Sohail in the process.
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There is a mystique around Sohail. He appears in the novel not as an errant human but a self-assured man, delivering sermons, curing his mother of cancer, displaying forbearance when his friends humiliate him, and displaying equanimity in grief. He appears undisturbed by the dictator and Shaheed Minar no longer tugs at his heart. Anam humanizes religion in the figure of Sohail, a traumatized young man who desperately wants to do the right thing. Zaid, however, believed that his father would send him back to the abusive Huzoor in the madrassa each time he would escape from there. The punishment meted out to pregnant Rokeya who frequented his gathering (by Khadija) when the former is made to stand in the sun are forms of violence that go unrecognized in Sohail’s world. It is arguable that when met with the complexities of the world outside (that a man of God can torture and sexually abuse a child) Sohail’s religion is often inadequate. It seeks to transform individuals (immunizing them against doubt) and the seduction of absolute faith in the Book is only a reverse of Maya’s deep mistrust of it. The clash of the two (Anam schematizes) results in tragedy and the expendability of lives in the face of larger conflict continues. It is at this stage-for we have looked at memorialization as a manifestation of competing visions (covered by Sufia M. Uddin) of identity and political community as the discourse where history and memory merge, collide, and appear compromised–that the implication of Anam’s work becomes slightly clearer. In Noor we talked about the problem of impunity in war; studies of the Partition of 1947 also refer to what it means to become perpetrators of murder and rape (Veena Das in her studies on 1947 and 1984) and become absorbed in the political discourse of nation building. Mujib’s amnesty, the Collaborators Act of 1972 repealed after Ziaur Rahman’s ascent to power, is symptomatic of justice as a form of politics.
By anchoring the moral need of dealing with memories of violence as a crucial legacy of the Liberation War, by recognizing the ambiguity between the victim and perpetrator in war, and the powerful claim of religion on those condemned by conscience because/though they have been spared by the law (Sohail) the author also wonders if the spectre of radicalization is not itself partially a consequence of the war of 1971 and its disturbing afterlife rather than only a remnant of the days as undivided Pakistan. At the same time his attachment to an elderly cleric, as a father figure, after the war is a response to trauma. Maya, having been spared what Sohail saw and did in the war is more apt to accept the continuation of the struggle for freedom’as a political and social end. In the end what disturbs us is the image of Sohail determined to go to
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Saudi Arabia with Khadija (also the name of the Prophet’s first wife) after his mourning duties to his son are over. Sohail’s need to transcend suffering, to exorcise his guilt, is in sharp contrast to Pia’s interpretation of her past. She gives birth to her son and in the country that failed to recognize her pain (we are reminded of Anuradha in Shaheen Akhtar’s Talaash) testifies to her rape and confinement in Imam’s Gono Adalot. Maya witnesses the moment with her daughter, Zubaida. The novel closes with the lines:
And here, at her temples, and every time she closes her eyes and sees the picture of who Sohail has become, knowing that they will never go to the cinema or sit up at the table with Ammoo or share a joke or a book (there can only be One, there can only be One), her heart will break. But she recognises the wound in his history, the irreparable wound, because she has one too. His wound is her wound. Knowing this she finds she can no longer wish him different.[100]
It is a moment when as Veena Das would put it, pain has been transacted and it creates the possibility that Sohail’s pain (so long itinerant, wandering) will find a house in Maya’s body.
Sohail, by aligning himself with the monolithic comfort of his faith, is able to survive. For a guerrilla who fought in A Golden Age it is a complex choice—he believes the Book will save him from hurting or taking another man’s life; his duties to his ailing mother are discharged in the performance of the miracle, and to his son by cutting him off from the love of his family. The narrative inclusion of the curing of Rehana by the holy water, chanting men, and Sohail’s prayers enhances his aura; from taking life he becomes the giver of life. The Book has made him powerful. The miracle is a superfluous insertion and the only conceivable function it serves is to inadvertently suggest that just as the sovereign usurpation of the domain of bare life'[101] (25 March 1971) is central to the state, the power to grant life (and absolve the guilty’) has historically been a domain of any Book or religion. Anam means to posit’recognition of wounds of the war’ (whether in the form of Sohail or the war crimes trial) as the foundation of any form of just politics in Bangladesh. Maya’s sense of loss opens her to her brother’s interpretation of the world. The book’s argument (acceptance of difference, faith as a legitimate response to wounds of history) is unexceptionable. In the backdrop of the discourses of the processes of memorialization, the argument appears to be a reinterpretation of the role of faith in an Islamic nation. Significantly,
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before the place of religion in Pakistan post 1947 could be conceived and interpreted, Bangladesh came into being having witnessed the oppressive racist Islam of the ruling military elite. Mujib’s secularism was a response to the experience of twenty-five years of living in Pakistan and a political concession to the sizeable community of Hindu minority. In independent Bangladesh, the collaborators became the index of radical Islam, inimical to the linguistic and cultural history of Bengalis. The empowerment of ‘war criminals’ by military dictators spawned a fear that the political use of religion would diminish the legitimacy of the war when so much was lost. Anam appears to be suggesting that at some point this fear became the dread of visible’ Islam. To accept what you cannot comprehend (if that is the solution Anam proposes) is a difficult knowledge to apply when it comes to the place of religion/faith in the public sphere. To believe that a religion that addresses itself to pain and victimhood has no implications beyond the personal is to refuse to learn lessons from the Israeli state’s appropriation of the legacy of Auschwitz, the signs of which Hannah Arendt so clearly anticipated in her work on trial of Eichmann in Ben Gurion’s Israel in 1961. As Omer Bartov writes in his work, the Holocaust has been central to the fashioning of its identity; it anchors itself in relation to an’apocalyptic vision’ of the past and legitimizes itself in its promise to ‘thwart apocalypse in the future:[102] Conversely, to treat with suspicion the need for healing or to subsume the nuances of violence in an expression such as it is war, these things happen, and then to refuse to address the trauma of morally ambiguous acts in war is to cede to absolutist claims of religion. In Mrs Dalloway Septimus, another victim of shell shock’as Maya would put it, jumps out of the window and kills himself. We hear Sohail in him when Septimus says: ‘For now that it was all over, truce signed and the dead buried, he had especially in the evenings these thunderclaps of fear. He could not feel:[103] Septimus wants to tell all, say that he has killed but all that is required of him is that he discovers a sense of proportion. Woolf critiques the society that sends its sons to war but consigns their memories to the William Bradshaws of the world. In a literature given to celebrate the exploits of the guerrillas and their mythical courage, Tahmima Anam introduces Sohail as the symbol of the anomie of post-war Bangladesh, a symbol that must be interpreted. Maya knows she and her brother will never share a book or a joke again; war has ended familiarity. The tragic death of Zaid is a death without a witness, under water. Subsequently, Sohail’s forgiveness, Pia’s testimony, and Maya’s belated recognition of her brother’s pain and weakness are in the nature of a narrative closure.
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In The Good Muslim the meaning of Maya’s realization that she no longer wishes Sohail different provides a resolution; it is unclear how it would translate in the language of society and politics. Anam’s work would foster (intuitive) understanding without dialogue. If the recognition that religion stems from an essential human need and might help in healing wounds of war is being sought, it simplifies the problem. Sohail’s depoliticization of his faith may be urgent but may not speak to war victims such as raped women whose invisibility and depoliticization has often been imposed on them. That his guilt’ may leave him unable to desire a more just political order of things may be read as a deep pessimism. It would be in place to remember that Sohail’s book-burning in 1977 happens after Mujib’s assassination; it is also the year of Zia’s ascent. And when he leaves for Saudi Arabia in 1985 General Ershad is president. This is also the legacy of the ‘war of liberation! Sohail might not have been alive but for the very human love that a man (the major who was running the guerrilla campaign in A Golden Age) had felt for his mother in 1971 and considered this a greater debt than the one to his nation. The meaning of this act in the fever of war might have a poetic force similar to that of the Book,
To conclude it may be submitted that the internal tensions in texts whether they are testimonial or ‘literary, are analogues to other processes of memorialization of the war in/as nationalist narratives. Taking a cue from Jahanara Imam, in the same way that her text is a complex meditation on the war and its memories and not easily absorbable into hyper-nationalist discourses, we have implied/emphasized in our analysis the work of interpretation undertaken by characters when conflict and war transform the everydayness of existence. Testimonies of raped women highlight the ways in which their trauma was sought to be subsumed in a language of martyrdom. Firdausi Priyobhashini and some of the authors of fiction who appear in this book come across as the inassimilable meaning of war. Finally, as our discussion of fiction puts forward, memories of wanton cruelty and sexual violence appear inextricable from stories of heroism and sacrifice cast in the mould of human suffering in both just and unjust war.
O.V. Vijayan and Tahmima Anam explore, as both actor and witness, the role of religion/spirituality in placing in context the suffering of war. In the former it attains the form of a meditation on life, death, and the design of the universe. Its crux is the futility of war and spirituality becomes a mode of acceptance of suffering. Vijayan’s work shares with Anam the aspect of depoliticization of the protagonist as a critique of
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the values of war. In Anam’s work religion appears both as therapy and a response to the moral space created by just war and abdicated by postwar politics. To place Sohail and Pia in the context of the discourses emerging out of the proceedings and judgements of the War Crimes Tribunal would be to admit that the attribution of complicity and guilt emanating from wartime acts is a complex and entangled process. To that extent 1971, even with the trials and convictions in the context of memories and experiences of the war, is far from over. In the fiction from Pakistan, we become aware of the inseparability of the perpetrator and the victim. As more and more authors revisit 1971, the silence around the event/defeat is being summoned from the deep unwieldy corners of the nationalist imagination. The war of 1971 continues to generate narratives that in questioning the received ideas of history undercut the status of the war of liberation as an uncritical component in Bangladeshi nationalism or a straightforward rallying point for belligerence against India in Pakistan. As for India, the political and ethical costs of the war yet continue to haunt the establishment in various forms.
Notes and References
1. Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 2.
2. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (UK:
Picador, 1999).
3. Langer, in this work, looks at the work of writers such as Thomas Mann,
Solzhenitsyn, and others to explore death by atrocity, a constituent of modern life, which lacks the redeeming features of tragedy. Mass deaths by cruelty numb us to loss, and as it becomes a regular feature of our experience, death itself needs to be reconceptualized in the context of our identity as human beings. (Lawrence L. Langer, The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978].)
4. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998).
5. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998)
6. Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, p. 30.
7. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 2007 (1989]).
8. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, translated by Danielle Heller
Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
9. Jessica Murray, ‘Tremblings in the Distinction Between Fiction and
Testimony, Postcolonial Text 4, no. 2 (2008): 1-19.
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10. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
11. Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War
(Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2011).
12. Bose, Dead Reckoning, p. 12.
13. Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangladesh (Delhi: Vikas Publications,(1971).
14. Bose, Dead Reckoning, p. 123.
15. Bose, Dead Reckoning, p. 143.
16. Bose, Dead Reckoning, p. 163.
17. Bose, Dead Reckoning, p. 183.
18. ‘Under Siege, Mahmoud Darwish, available at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/under-siegel.
19. After the formation of Pakistan riots between Hindus and the majority
Muslims had broken out occasionally, the one in 1950 being the most violent. Moreover, there were ethnic clashes between the Bengalis and “Biharis’ too in the east. However, the cogency of suggesting that 25 March 1971, when spectacular violence was unleashed against citizens (now rechristened miscreants) was when the currency of Pakistan as a haven for Muslims of the subcontinent was demonstrably lost is clear.
20. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary
(California: University of California Press, 2007).
21. Das, Life and Words, p. 40.
22. Muhammad Umar Memon, ‘Pakistani Urdu Creative Writing on National
Disintegration: The Case of Bangladesh, The Journal of Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (1983): 105–27, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2054619, last accessed on 12 February 2017
23. Memon, Pakistani Urdu Creative Writing’: 117.
24. Intizar Husain,”Sorrow City, in his Stories, translated by Moazzam Sheikh
(New Delhi: Katha, 2004), pp. 193–210.
25. Intizar Husain, ‘Prisoner(s); in The Seventh Door and Other Stories, edited
by Muhammad Umar Memon (Lynne Rienner, 1998), pp. 207-12.
26. Hijrat is translated as ‘migration’ or ‘exodus’ and has deep spiritual signifi
cance in Islam since it refers to the journey of Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in the seventh century. It also signifies a journey to a higher state of being from a lower state.
27. Intizar Husain, Basti, translated by Frances W. Pritchett (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 69.
28. Husain, Basti, 57.
29. Alok Bhalla, Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
30. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved.
31. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.
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32. Husain, Basti, p. 127.
33. Zakir tells Irfan: ‘I want to write her a letter!
‘Now?’ Irfan stared into his face. ‘Yes now Now when’-there was no telling what Irfan had wanted to say … ‘Yes now when—'(Husain, Basti, p. 204).
34. Muntasir Mamun, Shei Shob Pakistani (Dhaka: The University Press
Limited, 2009 (1999]).
35. See for example, ‘No tears for Dhaka’ by Khalid Hasan, available at
http://www.thehoot.org/media-watch/media-practice/no-tears-for dhaka-1166.
36. Husain, ‘Prisoner(s)’, p. 207.
37. Clifton R. Spargo, and Robert Ehrenreich, eds, After Representation? The
Holocaust Literature and Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2010).
38. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer (New York: Bantam
Classics, 1982).
39. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 16.
40. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Danielle Heller Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
41. Muhammad Umar Memon and Intizar Husain, ‘The Lost Ones, Journal of
South Asian Literature 18, no. 2, The Writings of Intizar Husain (Summer,
Fall 1983): 121-132, 128.
42. Husain, ‘Sorrow City’, p. 199.
43. Husain, ‘Sorrow City’, p. 200.
44. Husain, A Letter from India, p. 197.
45. Husain, ‘A Letter from India, p. 198.
46. The second man, fleeing from the woman (he cannot utter what he has
done to the girl) also mentions the windows which were shut and eyes stealthily peeping now and then as he made his way through the strange land. This time again the mass of the uprooted are not identified. The images of rape, murder, terrorized people, and refugees that literature from Bangladesh etches sharply and disturbingly here appear as ambiguous signifiers intended to refer to a reality that cannot be named, not only because it is unbearable but also because the author believes it is the moral import of the war and separation that is the crux of experiences of 1971. While’Sorrow City’ begins with certain physical detailing which allows the reader to conjure an image, it gradually blurs categories, finally becoming a dialogue of those who have lost their humanity.
47. We will recall a similar instance in “Those Lost Ones’ where the question of
testimony is raised.
48. One such example was the killings on 14 December 1971, in Rayerbazar
before the war ended.
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49. Hussain, ‘Sorrow City’, p. 200.
50. Hussain, ‘Sorrow City’, p. 204.
51. Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh
(New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2013).
52. Hussain, ‘Prisoner(s), p. 212.
53. Husain, Stories, p. 48.
54. Kamila Shamsie, Kartography (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 189.
55. Shamsie, Kartography, p. 231.
56. Shamsie, Kartography, p. 232.
57. Shamsie tries to soften the impact by also establishing that it is Yasmin
that Zafar had been initially attracted to but her misplaced coquetry made him settle for Maheen. Similarly, to make reconciliation a possibility, she also adds another twist of Ali being always helplessly in love with Maheen. This is where the plot appears a little forced and the tangential references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream seem to foretell that in the end the lovers, Karim and Raheen, shall meet.
58. Shamsie, Kartography, p. 127.
59. Shamsie, Kartography, p. 312.
60. Shamsie, Kartography, p. 312.
61. Shamsie, Kartography, p. 313.
62. Yasmin Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering
1971 (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2011), p. 266.
63. Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 268.
64. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 23.
65. Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 284.
66. Unless we are impressed when Anisul Hoque informs us in the postscript
to his revised edition of Maa that the man who had purportedly betrayed Azad and friends had died after a paralytic attack, we are in serious discomfiture.
67. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas dwells on the experience of the human face
in the context of violence and war. To construct the other as a mere body without a face, an enemy who is unlike us, the rejection of the human as human is our encounter with the inhuman. Unable to bear the otherness of the other, the ethical demand of her face, he uses the tools of history and politics to create a space for his own act of destroying the other. (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans
lated by Alphonso Lingis ([Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).)
68. Sorayya Khan, Noor (North Carolina: The Publishing Laboratory, 2006).
69. Khan, Noor, p. 164.
70. Khan, Noor, p. 204.
71. Khan, Noor, p. 141.
72. Shehryar Fazli, Invitation (New Delhi: Tranquebar, 2011), p. 385.
73. Fazli, Invitation, p. 384.
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74. Fazli, Invitation, p. 362.
75. Fazli, Invitation, pp. 362-3.
76. Fazli, Invitation, p. 372.
77. O.V. Vijayan, The Infinity of Grace, translated by Ramesh Menon and O.V.
Vijayan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1996).
78. On 20 December 1971, TIME magazine also reported the Pakistani
army’s insistence that it was winning.
79. Graham Greene’s anti-war The Quiet American (1956) comes to mind.
Fowler, the British journalist in this novel, captures the war through relationships he forms with strangers in the war zone. One of the first novels to come out of the American involvement in Vietnam, through the life and death of Pyle he tells us a story of complicity, the often righteous beliefs that keep a war going. In Vijayan the war is impersonal; Kunjunni, the reporter, witnesses refugees, raped women, hungry children, and mobs attacking a Razakar after the war is over before a grenade injures him. His struggle is personal and the war becomes a terrible moment of revelation; Greene’s characters inch ahead gradually, characters in a larger plot and yet the wheels that move the narrative/war forward; any moral is, therefore, meant as an aside. Vijayan etches spectacular destruction. In Greene, collusion is inevitable in Vietnam. In Vijayan, war helps break the circle of suffering in a religious transference of meaning.
80. This is not because I think that the attempt to break the circle of suffering
by Kunjunni is not interesting. He loses his brother to the Naxalite movement in Kerala, his friend’s young son is to be hanged, for as the war raged, the Indian state was engaged in a bloody battle with leftist insurgency’ in West Bengal. His parents are dead, he has separated from his wife. Before his daughter dies, he discovers that she is someone else’s daughter. And when he had entered Bangladesh and was walking through a village in search of someone, a grenade is hurled at him. He remains unconscious for days at end and when he wakes up he receives the final pain–the news of his daughter’s illness and impending death.
81. Qurratulain Hyder, Fireflies in the Mist (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,
1994).
82. Vijayan, The Infinity of Grace, p. 11.
83. Vijayan, The Infinity of Grace, p. 62.
84. Vijayan, The Infinity of Grace, p. 115.
85. This transformational move reminds us of Yasmin Saikia’s work on the
war of Bangladesh where she cites the example of two Pakistani soldiers, Colonel Ali and Mohammad, who by recognizing their inhumanity recover their insaniyat! She refers to this religio-cultural concept as the reconvened language of humanity’ (Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 263) and talks of the need to acknowledge the immense personal struggle involved in such an interpretive move where lessons are learnt from
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experience and sought to be applied. In this chapter we will have occasion
to discuss this in greater detail.
86. Vijayan, The Infinity of Grace, pp. 140-1.
87. Vijayan, The Infinity of Grace, p. 183.
88. Nasir Uddin Yusuf, Ghum Nei (Dhaka: Janantik Press, 2010 (1990]).
89. Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 148.
90. Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age (London: John Murray, 2007).
91. Anam, A Golden Age, p. 47.
92. Anam, A Golden Age, p. 47.
93. Here I differ with Cara Cilano who suggests that the portrayal of Rehana
in Anam’s book remains within patriarchal norms of representation of the heroic mother. As I have argued elsewhere, in the context of Bangladesh of 1971, to judge complicity in terms of choices made by women would require a different paradigm of understanding than in the Western context. See my review of her work in ‘National Identities in Pakistan: The 1971 War in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction’, Social Change 42, no. 4 (SAGE Publications, 2013).
94. Anam, A Golden Age, p. 274.
95. Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim (New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton,
(2011), p. 129.
96. We have mentioned the role of religion in consoling the bereaved and
combatants during the Great War in Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of
Mourning both during and after the war.
97. Anam, The Good Muslim, p. 284.
98. She realizes what it might have meant to Sohail when Joy tells her that
having lost his brother and father to the war he was so angry all the time that he would surely have murdered any ‘Bihari’ or Pakistani who crossed
his path. His mother then sent him to America to save him.
99. Anam, The Good Muslim, p. 288.
100. Anam, The Good Muslim, p. 293.
101. Agamben, Homo Sacer.
102. Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction.
103. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Bantam Books).
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Postscript
Can the argument for a better understanding of our histories and
each other necessarily lead to a more responsible governance
that does not flaunt the trauma of citizens to anoint its power with moral authority? This anxiety is at the heart of this work, one that has not left me even as the book draws to a formal conclusion. Can a better view of the contexts operating in 1971-narratives of human suffering and trauma-help us address the conflicts in the subcontinent?
In the recent exchange of 162 enclaves by the Indian and Bangladeshi governments, the border dispute was deemed to have been solved by the national press in India. In Assam, a place I grew up in, there has been a sharp and angry reaction in the public sphere about the surrender of its territory to a country that a large section of Assamese people holds responsible for illegal infiltration, the fear of outsiders outnumbering the natives, and insurgency troubles. The fears of the indigenous population partially go back to the war of 1971 when millions of refugees crossed the border into the eastern part of India. Its belated and insidious consequences materialized in the infamous massacre in February 1983 in
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Nellie, Assam, where an estimated 3,000-4,000 people were killed, with Bengali Muslims among the victims. While migration from East Bengal to Assam had been a pre-1947 colonial historical reality, with the drawing of national borders and the change in dynamics after an India-supported Muktijuddho, the question of repatriation of refugees, economic migrants, or those fleeing in fear of religious persecution 1950 onwards from East Pakistan and later Bangladesh became critical to notions of identity for the native Assamese. Moreover, incompatible interpretations of immigration between the government at the centre and those who considered themselves’local people gradually led to a militant political discourse that saw the birth of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), which engaged in a violent revolt against the Indian state’ for over two decades. Incidentally, the non-implementation of the Assam Accordwas one of the major grouses on which the organization erected its critique of a stepmotherly’ state. While the public sphere in Assam generally looked upon the increasingly violent ULFA with misgiving, many were drawn to sympathize with the boys since for them the immigration problem constituted the moral fibre of their resistance.
It is important to study violence and to know it ethically and personally to develop a human language for reconciliation between victims and perpetrators-women and men as well as the countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In her work on the war of 1971, Yasmin Saikia refers to her early attitude to Bangladeshis having been formed in the crucible of the dominant political discourse in Assam, where she speaks of merely internalizing the fear that these outsiders’ would lay siege to the state and the natives would be turned out of their houses one fine morning. It was only when she began her research into Assamese history that she glimpsed the recurring strains in claims of ethnicity to construct a spurious other harbouring mala fide intent. She had to unlearn her prejudices and question her position based on her research and a few other personal experiences: her uprooted domestic worker in Assam who had crossed the border over to India during the war fleeing from possible sexual violence like several other women and never returned fearing debilitating poverty; her father’s heady youthful days in Dhaka University; and finally the woman Fatima she meets in ‘Bihari’-dominated Mirpur whose entire family had been wiped out in 1971 and when she herself had been brutally attacked. This brings her to emphasize on the connotations of
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the term ‘insaniyat’ to explain what was lost when violence was perpetrated in the name of the state and the nation. It is possible, she feels, to recover this sense of being human’ if the perpetrator confronts his guilt and seeks forgiveness. In such a discourse of healing, Yasmin Saikia finds the possibility of a transformative politics. This is where we need to address an aspect of her work. Saikia moves from a general overview of problems of writing a history of 1971 to women’s memories of war and sexual violence. She inserts herself generously, trying to etch for us both the trauma of the victim and its effect on her. In the final section, she moves on to perpetrators’ memories and brings to fruition her conceptualization of insaniyat. The structure of this work, then, appears to be a stocktaking of the effects of the loss of ‘humanity’ on women followed by the impact of this loss, if any, on the men who participated in the violence. The attempt here, however, has not charted a similar trajectory. Saikia theorizes the violence of 1971 and puts forwards a panacea, albeit self-consciously. It is very hard to see how this helps her to re-evaluate her position as a researcher from Assam who is implicated in its politics, which she mentions in the introductory section. Also, the method of fostering a dialogue between individual perpetrators and their victims through their governments, which she suggests, seems at this juncture a difficult project, to say the least. Though the prescription of ‘reconciliation cannot be faulted and Saikia’s need to provide a ‘solution’ is understandable, one is left with the impression that ‘repentance’ and ‘forgiveness’ in the context of 1971 are not terms that would persuade victims forsaken by their own states and, often, societies. As for perpetrators, the two or three tales of guilt that Saikia unearths hold interesting implications but the measure of impunity vis-à-vis crimes that 1971 condoned can only engender a very feeble hope of justice, a pre-requisite for any ‘forgiveness that is not forced or expeditious, as Amery and Agamben remind us. Finally, even as she tries to take stock of testimonies from Bengalis, ‘Biharis, and Pakistani soldiers, she is unable to offer a convincing conceptualization of her own position. Thus, she fails to cover another tributary of 1971 leading to Assam, an expectation raised in the reader due to her constant self-referencing.
It is true that literature and films often provide modes and narratives which assist in imagining ethical spaces of coexistence, as Priya Kumar argues in the context of the Partition of 1947. With the former, its relevance in semi-literate postcolonial South Asia cannot be exaggerated. However, as this book shall hopefully clinch, testimonial and ‘literary’ narratives draw attention to the politics of memorialization in
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Bangladesh and by extension to the difficulty of reducing 1971 to a necessary event in the service of any evolutionary thesis of Bengali Muslim nationalism-a national narrative of hurt pride and backstabbing in Pakistan, or a tale of victory for India. While the movement against oppression in pre-war Pakistan did combine elements characteristic of a modern, progressive democracy, the memories’ of war and its aftermath will bear out the spectacle of its failure.
One may now safely argue that literature about the war is, inter alia, a repository of the unfinished task of memorialization in Bangladesh and Pakistan and its exclusionary nature; in addition it helps us with its ethical traces to address unprecedented suffering, to make the recognition/ redressal of trauma appear germane to any politics of inclusive democracy. As argued earlier, the war crimes trials currently being undertaken, the consequent eruption of violence and the recent spectres of radicalization of youth, the murder of bloggers, Hindus, Christians, and secular Muslims across Bangladesh, the imperilled everyday living in Pakistan, its disturbing investment in Kashmir and Afghanistan to say the least, point us to unresolved trauma, and the legitimizing of transnational hate industries. Even as I write this postscript, seventeen jawans (soldiers) have been killed in Kashmir’s Uri sector on the same day that a twelveyear-old died of pellet injuries inflicted by the Indian army in the Valley.
While the state, and often people, creates their own pecking order of suffering, recognizing the suffering of one while denying recognition to the pain of another, the texts that we have considered so far surely demonstrate the futility of such a politics. By recording the ethical traces’ of historical events such as the war of 1971, Ranabir Samaddar argues in an essay entitled ‘History and the Historical Moment,
Literature poses an intractable problem in writing a definitive history of 1971 because they are not just stories, biographic accounts, dramas and novels. These literary writings carry ethical traces. They often become irrespective of the wishes of the authors the ethical mark, by which 1971 is judged.
It is this discomfort with partisan histories that is the spring of this book.
Notes and References
1. The Assam Accord was a memorandum of understanding signed between
the representatives of the Assam Movement against ‘foreigners and the Government of India. One of the provisions of this was the Illegal
316
Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, the well-known IM(DT) Act, that has been the bugbear of Assam politics for a long time. This Act under the Assam Accord prescribed cut-off dates for different categories of illegal migrants, an issue which had been particularly made complex due to the large-scale migration from East Pakistan during the war of 1971. This act provides for the deportation of migrants who have been determined as illegal vis-à-vis the cut-off dates.
2. Sanjib Baruah, India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007 (1999]).
3. Baruah, India against Itself, p. xv.
4. Jean Amery, At the Minds Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz
and Its Realities, translated by Sidney Rosenfield and Stella P. Rosenfield (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, translated by Danielle Heller Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
5. Ranabir Samaddar,’History and the Historical Moment, in his Paradoxes
of Nationalist Time: Political Essays on Bangladesh (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2002), p. 4.
317
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