Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971

by Yasmin Saikia

Overview

Fought between India and what was then East and West Pakistan, the war of 1971 led to the creation of Bangladesh, where it is remembered as the War of Liberation. For India, the war represents a triumphant settling of scores with Pakistan. If the war is acknowledged in Pakistan, it is cast as an act of betrayal by the Bengalis. None of these nationalist histories convey the human cost of the war. Pakistani and Indian soldiers and Bengali militiamen raped and tortured women on a mass scale. In Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, survivors tell their stories, revealing the power of speaking that deemed unspeakable. They talk of victimization-of rape, loss of status and citizenship, and the "war babies" born after 1971. The women also speak as agents of change, as social workers, caregivers, and wartime fighters. In the conclusion, men who terrorized women during the war recollect their wartime brutality and their postwar efforts to achieve a sense of humanity. Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh sheds new light on the relationship among nation, history, and gender in postcolonial South Asia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822350385
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/10/2011
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Yasmin Saikia is the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies and Professor of History at Arizona State University. She is the author of Fragmented Memories: Struggling to Be Tai-Ahom in India, also published by Duke University Press.

Read an Excerpt

WOMEN, WAR, AND THE MAKING OF BANGLADESH

Remembering 1971

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By YASMIN SAIKIA

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 YASMIN SAIKIA
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5038-5

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Chapter One

THE TOLD AND UNTOLD STORIES OF 1971

HISTORY AND MEMORY

In 1971 multiple wars broke out in East Pakistan (later known as Bangladesh): one was a civil war fought between East and West Pakistan; another was an international war fought between India and Pakistan; a third war erupted between the Bengalis and Urdu-speaking groups, the so-called Biharis; and finally, a rampant gender war broke out against vulnerable women within East Pakistan. Men representing the armies of Pakistan and India, as well as the Mukti Bahini (a Bengali militia created with Indian support) and pro-Pakistani Bengali and Bihari civilians who volunteered in the paramilitary forces of Al-Badr and Al-Shams, raped, looted, killed, and terrorized noncombatants in East Pakistan. At the end of the civil war the Pakistan government lost legitimacy in its eastern province; the international war resulted in the partitioning of Pakistan and the creation of an independent nation-state of Bangladesh; the ethnic war transformed the Biharis from citizens into stateless refugees; and the gender violence destroyed the very fabric of society, creating multiple marginal communities of absent subjects in postliberated Bangladesh.

Today the war of 1971 is remembered in various ways in history books in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. In Bangladesh it is celebrated as the War of Liberation from Pakistan, and it is certainly the most important event in the history of Bangladesh. The war ended West Pakistan's "colonialism" in the east, and Bangladesh came into being. In Indian history, 1971 is enshrined as the Indo-Pak conflict, and India's triumphant success is viewed as a settling of scores for the partition of 1947 and the founding of Pakistan. In Pakistan there were many attempts to forget the events of 1971, and as a result, today very few people remember that East Pakistan was once an integral part of a united Pakistan. The war is generally viewed as an act of "betrayal" by the Bengalis. The tendency of national histories in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan is to partition the memories of 1971, allowing for blame to be relegated to the Other; nearly four decades later the binary memories of "us" as good versus the Other as evil produces simplistic narratives without addressing the complexities of the conditions and circumstances that produced horrific outcomes in the war and the impact of violence and terror on people's lives.

The disproportionate allocation of resources in favor of West Pakistan; the political ambition of the West Pakistani elite; the rabid demands of political Islam in the public sphere accompanied by further marginalization of minority communities, such as the Hindus in East Pakistan; the ethnic tensions between the Bengalis and the Punjabis; and the interference and support of India in motivating the Bengalis to secede from Pakistan all lie at the heart of the clashes leading to the outbreak of war. The violence did not, however, remain confined to confrontations between armed groups of men. The violence harmed and destroyed unarmed, unresisting civilians of all ages, particularly women, who had done no injury to their aggressors. Ultimately the war of 1971 was not simply a war that men fought; it was a crime against vulnerable groups of the elderly, women, and children.

By using a "multi-sited" ethnographic research methodology that combines oral history with archival, literary, and visual materials and keeping in mind that the diverse memories of 1971 produce polyversal narratives, I explore an inner history of the war that is not in circulation in the public sphere. The forgotten, hidden memories belong to women who were terrorized, brutally sexualized, and marginalized in the war. Their stories provide a human voice that illuminates the experiences of the majority who were not directly involved in the war, yet became the site on which violence and power were inscribed. The disengagement with women's trauma in the existing official histories creates a yawning gap that makes 1971 almost impossible to understand. What is submerged in this official history is also forgotten in the public collective memory, and the awareness of the violent past is lost. In turn, a peculiarly skewed, officially backed representation of the war as a nationalistic life-and-death struggle (between the Bengalis and the Pakistanis) is produced both in the site of history and public accounts. An official narrative is constructed that focuses on the events and actions happening at an external level. Therefore, combat operations, tactics, strategies, leaders, and campaigns are privileged and become the stuff of memory and history.

As a South Asian person I understand the conflicting passions in the subcontinent regarding gendered memory and the public uneasiness with such a project as this one. Recalling this hidden and forgotten past unearths complexities that are moral, political, social, religious, and psychological. As such, on the one hand there is a need to remember, and, on the other hand, there is the desire to forget the episodes of violence in the war. The exploration promises an exciting possibility to access history and the actors who made it. Simultaneously, it is frightening because the investigation will reveal the story of our times and that of our parents. We do not want to ask an entire generation to bear witness to the activities and crimes of a "minority" (Arendt 194). More so, perhaps we are afraid we may find ourselves as both victims and perpetrators. Hence, we push violence away "like someone else's history— or even, not history at all" (Pandey 2001, 6). Can we continue to live in this state of denial and exclusion? My aim is not to arrive at a transcendental truth and create a knowable, documented, archived "history" that would stand in as testimony for what happened in 1971. Instead, I offer a narrative of the hidden memories to make sense of gendered violence in the war, to understand the human cost, and to move beyond it to explore how people process violence and the lessons they learn from it. In particular I pay attention to the human voice of women and men, survivors of 1971, emerging from the abyss of violence and teaching us new lessons of humanity that are not in conflict but resonate with common themes. With the shift in focus from the external story of the war to the internal dimensions of people's memories, I highlight the internal capacity for developing an ethical memory that I hope will initiate multiple tellings of 1971, and through repetition and new probing we can grasp and understand the forgotten, as well cultivate a site for the divided people of South Asia, in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, to contemplate a different self and Other relationship.

Coming to terms with the past and voicing the memories of ordinary people, particularly noncombatants who experienced extraordinary violence from combatants during wars and conflicts, have become the most important concerns of memory projects in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It has been suggested that telling the past will enable survivors to recognize what they had experienced and create public awareness, allowing individuals and societies to move beyond the legacy of trauma. Individuals and nations are seeking survivors' memories to develop a collective spirit of bonding in the public sphere and build community and identity through belonging. A well-known example is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa that was instituted from 1996 to 1998 to examine in the public space the gross human rights abuses committed against individual victims during the apartheid regime. The hope was that all South Africans could come to terms with the past and move on. In other words, the pursuit of truth and reconciliation in this case was a search for justice and a common ground between victims and perpetrators to redeem the past and create a new beginning in South Africa.

The revisiting of violence in public accounts of victims' sufferings and perpetrators' violence was meant to create a record to enable a final closure of a traumatic period. Individual "victims" were encouraged to tell their experiences under the glare of the public media to seek restorative justice and reparations for the violence they suffered, and "perpetrators" were promised amnesty for "truth telling." The TRC's privileging of individual stories placed the location and site of traumatic history at the personal level; thus its hope for "imagining" a "new rainbow nation" based on individual reconciliation did not do enough to account for the institutional context of apartheid that organized power and enabled structural violence, which the critiques of TRC point out was its most glaring shortcoming (Bundy 2000; Mamdani 2002; Wilson 2001). The memory project for seeking justice initiated by the TRC was limited to a narrow purpose of admitting the horrific crimes committed by individuals, which may have served as a cathartic process, but the emphasis on remembering and revealing personal experiences was not enough to answer the larger questions of how a state can resort to making up laws to violate people's rights. There was no forum to speak about or bear witness to the violence of an apartheid regime.

Particularly, the TRC failed to address the location of conflict, which was everywhere, and that it was not individuals but entire communities marked on the grounds of race and ethnicity who were subjected to routine violence. Even more significant, the relative absence of women's voices throughout the "truth collection" process led to serious gaps in the collective memory and dislocated women's experiences from the historical context that produced everyday gendered violence. The hierarchy of men's truth and women's silence persisted. The pursuit of healing through forgiveness based on the public exposure of certain kinds of "truth" within the national context, which was a "political compromise" (Mamdani 2002, 33), obscured the multiple ways vulnerable constituencies of people, especially women who were not state agents or political or national actors, experienced regular violations in the apartheid state.

When the public telling of traumatic memories becomes a challenge for victims due to the intense suffering of violence, and when social, cultural, and political structures discourage the voices of victims before even a murmur develops, then a project like the TRC is not enough. Devalued survivors excluded from the moral universe of the new regime of truth and justice cannot find voice to reconcile and heal. The juridical notion of truth is not a substitute for what happened and cannot reconcile victims and perpetrators based on a selective representation of suffering. The truth that people know cannot be imposed or extracted by coercion or persuasion, and the promise of reconciliation engineered by institutional engagements is not the way out of a turbulent past.

At a certain point it becomes clear that the "new politics of truth" (Foucault 1979) have an essential lacuna: instituted truth obscures the history that produces the conditions for making victims and perpetrators. And this instituted truth and its resultant history cannot explain how victims and perpetrators experience the violence and deal with their memories. Thus, the engineered history can only bear witness to a narrow definition of the truth, and, in turn, it defines the boundaries of what is permissible, what can be spoken and consumed by an audience coached to forget the rest. The troublesome memories that produce unease and even a sense of guilt do not become part of the "truth collection," and at times the sheer power of violence is such that it can devastate survivors' ability to speak, according to Holocaust scholars (Felman 1992; Agamben 1991, 1999). What kind of memory inhabits the site of pain that has never been resolved or visited? How does forgetting and remembering enable the semblance of continuity for victims who experience gendered violence carried out with the aim of destroying their humanity? How can we integrate the voices of women who are suffering violence? These are all questions that have received amazingly little attention in memory projects such as the TRC.

The memories of the survivors of 1971 are brought to center stage not to debunk the existing histories or annul national identities that are important to the citizens of the respective countries but to confront the project of history that has forgotten and deleted what the anonymous survivors, particularly the women of Bangladesh—Bengali and Bihari, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, and others—suffered and endured. Survivors' memories are added to the existing histories and memories to offer another way of engaging with the violence of 1971 and to question the dominant constructions of official national histories. The result is the creation of a new narrative that humanizes victims and perpetrators, the people of South Asia, and reclaims a people's history. Writing a people's history of 1971, I suggest, is a way of developing a shared responsiveness for allowing transformation within the self while simultaneously acknowledging interconnectedness with others.

Retrieving survivors' memories is, of course, not an easy, straightforward process. The memories of violence are inchoate; there is nothing coherent about the violence that has left survivors asking how to tell the experiences, and this reality is at the heart of this book. The forgotten, suppressed memories of survivors are hard to grasp and fashion into a narrative because survivors are often not aware of their shared experiences of loss, and they continue to fragment their memories based on gender and class, religious, ethnic, and national divides and continue to think of their experiences as unique and exceptional. Because we lack a narrative structure to accommodate the people's history of 1971, we have to make sense of survivors' memories, both women's and men's, on our own and make it our common goal to understand the trauma of violence and dehumanization within a single frame of reference. Interrogating the restricted site of history made in the halls of power is the beginning step, as we can examine the limitations of the national history and the official memory project and see a vacant place for the forgotten memories of survivors.

By history I do not mean the past or the narrative we tell about ourselves in the light of the present. By history I mean the artifact that is the product of a systematic construction, the development of a corpus of knowledge produced in the sites of power and revised and deliberately woven into a murky mess to generate a confused collective memory about the past. History in this sense is an institutional tool and must be engaged with as a character in the national plot with strategic use.

The writing of history as official knowledge to give and create identity in South Asia developed with the entry of the British colonials and was inaugurated in the late eighteenth century by Warren Hastings, who was determined to find the ancient past of the Hindus as separate from the Muslims. Through active circulation and repetition of the divided history—Hindu and Muslim—the colonial agents (James Mill, Mounstuart Elphinstone, and Vincent Smith, to name a few early British administrators and historians) created believability about the Indian past they produced, while other forms of remembering and knowing were undermined in the official story. To assert its power, official history in South Asia since the colonial times and even now depends on people forgetting much of the lived past. We cannot afford this kind of history any longer. The different, possible narratives preserved in people's memories must be explored and acknowledged if we in South Asia are to confront what decolonization really means.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from WOMEN, WAR, AND THE MAKING OF BANGLADESH by YASMIN SAIKIA Copyright © 2011 by YASMIN SAIKIA. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xv

Glossary of Terms xix

Part I Introducing 1971

1 The Told and Untold Stories of 1971 3

2 Creating the History of 1971 34

Part II Survivors Speak

3 Victim's Memories 109

4 Women's Services 158

5 Women's War 186

Part III A New Beginning

Postscript: Lessons of Violence 215

Notes 243

References 279

Index 299

Editorial Reviews

"[H]ighly readable.... The book is written in a lucid style and the stories told by the women make for compelling reading.... [B]ecause it is a product of an eclectic research methodology that includes rich ethnographic fieldwork alongside more traditional archival sources, the book would serve as a wonderful teaching tool in graduate courses on memory, oral histories, and the making of archives."--Chitralekha Zutshi "H-Net Reviews"

"In Yasmin Saikia's groundbreaking and provocative book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, she challenges a number of cherished and inherited "truths" regarding the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971.... I commend the author for her careful analysis of militarism as a system and the cultivation of hate within it that gradually dehumanizes the Other and makes violence banal."--Elora Halim Chowdhury and Devin G. Atallah-Gutierrez "Human Rights Quarterly"

"Saikia lets ordinary people speak for themselves - and in so doing, she humanizes a story that's usually told as a struggle of nations. Together, she and her interview partners make us think anew about the possibilities for remorse, recovery, and forgiveness."--Elizabeth Heineman "New Books in Gender Studies"

"Saikia raises the rather pertinent, often forgotten, issue of women getting caught up in the cauldron of war and then, once the battlefield activities are over, being either ignored or deliberately pushed to the fringes of the societal order. Saikia's comprehension of the history of the 1971 war leaves nothing to chance.... Saikia's professionalism comes touched with empathy."--Syed Badrul Ahsan "Asian Affairs"

"Saikia's Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 makes a significant contribution to the war literature by documenting the untold stories and the unaccounted suffering of Bangladeshi women.... [P]erhaps the most significant contribution Saikia's book makes to the 1971 war literature is that it breaks the exclusive claim by Bengalis on the experience of violence during the war by documenting the experiences of both Bihari and Bengali women as well as women of other ethnic and religious backgrounds.... Saikia's book is a thought provoking read for scholars and students in the fields of Women and Gender Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and South Asian Studies."--Hannah Sholder "South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal"

"These are compelling lessons to learn and reflect on.... this book is an informative read because it lays the framework for an important historical event that hasn't received its fair share of ink. It also explains these events in the context of the suffering of its victims; their apolitical testimonies a reminder that war has no winners."--Aparajita Saha-Bubna "Warscapes"

"Yasmin Saikia's book is an important intervention in the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their voices. Saikia documents women's voices and highlights their agency and the multiplicities of their role in the conflict."-- "Chapati Mystery"

"[A]n important intervention in the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their voices." - Salman Adil Hussain, Dawn.com

From the Publisher

[H]ighly readable…. The book is written in a lucid style and the stories told by the women make for compelling reading…. [B]ecause it is a product of an eclectic research methodology that includes rich ethnographic fieldwork alongside more traditional archival sources, the book would serve as a wonderful teaching tool in graduate courses on memory, oral histories, and the making of archives.

H-Net Reviews - Chitralekha Zutshi

In Yasmin Saikia's groundbreaking and provocative book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, she challenges a number of cherished and inherited "truths" regarding the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971…. I commend the author for her careful analysis of militarism as a system and the cultivation of hate within it that gradually dehumanizes the Other and makes violence banal.

Human Rights Quarterly - Elora Halim Chowdhury and Devin G. Atallah-Gutierrez

Saikia lets ordinary people speak for themselves – and in so doing, she humanizes a story that’s usually told as a struggle of nations. Together, she and her interview partners make us think anew about the possibilities for remorse, recovery, and forgiveness.

New Books in Gender Studies - Elizabeth Heineman

Saikia’s Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 makes a significant contribution to the war literature by documenting the untold stories and the unaccounted suffering of Bangladeshi women…. [P]erhaps the most significant contribution Saikia’s book makes to the 1971 war literature is that it breaks the exclusive claim by Bengalis on the experience of violence during the war by documenting the experiences of both Bihari and Bengali women as well as women of other ethnic and religious backgrounds…. Saikia’s book is a thought provoking read for scholars and students in the fields of Women and Gender Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and South Asian Studies.

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal - Hannah Sholder

[A]n important intervention in the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their voices.

Dawn.com - Salman Adil Hussain

Yasmin Saikia’s book is an important intervention in the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their voices. Saikia documents women’s voices and highlights their agency and the multiplicities of their role in the conflict.

Chapati Mystery

These are compelling lessons to learn and reflect on…. this book is an informative read because it lays the framework for an important historical event that hasn't received its fair share of ink. It also explains these events in the context of the suffering of its victims; their apolitical testimonies a reminder that war has no winners.

Warscapes - Aparajita Saha-Bubna

Saikia raises the rather pertinent, often forgotten, issue of women getting caught up in the cauldron of war and then, once the battlefield activities are over, being either ignored or deliberately pushed to the fringes of the societal order. Saikia’s comprehension of the history of the 1971 war leaves nothing to chance…. Saikia’s professionalism comes touched with empathy.

Asian Affairs - Syed Badrul Ahsan