Throughout 1971, the atrocities committed by the Pakistani military forces during the national liberation war of Bangladesh drew widespread international media attention. But after the end of the war, the media's attention turned to other troubled spots and the story of the Bangladesh genocide faded from international public memory.
In the four decades following the birth of Bangladesh, only a few academic publications have looked at the national liberation war. Yasmin Saikia's pioneering research, documenting the experiences of women during the nine-month war, is a bold attempt to recover people's history. Her goal, as she herself explains, is to tell the story of the war as a human event that was marked by a “collective loss of humanity” (p. xi). The focus of her study is gender violence, and she explores its impacts on the victims as well as the perpetrators. She collected oral testimonies of women in Bangladesh and of military personnel in Pakistan.
Undertaking this research, more than a quarter-century after the event, was a daunting task. Though after the war the Bangladesh government claimed that more than 200,000 women had been raped and bestowed on them the title of birangana (war heroine), no effort was made to record and preserve their testimonies because it was believed that silence and anonymity would help these women avoid social stigma. From the mid-1990s on, several initiatives were undertaken in Bangladesh to make women's roles in the liberation war more visible, but these efforts reached mainly an audience within Bangladesh. A major contribution of Saikia's study is its systematic presentation of evidence documenting the massive violence against women in Bangladesh to a global audience. Another contribution is its exploration of multi-level violence committed by different groups of men against different groups of women. Most narratives of 1971 focus on the Pakistani military's violence against the Bengalis. Saikia sheds light on another group of victims, non-Bengali women, who suffered at the hands of Bengalis during 1971.
Saikia chooses to tell the Bangladesh story in the wider context of the discourse on violence. The book is organized in three parts. The first part provides a rich discussion of theoretical and methodological issues of writing people's history and writing about violence. This helps the readers to look at the Bangladesh case in a comparative perspective. The second part of the book presents women's experiences from multiple dimensions, not simply as passive victims of violence but also in other proactive roles, as caregivers as well as soldiers. Here women speak in their own voice. Ten testimonies are included, five of victims of sexual violence, three of caregivers, and two of women who took arms training. The testimonies are carefully selected to show the wide geographical spread of the atrocities covering all regions of Bangladesh. They illustrate different sites of violence, different groups of victims and perpetrators, and different forms of service performed by women during and in the aftermath of war. A common thread in all the narratives is the acute undervaluation of women, who always faced gendered discrimination. Their experiences and contributions were largely ignored, and they remained invisible in recorded history. Women were not recognized as mukhti joddha (freedom fighters). The third and final part of the book, which contains testimonies of Pakistani military personnel, adds an innovative dimension to the account. Here the soldiers attempt to come to terms with their acts of violence. The testimonies present a mixed picture. Some are still unrepentant, while some others are now willing to acknowledge their role in committing the atrocities and losing their humanity.
No doubt some of Saikia's arguments and perspectives will be contested by readers. For example, she is not sure whether the atrocities in Bangladesh can be termed as genocide. But other scholars have classified Bangladesh as a case of genocide because specific groups, such as Hindus, were targeted as a group for elimination. Her overarching perspective of rape survivors being invariably discarded by their families is also contestable. Other published testimonies include narratives of women who were supported by husbands and mothers-in-law after their rape.Footnote 6 Inclusion of one such testimony would have illustrated the diversity of the social situation and would have fitted well with Saikia's worldview of social tolerance.
There are a few minor irritants. First, there are repetitions; in particular the introduction to the testimonies and the testimonies themselves are often repetitious. Second, there are some factual errors. For example, abortion services to rape survivors were not forced by the government. Rather the government had to provide these services to meet demand on an emergency basis. Finally, some well-known names and places are not correctly recorded. For example, it was Justice K. M. Sobhan and not Rehman Sobhan (an economist and a member of the Planning Commission) who headed the Women's Rehabilitation Centre. These factual errors should be corrected in the second edition.
Notwithstanding these contestations, Saikia's nuanced account of multilevel violence committed by multiple actors during 1971 in Bangladesh deserves a wide readership. South Asianists as well as non-South Asianists interested in studies of violence and gender will find the book illuminating. The oral testimonies, the detailed introduction to the testimonies, and constant references to theoretical and comparative literature make the book very suitable for use as course material in colleges and universities.
