“I used to be under the bed for hours, even if they were sitting for two, three, four hours. My mother said you need to use the bathroom you will go there; you will not come out from under the bed, they should not see you.”Footnote 1
In 1971, multiple conflicts unfolded in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh): the international war between India and Pakistan, the military action of the Pakistani state in East Pakistan, and the violence against Biharis carried out by Bengali militants and their collaborators during the war of liberation.Footnote 2 Between late March and mid-April 1971, Haseen Durrani was one of the forty-six Bihari women and children detained in a two-bedroom apartment by the Bengali militia and their collaborators in East Pakistan. Her testimony offers a point of entry into a history that has largely remained absent from dominant narratives of 1971. This article argues that the inclusion of Bihari testimonies is essential to rethinking both the history and historiography of 1971. Here, oral testimony is not treated as illustrative evidence, but as a mode of historical production, repositioning Biharis long situated at the margins of history as active participants in the making of historical knowledge. By framing listening as a form of inquiry rather than passive reception, the article advances a methodological approach grounded in relational engagement with memory.
This article proceeds in four sections. The first constructs the historical landscape of the region and situates Biharis within the political context of East Pakistan in 1971.Footnote 3 The second focuses on methodology and ethics of data collection, offering “practiced listening” as a framing tool for approaching oral histories in historical reconstruction. The third applies this framework to the oral testimony of a 1971 Bihari survivor to examine the gendered, spatial, and temporal dimensions of memory and recall. The final section concludes that Bihari oral histories constitute a counter-memory to dominant narratives of 1971 and reflects on the role of oral testimony in constructing more inclusive archives as sites of historical knowledge production. This article is positioned as a call to action, beyond this particular case study, for collaborative alliances toward the production of archival knowledge that supports subaltern voices, affirming that such a move will not only expand the scope of historical inquiry but also contribute to post-conflict political, social, and cultural healing, paving a path toward peace in the region.
Political history of 1971 East Pakistan
The established histories within the different countries of South Asia recognize the moments of conflict in 1971 East Pakistan in differing ways. Pakistan nationalist history has largely downplayed or ignored its role in the brutalities committed in East Pakistan.Footnote 4 Confronting these events would challenge the state’s cultivated amnesia surrounding 1971, particularly the military’s rampant use of torture, rape, and indiscriminate killing against its citizens.Footnote 5 For Bangladesh today, the presence of the stateless Biharis from 1971 also complicates the national narrative. Acknowledging the experiences of non-Bengali civilians shifts the country’s self-perception from one of exclusive victimhood in pursuit of liberation to a more complex landscape of memory that also implicates perpetrators. Since Bangladesh’s creation rests on the narrative of Bengali subjugation and exploitation by West Pakistan, acknowledging the victimhood of Biharis who became “othered” in their own country unsettles this binary and challenges the coherence of the nation’s post-independence identity.Footnote 6 For India, the 1971 war is cast as retribution for the 1947 partition, a historical wound that fractured a sacred geography.Footnote 7 In this imagination, land became a sanctified territory rather than a political space, and the 1947 partition of India became framed as not a compromise but an unjust surrender of land, first to “Muslim invaders,” and later, through statecraft, to those who undermined regional sovereignty. Within such discursive constructions, the experiences of non-state actors such as the Biharis remain mostly invisible from historical retelling.Footnote 8
The war and violence of 1971 in East Pakistan cannot be understood outside the larger history of decolonization initiated by the 1947 partition of British India. Announced hastily and implemented with devastating speed, the partition produced two new nation-states: India and Pakistan, separated along religious lines, triggering one of the largest mass migrations in modern history.Footnote 9 Most of these migrations were a result of the emerging national identities that cast the demographically estimated minority populations (based primarily on religious affiliation) in both new nation-states as suspect. Today, it is estimated that 17.9 million people crossed newly drawn borders, while 3.4 million are reported lost or killed during the 1947 partition.Footnote 10 The borders themselves, officially declared after independence, concealed the scale of social disintegration, inaugurating enduring legacies of displacement, fractured identities, and unresolved trauma across the region.Footnote 11 Within this emerging postcolonial landscape, national belonging was imagined as a function of religion, territory, and state power. Communities were recast as Indian or Pakistani, majority or minority, belonging or suspect based solely on religion, often irrespective of lived histories or local affiliations.
By 1971, the limits of religion as a unifying political identity became starkly visible in East Pakistan. The Bengali struggle for independence was not premised on religious difference, it was based on political marginalization, cultural autonomy, and linguistic recognition.Footnote 12 Ethnonationalism, rather than religion, emerged as the primary axis of belonging. In this reconfigured nationalist imagination, Urdu conceptualized as a symbol of Muslim unity in the political buildup to 1947 was recast to signify domination by West Pakistan. Urdu-speaking Muslims were increasingly reimagined as cultural outsiders and political collaborators, despite sharing the 1947 partition logic of religious commonality as national identity. This shift produced a new hierarchy of inclusion and exclusion. Initially limited to Bengali Hindus as “others,” by 1969 an emergent argument also included non-Bengali Muslims as internal enemies whose presence threatened the coherence of Bengali nationalistic politics.Footnote 13
Violence against Biharis in 1971 unfolded within the broader political rupture that followed the 1970 general election and the refusal of West Pakistani political and military elites to transfer power to the winning party and candidate: the Awami League and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The crisis escalated further with the Pakistan army’s military action in East Pakistan on 25 March 1971, which sought to suppress Bengali nationalist mobilization and intensified the transition from political deadlock to military action. In the following months, the Pakistani state increasingly framed Bengali nationalism as secessionist, and Indian support for Bengali liberation deepened ethnic and political divisions. Urdu-speaking Biharis perceived as politically, militarily, and economically aligned with the Pakistani state became vulnerable to Bengali nationalist retaliation and transformed into an internal enemy within East Pakistan.Footnote 14 In the events leading to the independence of Bangladesh, violence against these groups was legitimized through this logic as necessary to securing territory, identity, and national sovereignty. The notion of “belonging” was thus transformed from a religious collective into ethnonationalism, enforced through new collective memory, militarized authority, and ethnic violence.Footnote 15
To date, the aftermath of 1971 resists closure because of both the scale of violence and the unevenness with which violence was recorded, remembered, and rendered legible. Estimates of Bihari deaths following the creation of Bangladesh vary widely: a Pakistani government document places the figure at 15,000, eyewitness accounts suggest numbers closer to 50,000, and South Asian historian Yasmin Saikia claims that the number of Bihari killed has never been accounted for.Footnote 16 These discrepancies are not merely statistical; they expose the instability of archives, historical scholarship, and hierarchies that determine what is counted and whose suffering is named. This instability becomes even more pronounced in the absence of systematic documentation of sexual violence against Bihari women. While the mass rape of Bengali women has occupied a central place in Bangladesh’s political accounts of wartime sexual violence in 1971, no comparable record exists for Bihari women.Footnote 17 Their experiences surface only through fragments of testimony and regional feminist scholarship of gendered wartime rape as silences that carry their own force.Footnote 18 The scarcity of documentation is therefore not evidence of absence, but a reflection of how certain forms of violence fall outside the moral and political imagination of the postwar archive.
In the war’s aftermath, hundreds of thousands of Biharis were rendered stateless and confined to refugee camps across Bangladesh. A 1972 situation report documented over one million Biharis in settlements across Dhaka—particularly Mirpur, Mohammadpur, and Adamjeenagar—as well as in cities including Saidpur, Rangpur, Chittagong, Khulna, and Sylhet.Footnote 19 Repatriation to Pakistan was limited and uneven, with the majority occurring in 1973–74 and sporadic transfers continuing until 1993.Footnote 20 Memory thus points to both unresolved displacement and the question of belonging itself. Widely perceived as usurpers and traitors, Biharis have often been collectively remembered as collaborators with the Pakistani army. Although some individuals, particularly politically active young men, did participate in pro-Pakistan militias and collaborationist networks (see footnote 14), their presence has often overshadowed the community’s wider experiences. The Bihari population also included women, children, the elderly, and many men with no involvement in the conflict, a large number of whom nevertheless became victims of the violence and political upheavals of 1971. Their memories therefore point to a more complex history of witnessing and suffering, one that unsettles simple divisions between collaboration and victimhood.
This tension in history can be better understood through anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s framing of how historical silences are produced. Trouillot points out that silences enter historical production at four moments: “the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”Footnote 21 He further distinguishes between two forms of silencing: erasure and banalization (or trivialization).Footnote 22 If we place the Biharis within Trouillot’s framing, we observe that silencing does not take the form of complete erasure at the level of sources, archives, or early narratives. Instead, Biharis are often acknowledged but constrained, folded into a dominant framing that reduces them primarily to collaborators or renders their suffering legible only through that association. For Biharis, the more decisive silencing occurs at the stage of “retrospective significance,” when the meaning of the war is fixed within nationalist historiographies and the complexities of lived experience are flattened into stable categories of perpetrator and victim. At this point, the everyday experiences of ordinary Biharis—including women, children, elderly, and politically uninvolved men—are largely excluded from historical recognition. Their marginalization is thus both political and historiographical, shaped by exclusion from both narratives of violence and how the history of 1971 is ultimately told.
More than five decades after Bangladesh’s independence, many Biharis continue to live in prolonged conditions of dispossession as “aliens” within the very states that shaped their fate. A persistent assumption within dominant approaches has been that citizenship alone would resolve this condition. The 2008 Bangladesh High Court ruling formally granted citizenship to Urdu-speaking Biharis, but it did not produce substantive political, social, or economic inclusion. Exclusion instead persists through bureaucratic discretion, the spatial confinement of camps, and enduring narratives of historical blame.Footnote 23 Thus, framing Biharis as merely “awaiting legalization” reduces their predicament to a bureaucratic delay and obscures the deeper rupture inflicted on their sense of self, identity, and belonging.Footnote 24 Today, approximately 250,000 Urdu-speaking Biharis remain in Bangladesh, many of whom continue to reside in designated refugee camps, while others live outside formal camp structures under conditions of limited access to legal recognition and public services.Footnote 25 A substantial number migrated to Pakistan in the decades following 1971, often through informal or assisted relocation processes. Many arrived without formal restitution for land, housing, or movable property left in Bangladesh, and without structured compensation mechanisms. In Pakistan, most Bihari migrants were primarily resettled in low-income developing urban settlements in Karachi, while others were settled in parts of interior Punjab.Footnote 26 Their incorporation into these areas took place within existing patterns of internal migration and urban expansion. Although Urdu-speaking, many Bihari communities experienced difficulties in socioeconomic integration linked to differences in regional dialects, occupational profiles, and prior displacement histories. Their settlement trajectories have therefore been shaped by uneven access to housing, employment, and public infrastructure, as well as by their positioning within broader state and municipal frameworks governing migrant populations. Thus, legal recognition of displaced communities such as the Biharis, without historical reckoning, risks assimilating populations into political orders that had already marked them as dispensable.Footnote 27
Memory as historical intervention
Literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that silences are structurally produced and hierarchically maintained.Footnote 28 Spivak’s work calls for a continued interrogation of the archive’s authority and an ongoing search for what remains obscured within the historical record. As a poststructuralist argument, the question then becomes: who is left outside of the narrative of 1971 and what tools can be applied to bring those outside the frame into the story? As such, I approach the absence of Bihari voices in dominant narratives not merely as a gap in the archive, but as a site of critical discovery. Building on Pierre Nora’s argument that memory is a living and evolving force carried by those who bear it, I turn to Bihari memory to trace a parallel history of 1971.Footnote 29 By acknowledging the dominant narratives as unstable, I approach Bihari memory as a counter-archive, deploying Spivak’s formulation of “affirmative sabotage” to intervene in the boundaries of what counts as archival evidence in the historiography of 1971.Footnote 30 I do this to unsettle the authority of the historical record and bring to light experiences that have remained outside the narrative.
The archival material for this disruption comes from the empirical data collected for the 1971 Bihari Memory Project, which I initiated while serving as Head of Research and Digital Archiving at the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, a non-profit organization based in Lahore and Karachi dedicated to preserving Pakistan’s history.Footnote 31 Between 2021–2023, the project recorded the experiences of non-Bengali Muslim populations displaced during and after the 1971 war in East Pakistan. The project archived eighty-seven oral history interviews with forty-eight participants (forty men and eight women), constituting one of the most extensive oral history collections on the Bihari experience of 1971 in East Pakistan. I currently serve as a digital archivist at Stockton University, where I am migrating, transcribing, and translating these interviews for a digital archival repository and developing a public-facing website to make the material accessible to scholars, researchers, and the broader public interested in South Asian history.
For this article, I approach Bihari memory through a method I call “practiced listening.” Practiced listening treats memory as a historical site that contains traces of the experience that produced it, not as a flawed source. Encounters with silences, unfinished sentences, broken sequences, confused timelines, and irregular geographies are approached in memory as a situated presence that reveals the pressure of trauma, displacement, and loss on recollection. By shifting these moments in memory from being weaknesses in testimony to signs of how memory has been lived, carried, and recalled over time, I understand memory not as a stable record located in the past, but as a layered, temporal practice in which past and present co-exist and reshape one another. In this sense, memory makes visible the ongoing tensions between past and present, thereby enabling an analytical movement between lived recollection and historical reconstruction. By situating a recollection within its broader historical timeline, I can begin to recognize what the words themselves struggle to articulate and what history has yet been unable to document. I assert that silences, hesitations, and absences in memory often signal experiences that resist documented narration. These gaps are not empty; they carry meaning. These silences should be approached as clues rather than errors. When read alongside the historical conditions in which the memory was formed, silences have the capacity to reveal layers of experience that remain unspoken but are nevertheless present. Practiced listening, therefore, allows memory to contribute to the reconstruction of history not despite its fractures but through them. With this framing of memory and researcher, I situate Haseen Durrani’s single narrative within a broader archival corpus, analytically centering individual testimony to trace how memory operates both within and against authorized histories.
Memory as historical evidence
Haseen Durrani was one of eight women interviewed for the 1971 Bihari Memory Project, and the only oral history account in the archival collection of a woman who had been held in captivity by Bengali militia and their collaborators.Footnote 32 Before the formal interview, to help build rapport, I visited her on multiple occasions, sharing tea and conversation.Footnote 33 Teatime, widely considered a quintessential South Asian practice of community building, became a space of trust and informal disclosure between us. On the day of the interview, prior to recording, we returned to tea to ensure her comfort with both the process and the people involved. We discussed the structure of the interview, the number of participants present, and the recording equipment.Footnote 34
Durrani’s narrative was digitally recorded in both audio and video formats at her home in Karachi, Pakistan, on 9 May 2022. I conducted the interview bilingually in English and Urdu. Building trust was central to creating an environment in which she felt comfortable, not only with me, but also with the technical setup and the two colleagues accompanying me. I applied practiced listening as an oral history interview method, guiding how the relationship between myself (interviewer) and Durrani (interviewee) unfolded. Durrani’s memory rarely emerged as a smooth narrative. Silences, incomplete sentences, mismatched recollections, and abrupt shifts in timeline and conversations were common features of recall. Practiced listening allowed me to remain present within these moments; rather than rushing to clarify or repair them, I stayed with the cadence of her memory. With this attentive listening, the interview became a process of shared trust building along with recollection. Signaling that her recall did not need to be polished or corrected in order to be heard helped deepen our rapport and created space for more layered memories to emerge.
On 13 April 1971, Durrani was among seven survivors rescued by the Pakistani army from the Ispahani Jute Mills in Kalurghat, near the port city of Chittagong in present-day Bangladesh. She was sixteen years old. Durrani’s interview began with general questions drawn from the oral history methodology, which refers to this stage as the pre-interview questionnaire. These seemingly mundane, statistical questions—such as date and place of birth or details about parents—often help to ease interviewees into the conversation.Footnote 35 Through these simple prompts, many narrators begin to find their voice within memory, gradually locating what they are willing, wanting, or needing to share, and identifying the details they consider essential to their story as it enters the historical record. As with any act of narration, the storyteller’s attunement to their own memories shapes what emerges and how it unfolds. At the same time, practiced listening of the interviewer plays a crucial role; it can gently guide the narrator back to sites of memory that may have been suppressed, repressed, overlooked, or rendered silent. Open-ended questions are therefore central to the research process, allowing the story to develop collaboratively and on the narrator’s terms. During her interview, Durrani at one point remarked, “so what else,” and later urged, “keep asking me because I forgot.”Footnote 36 These moments call for an attentiveness to cues that enables the interviewer to support the narrator in building a narrative with confidence, while also strengthening rapport and trust between interviewer and interviewee. To remain within Durrani’s memory, I start from the beginning of her story.
My name is Haseen Rahman Durrani. I was born on 19 September 1955, in Dhaka. My father’s name was Mirza Agha Shirazi.Footnote 37 He was working for the Ispahani Jute Mills.Footnote 38 My mother was Nargis. I had two brothers; their names were Hasan Shirazi and Asghar Shirazi. My father was working at the Ispahani Jute Mills, and he used to travel to different villages and cities, but we were based in Dhaka. My younger brother had polio, and therefore, after 1965, we started traveling with my father. Finally, he was transferred to Chittagong, Ispahani Jute Mills, Kalurghat in 1968.Footnote 39
As shown above, the structured pre-interview questions—closed-ended and seeking definitive answers—helped Durrani get comfortable and also locate her own pace and voice. She responded slowly, with only brief pauses, settling into the rhythm of the exchange. In many of the 1947 partition and post-partition interviews I participated in, narrators often recalled childhood through nostalgia, speaking of community, camaraderie, gentle landscapes, and youthful adventure. Durrani’s memories initially followed a similar pattern: “I was a tomboy, I used to play cricket with them [her brothers and their friends], I used to play football with them, I used to do wrestling with them.”Footnote 40 The non-subjective nature of the opening questions allowed her to grow comfortable with the line of inquiry, the unfamiliar recording technology, and the attentiveness of the listeners. Yet it was precisely as she entered these happier memories that the first rupture in her storytelling appeared, as she recalled, “you know, I used to do whatever they did, so and what else.”Footnote 41 Here, she drifted into recollections marked by trauma: the loss of her father and her brothers amidst the violence unleashed against Biharis by Bengali neighbors and militia. Her silence at this moment in the testimony commands recognition. It can be understood as an act of reclaiming memory when approached methodologically as meaningful in and of itself, not simply as a gap. The recording was paused here to allow Durrani to regain composure. Although the standard practice is to continue recording and later remove any material the interviewee does not wish archived, in this instance we paused, stopped the recording, remained within her silence, and, once she gestured at her readiness, restarted the session. This was done with intention and understanding for the presence of silences, and to ensure that agency and control remained with her throughout the narrative. Durrani made particular mention of her father’s work at the Ispahani Jute Mills and her family’s residence in Kalurghat for five years, before they were forcibly displaced by the violence. The temporal and spatial details of her recollection situate her narrative of ethnic violence, rape, and social rupture during her captivity in the Ispahani Jute Mill areas of Kalurghat, between 30 March and 13 April 1971. Here, I place her memory in dialogue with state-sanctioned historical accounts to demonstrate how practiced listening enables movement between personal testimony and established history. Through this method, her memory becomes a critical intervention: it reclaims temporal and spatial sites that national narratives have stabilized.
Kalurghat occupies a celebrated place in the national history of Bangladesh’s independence. It was here, near the makeshift Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra (Independent Bangla Radio Station), that Major Ziaur Rahman broadcast the declaration of Bangladesh’s independence on behalf of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 27 March 1971.Footnote 42 The political significance of the site within narratives of Bengali liberation complicates its mnemonic hierarchy when placed alongside Durrani’s testimony: a space memorialized as foundational to national freedom also functions, in Durrani’s memory, as a site of ethnic rupture and intimate violence. By juxtaposing Durrani’s recollection with the official account of Kalurghat in Bangladesh’s history of independence, practiced listening reveals how what appears in the national archive as an uncontested historical site becomes, through memory, deeply contested. Her testimony unsettles the authority of state archives as the sole source of evidentiary truth. This layering of meanings exposes the instability of historical sites and the selective visibility through which they are remembered. For 1971, Kalurghat does not hold a singular past; rather, it demonstrates how sites of national liberation can simultaneously be sites of exclusion, terror, and silenced suffering. Durrani’s recollection disrupts the teleology of liberation by re-inscribing violence—particularly gendered and ethnic violence—into a space otherwise claimed by nationalist triumph. Simultaneously, her marked identity as “Bihari” therefore emerges as a historical site. Through this embodied positionality, the contradictions of Kalurghat become legible: history is not only embedded in physical sites but carried in memories by identities rendered marginal to the nation’s dominant narrative. Durrani’s testimony therefore reorients historical inquiry away from commemorative geographies of freedom and toward the lived, contested spaces where liberation and rupture coexisted.
“1 April, we went there, and we were there till 13 April, we were like the prisoner of war.”Footnote 43 While recounting the thirteen days she was held in captivity, Durrani maintained a strikingly stoic demeanor, narrating events in a restrained and factual register. Rather than reading this composure as either strategic self-fashioning or evidence of unprocessed trauma, I approach it as an analytic tension that reflects the gendered conditions under which women’s suffering becomes narratable. In our pre-interview conversations, she told me solemnly that she had never spoken of these events before. Her family discouraged such discussions, and she had severed ties with most people from her former life in East Pakistan.
South Asian feminist scholars such as Urvashi Butalia, Veena Das, Ritu Menon, and Kamla Bhasin, through their work on partition violence of 1947, have mapped the entangled terrain of gendered violence, memory, and nation-making.Footnote 44 Their works argue that women’s experiences of conflict are often mediated through cultural performance, silence, and rupture. Women’s memories of violence are frequently articulated through restraint, shame, or invisibility, demanding modes of listening attentive to both what is spoken and how it is withheld. Such scholarship helps read meaning in Durrani’s silences, guiding the listener toward how her narrative consistently directs toward sexual violence. While providing a frame to see that rape emerges as an organizing force within her recollection, the act itself still remains unspeakable. Durrani recounts that women were taken each evening and returned the next day, often bearing visible marks of abuse that signaled sexual violation—yet she does not describe how the women in the apartment grappled with these events or, more importantly, how she made meaning of it. She passes through this memory, “they used to take them, rape them, whatever, and then bring them back in the morning.”Footnote 45 Her instinct to move quickly through this memory, rather than remain within it, signals the presence of history; the violence emerges through its aftermath rather than through graphic narration. In passing through the memory so briefly, she nonetheless situates us within a history structured by gendered violence.
Durrani recounts, “they used to see the girls, and they used to come at night, take them.”Footnote 46 Her words gesture toward a violence that is present yet left unaccounted. This hesitation is not absence; it signals a structure of power in which women’s bodies became sites upon which political struggle was enacted. Throughout wars, it is perhaps in the brutality inflicted on the human body that sex differences are most starkly marked within societies. During moments of upheaval, women are disproportionately targeted, their suffering often absorbed into nationalist narratives that obscure its specific meanings. Men and women die different deaths and are subjected to different forms of torture and abuse in war, both because of biological differences and because of the cultural meanings ascribed to their bodies.Footnote 47 Ruth Seifert’s tracing of the continuation of rape and gendered violence against women in the postwar period (including in Nanking in 1937 and Berlin in 1945), Ruth Jacobson’s documentations of largescale rape and sexual violence during the war in Mozambique (particularly at the hands of RENAMO troops and their supporters), and Silva Meznaric’s writings on the wars associated with the breakup of Yugoslavia, arguing that women’s bodies were constructed as “ethnic markers” within nationalist ideologies, point to the ways in which wartime sexual violence is embedded within broader structures of patriarchy and nation-building.Footnote 48 The sexual violence on women’s bodies in 1971 by both the Pakistani army and Bengali militia, as well as their collaborators, reflected a similar logic in which men’s universal gender war against women was used by both groups to humiliate and instill fear in the other.Footnote 49 Read in this context, rape morphs into a form of boundary-making, a mechanism of humiliation, domination, and exclusion that positioned Bihari women outside the moral and political community of the emergent state. This reading resonates with broader scholarship on sexual violence in contexts of armed conflict, which has demonstrated how rape is frequently mobilized as a strategy of war to inscribe political, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies onto civilian bodies. Situating Durrani’s 1971 experience within this wider analytical frame of gendered violence reveals the importance of gendered histories through which we can analyze how women’s bodies have been universally used as sites where collective identities and political boundaries are asserted and enforced during periods of war and state formation.
However, sexual violence in Durrani’s memory operates not only as gendered harm, but also as a violent ethnonationalist claiming of identity, belonging, and sovereignty enacted upon those deemed unworthy. While I recognize the importance of feminist scholarship that examines violence against women in conflict as part of broader patriarchal structures, and as a valuable framework through which to situate Durrani’s testimony, I find myself disagreeing with Saikia’s inclusion of Bihari women within a collective framework of women’s experiences of violence in 1971.Footnote 50 Spivak cautions against treating women as a “monolithic” category, reminding us that differences in historical location, power, and subjectivity matter.Footnote 51 The experiences of women during conflict are neither uniform nor interchangeable. Therefore, we must acknowledge that both Bihari and Bengali women recount experiences of violence through differently fractured positions of subjectivities shaped by the breakdown of existing social and political structures.
That said, Biharis as an ethnic group were never recognized as worthy in the construction of the history of 1971 and, thus, their experiences of violence were erased from the narrative. Therefore, Bihari women recount experiences of sexual violence and mortal threat at the hands of Bengali militias, while simultaneously directing us to the silences produced in the aftermath of the war. Their testimonies illuminate a moment of historical production in which they were rendered absent not merely as women, but specifically as Bihari women. This logic becomes even clearer in Durrani’s account of what happened when the militia learned the Pakistani army was approaching: “they started shooting from outside, then they broke open the door, they came inside, they took out the girls they used to take every night… so they took out these five to six girls and then they started shooting.”Footnote 52 The sequence is telling. Separated before the indiscriminate shooting began, the raped women’s targeted killing reveals a logic of erasure: if the aim had been only to inscribe embodied shame as a marker of dominance, they would have been left alive.
Juxtaposing Durrani’s memory with the experiences of Bengali women, we observe that Bengali women speak to sexual violence perpetrated through the state-sanctioned apparatus of the Pakistani army and their collaborators as a form of subjugation and then inform us of their place in the narration of the 1971 war of liberation. Examining the difference in narrative position within these memories is an important distinction to make, as it can guide us to the formation of identity and belonging in post-war Bangladesh and further illuminate the statelessness of Biharis after the war. Therefore, rather than subsuming Durrani within a generalized category of wartime violence against women, I remain attentive to the specific historical and political conditions that shaped her experience as a Bihari woman.
At the outset of her narrative, Durrani told us that she had never spoken about her experiences to anyone, cautioning against the positivist collection of monolithic women.Footnote 53 I argue that to place her testimony, or those of other Bihari women, into collectivization with Bengali women’s narratives, as Saikia does, risks collapsing the specificity of Bihari experiences into a broader memory of gendered violence in 1971 and places women outside of ethnic markers. Women were not outside ethnicities, rather, as Meznaric observed, they were targeted because of their perceived ethnicities.Footnote 54
These perceived ethnicities, as mentioned above, also dictated the visibility of gendered memories after the 1971 war. The experiences of Biharis remained without an interpretive or institutional frame through which they could be publicly acknowledged. For this reason, incorporating Durrani into a collective category of wartime violence against women would be counterproductive to the aims of this study and risk reproducing the very conditions of subalternity I am interrogating. As Spivak reminds, the subaltern is both an analytical and an archival problem.Footnote 55 My argument rests on the discovery of the absence of Bihari memories from the history and historiography of 1971 and an interrogation of the ways in which these memories have remained structurally unheard. To subsume Durrani within a generalized category of women’s wartime suffering would diminish the specificity of her position as a Bihari woman and obscure the distinct forms of marginalization that shaped her experience. Therefore, throughout this study, Durrani must remain legible as a Bihari woman rather than be collectivized within a broader framework of gendered violence in 1971. To do otherwise would risk doubly effacing the very subaltern subject (Biharis) that this article seeks to locate and represent. I contend that the “archival” and “historiographical” task before us is one of measuring silences.Footnote 56 In the case of 1971, those silences are most clearly revealed through the absence of Bihari voices from both the archive and the historical narratives that continue to shape public memory.
Having recovered agency within silences that can be read as meaning making through gendered histories, I now turn to Durrani’s testimony to excavate moments of memory articulated through gendered frameworks of meaning. This shift allows me to further investigate the relationship between gender and memory while continuing my argument for the inclusion of Bihari testimonies (from both women and men) in understanding what remains unknown about the war in East Pakistan in 1971. Rather than suggesting that women possess inherently different memories from men, I argue that memory is recalled and narrated through gendered subject positions. As a result, women’s testimonies may foreground experiences, vulnerabilities, and interpretive frameworks that become intelligible through the social performance of gender.Footnote 57 If gender is not an innate truth but a repeated performance shaped by discursive and material structures, then Durrani’s recollections—her silences, emphases, and narrative choices—can be understood not merely as testimony, but also as situated performances of survival, mourning, and resistance articulated through culturally intelligible modes of femininity. This move makes her testimony function as a subversive discursive intervention, challenging dominant narratives of 1971 by producing alternative meanings through memory.
As she recounts, “I was the only girl who was spared, Alhamdulillah (by the Grace of God), otherwise they [militia] used to come, they used to sit around.”Footnote 58 Read through the lens of gender performativity, the term “spared” does not carry its conventional meaning of safety or protection, instead referring specifically to sexual violence. Rather than naming the act directly, Durrani articulates it through negation, stating that she was “spared” instead of explicitly saying that she was not raped. This claim is further unsettled by what she later recounts:
They started shooting at large, I was hit by a bullet, it passed through my knuckles, went through my throat and got lodged in my jaw, I fell and other women fell on top of me. They started stabbing us with bayonets, I was stabbed three times in my abdomen, they missed my stomach by a few inches.Footnote 59
These two moments in her memory do not cancel each other out; rather, they expose the instability of what “spared” can mean within a gendered rule of violence. Durrani was not spared from brutality. She was shot, stabbed, and left for dead. To her, being “spared” specifically referred to the absence of sexual violation. Read through Judith Butler’s formulation of gender as performative, this distinction becomes analytically significant.Footnote 60 Durrani’s testimony does not simply add “women’s suffering” to an existing archive of 1971. Instead, her testimony reveals how gender structures the terms through which harm is narrated, remembered, and hierarchized. Survival is articulated through a gendered hierarchy of violence in which the absence of rape emerges as a meaningful category even when accompanied by extreme physical brutality. This tension is not a contradiction, it is a site of meaning that demonstrates how memory is narrated through broader expectations around honor, violation, and female vulnerability. Durrani’s testimony therefore becomes central to understanding how memory itself is produced within, and constrained by, gendered structures of power. Her testimony continues to expose these structures. Recalling the events leading up to the attack, she states: “we were alone in the apartment that day, myself, my mother, my younger brother, my aunt, her five daughters, and her younger son.”Footnote 61 The term “alone” here does not function as a demographic description, instead it is a gendered social condition, the intelligibility of which emerges not from the presence of women but from the absence of adult men. In Durrani’s recollection, alone signifies the absence of male protection, not the absence of people. The statement derives its meaning from a patriarchal social order in which women’s vulnerability is rendered intelligible through the absence of men.Footnote 62 Thus, memory is not simply recalling an event; it is recalling that event through socially constituted understandings of gender, protection, and vulnerability.
This interpretation becomes even more apparent when Durrani later recalls: “that night was hell, we were all women in the apartment, and they knew that we were all alone.”Footnote 63 In this recollection, ten people become alone because no adult man is present. Gender, therefore, structures both lived reality and the language through which it is narrated. Her emphasis on this detail invites a broader question: how might this memory have been narrated had men been present in the apartment? While such a question cannot be answered conclusively, its very emergence reveals the extent to which gendered expectations shape the recall and narration of memory. What is remembered as significant is itself conditioned by gendered frameworks of meaning. Remaining within these socially constituted performances of gender, Durrani positions her mother as both central and exceptional, describing her as decisive and strong: “my maternal grandfather was Scottish and if you saw my mother, she used to look Scottish.”Footnote 64 Durrani continues, “but my mother was a very strong woman, my mother had witnessed World War II. My mother alone was handling everything, five, six young girls.”Footnote 65 Durrani narrates her mother through an alternative performance of femininity marked by authority, decisiveness, and leadership. This contrasts sharply with her portrayal of her paternal aunt, who, in Durrani’s recollection, became overwhelmed by fear: “my mother was very strong, my aunt was shivering in one corner and she was passing out.”Footnote 66 What is striking here is that the aunt’s reaction requires no explanation, while the mother’s strength does. Strength, rationality, and leadership emerge as departures from normative expectations of femininity and thus require narrative justification. Durrani provides this explanation through references to her mother’s “other” (Scottish) ancestry and “other” (wartime) experiences, suggesting that these influences enabled her to move beyond conventional expectations of womanhood. Whether or not this explanation is historically persuasive is less important than what it reveals about the gendered logic through which Durrani makes sense of the past. Her mother’s agency becomes intelligible precisely because it is narrated as exceptional. If we understand memory as not simply the retrieval of past events but the narration of experience from a socially situated subject position, then gender shapes both what is remembered and how memories become meaningful. Durrani’s testimony reveals how Bihari women occupied a doubly effaced position—rendered vulnerable by state and ethnic violence while simultaneously constrained by familial and societal norms that limited their agency. Durrani’s testimony therefore does more than document violence; it demonstrates how memory itself is structured through gendered relations of power, revealing dimensions of the 1971 war that have so far remained obfuscated within dominant historical narratives.
“My father was so particular, he told us that ‘since you are living here, you should know the language.’ I can read and write Bengali. But nothing came handy.”Footnote 67 With this turn in her memory, Durrani directs us toward language and its failure to secure belonging. If Urdu was rejected as the national language by Bengalis, why was her fluency in Bengali insufficient to protect her? As fluency in the dominant language is often assumed to function as a pathway to social inclusion, why did it not offer any safeguard against violence or exclusion in 1971? Durrani tells us that language, in 1971, did not operate as a bridge to belonging; instead, it gestured towards the structural impossibility of belonging. This recollection hints at the fragility of the relationship between language, identity, and trauma under conditions of sociopolitical rupture (for example, the 1947 partition). Durrani explains how the labor of learning, speaking, and inhabiting the dominant language collapses precisely when recognition is most urgently needed, telling us how violence distorts both how individuals are perceived by others and how they understand themselves within the social world. As historian Mark Mazower argues, the “self” is not simply an interior psychological space, it is a relational construct—constituted, affirmed, or denied through social recognition. Within this framework, identity is collective and contingent, dependent on acknowledgment by others to hold meaning. Identification becomes an ongoing and fragile negotiation with shifting political boundaries.Footnote 68
Durrani’s testimony reveals the limits of that cooperation. She describes learning the language and attempting to assimilate within the group, yet her marking as a Bihari confirmed her status as non-belonging within the broader structure of emerging Bengali nationalism. Her exclusion from the new collective, shaped by the consolidation of political consciousness and nationalist identity, positioned her outside the collective social order. What her narrative makes visible is not only exclusion from belonging, but the way belonging itself is structurally produced and regulated. Her linguistic competence signals an effort toward alignment and recognition, yet the refusal of social acceptance rendered that effort incomplete, producing a rupture between self-understanding and social legibility. In this sense, Durrani’s testimony shows how individuals are embedded within structures that predefine the conditions under which they can appear as intelligible subjects: structures that both enable action (language acquisition, participation) and delimit its meaning (belonging, recognition, exclusion). What her memory makes visible, therefore, is not only the collapse of political structures in 1971, but the affective and epistemic consequences of that collapse as lived experience. Her words carry the haunting of this divide between effort and recognition, belonging and exclusion. Her oral memory, in this sense, does not merely supplement historical accounts of 1971; it articulates dimensions of dislocation and fractured selfhood that official histories are often unable—or unwilling—to register. Her memory tells a parallel history of 1971 through the counter-narrative of the subaltern.
Conclusion
The instruction given to a teenager in 1971 to remain hidden under the bed captures more than a moment of fear, as it also reflects the structural position of Bihari memory within dominant histories of 1971 East Pakistan: the teenager was told not to emerge, not to be visible, not to be counted. By treating what was previously unknown as historical ground, this article both challenges conventional approaches and argues for a reconsideration of what counts as historical knowledge. Using Pierre Nora’s framing of memory as a living and evolving force carried by those who bear it, Haseen Durrani’s oral history illustrates how memory can serve as a stable site of historical evidence while simultaneously exposing the instability of positivist national and political narratives that have limited who appears as a legitimate subject of history.Footnote 69 Through Durrani’s testimony, Bihari experiences entered the frame of historical inquiry, allowing lived experience to construct historical record.
National archives in both Pakistan and Bangladesh have long privileged political histories as their organizing frame; within this nationalist lens, Bihari lives appear unintelligible or out of place. The systemic invisibility of Biharis from the historiography of 1971 speaks to what Spivak describes as the condition of the subaltern: a position in which certain voices remain unheard not because they do not speak, but because prevailing frameworks of knowledge present themselves as absolute and complete, failing to register those that lie outside of their constructed narration.Footnote 70 Gender further amplifies this patterned Bihari absence. While Durrani’s testimony reflects traumas similar to those experienced by Bengali women publicly recognized as Birangona—a Bengali title meaning “war heroine” that the Bangladeshi state bestowed on women raped by Pakistani forces and their collaborators during the 1971 war—the suffering of Bihari women lies outside these sanctioned frameworks. As a result, their experiences remain largely invisible within nationalist narratives that valorize particular forms of heroism and victimhood.
Our work on testimonies from the 1971 Bihari Memory Project unsettles nationalist narratives by revealing the fragility of belonging and the precariousness of identity during moments of social rupture. Widely perceived as sympathetic to the Pakistani state, Biharis were cast out of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, labeled disloyal to her people and indifferent to their suffering. Still, the 1971 Bihari Memory Project narrators consistently acknowledge the unequal distribution of state resources and the legitimacy of Bengali political demands. Biharis neither shaped nor benefited from the political stalemate of the 1970 election that led to military violence in 1971 and culminated in the creation of Bangladesh, instead occupying a position of acute vulnerability. Having migrated to East Pakistan in 1947 because of emerging religious nationalism in their ancestral homelands, by 1971 Biharis’ perceived loyalty to Pakistan (East and West) rendered them suspect within emerging trends of ethnonationalism in their new homelands. Therefore, violence emerged not from Bihari agency, but as a result of their geographical location within a moment of rupture.
The complexities of Bihari belonging were further compounded by histories of displacement that stretched across generations. Interviewees for the project repeatedly described their family’s migration in 1947 as an experience of expulsion and enforced non-belonging. The trauma of the 1947 partition remained unresolved and often traveled across generations through silence, grief, or withdrawal. Most narrators were young adults in 1971; their understanding of the 1947 partition mediated through the memories of their parents. One interviewee spoke about her father after the second migration to Karachi in 1971, claiming that he stopped speaking and painted instead, each canvas depicting scenes from their former life in East Pakistan. To expect this population—still bearing the wounds of 1947—to align seamlessly with emergent nationalist projects in 1970 was to misunderstand survival shaped by accumulated displacement. Their gravitation toward perceived safety reflects memory and vulnerability rather than indifference. Biharis were not disloyal to Bengal or her people, they had migrated in 1947 on a different metric of national belonging, and the shifting trends towards ethnonationalism in the post-partition era in East Pakistan was reminiscent of the 1947 expulsion due to religious nationalism.
Remaining attentive to Spivak’s poststructuralist insight that historical narratives are constructed—while often presented as complete and authoritative—the 1971 Bihari Memory Project asks who has been excluded from the narrative of 1971 and what forms of knowledge become unintelligible through such exclusions.Footnote 71 Building on the call for locating what remains outside the narrative, this engagement with Durrani’s memory constitutes a deliberate intervention in South Asian historiography. The 1971 Bihari Memory Project, comprising eighty-seven testimonies of men and women who lived through 1971, remains the only sustained oral history collection of this population. In its very existence, the archive challenges the enduring binaries of “us” and “them” that structure dominant narratives of the conflict.
Yet the stakes of this intervention extend beyond historiography. More than five decades after Bangladeshi independence, over 250,000 Biharis continue to live in conditions of prolonged dispossession across camps in Bangladesh.Footnote 72 Citizenship alone will not resolve their marginalization; the deeper rupture inflicted upon identity and belonging will persist unless it is recognized and given its rightful place in history.
Centering Durrani’s memory helps demonstrate how microhistories can reposition those excluded from the shifting cartographies of 1971 East Pakistan as producers of historical knowledge. Yet, the significance of this work lies not only in interpretive recovery, but also in archival reconstruction. The 1971 Bihari Memory Project establishes an evidentiary infrastructure where institutional silence once prevailed, reshaping what can be known and who may appear in the historical record. The task, therefore, is not merely to reinterpret 1971 within existing national frames; it is to construct archival forms capable of sustaining marginalized testimony as constitutive evidence. In treating oral testimony as structural rather than illustrative, such archives affirm those long positioned at the margins not as subjects of restoration, but as active participants in knowledge production. The future of historical inquiry in South Asia thus depends on both revisiting the past and building archives through which it can be responsibly and ethically known.
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