Following two recent landmark feminist publications on the Bangladesh War of Liberation—Bina D'Costa's Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2011) and Yasmin Saikia's Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011)—Nayanika Mookherjee's monograph The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 stands apart in its methodological and theoretical contributions. Ethical storytelling as political and analytical projects infuses the process of interrogating and reflecting upon the otherwise extractive nature of ethnography. It is noteworthy that Mookherjee chose Enayetpur as the site of her research, because there reside the women who have already experienced public exposure, having been summoned to Dhaka to give testimonies at the People's Tribunal of 1992. Remarkably, Mookherjee does not inquire directly about the events of 1971; rather, by focusing on the everyday “fragments” and narrations she conveys a “talkable history” of war and its circulations. Mookherjee's meticulous attention to women's narrations of the minutiae of suffering illuminates the social construction of trauma, its nonlinear and relational manifestations. Even as individual women's stories are highlighted, these very singular experiences are shown to be shaped by a confluence of social forces, including patriarchy, poverty, ethnicity, and religion.

There are no easy answers to questions raised in this critical book. “What does ethnography offer to complicate narrative and to engender ethical activism?” “Can human rights narratives accommodate the complexities of birangonas’/victims’ experiences?” “How can activists recognize sexual violence without stigmatizing the experience as a wound?” Demystifying national mythologies that erect figures such as the virtuous birangona and the detestable collaborator, Mookherjee unpacks war's complicities and contradictions. Symbolic violence against women, coupled with demasculinization of men, feminization of the colonized, and the irreducible historical and racialized differences in a society at a particular time shape the contours of each war, such that each atrocity remains mired in its unique historical and political conditions. While this review can never do justice to this multifaceted ethnography, I will organize my remarks around the following themes: gendered trauma and the question of silence.

Mookherjee's theoretical contribution in explicating how trauma is embodied, fragmented, triggered, and revealed challenges epistemological conventions of rendering intelligible the suffering and agency of rape victims. The experience of sexual violence, she posits, is folded into the daily socialities of birangonas, rather than being identifiable as a single horrific wound. It is neither one moment of abject violation, nor does it necessarily lead to a lifetime as a social outcast. Mookherjee's nuanced account demonstrates how the idea of the physical and social wound befalling the birangonas as a marker of the authentic raped woman is continuously generated through cultural productions, state histories, and testimonies assigning the birangona to a site of alterity or abnormality. While the identity of the muktijoddha (freedom fighter) carries symbolic capital and moral personhood, birangonas are relegated to the margins unless when expedient. Mookherjee documents the ways in which the nation has chosen to represent and circulate the trauma of its male and female citizens: Naibuddin Ahmed's famous photography that has been considered definitive to the birangona experience is revealed as perhaps staged or taken without consent. In this context, should one read the crossed arms of the photographic subject as representing shame or expressing defiance to the gaze of the nation? The erasure from the national narrative of Bengali men's own sexual violation and the rape of Hindu and Bihari women by Bengali men leave uninterrupted the contradictions of war. These silences reify the binary of Pakistani/Panjabi men as natural rapists and women as always already rapable. The subversive use of Kishor Parekh's photograph of the Indian soldier inspecting Bengali collaborators for weapons points to its strategic deployment in war narratives.

Mookherjee's tracing of the multiple silences in war remembrances is transformative. The Bangladesh context, Mookherjee argues, defies the assumption that there is silence regarding wartime rape. She finds this history alive in public memory yet shrouded in public secrecy. Wartime rape is not a mute history in Bangladesh; rather it is discursively circulated through certain methodical (re)productions. In a historically unprecedented move, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the Bangladesh state bestowed the honorific Birangona to women who endured sexual violence during the war. Women's experience in war has been extensively archived in visual and literary media since, even if official documentation is scarce. Since the 1990s, there have been concerted efforts by civil society organizations to collect survivors’ testimonies.

In Enayetpur, where Mookherjee conducted her eight-month fieldwork, villagers perceive rape as both premeditated army policy and as unsystematic consequence of the war's chaos, and integrate survivors into the fabric of routine life as long as they do not publicly speak of their experience. Mookherjee finds this ostensible silence indispensable to the operation of power whereby rape is known but cannot be articulated. Its only overt invocation occurs through scorn (khota) or incitements. The “marketplace of khota” has consequences regarding the way birangonas are made visible, which Mookherjee sees as violence in another register by the women's own community. Hence, silence becomes the expression of agency where, in direct contrast, the same women are called upon to speak by journalists and activists in their efforts to narrate suffering and violence to mobilize the movement for political justice—nationally and globally. There is a class dimension to this silence; the economy of shame affects the marginalized in their ability to acquire resources, respect, and employment. Although compensation is offered to the birangonas, speaking of their experience denies them authenticity, as there is an assumption that “true” sufferers should remain silent.

Critical, reflective, and transformative to our understanding of gender violence, memory, and recuperation, Mookherjee's extraordinary ethnography is undoubtedly essential reading for scholars and students of feminist theory, anthropology, Bangladesh, and South Asia studies.