Gender, Nationalism, and Genocide in Bangladesh

Naristhan/Ladyland

Azra Rashid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429793547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 1971 genocide in Bangladesh took place as a result of the region's long history of colonization, the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into largely Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, and the continuation of ethnic and religious politics in Pakistan, specifically the political suppression of the Bengali people of East Pakistan. The violence endured by women during the 1971 genocide is repeated in the writing of national history. The secondary position that women occupy within nationalism is mirrored in the nationalist narratives of history.

This book engages with the existing feminist scholarship on gender, nationalism and genocide to investigate the dominant representations of gender in the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh and juxtaposes the testimonies of survivors and national memory of that war to create a shift of perspective that demands a breaking of silence. The author explores and challenges how gender has operated in service of Bangladeshi nationalist ideology, in particular as it is represented at the Liberation War Museum. The archive of this museum in Bangladesh is viewed as a site of institutionalized dialogue between the 1971 genocide and the national memory of that event. An examination of the archive serves as an opening point into the ideologies that have sanctioned a particular authoring of history, which is written from a patriarchal perspective and insists on restricting women's trauma to the time of war. To question the archive is to question the authority and power that is inscribed in the archive itself and that is the function performed by testimonies in this book. Testimonies are offered from five unique vantage points – rape survivor, war baby, freedom fighter, religious and ethnic minorities – to question the appropriation and omission of women's stories. Furthermore, the emphasis on the multiplicity of women's experiences in war seeks to highlight the counter-narrative that is created by acknowledging the differences in women's experiences in war instead of transcending those differences.

An innovative and nuanced approach to the subject of treatment and objectification of women in conflict and post conflict and how the continuing effects entrench ideas of gender roles and identity, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian History and Politics, Gender and genocide, Women and War, Nationalism and Diaspora and Transnational Studies.

1 Introduction

In 1971, during a nine-month long war, at least 300,000 Bengali people were killed and over 200,000 women were raped by the Pakistani army in East Pakistan, which is now known as Bangladesh.¹ This genocide resulted from a long history of discrimination against Bengalis who were considered Hindu-like, represented a distinct cultural group and spoke a different language from the Urdu-speaking ruling elites located in West Pakistan. Representations of this event have been highly contested and controversial. Additionally, the fact that these traumatic events are open to partisan interpretations suggests the impossibility of a unified truth. Janet Walker argues in “The Traumatic Paradox: Documentary Films, Historical Fictions, and Cataclysmic Past Events,” that “precisely because the past is open to partisan rereadings, there is a dire need to develop ways to understand representations of the past as texts that adhere nevertheless to historical realities” (806). Since the war of 1971, scholars have debated whether to use the term “genocide,” “mass killing,” “ethnic cleansing” or “politicide” to describe this historical reality (Bose, S 2011 and Saikia 2011). Each word is loaded with political implications and biases. My research mobilizes women’s memories through five women’s testimonies in order to create a local remembrance of the war of 1971, and for that reason I have chosen the word most commonly used by the people of Bangladesh: Genocide.

The violence endured by women during the 1971 genocide is repeated again in the writing of national history. The secondary position that women occupy within nationalism is mirrored in the nationalist narratives of history. Scholars of Subaltern Studies, including Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Ranajit Guha, have problematized the historiography of the Indian subcontinent. Subaltern Studies raises important questions about the dominant discourses of history, in particular India’s colonial past and the difficulties of the nation-state in articulating the role of women in history. Partha Chatterjee argues in “Nation and Its Women” that Indian nationalism situated the questions regarding women’s position in society in an “inner” domain of sovereignty far removed from the arena of political contest with the colonial state (242). While freedom was articulated in nationalist terms, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues in “Postcolonality and the Artifice of History,” the differences between men and women were largely ignored and the speaking postcolonial subject remained patriarchal. The gendered narratives of history in colonial India continue to depict womanhood as a disability to be overcome for national independence and sovereignty. Durba Ghosh attempts to incorporate stories of female “revolutionary terrorists” whose feminine nature was transformed by the conditions of colonial rule, which was seen as an assault on the nation’s manhood (356). The dominant accounts of the history of the region, however, remain patriarchal narratives that are constructed around anti-colonial nationalist struggle. History-writing re-establishes hegemonic ideologies and narratives. This is a primary concern of postcolonial scholarship, also echoed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Challenging the imperialist subject-production, Spivak asks, how is history written in South Asia? Spivak writes:

Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is “evidence.” It is, rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.

(82–83)

Through her discussion of suttee, the self-immolation of widows, Spivak constructs a counter-narrative of woman’s consciousness in South Asia. The practice of suttee was banned by the British colonizers in 1829, thus becoming an example of what Spivak calls, “white men saving brown women from brown men.” Against this, Spivak writes, is the Indian nativist argument: “The women actually wanted to die” (93). The two statements legitimize one another but women’s testimony, which would produce a counter-narrative, has been silenced. Narratives of history that have been produced from a position of power and dominance perform epistemic violence to the colonial subject and in the Indian context have muted the subaltern woman as a subject. History continues to be a contested territory. As feminist historian Yasmin Saikia writes, we cannot afford this kind of history any longer. Saikia quotes Mahmood Mamdani, “The perpetrator is history” (Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh 9). This perpetrator has created enemies and bodies over which wars are fought in the various discourses that seek omission and forgetting of the complex lived realities of people, especially women. As Spivak argues in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (102). The disappearance of the subaltern woman from the narratives of history is evident in the archives of the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh. To interrogate history, one must closely examine the site where history is memorialized, and war museums and their archives are one such site. Through sanctioned erasures and memorialization, the archive of a museum transforms into a repository of public memory, sanctioned by those with authority and power to create history.

The primary aim of this book is to explore and challenge how gender has operated in service of Bangladeshi nationalist ideology, in particular as it is represented at the Liberation War Museum. In examining the representational strategies engaged in the Museum’s exhibition – using archival photographs, news clippings, narrated film footage, documents and artifacts – five women’s testimonies are presented to counter the reductive categories ascribed to women of “rape victim,” “war baby,” “freedom fighter” and “refugee” that prevail through the museum’s displays. Specifically, this book turns to the multiplicity and specificity of women’s experiences in the 1971 genocide to closely examine questions about identity, nationalism and history, the relationship of gender to these concepts, and the mechanisms by which these relationships are transformed or maintained during the time of a conflict. I engage with existing feminist scholarship on gender, nationalism and genocide and investigate questions about the representation of women’s stories in genocide. Through the testimonies of women, this book documents the specific memories of five women during the war of 1971 in order to resist and challenge the selective remembering, silencing and appropriating of women’s experiences in the widely circulated images of the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh.

At the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh, the story of women and war begins with Begum Rokeya Sakhawat. In 1905, Rokeya Sakhawat wrote a short story, Sultana’s Dream, about a woman’s fantastical journey into the future to a place called ‘Naristhan’ or ‘Ladyland.’ This imaginary place is a matriarchal society with great innovation, science, art and beauty. The story begins with protagonist Sultana, who may or may not have fallen asleep while contemplating the condition of Indian womanhood, being visited by a woman who resembles her friend and takes her on a journey to Ladyland where women are in charge. Sultana does not understand the language spoken in this land. Here, traditional gender roles are reversed; men look shy and timid, and are confined within the four walls of the home. When Sultana inquires about this reverse gender segregation, her friend asks what would one’s countrymen do if some lunatic escapes from a mental asylum and wreaks havoc in society. Sultana replies that such a person would be captured and put back into the asylum. In Sakhawat’s Ladyland, women’s rise to power took place as men were interested in military power and women were educating themselves in scientific research. When men were defeated at battle, women came to the rescue and gained power. Sultana is informed that the religion in this place is based on love and truth. The story, which is touted as an early feminist text from South Asia, written in English and then translated by the author in Bangla – the regional language of the people – is born of Sakhawat’s imagination, but also reflective of a time of British colonization and western influences on education and society. The representation of women in the story follows a narrative of empowerment as they overcome gender inequality and oppression. In the decades that followed the story’s first publication in 1905, there have been many shifts in the politics and representation of women in South Asia as a result of geopolitical movements for decolonization, rights and equality. In Bangladesh, these shifts have largely corresponded with the Bengali people’s internal struggle for identity, first under the British colonizers and then under the Pakistani rule. Since Rokeya Sakhawat was born in a part of India which is now in Bangladesh, over the past few decades, Sultana’s Dream has become a widely celebrated feminist text and a part of Bangladeshi identity that not only Bangladeshi feminist scholars and activists take great pride in, but with its narrative, story-telling function in the archives at the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, it can also be argued that Sultana’s Dream is among the first women’s stories to be appropriated by the nationalist agenda.

Established in 1996, the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh has 17,500 items in their archive that narrate and represent the events and stories of the war of 1971. At the entrance of the museum, the eternal flame burning inside a glass casing reminds the visitors of the “fallen heroes” of the war, and the six galleries of the museum display artifacts that present the Bengali identity, heritage, and the 1971 genocide. As Achille Mbembe writes about the archive as “a temple and a cemetery,” the archive of the War Museum also performs the function of standing in as a place where rituals are performed and “fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there, their shadows and footprints inscribed on paper and preserved like so many relics” (19). The nation’s struggle against a common enemy, the government of Pakistan, is represented through reproduced newspaper articles, videos and photographs of men and women carrying weapons. Also on display are personal items of people who were killed in the war, skulls and bones, and photographs of the raped and emaciated bodies of women, which show us the death and destruction caused by war. Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others, “Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins” (9). But the images at the War Museum do not seek to repudiate war; instead, they are mobilized to foster a sense of national unity and necessary sacrifice in the name of the Bengali nation. The Liberation War Museum is not simply a public repository of “archives of horror,” (68) as Susan Sontag has described in speaking of war photographs and their exhibition, but the Museum as an institution has deep-rooted ties to history and national politics as it is supported and financed by the current national government. As a result, the museum, through its displays, and the museum’s caretakers through appearances in the media and other public platforms, show unequivocal support for the ongoing war trials initiated in 2010 by the same government. The version of history on display at the museum can therefore be considered to be a state-sponsored one.

The events of 1971 need to be historically situated and interpreted at the intersection of the region’s long struggle with British colonialism and patriarchy. The 1947 partition of India into dominantly Hindu and Muslim states, irrespective of distinct cultural identities within those states, created divisions that could not be reconciled. The oppressive policies by a national government that was located in West Pakistan and geographically and culturally removed from the Bengali population of East Pakistan fueled a nationalist movement for secession, which eventually led to the genocide of 1971. The discourses led by the victors of war overlook the humbling reality and experiences of the victims, especially women, for whom the suffering continues in the aftermath of the war, and that has certainly been the case in Bangladesh. Women of Bangladesh thereby have a vexed relationship to the national memory of this war of liberation. In “Girls in War: Sex Slave, Mother, Domestic Aide, Combatant,” Radhika Coomaraswamy writes about the vulnerability of girls in an armed conflict. According to Coomaraswamy, girls are affected by war in five different ways: as victims of direct violence, as combatants, as refugees, as victims of trafficking, and as orphans (50). In Bangladesh, girls and women experienced the war of 1971 from all of those vantage points and more: as victims of direct violence, girls were raped or killed; Hindu women were doubly marginalized in a nationalist war of liberation in a Muslim country and therefore became more vulnerable; as refugees many women were forced to flee to India or Pakistan or they were internally displaced; some women were also militarized and recruited as combatants; many women acted as service providers; and finally, in addition to children who lost their parents in war, there were also war babies who were conceived as a result of wartime rape and generally deemed unwanted by the post-war society. Furthermore, the women who were victimized in these multiple ways during the war of 1971, did not all die; many of them survived and continue to suffer.

In dominant narratives of nationalism in Bangladesh, a woman is therefore asked to forget her gender and her ordeal in order to participate in the collective aspirations and collective memory of the Bengali nation in the aftermath of war. As a result of this process, many women found the specificity of their experiences subjected to a selective remembering – through omission, denial and appropriation – to be in service of a collective nationalist memory. This national memory conflates women’s experiences into a singularity, whereby, as victims of rape, they were first named “Birangana” meaning female hero, and now have been renamed “freedom fighters,” who are perceived as having performed a sacrifice for their nation. This renaming of women’s experience with rape is a position supported by many Bangladeshi scholars who presented at a conference organized by the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka in March 2015. As well, any representation of the particularities of women’s suffering in the aftermath of the war is generally missing from the discourse. The archival display at the Liberation War Museum ventures to depict wartime violence, but in a way that highlights all women as Bengalis in the first instance, despite their multiple, complex and traumatic experiences. Instead, images that are in view are of women who were raped and killed, took up arms, or migrated to India as refugees. It is to be emphasized that there are no images of rape survivors at the war museum, only of women who were brutally raped and killed by the Pakistani army. Women as vulnerable individuals who were raped and killed dominate the War Museum’s representations of women’s trauma in the war of 1971, yet those who survived are silenced. The invisibility of war babies from the display points out a nation’s continuing uncomfortable relationship with children conceived as a result of wartime rape. While photographs of women holding guns are on display, testimonies of women show that women were generally not allowed to fight on the frontlines. The photographs of refugees ensure that the war of 1971 is represented as a strictly Bengali experience as there are no images on display of internally displaced Bihari refugees in Bangladesh. As a site of nationalist representation and through the conflation of all difference to the reductive images of the women, the War Museum thereby provokes us to think critically about the intersections of gender, nationalism and war. What does the violent formation of the nationalist state require? What are gendered experiences of war? How are women subjected to particular forms of violence as women? And how does the Bengali nation represent its formation?

The main focus of this book is to unsettle and disrupt these prevailing national narratives and offer a counter-narrative, which makes space for women from religious and ethnic minorities, depicts the complexities and contradictory experiences of women who chose to fight against the national enemy, and names previously unnamed rape victims. This work builds on Nayanika Mookherjee’s research on the war of 1971; Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s work in identifying the subaltern woman in the history of South Asia; and Yasmin Saikia’s efforts to unsilence women’s stories from the war of 1971. Building on this existing research, the aim of my book is to bring the stories of survivors into the existing discourse on genocide. The book seeks to make an intervention into the nationalist account of the 1971 genocide that remains gendered and forces a double marginalization – first during the war and then in the post-war narratives – on women rape survivors, freedom fighters, religious and ethnic minorities. Using testimonies of survivors, I attempt to create a shift of perspective that demands a breaking of silence. Additionally, even though the specificity of gendered wartime experience runs as a common theme, there are nuances that cannot be ignored. These nuances involve the intersectionality of race, class and religion. A feminist study of women’s experiences in the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh demands that all experiences, or as many as possible, are included in the counter-narrative along with the ethnic, religious or class boundaries that are often seen as burdening the analysis.

In 2014, I visited Bangladesh for my first research trip and interviewed several female survivors of the war from different ethnic and religious backgrounds who have contributed the central testimonies that make up this book. The women included Pratiti Devi Ghatak, Aroma Dutta, Saira Bano, Ferdousi Priyubhashini and Sultana Kamal. I met Shama Hartt in Montreal at a later stage of my research. I examine the testimony of Pratiti Devi Ghatak and Aroma Dutta, Hindu women survivors of the war of 1971, with complex relationships to a national identity that seeks to exclude the experiences of religious minorities from the dominant narrative on the war of 1971. Saira Bano is a female survivor and a refugee from the enemy side. Saira Bano’s story helps us to understand that in nationalism women are not only assigned a specific role and their stories appropriated to serve the nationalist agenda, but also that some stories can be completely erased from the memory. Ferdousi Priyubhashini is an artist and a survivor of wartime rape. The stories of Ferdousi Priyubhashini and Shama Hartt highlight a nation’s uncomfortable relationship to women and rape and children conceived as a result of rape. Hartt’s testimony challenges the missing bodies of war babies from the national discourses on the war of 1971 and reminds us that the government’s policy of adoption or abortion resulted in decisions about infants and women who had significantly less power than the state or society to decide for themselves. Sultana Kamal, a service provider during the war of 1971 and currently the Executive Director of a non-governmental organization, brings to this book an important understanding of the way in which women’s lives are militarized in general and in particular, the marginalization that female freedom fighters in Bangladesh have endured. The five unique vantage points from which testimonies are offered show the multiplicity of women’s experiences in war and a coming together, without being asked to transcend their differences. By sharing their memories, the survivors ensure that their stories will not be forgotten and will become part of a longer and collective life in the form of this project. The sixth and final vantage point in this book belongs to me. In my research, the subjectivities of the interviewees and my own have resulted in moments of negotiation, reflection and analysis. As a feminist filmmaker, researcher and a woman from Canada who was born in Pakistan to parents who were born in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and grandparents who were from India and came to be known as Urdu-speaking Biharis in East Pakistan, negotiations had to take place on more occasions than I had anticipated; many a time during fieldwork, ...