The Spectral Wound by Nayanika Mookherjee

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Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of

N A Y A N I K A M O O K H E R J E E


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T H E S P E C T R A L W O U N D


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T H E S P E C T R A L W O U N D

Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of *

Duke University Press Durham and London 2015


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper ∞

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker

ypeset in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mookherjee, Nayanika, [date] author.Te spectral wound : sexual violence, public memories and

the Bangladesh war o 1971 / Nayanika Mookherjee ;

oreword by Veena Das.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

978-0-8223-5949-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-5968-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7522-7 (e- book)

1. BangladeshHistoryRevolution, 1971. 2. Rape as a weapon o warBangladesh. 3. WomenCrimes against

Bangladesh. I. itle.

395.5.65 2015

954.9204'6dc23

2015021378

Duke University Press grateully acknowledges the support

o Durham University (), Department o Anthropology,

which provided unds toward the publication o this book.

Cover art: Rehabilitation Centre, Dhaka, 1972. © Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak


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“ ,”

for their fortitude and affection

,

for letting me y and for their love and strength

195 6–2011,

for his spirit of critical interrogation and friendship


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Foreword * ix Preace: “A Lot o History, a Severe History” * xv

Acknowledgments * xxi

Introduction: Te “Looking-Glass Border” * 1

P A R T I

. “Te Month o Mourning and the Languid Floodwaters”:Te Weave o National History * 31

. “We Would Rather Have Shaak (Greens) Tan Murgi (Chicken) Polao”: Te Archiving o the Birangona * 47

. “Bringing Out the Snake”: Khota (Scorn) and thePublic Secrecy o Sexual Violence * 67

. “A Mine o Tieves”: Interrogating Local Politics* 91

. “My Own Imagination in My Own Body”:Embodied ransgressions in the Everyday * 107


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P A R T I I

. “Mingling in Society”: Rehabilitation Program andRe-membering the Raped Woman * 129

. Te Absent Piece o Skin: Gendered, Racialized,and erritorial Inscriptions o Sexual Violence during theBangladesh War * 159

. “Imaging the War Heroine”: Examination o State, Press,Literary, Visual, and Human Rights Accounts, 1971–2001 * 177

. Subjectivities o War Heroines: Victim, Agent,raitor? * 228

P A R T I I I

. “Te ruth Is ough”: Human Rightsand the Politics o ransorming Experiences o Wartime Rape

“rauma” into Public Memories * 251

Postscript: From 2001 until 2013 * 264

Notes * 277 Glossary * 291 Reerences * 293 Index * 309


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“When I asked the women directly whether I should anonymize their namesin my writings, they said that I should use their own names because it is “ourown kotha (words), mela itihash (a lot o history), ja ma tomare ditesi [what

mother we are giving to you (reerring to me as “mother,” which is an affection-ate term used or younger women by older women)].” Nayanika Mookherjeereceives the gif o this mela itihash, and the question that animates the book

beore us is, how is she going to bear this knowledge? Te gif o knowledgehas been bestowed upon her with the contradictory injunctionsthe im-perative to tell the story and also to not tell the story. Such dilemmas are notnew or anthropologists studying sexual violence in situations o war or riots,in the streets, or at home. How to navigate the delicate terrain between public

knowledge and public secret in which sexual violence lies? Yet every time onetouches the subject, one encounters it as a resh problem, or no general solu-tions or abstract advice will do.

Mookherjee understands well that writing this history is like touchingmadness. She writes an account, weaving her experiences with the birangonas

who were subjected to sexual and physical violence during the war o inde-pendence in Bangladesh in 1971 and later declared as “war heroines” into atext that never loses sight o the concreteness o these women as esh-and-

blood creaturesnot some idealized “victims” whose stories will serve alarger purpose in the name o this or that ideology. Te achieved depth o this

book and the theoretical humility with which concepts are drawn rom the

*


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everyday make it a proound workone that will linger in the reader’s mindas the signicance o the words used, the stories told, the lists provided, or theorphan phrases that appear here and there, will only reveal themselves in slowmotion. Tere is no direct access to the experiences o the women throughsuch routes as sentimental empathyor through analogies with one’s ownexperiencesor each woman appears in the singular, and it is in their sin-gularity that the conuence o orces that are at once social (e.g., politics inBangladesh) and existential (the ability or inability to bear the child o therapist) is revealed. Tough I cannot do ull justice to the themes that emergein the book in this short oreword, I hope the points I touch on will serve asan invitation or deeper reection on the sexual economies o war and theirdispersal into other orms o violence with which we all live now in one way

or another.Unlike the stories o rape and sexual violation told within a judicialramework as in truth and reconciliation commissions or in court trials, thestories o the our women birangonas (war heroines) did not come out inone go. Te contradictory affects with which the term comes to be inused in thelocal context war heroines to be honored or soiled women to be shunnedserve as a warning to wait and learn what questions to ask. Tus Mookherjee

waited, immersing hersel in the daily talks and the everyday socialities o

the village. She was sometimes invited by one o the women’s husbands to visit and hear their storysometimes others pointed out to her a amily theyelt she should visit and hear about their suffering. Afer all, a long time hadpassed between the time o the ghotona (event, incident) and the time o thetelling. Te story had gathered in on itsel not only the memory o the originalevent but also how it was unearthed, combedthe expression Mookherjeeuses repeatedlyby different kinds o actors and traded or the different

values it carried. Mookherjee’s delicacy o touch is visible in the subtle ways

she wards off pressure on the women rom husbands or riends to “narrate” what happened. She allows the experiences o different kinds o violations(and not by the soldiers o the Pakistani army alone) to seep through theordinary expressions they use, sometimes by listening to what they want herto “overhear” and at other times by her attentiveness to expressions that ariseunbidden and evoke the sorrow or the terror o being brutally violated.

For the linguist anthropologist used to “capturing” the precise speechthrough the use o tape recorders and then analyzing it in terms o an elaboratesemiotic apparatus, this mode o collecting stories might seem suspect. But tothe women who were subjected to the glare o media in the commemorativeevents in 1992 o the Muktijuddho (the war o 1971) without ully understand-


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ing why they had been brought to these events or what their presence wastestiying to, it was the tape recorder and a oreigner wishing to record their“testimony” that would have been threatening. Mookherjee traces with greatpatience the manner in which media attention, including the pictures o the

birangonas in newspapers, circulated back to the village and became a majorsource o shame or the women, who were seen to violate the local codes omodesty and protection through silence. Te ethics o storytelling here is noteasy to discern, or the stories that might seem to perorm the task o criticismin one domain (say, that o national publicity) might become lethal or theimpact they have on the one whose story is being toldhere the bearer othe story is not a generic raped woman but a woman with this kind o amilyhistory, this kind o local politics, and it is her singularity that is at issue, not

her place in the general scheme o things. What, then, is to tell one’s story? Is it the same as being able to author it? Inmy own work on sexual violence, I have ound it useul to think o the differ-ence between speech and voiceor one does not always nd one’s voice inone’s speech. Tus, Mookherjee shows how one o the women, Kajoli, tries tonarrate what happened to her when she was raped but was interrupted againand again by her husband, who wanted to correct her on what really tookplaceor him, she did not know the events o the war well enough to be

able to narrate them correctly. “All this time, Raque was prompting her tospeak louder and talk about the ghotona. Kajoli at this point told him that sheshould nish her work or she would not get paid. Raque became quite an-noyed, but I saw that Kajoli was reluctant to talk. I said I was tired mysel, and

we sat or some time in the courtyard chatting, and then I lef.” Te power dy-namics within the domestic are o a different order than the power dynamicsthrough which national memory o the war was sought to be created througha visual archive o the photographs o birangonas or through the stories they

were urged to tell. Yet in many instances, as in the case o the our womenrom Enayetpur who were taken to Dhaka without being given any explana-tion and thus ound themselves unable to speak, it was the voice-over o theorganizers through which their suffering was publicly told and displayed andtheir “demands” or justice were articulated. What happens to these women

who are displayed as gures o abjection and desire, as they struggle to take back authorship that was wrested away rom them, is rarely tracked into theireveryday lives. In Mookherjee’s analysis we see how the publicity strikes backat the women through the everyday evocation o khota (scorn) in the village asthey and their amilies are stigmatized or having made their sexual violationpublic.


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Te story, then, is not a constant even when no one doubts that a rapeoccurred. It gathers other acts, gains weight or becomes rayed, waxes and

wanes in intensity. In some cases women and their amilies want to trade thestory o rape or material goodsmoney, government jobs, ree educationor their children. At other times the same amilies might heap scorn on themeager compensation they received or at promises o rehabilitation that areroutinely broken. Other amilies might wish to hide the acts o sexual viola-tion to avoid being expelled rom the sphere o village sociality.

It was ofen alleged by various people in Bangladesh that women romrespectable amilies who were raped never told their stories and that storieso rape were a ruse or poor women to extract something rom the govern-ment. Tere were rumors about sexual violation o more powerul women

even the leader o the opposition and ex-Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, wasrumored to have been raped, or it was alleged that she had ormed an alliance with a powerul general, putting her into the category o a collaborator. Tenomadic lives o the stories that circulated were invariably accompanied byrumors, suspicion, doubtsthere is an intensication o what I have else-

where called the tempo o skepticism. But i the story was not constant, nei-ther was the context.

First, there was the changing milieu o democratic politics and especially

the opposition between the Awami League and the Bangladesh NationalParty, the two main parties whose rivalry gathered multiple meanings at thenational and local levels. Ranging rom such issues as what kind o Muslimcountry Bangladesh aspired to become, to claims over who was to be re-garded as the true leader o the war o liberation, to issues that seeped downto the local level in terms o whose pictures were displayed in the houseor what kind o patronage one was entitled to receive as a member o one orthe other party, we see the astonishing reach o politics in every corner o

lie in Enayetpur and in the country in general. Second, there were multipleactors who emerged, each trying to place the specic issue o sexual and re-productive violence within the intense conicts over identityBengali andMuslimthat kept changing shape. Tus the context was itsel dynamic.One might have access to the context o one’s lie one day and lose it entirelyanother day. Tus women were able to read the politics o the amily and o the

villagethe jealousy o a co- wie, the grie o a husband who had no other wayto express himsel except to reuse to sleep at home even though he did notabandon his wie ater her rapeand all this aected the most quotidianmatters such as the ood one cooked and the most proound anxieties suchas the possibility o being abandoned.


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When it came to the ghotonathe event, incident o the rape womenstruggled to understand what had made them so vulnerable. What role didtheir husbands’ allegiance to Sheikh Mujib or to the muktijoddhas (libera-tion ghters) play in making them vulnerable to rape? As much as the sexual

violence wounded them, the everyday politics o the village and the khotathat burst out in everyday squabbles, in petty orms o revenge or insult,made the distant violence o the rape contiguous to everyday orms o vio-lence. Mookherjee’s masterul descriptions o village lie lead us to ask: Do theslights, bitterness, betrayal, and perverseness that pervade intimate relationsas well as lines o known enmity in the village give us a clue to how dra-matic enactments o violence might be born out o the ordinary? How elseto explain the sudden opportunities used by men to rape the daughter o a

neighbor (a Hindu neighbor’s daughter in one case) or to understand howrazakars (collaborators who supported the Pakistani army) became the sup-pliers o women to the Pakistani soldiers? No general appeal to our humanityor to humanitarian reason will provide a therapy or such disasters here

but Wittgenstein’s remark that the whole planet can suffer no greater tormentthan a single soul might help to orient us in this devastated landscape.

Perhaps the torment o this single soul is what makes Mookherjee trudgeto other villages, to the offi ces o human rights organizations, and to the

Muktijuddho Council or to search the massive literary and visual archive onthe war to see how the story o sexual violation becomes also the story o thenation. Her analysis o the literary and visual archives blocks any sentimental,compassionate, or empathetic reading that can create a alse sense o connec-tion to the women or to the meaning o sexual violation or them. Mookherjeeshows that a cultivation o suspicion toward the visual archive is not unwar-ranted, as in the example o the amous image o a soldier peering inside aloosened lungi (sarong) o a Bengali-looking man, which was read as a Paki-

stani soldier looking at the man’s penis to see i he was circumcised and thusproperly Muslimthough it turned out that the soldier was rom the Indianarmy and was searching or hidden weapons carried by suspected collaborators.She does not, however, equate the mere cultivation o suspicion with criti-cism, as i that provided the resting point o the analysisas i, once you haveshown the misreading o a photograph or discerned its voyeuristic impulse,

your task as a critic is over. Instead, Mookherjee lays out the ull geographyo the contradictions in the lef-liberal secular intellectual discourse, in thepractices o human rights organizations, in the obsessive politics o party ri-

valries, and in the hurts that amilies and villagers inict on each other evenas she documents efforts to provide succor, to impart justice, or to enshrine


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the experience o the women as heroic in the national narrative o indepen-dence. Tis is one reason the book is ascinating in the details it unravels andalso deeply disturbing, since it reuses to yield to our desire or criteria that

would help us to unequivocally determine those who are virtuous and those we might detest. Te orm o criticism here is much more subtle than a simplesearch or the good. Te obligation to respond to the violation that womensuffered is an existential one, but the space it opens up is one in which weare encouraged to think o the birangona not as the haunted specter that

would eed the imaginary o the nation but as one who has to make herlie in the world in a mode o ordinary realism. Such realism is what we sensein the evocation o everyday orms o sustenance such as rice and cloth that

women ear they might lose i their violation becomes public. But everyday

lie also nurtures aspirations that perhaps someone will open hersel to one’spain. Tere is a poignant moment in the book when the our birangonas romthe village give an account o their visit to the prime minister’s house. Tey

were given saris and money, but Sheikher Beti (Sheikh Mujib’s daughter)did not have any time to talk with them. As Moyna, one o the birangonasmused, “ ‘I I had talked a bit with her about my sorrows, I would have keptit in my heart and remembered it again and again. Te main thing was to cry

with her and eel a bit light in the heart.’ ” In this movement between aspira-

tion and disappointment, Mookherjee gives us a sign o what it is to inhabit lieagain. Te mela itihash, chorom itihash (lot o history, severe history) is whatMookherjee was givenand it is that to which she has given her anthropo-logical labor to produce this thoughtul account that is beore us now and or

which I am most grateul.


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In late 1971, Bangladeshi photographer Naibuddin Ahmed took a photographo a woman who had been raped by the Pakistani army during the Bangladesh

war o 1971 (ofen reerred to as Ekattor [1971]). Tis photograph depicted

the woman with her disheveled hair and her crossed, bangle-clad sts cover-ing her ace. Smuggled out o Bangladesh (M. Masud 1998), the photographdrew international attention to the Bangladesh war, through which East Paki-stan became the independent nation o Bangladesh, and in which rape wascommon. Faced with a huge population o rape survivors, the new Bangladeshigovernment in December 1971 publicly designated any woman raped in the wara birangona (meaning brave or courageous woman; the Bangladeshi state usesthe term to mean “war heroine”; see chapter 6 or various connotations o biran-

gona). Even today, the Bangladeshi government’s bold, public effort to reer tothe women raped during 1971 as birangonas is internationally unprecedented,

yet it remains unknown to many besides Bangladeshis. In 1994, the imam oSarajevo o the Islamic Association in Bosnia made a similar (yet little known)atwa (proclamation) that women who were raped in the war should have theposition o a soldier, o a ghter (Skjelsbæk 2012, 98–99). Among many otherimages, Ahmed’s photograph is iconic, symbolizing the horrors o 1971 andconnoting the supposed shame and anonymity o the raped woman. It is alsoone o the most of-cited and widely circulated visual representations o the

birangona. Tis image has been used on the cover o an English translationo a Bengali book on women’s oral history o 1971 (Shaheen Akhtar et al.

“A Lot of History, a Severe History”


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2001b). In the spring o 2008, a photographic exhibition titled Bangladesh displayed this picture at the Rivington Place Gallery in Shoreditch, East Lon-don, as the visual “trace” o the raped woman o 1971. In 2013–2014, a London-

based theatre company Komola Collective announced its intention to stage aplay on the Birangona: Women of War, in the United Kingdom and Bangladesh

based on the testimonies collected rom a group o poor birangonas in Siraj-ganj. It included Ahmed’s photograph on its poster to announce the play.Unlike Ahmed’s photograph, where the raped woman uses her hair (as wellas her sts) to cover her identity, the theater group altered this photographto portray the birangona as looking out through her disheveled hair. In this

version, she holds up her sts in protest above her mouth while revolutionary women emerge out o the olds o her sari. Te connotations o shame and

anonymity in Ahmed’s image have been replaced by the birangona’s demandsor justice or the killings and rapes o 1971 (see gs. P.1, P.2, P.3).Te circulation o this photograph and o other visual portrayals o the

raped women o the Bangladesh war o 1971 underlines the presence o a pub-lic memory o wartime rape. It also suggests the importance in Bangladesho visually identiying the raped woman. In act, on a number o occasionsduring my eldwork, people narrating encounters with the “raped women”

would reer to the photograph: “Have you seen ‘the amous hair photograph’?

Te raped woman covering her ace with her st and hair? Te women we sawlooked very much like that. Tey had become ‘abnormal’ (mentally unstable)as a result o the rape.” Tis comment also suggests that in the public memoryo rape there exist visual ways o identiying the raped woman as “abnormal.”Here real-lie encounters with the “abnormal” birangona intertwine withsimilar portrayals o the raped woman in the existing literary and visual repre-sentations to arrive at a sedimented image o who a birangona is.

Images o the birangona are also complemented in contemporary Ban-

gladesh by various testimonies o wartime rape by the women survivorsthemselves. Mosammad Rohima Nesa, Kajoli Khatoon, Moyna Karim, andRashida Khatoon, like many other women, were raped by West Pakistanisoldiers in their homes during the Bangladesh Liberation War o 1971. Whenattempting to narrate their experiences o 1971 in the 1990s, they would say tome, “Ha , amader mela itihash, chorom itihash ache” (Yes, we have a lot o his-tory, a severe history). Tey would reer to the “poison” o the 1971 “history ”that they carry, the “spillages” and “excesses” o their experiences rom the1970s to the 1990s.

Four poor, landless women, they have lived since 1971 with their husbands and children in villages (Enayetpur and its neighbor) in a western dis-


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.1. Te birangona “hair” photograph. Courtesy: Naibuddin Ahmed.


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.2. Autograph

exhibition: Ahmed’s photograph

in Bangladesh , a major

documentary photography

exhibition at Rivington Place

Gallery, London, April- June

2008. Courtesy: Autograph .

.3. Ahmed’s photo-

graph as part o the poster

or the play Birangona: Brave

Woman , staged in the United

Kingdom and Bangladesh in2013–14. Courtesy: Caitlin

Abbott.


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trict in Bangladesh where I spent eight months o my year-long multisitedeldwork. During my eldwork, when I would return to Dhaka rom Enayet-pur, people activists, human rights lawyers, intellectuals, writers, jour-nalists, academics, eminists who knew about my research would invariablyask the ollowing questions about the war heroines: Are they married? Dothey have a amily, children, kutumb (in laws)? Did their husband know o theincident o rape? My answer to these questions would amaze them: the poor,rural, and illiterate women continue to be married to their landless husbands

with whom they were married even beore 1971, in spite o the rape. Tese re-quently occurring, repetitive questions point to a sedimented imaginary o the

war heroine among the activist community. Just as the image in the hair photo-graph gives an idea o the birangona as “abnormal,” various literary and visual

representations have contributed to the perception that the war heroine’s kinnetworks have abandoned her and her amily has not accepted her as a resulto the rape.

Te phrase o the Enayetpur women“a lot o history, a severe history”urther resonates with Shiromoni Bhaskar’s representation and articulationo her experience o the Bangladesh war o 71. In 1998, Shiromoni, a amousBangladeshi artist, acknowledged publicly that she had been raped during the

war by Pakistani offi cials and Bengali collaborators. As a raped woman rom a

middle-class background, her testimonies and photographs have been centralto various national commemoration programs on 1971. As a middle-class bi-rangona, Shiromoni dismantled the prevalent stereotype that all birangonasare ashamed and invisible as a result o their rape.

Tis public memory contradicts the prevalent assumption that there is si-lence regarding wartime rape. It is incorrectly assumed by many that becauseBangladesh is a “Muslim” country, the traditions and practices o Islamand its assumed association with ideologies o gender, patriarchy, honor, and

shameensure the preservation o silence about wartime rape (see, e.g.,Brownmiller 1975, 1994; and chapter 6 on orientalizing rape). My ethnog-raphy highlights the various socioeconomic dynamics within which theideologies o gender, honor, and shame are practiced among the birangonas.It shows that the public memory o wartime rape maniests in Bangladesh inthree ways: rst, the state category that designates the raped women as biran-gonas; second, an extensive archive o visual and literary representations dat-ing back to 1971; and third, human rights testimonies o poor and middle-class

birangonas since the 1990s.o date around thirty to orty war heroines have publicly acknowledged

their history o rape during 1971, including the previously mentioned our


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women rom western Bangladesh, whose testimonies and photographs have been part o a number o national commemorative programs. Tese testimo-nies started being collected by the Bangladeshi lef-liberal activist communityin the 1990s as evidence o the injustices and what many would consider to begenocide committed through the rapes and killings o 1971. Within humanrights narratives, there is a predetermined ocus on documenting and pre-senting the birangonas’ account as only a horric one; inadequate attentionis given to the way in which the war heroines themselves want to articulatetheir experience not only o 1971 but o the trajectory o their subsequentpostconict lives. In contrast, I show that ocusing on the postconict liveso the women not only gives us an in-depth account o the impact o wartimerape but also highlights the complex ways in which women and their amilies

have dealt with the violence o rape over time. By giving due emphasis to theconcerns o birangonas, one can also attempt to ethically document and careor the inormants whose violent narratives and experiences are possible evi-dence o the occurrence o genocide in 1971. I we open up questions aboutthe complex realities o experiences o wartime rape among the women andtheir amilies, we could locate their accounts within the local politics o wartimerape and the political economy o the women’s postwar appropriation in thepublic sphere o Bangladesh.


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Tis book has been diffi cult to write or various reasons and has taken along time. Indeed, my debts are endless. Primarily, this study would have

been inconceivable without the love, warmth, and hospitality that I received in

Enayetpur. My sincere gratitude to the people in Enayetpur and particularly toMoyna, Kajoli, Rohima, Rashida, and their amilies and other birangonas with

whom I worked. Tis is only a small attempt on my part to mirror their variedexperiences. My thanks to Khokon Hossein or ably helping me as a researchassistant.

Te Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship o the Wenner Gren Foundation or Anthropological Research, New York, helped me to complete this book. I amalso thankul or the award o the Felix Scholarship or unding my disserta-

tion rom which this book draws. Fieldwork was supported by the CentralResearch Fund o the University o London, the Emslie Horniman Scholar-ship rom the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the (School oOriental and Arican Studies, University o London) Additional FieldworkFund. Funding rom Durham University has also been signicant or the book.I am grateul to Naibuddin Ahmed, Roshid alukdar, Maleka Khan, SwapanParekh, Autograph, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jill (Durrance) Sabella,

Joanna Kirkpatrick, Geraldine Forbes, and Paul Greenough or grantingpermission to use their photographs and other documents rom their per-sonal archives. Sadly, Naibuddin Ahmed and Roshid alukdar died in 2009and 2011, respectively.


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An earlier version o a section o chapter 3 appeared, in a different orm,as “ ‘Remembering to Forget’: Public Secrecy and Memory o Sexual Violencein Bangladesh,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, no. 2 (2006):433–50. An earlier version o a section o chapter 5 appeared, in a differentorm, as “ ‘My Man (Honour) Is Lost but I Still Have My Iman (Principle)’:Sexual Violence and Articulations o Masculinity,” in South Asian Masculinities ,edited by R. Chopra, C. Osella, and F. Osella (New Delhi: Kali or Women,2004, 131–59). An earlier version o chapter 7, in a different orm, appearedas “Te Absent Piece o Skin: Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War and ItsGendered and Racialised Inscriptions,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (2012):1572–601.

An earlier version o a section o the conclusion appeared, in a different

orm, as “Friendships and Ethnographic ‘Encounters’ within Let-LiberalPolitics in Bangladesh,” in aking Sides: Politics and Ethnography (A NancyLindisarne Festschrif), edited by H. Armbruster and A. Laerke (Oxord:Berghahn, 2008, 65–87).

I am grateul to Modern Asian Studies , Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute , Berghahn Books, and Women Unlimited (earlier Kali or Women) orpublishing these earlier versions; the versions that appear in this book aresignicantly revised.

Te scholarly roots o the book took shape rom discussions withPro. Prasanta Ray o Presidency College, Calcutta University, and Pro. . K.Oomen, Pro. Avijit Pathak, and Pro. R. K. Jain o Jawaharlal Nehru Univer-sity, Delhi. In , Pro. Christopher Pinney and Dr. Caroline Osella notonly were supportive supervisors but also have become important intellectualinterlocutors and riends. Dr. Nancy Lindisarne has also continued to pro-

vide invaluable succor and motivation throughout. Pro. Veena Das has beena huge support or the book, and I am grateul or her warmth and intellec-

tual inspiration. Pro. Jonathan Spencer has encouraged me with discussionsrelated to anthropology o politics. In Lancaster University, discussions withPro. Jackie Stacey, Dr. Anne-Marie Fortier, Dr. Bulent Diken, Pro. Cindy

Weber, Pro. Paolo Palladino, Pro. Michael Dillon, and students o variousundergraduate and postgraduate courses have enriched the book urther. Mysincere thanks to the Anthropology Department in and Sussex or givingme the opportunities to teach and or various scholarly engagements.

I am also thankul or the eedback received or my presentations at the an-nual conerences o the American Anthropological Association and the Asso-ciation o Social Anthropology, the Brick Lane Study Circle, the South Asian

Anthropological Group, Ain-O-Shalish-Kendra, Bangladesh Rural Advance-


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ment Committee University in Dhaka, Centre or Research in the Arts, SocialSciences and Humanities ( and South Asian studies seminar inCambridge University, Madison Preconerence on 1971, Rape in Wartime con-erence in Paris, Workshop on State and Sel-making, and the anthropol-ogy department seminars in Jahangirnagar University (Dhaka), University oManchester, Warwick, , University College London and Sussex.

Te warmth I received in Bangladesh was overwhelming. Te comorts o mystay in Enayetpur were ensured by the hospitality o my hosts in Enayetpurthe Chowdhurys and in DhakaUrmi Rahman, Shireen Hossein (onudi),Sharmima Rahman (Soma), Deedar Hossein, and Khaleda Khatoon, my hosts-turned-riends, provided me a home away rom home. Particularly, the loveand support o the employees o the Nijera Kori, in Bhashkhal, gave me

many new riends, precious among them being Shikha Saha. I value the aca-demic discussions with and riendships o Dr. Meghna Guhathakurta, SuraiyaBegum, Hasina Ahmed, and Dr. Sukumar Biswas o Bangla Academy. Tey,along with Rahnuma Ahmad, Shahidul Alam, Khushi Kobir, Akku Chowd-hury, Modul Huq, Asan Choudhuri, Hameeda Hossein, Shaheen Akhtar,Sara Hossein, areque and Catherine Masud, ahmima Anam, ManoshChowdhury, Ryan Good, David Bergman, Naila Zaman Khan, Dina Siddiqi,Naeem Mohaiemen, Bina D’Costa, Shahidul Alam uku, aslima Mirza, Say-

eed Ferdous, and Zobaida Nasreen, enabled the continuation o my eldworkoutside Bangladesh by sending me requent packages, taking time to answermy innumerable queries, and above all strengthening our riendship.

Various individuals in different organizations also helped me in numer-ous ways. Tese organizations include Ain-O-Shalish-Kendra (), Ban-gla Academy, Bangladesh Women’s Health Coalition, Bangladesh National

Women Lawyer’s Association, Community Development Library, Bangla-desh National Archives, Environment and Support Project (), the

Bengali newspaper Prothom Alo , and University o Dhaka Library. I acknowl-edge the support given by students o Jahangirnagar University and Picture Library: Khandaker anvir Murad opu, Debasish Shome, and Nu-runnahar Nargish, in nding and photographing various visual illustrationsand ollowing up on reerences to various literary works. Stephen Tomas othe Photographic Unit, Lancaster University, helped me to nalize these im-ages. Te music o Jazz ’s Late Lounge provided a productive ambience or“thought struggle” in the early hours o the morning.

Te long process o writing this book has been made considerably easierand enjoyable by the support o riends and amily. My thanks to Shruti Kap-ila, Greg Cameron, Jisha Menon, Lindi odd, Andrew Irving, Nigel Eltringham,


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Iran Ahmed, Anuradha Chakravarty, Radha Roy, Ruben Andersson, akshaykhanna, Anoshua Choudhuri, Anupam Banerjee, Binod Mukherjee, SwarnaliBanerjee-Cochrane, and Ester Gallo. I lost two riends during the process o

writing this book: Justine Lucas, who died o a terminal illness, and arequeMasud, who died as a result o a tragic road accident. Teir indomitable spiritand quest or lie served as an example to all around them. Te constant aitho my dearest sister, Abantika and brother-in-law, Saradindu, the love o myniece, Meghna, and the warmth o Ed and Ann Lacy have been invaluable.Given the theme and the nature o the material, as well as the multiplicity osources that this book draws upon, I have ound concluding it, challengingor various reasons. My moner manush , Mark Lacy, has endured patiently thecompletion o this book through engaging, encouraging, critical discussions,

editing and by cooking me innumerable meals and giving me the space tonish it. His companionship, love, laughter, humor, and support are precious.Te birth o our sons, Nikhil and Milon, made me realize the signicance oall three “babies”the book and our sons. Nothing would have been possible

without the blessing, warmth, sacrice, support, unstinting aith, and encour-agement o Ma, who let me y when I wanted to. Tis book is a testament toher love, strength, and spirit.

Tanks to Ken Wissoker, the editor at Duke University Press who took on

this project. Tanks also to the anonymous readers or their comments and toLaura Helper-Ferris, Jade Brooks and Sara Leone or all the editorial help.o all these individuals, my warmest, heartelt gratitude. Needless to say, Ialone am responsible or any shortcomings that remain in this study. All e-orts have been made to secure permissions. For urther clarications, pleasecontact the author by email. I will donate all royalties received rom sales othis book to the birangonas in Bangladesh.


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“Te Looking-Glass Border”

Tere never had been a moment in the our thousand year old history

o that map when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound

to each other afer they had drawn their linesso closely that I, in Calcutta, had

only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the

inverted image o the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that

was to set us reeour looking-glass border. 1988, 233

Bangladesh is a country symbolized by its lack and excess. A prevalent stereo-type o Bangladesh in India and in the West is that it is an “Islamic” country

ruled by military governments and dominated by s. Alongside the prevailing international image o grinding poverty, oods, and cyclones, studieshave ofen linked Bangladesh to policies o population control, development,outsourced garment production, and now climate change. In 1972, reecting onthe bizarre donation o a shipment o used ski clothing sent by well-meaningresidents o a Scandinavian country as part o the relie efforts afer the 1971

war, a Bangladeshi relie worker in Dhaka rightly said, “I guess that or manypeople Bangladesh is a place o shadow geographyone o those countries

you think is in the Himalayas but on the other hand might be Tailand’s neighbor to the south” (Ellis 1972, 298).


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Prior to 1947, the Hindu Bengalis constituted the dominant landown-ers in East Bengal, while Muslim Bengalis primarily worked as munshis (ac-countants) and landless peasants. Afer the ormation o East Pakistan on the

basis o religious identity, many Hindus moved to West Bengal in India andMuslim Bengalis to East Pakistan. Over the years, numerous Hindu Benga-lis have also moved rom Bangladesh to West Bengal as “reugees”; they havemany stories about losing property. Te attachment and distance between thetwo Bengals are aptly captured in Amitav Ghosh’s “looking-glass border”each place became an inverted image o the other. Te writings o the Bangla-deshi eminist writer aslima Nasreen contributed to this image and urtherstrengthened already existing negative stereotypes in West Bengal and Indiaabout the “Muslims” o Bangladesh. In 1993 she published Lojja (Shame),

portraying the backlash o the majority Muslim population against minor-ity Hindu communities in Bangladesh. Tis was in response to the right- wingIndian Hindu communalists’ demolition o Babri Masjid at Ayodhya on De-cember 6, 1992, and the subsequent massacre o minority Muslim communitiesin Mumbai in India.

In conjunction with this idea o lack, Indian Bengalis contradictorily iden-tiy Bangladesh as a place o excesso hospitality, warmth, beautiul jam-dani saris, and “good ood” (especially o varieties o river sh, particularly the

avorite Bengali sh, hilsa/ilish , delicious kebabs, and biriyanis). Te shadowylines between Bangladesh and West Bengal (India) not only separated thecountries but created “a yet undiscovered irony” (Amitav Ghosh 1988, 233)highlighted by the paradoxical, yet inarticulable, undiscovered relationshipo intimacy and distance, lack and excess between the two divided Bengals.Doing this research in Bangladesh as an Indian Bengali rom Calcutta, WestBengal (the Indian part o Bengal), I ofen thought o Ghosh’s “looking-glass

border”: this work made me relearn our own cross- border histories.

Crossing Borders

Tis research was triggered in 1992 by my outrage and despair as an under-graduate student in Calcutta, India, over the unolding o intercommunal vio-lence afer the demolition o Babri Masjid, by Hindu communalists. Beingconned at home during the imposition o curew and depending on Door-darshan (the government channel) or news, I became aware o the powero political rumors as I heard o widespread instances o sexual violence inGujarat during 1992, that o Hindu men raping Muslim women and Muslimmen raping Hindu women (Agarwal 1995). Tese circulating accounts spoke


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to me o how a woman’s body becomes the territory on which men inscribetheir political programs, a point that the violence against Muslims in Gujaratin 2002 reconrmed. Also, news throughout the 1990s o the Japanese com-ort women, the rapes in Bosnia and Rwanda, and the United Nation’s dec-laration o rape as a war crime in the 1995 Beijing sessionall these eministconcerns triggered and inormed my research in Bangladesh.

In the rst year o my doctoral work, I heard rom a Bangladeshi student inLondon how women in Bangladesh were publicly talking about their experi-ence o wartime rape. Drawing on various eminist theorizations o wartimerape (Brownmiller 1975, 1994; Stiglmayer 1994), I assumed that there would

be silence about this issue at the Bangladeshi national level. I decided to visitBangladesh or the rst time in March 1997 to coincide with its twenty-fh

anniversary o the liberation war as part o a pre-eldwork trip. On a warm,sunny morning, I landed in the smart Zia International Airport, named aferone o the nation’s muktijoddhas (liberation ghters), later the military presi-dent, Ziaur Rehman (1975–81), carrying a photograph o my host. Murals othe war could even be seen rom the plane. Soon I ound mysel being driventhrough the streets o Dhaka to the upmarket diplomatic residential enclaveo Bonani. On the way, I watched with curiosity and amusement as color-ully painted rickshaws, “baby-taxis,” and expensive oreign cars vied or road

space. Te stretch rom the airport was also interspersed with large cutoutso Sheikh Mujib, Sheikh Hasina, Yasser Araat, Nelson Mandela, and Sulei-man Demeriel (the urkish prime minister). Huge banners welcomed theseinternational guests coming to celebrate March 26, Independence Day, which

would also mark the end o the yearlong celebrations o Bangladesh’s twenty-fh birth anniversary.

On the ollowing morning, March 26 itsel, I headed or a public meetingin the grounds o the Shaheed Suhrawardy Udyan (Martyred Suhrawardy

Park), where newly elected prime minister and Awami League leader SheikhHasina would share the stage with Araat, Mandela, and Demeriel. Hasina’sobservation o Independence Day would be particularly signicant, or she

was also the daughter o the charismatic leader and the assassinated rstprime minister o independent Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. Earlier,I had watched on tele vision as Hasina, along with the three oreign dignitaries,placed a wreath at the Savar Smritisoudho (Memorial o Memories) justoutside Dhaka, where the government rst takes all international guests.Hasina showed them the mass graves to the beat o a military guard ohonor; then the tune o the national anthem, “Amar Sonar Bangla ami tomai

bhalobashi” (My golden Bengal, I love you), written by Rabindranath agore,


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a non-Muslim (Brahmo), Bengali Nobel laureate, lled the air. Now, atSuhrawardy Udyan, in the presence o the international guests, Hasina lit theShikha Chironton (Eternal Flame) at the site o her ather’s historic speechgiven on March 7, 1971. Here Sheikh Mujib had called Bengalis to struggleor national liberation through a movement o noncooperation. March 7 isdeemed by the Awami League to be the trigger or the liberation war. Hasinadeclared that the ame o Muktijuddher Chetona (spirit o Muktijuddho)

would burn orever so as to bring to ruition her ather’s dream o Sonar Ban-gla (Golden Bengal). Sonar Bangla is a romantic and nostalgic visualization o“mother Bengal,” with her prosperous lands and rivers inhabited by a peaceul,harmonious, agrarian community, a timeless and an apparently classless imag-ery. Sheikh Mujib himsel had developed this scene o eternal tranquillity

which evokes sorrowul longing and emotion or one’s homelandas a politi-cal project to inuse pathos into Muktijuddho (Bangladesh Liberation war o1971) and a passion or post–1971 nationbuilding. As I stood on the ringes othis crowded meeting, everyone around me cheered as Mandela, Demeriel,and Araat acknowledged Bangladesh’s liberation struggle. It was a momentouseeling.

I next visited the Muktijuddho Museum, where the air reverberated withthe revolutionary songs o agore and Nazrul Islam (the national poet o

Bangladesh). Te atmosphere was estive, with children accompanying adults, young women dressed beautiully in saris, and men in punjabis. Here exhib-its decentered the Sheikh Mujib–ocused celebrations and emphasized the roleo common people in the liberation o 1971. Te museum housed belongingso muktijoddhas and exhibited gruesome photographs o those who werekilled and women who had been raped. In the museum caé I met a mix o

young and middle-aged people, many o whom expressed their hatred orPakistan, saying that they rerained rom buying clothes or ruit juices made

there. One o them added, “So what i we hate Pakistan because o 1971?Hasina might talk o Muktijuddho, but she has just returned rom the Orga-nization o Islamic Countries Conerence in Pakistan. Also have you seen her

wearing the ‘headband’ hijab [veil] just beore the June 1996 elections? Shecannot seem to decide what Bangladesh should beBengali or Muslim!” Atthe same time, Pakistan, especially its cricket team and players, is, however,much more popular among the younger generation in Bangladesh. So, in myrst ew days I witnessed vivid examples o the inherent contestations in thenational celebrations o independence earned as a result o the Bangladesh

war o 1971.


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In the week ollowing the Independence Day celebrations, the leadingnewspaper dailies I perused all eatured the Awami League and BangladeshNational Party ( leadership debate between Sheikh Mujib and GeneralZiaur Rehman (see chapter 1). Each newspaper proclaimed that its avoritehad led the 1971 war. It was evident that the Sheikh Mujib–centric state cele-

brations were meant to offset the preceding government’s militarizedcommemorations. Te celebrations eatured Bengali songs and poets in orderto emphasize a Bengali identity. Te ethos o Bengali identity and the “spirit”o the war o 1971o which the lef-liberal communities considered Hasinato be the repositorycentered on principles o secularism, democracy, andBengali nationalism, as opposed to the emphasis on Islam and Bangladeshinationalism o the and Jamaat-e-Islami (). But the celebration and

symbolism did not convince everyone: those with a erce hatred or Paki-stan’s role in Bangladesh in 1971 strongly questioned the state’s irtation withIslamic and Bengali identity.

Te research center with which I was affi liated employed leading Bangla-deshi scholars rom the different social science disciplines. Ranging rom thelower middle class to the middle class, the scholars were not homogeneous,and tensions existed between the women eminists and other male intellec-tuals. But at the beginning o my eldwork, everyone welcomed me warmly,

reerring to me as “the girl rom Calcutta working on our 71,” and I establishedlong-lasting riendships with some o the eminist scholars, activists, andlawyers.

I was also increasingly unlearning my initial presumptionthat the his-tory o rape was absent rom the metanarrative o the Bangladesh war. Instead,I ound it continually invoked, especially in the state speeches and policieseulogizing the women as birangonas. I came across testimonies o rape indocuments rom afer the war (rom 1972 and 1973) and as the subject o

museum exhibitions and voluntary narratives o birangonas in newspapersrom the 1990s. I later ound my way to the village o Enayetpur to conductmore in-depth eldwork, specically to talk to birangonas in their everydaylives today. Apart rom the our women o Enayetpur (mentioned in the pre-ace), I also worked with seven other women (rom different parts o Bangla-desh) who were raped in 1971: Chaya, Rukhshana, Aroza, Morjina, Bokul,Shiromoni, and Shireen. In Enayetpur, I was helped by Khokon Hossein, a

young journalist who worked or a local newspaper. Wittily reerred to in the village as the shanghatik shangbadik (erocious journalist) or his keen jour-nalistic aspirations, he acilitated my access to muktijoddhas in and around


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Enayetpur or the purpose o interviews. At various local and national sites, Ialso interviewed and observed eminist and human rights activists and orga-nizations, state offi cials, lmmakers, writers, and other producers o variousliterary and visual representations o the birangonas o 1971.

Spectral Wound is the result o this multisited eldwork. It documents andanalyzes the public memory o wartime rape perpetrated by the West Paki-stani army and local Bengali men in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) duringthe Bangladesh war o 1971. It seeks to explore the ollowing questions: Howis the raped woman invoked in the public memory o 1971? What is therelationship between this public memory and the experiences o women who

were raped in 1971? he book tries to counter the limited and orientalizedunderstanding o the impacts o wartime rape whereby the raped woman is

only understood to be an “abnormal,” horric, dehumanized victim, aban-doned by her kin. It ethnographically analyzes the social lie o testimonies,examining how the stories and experiences o raped women o the 1971 war

became part o a broader set o national discourses and debates, bringing to-gether testimonies and visual representa tions. It examines how these visualand literary representations o the raped woman create a public culture o“knowing” and remembering her that in turn inorms the processes o tes-tiying and human rights. Te book argues that identiying raped women only

through their suffering not only creates a homogeneous understanding o gen-dered victimhood but also suggests that wartime rape is experienced in the same

way by all victims. Spectral Wound instead utilizes a political and historicalanalysis to highlight the varied experiences o wartime rape during 1971.

Addressing how the experiences o 1971 maniest today among womenthemselves and their amilies, this book triangulates the narratives with

various representations (state, visual, and literary), as well as contemporaryhuman rights testimonies. Te book thereby examines the circulation o press

articles, a range o oral accounts (interviews, discussion, observation, rumors,and gossip), images, literary representations, and testimonies o rape amongsurvivors o sexual violence, their amilies and communities, the lef-liberalcivil society, and different governments and state actors. Spectral Wound alsoreects on the silence relating to the violation and rape o men and juxtaposesit with the public memory o the rape o women. Tis allows a theorization othe relationship between the nation, sexuality, and masculinity and identiesissues o demasculinization in the husbands o raped women.


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Razakars and Birangonas: Te Past in the Present

Worldwide, the dominant understanding is that communities and nationsconsign sexual violence during conict to oblivion and silence. It is under-stood to be a cost o war. In response to the assumed silence about wartimerape, eminists and activists have ound it imperative to testiy, to witness, tospeak out, to “recover,” to give voice to raped women’s narratives. Tis wit-nessing is both a methodology and a politics, and eminists and activists char-acterize it as empowering, therapeutic, and liberating to those being given ornding their voice. Such activism has publicized the rapes o comort womenin Japan during World War II, the rapes in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s,and sexual violence in Darur and Congo.

But wartime rape was already part o public conversation in Bangladesh inthe 1970s, immediately afer the Bangladesh war, and it has continued to bepart o public discussion since the 1990s. Along with designating the raped

women as birangonas, the Bangladeshi government also set up various rehabilitation programs and centers or the women in 1972, organized marriagesor them, and helped them enter the labor market to guarantee that they werenot socially ostracized. Whether successul or not, the effort by the new Ban-gladeshi government to publicly present women raped during 1971 as “war

heroines” remains almost unparalleled. It is important to note that the Ban-gladeshi press did all silent on the birangonas between 1973 and the 1990s,as did the government. Te issue o wartime rape has, however, remained onthe public stage, as a topic o literary and visual media (lms, plays, photo-graphs) since 1971, thereby ensuring that the raped woman has endured as aniconic gure. Real-lie encounters with the birangona afer the war have alsocontributed to the “knowing” o the birangona, as is evident in the ollowingillustrations.

When I started my eldwork in 1997, many personal accounts o war amonga large number o people in cities, suburban towns, and villages eatured “know-ing” a woman who had been raped in 1971, “who lived next door,” “in the sameroad,” or “in the neighboring locality/village.” Te woman in question wouldalways be remembered through her “disheveled hair,” “her loud laughter,”or her “quietness” or “muteness,” or as “the one who stares into space” with“deadened-eyes.” Ratanlal Chakraborty o Dhaka University said that he sawmany women roaming different parts o Dhaka city like vagrants afer the

war, rom December 1971 until February 1972: “Teir dress and movements were proo or many o us who were denite that they were victims o the warand that they had nowhere to go” (S. B. Rahman 2002). In various personal


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communications during my research, individuals rom different class back-grounds would remember returning afer the war and encountering a “raped

woman.” I cite here responses o three individuals:

We were in Babur Road when we returned to Dhaka and there was a

house across the road where we saw many women with their unkempthair, coming out on the road, purposelessly. We could hear their laugh-ter at night.

When we returned afer the war, there was a woman next door wholooked unstable. . . . her hair was all over her ace and she was alwaysquietwe knew she was raped.

Afer the war, my ather saw thousands o raped women standing still,

back to back, against a truck. Not a hair moved among them and there was no sign o lie in their eyes. Tey were mute, with deadened eyeslike Qurbani, sacricial cattle. Whenever I utter the word birangona Iinvariably think o that image. (Gazi 2014)

Tese postwar encounters with the raped women resonate powerully withthe amous “hair photograph” and the way various people reerred to it to makesense o their own wartime encounter. It is telling that while the staging o

the play Birangona draws upon the memory o the director’s ather (as men-tioned earlier in the Preace), the theater company also chose the hair photo-graph on its poster to stand in or this memory o the birangona.

Alongside the gure o the birangona in these narratives is the gure o therazakar , a male collaborator. Local Bengalis and Bihari Muslims collaborated

with the Pakistani army in the rapes and killings during 1971. Bangladeshisreer to them as razakars , which means volunteers or helpers in Persian andUrdu, but they use the term pejoratively, as the name Judas might be used

in Europe or Mirjaar in West Bengal, Indiainsults based on historicalgures o betrayal. Numbering around fy thousand, razakars are deemedto be those who spoke Urdu, came to East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) duringthe 1947 partition, and were members o the religious reactionary parties like

(Salek 1977), Al Badr, and Al Shams (which ormed “peace committees”during the 1971 war). Teir collaboration with the Pakistani army resulted in thedeath o anywhere rom 300,000 to 3 million civilians (these numbers are con-tested numbers, depending on who is articulating them), the death o around18 to 50 “intellectuals,” the rape o hundreds o thousands o women (thesenumbers also are contested, varying between 100,000 and 400,000), and 25,000to 195,000 orced pregnancies.


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Te lef-liberal activist community stereotypically represents the raza-kar with a beard and a cap, as signiers o “Islamic” identity. Since 2009, thegovernment has tried many o these collaborators at the controversial warcrimes tribunal in Dhaka and has sentenced six to death. On December 12,2013, one o those being tried or these war crimes was executed in the midsto jubilation as well as anger. Nonetheless, in independent Bangladesh,powerul razakars have gained political power. Some were cabinet ministersin the government led by Khaleda Zia and the , in 2001. Some o them areIslamicists who belong toor are politically closer to , the right- wingIslamic party.

Te razakar and the birangona are iconic gures in the public memory o1971: male and emale, perpetrator and survivor, both public and both secret,

both being memories o that past which are erupting and shaping the present.Tat in contemporary Bangladesh there is need or the razakar to be punishedis powerully shown through the ollowing vignette. Heard in nearly all partso Bangladesh, it establishes a direct relationship between the raped womanand the collaborator.

A razakar who once provided women to the Pakistani army alls prey tohis own deeds. On a day when there are no women to provide, the Pakistanigeneral rapes the razakar’s own daughter. Te daughter commits suicide afer

disclosing her ather’s betrayal to the villagers. I ound this story in bookspublished in the 1990s documenting the narratives o torture and violation o1971. Syed Shamsul Haq’s amous play, Payer Aoaj Paoa Jai (Footsteps can beheard; [1976] 1991), ocuses on this account o rape, which I also ound to bethe content o various dramatized stage plays and televised serials. Te ubiq-uity and consistency o this account o rape through its circulation throughliterary, press, and media accounts might suggest that this narrative enablespeople to imagine how a collaborator might have been punished, seemingly

possible only by the rape o his daughter! Te punishment meted out to therazakar through his daughter’s rape also alerts us to the prevailing discomorttoward the birangonas’ transgressed sexuality. Te reactions to the “hair photo-graph” typiy this discomort.

Te ceaseless exchange across national and cultural boundaries o this visual economy o the birangona in this public, and its intertextuality (theintertwined, circulatory traces o discourses, symbols, and images that cross-reerence each other in different texts, contexts, and times) with witness ac-counts have signicantly contributed to the effi cacy o this representation othe raped woman as a horric “wound.” It is important or me to clariy myuse o “wound,” a psychoanalytically loaded term that has been all too easily


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invoked to mean something painul that bears witness to a orgotten traumaand past injustice. Tis denition allows a seamless, ahistorical sliding o indi-

vidual trauma into collective trauma. Instead, I use “wound” literally to reer tothe physical and social injuries through which different Bangladeshi publicsidentiy and thereafer circulate, know, and imagine the iconic gure o the

birangona. Tis “hair” image has brought the horric events o 1971 to theattention o an international public, the image standing in or the continual

wounded history o Bangladesh.

Feminist Oral Historiography and Public Memory

My ocus on the gendered narratives o sexual violence occurring during

times o conict builds on the theoretical, methodological, and ethical con-cerns emerging rom the scholarship o eminist oral historiography relatingto the partition o 1947 (Butalia 1998; R. Menon and Bhasin 1998; Das 1995)and women’s experience in 1971 (D’Costa 2011; Saikia 2011). Drawing on tes-timonies and documents, these works alert us to the ethical pitalls o uncov-ering these narratives. Tis is a concern o contemporary signicance giventhe continuation o sexual violence during conicts, including the currentrapes perpetrated by the Indian army in its attempts to suppress resistance to

its authority in Kashmir, in the northeastern states, and in Sri Lanka duringthe civil war. In act, unconrmed reports alleged that soldiers o the IndianPeace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka raped Rajiv Gandhi’s “suicide bomber” as-sassin (Dhanu or Tenmozhi Rajaratnam).

Te history o partition is the poignant account o deep mental and physi-cal violation o women, as is made clear by the rich scholarship on partition vi-olence that was published in the 1990s: Te Other Side of Silence (Butalia 1998),

Borders and Boundaries (R. Menon and Bhasin 1998), and Critical Events (Das

1995). Tese works show how “non-actors are shaped by an epochal event andhow their response enables a critique o political history” (R. Menon andBhasin 1998, 16). Troughout this book, I draw extensively on Veena Das’s(1995) theorization o the relation between language, body, pain, and thestate via the lens o women affected by the anti-Sikh riots o 1984 and thepartition o 1947. Trough oral history narratives, Butalia highlights how par-tition divided amilies, how they rebuilt lives, what resources they drew upon,how the trauma o displacement and losing one’s home shaped their lives,and the indispensability o “low-caste and low-status” jobs in the context oconict. Butalia, Das, and Menon and Bhasin were the rst to ocus on therole o amily violence and “honor killings” (as a mark o masculine honor)


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o women during partition, elling the stories o women who had resorted to violence by killing themselves, and how their amilies could only recall themas heroic martyrs (e.g., Butalia 1998, 62), their work shows how scholars andothers usually conceptualize violence as male and patriarchal.

My work on the testimonial cultures o the public memory o wartimerape also engages with two academic books on the gendered account o theBangladesh war that have provided a timely ramework or debates relating to

women’s experiences o 1971: Bina D’Costa’s Nationbuilding , Gender and WarCrimes in South Asia (2011) and Yasmin Saikia’s Women, War and the Making of

Bangladesh: Remembering (2011). From a eminist approach based in thedisciplinary paradigms o international relations, D’Costa (2011) tracks in de-tail the trajectory o nationalism in Bangladesh, the sequence o events rom

1947 to 1971, and the impact o the war on Hindu victims. Drawing on thehope o insaniyat or manushyata (the capacity to recognize the shared humancondition), Saikia (2011) attempts to map out a transormative, empowering,responsible space in response to the violent narratives o 1971. Many o herrespondents show an inner capacity or humanity in the midst o violenceand war. Saikia includes the narratives o ve women raped during the war,reerring to them as “victims” and distinguishing them rom liberation ght-ers. Saikia mentions other narratives and describes three women who were

involved in providing various ser vices during the war, two emale liberationghters, and two mena Bengali liberation ghter who had also committedrape and a Pakistani soldier who were the perpetrators o violence during1971. Her work is important or its ocus on the experiences o a Bihari woman,a war babyBeauty who struggles with her mother or a true account o theevents o her birth and its ocus on perpetrators.

I agree that as a supplement to existing women’s history, oral histories cangive a texture and quality to women’s lives. Also, just as the anti-Sikh riots o

1984 became a trigger or an exploration o the violent, undocumented eventso the partition o 1947 (Das 1995), similarly, in Bangladesh in the 1990s, emi-nists and human rights activists sought to document women’s oral histories otheir rape o 1971 and try the collaborators o the Bangladesh war. Tis createdthe conditions that enabled various women to narrate their violent historieso 1971 and their post–1971 lie trajectories.

While drawing on oral histories and narratives o the women affected,ollowing work by Das, Butalia, and Menon and Bhasin, I also draw on gov-ernment speeches, documents, and interviews with social workers and otherauthorities who worked among these women. Tese invaluable archives osocial memory have allowed me to think through how the state, when seeking


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to implement rules or the supposed best interests o its citizens, actuallyexercises violence covertly. In the case o partition, Das (1995) examined atlength the intervention o the Pakistani and Indian states in bureaucratically“recovering” Hindu and Muslim women “abducted” into Muslim and Hinducommunities to police the sexuality o women in the name o securing their

well- being. D’Costa’s work also examines the state processes regarding children born during 1971, homeless widows, and the role o various leaders, doctors,missionaries (respondent M and Geoffrey Davis in D’Costa 2002), and social

workers. While drawing on oral history, this book also identies the limitations o

depending solely on it. I am particularly cautious o how oral history, testi-mony, and memory are ofen invoked uncritically in retrieving “untold sto-

ries” o a “real past,” an approach that has been critiqued by historians andanthropologists: “Popular memory, has come to be increasingly important asan alternative, oppositional archive that allows access to ‘untold stories’ oa ‘real past’ that can presumably be tapped into by simply posing the rightquestions” (M. Sarkar 2006, 140).

I am wary o the attempt to “recover” and give “voice” and here borrowthe words o Veena Das: “It is ofen considered the task o historiography to

break the silence that announces the zones o taboo. Tere is even something

heroic in the image o empowering women to speak and to give voice to the voiceless. I have mysel ound this a very complicated task, or when we usesuch imagery as breaking the silence we may end up using our capacity to‘unearth’ hidden acts as a weapon” (2006, 57). I agree with Sarkar and Dasand instead ocus on “testimonial cultures” (S. Ahmed and Stacey 2001) toexamine the dominant narrative through which sexual violence during theBangladesh war is described in the public memory. I ollow the ethnographicand historiographical work o scholars who have all ocused on a post-event

trajectory among their inormants. In the process, they have engaged criti-cally with the prevalent idea that speaking/having a voice can alone be heal-ing. Further, they explore the social lie o these testimonies to examine hownarratives can be appropriated in various contexts.

My argument and emphasis on examining wartime rape within its post-conict dynamics and political ramework have also gained succor rom two

works: Skjelsbæk’s (2012) book on the political psychology o war rape inBosnia, and Baaz and Stern’s (2013) unpacking o the power dynamics o rapeas a war crime in Congo. Skjelsbæk argues against a uniied experienceo ostracization o the raped woman. Similar to Bangladesh, “Commentaries


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and academic publications on the war rape tragedy in Bosnia have arguedalmost with one voice that raped Bosniak women would be stigmatized andostracized by their amilies” (2012, 46). She shows through her case studiesthat the postconict experience is not so homogeneous, and that womencontinue to live with their amilies and husbands in spite o their articulatedexperience o wartime rape. Skjelsbæk argues that emininity, masculinity,and violent political power struggles interact in constructing the meaning osexual violence in armed conict in Bosnia. In act, positioning onesel as anethnic victim o wartime rape makes possible the construction o a survivoridentity and creates solidaritya solidarity that supersedes the patriarchalrelationships in the amily. Baaz and Stern (2013) explore the power relationsin eminist engagements relating to rape as a war crime in Congodeemed

“the rape capital o the world.” Tey show how “a generalized story o rape in war limits our abilities to analyse and redress instances o sexual violence inspecic warscapes as well as to attend to those people whose lives are circum-scribed by such violence” (Bazz and Stern 2013, 5).

While drawing extensively rom this scholarship on the birangonas, emi-nist oral history, and ethnography, Spectral Wound adds to and rerames thisliterature in three ways. First, it contextualizes these narratives within theircomplex representational postconict politics and locates them within vi-

sual, literary, and national representations. In this book the small, individual voices not only are connected to the national narratives but also addressevents o 1971 and the 1990s. Given the presence o a substantial visual repre-sentation o the birangonas, I contextualize most o the images through dis-cussions with their photographers and various audiences. Tis multisited

view is absent rom any o the existing work on birangonas, where imagesare ofen cited without analysis and sometimes without acknowledgment othe photographers. Saikia, in describing her book as “women’s memories as

told by women” (2011, 15), has also suggested that “women’s memories cannot be subsumed within categories and reduced to analytical rames” (11) becausethey are the sites o an embedded past. However, i women’s testimonies aredeemed to be sacred, both without and above politics, how could we mapthe hierarchies in the representational, discursive, and testimonial politicsthat we nd in the public memory o wartime rape o the Bangladesh war o1971? In highlighting the political and representational complexity o the is-sues surrounding the subject o public memory o wartime rape in 1971, Spec-tral Wound connects the complex ethnographic social relations among the

birangonas to discourses at the level o local politics and to the representational


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overlay in state-sponsored ceremonies, lm, and oral history and documen-tary projects, as well as to the emergence o the birangona in popular culturesuch as magazine advertisements, poetry, and short stories.

Second, the book also argues or the existence o both public memory andpublic secrecy, in contrast to the prevalent understanding that there has simply

been silence about wartime rape and that we need to give voice to these narra-tives. I ound a public invocation o wartime rape in Bangladesh in instanceso government speeches, in the state reerence to women as birangonas, andin literary and visual representations. Again, I acknowledge that this publicmemory o the representation o the birangona was not complemented bynarratives o the experiences o real birangonas (apart rom two testimoniesin Rahmana [1982–85, Vol. 8: 236, 398]) until the 1990s, when oral history

projects on wartime rape were being carried out. A ocus on “breaking the silence” is unable to capture dual aspects o thehistory o rape o 1971 in contemporary Bangladesh and the interesting ques-tions they lead us to. On the one hand, the very presence o the public mem-ory o the birangona in Bangladesh is exceptional or most global instances o

wartime rape. On the other hand, in my ethnographic research I ound that, juxtaposed with this public memory, there exists a public secrecy o the his-tories o wartime rape. For example, I ound that in rural areas, amilies and

communities knew about the rape o the woman during 1971. Tey explainthat the women “haush kore jai nai, jor purbok oi kaaj hoise” (the woman didnot go on their own, but that “work” [rape] happened as a result o orce). Tey

would, however, preer to not talk about it today or various socioeconomicreasons (as explored in chapter 3). At the same time, they would remember

what not to orget and repeat it as a secret , a public secret. Public memoryand public secrecy thereby complement each other throughout this book.Te public secrecy also exists in what I reer to as the “talkable history” or

the birangonas, that is, the stories o their post–1971 trajectories. Tis is notaddressed by oral history projects, which ocus predominantly on the experi-ence o rape o 1971 (chapter 2). Tis book addresses the dynamics o publicsecrecy in relation to 1947 and partition (chapter 1); the role o scorn in vil-lages coping with the history o rape during 1971 (chapter 3); the local politicso appropriation and hidden transcripts (chapter 4); testimonial cultures andthe presence o a wound rather than trauma (chapter 5 and conclusion); theragmented experiences o men, demasculinization, and silence about the vi-olation o men compared with the public memory o the rape o women dur-ing 1971 (chapters 5 and 7); and the way in which the birangona is portrayed


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as a traitor (chapter 9). An examination o public secrecy captures the socialnuances o lie trajectories afer wartime rape, which the paradigm o voice/silence, darkness/light is unable to address.

Tird, while ocusing on gendered narratives, Spectral Wound not onlyexamines the experiences o women but also brings to the surace men’srelationships to sexual violence, and sexuality’s link to the nation (similar toZarkov’s [2001] work in the case o Croatia). I also examine the role o men,masculinity, and the vulnerabilities o patriarchal men linked to the publicmemory o wartime rape during 1971.

Overall, then, the book draws rom existing scholarship on eminist oralhistoriography but also restructures it considerably. It ocuses not only on theexperiences o women but also on those o men; examines public memory

and public secrecy o wartime rape rather than seeking to highlight silentnarratives; and nally contextualizes the narratives within wider political,literary, and visual discourses. Te book shows how the accounts o rapesurvivors maniest various national policies and narratives, and it also inter-rogates them. It explores the political unctions and the social ramicationso testimonial witnessing within national processes, as women sought redressor violent pasts. As a result, the book not only ocuses on the power andlimits o representation o the gure o the war heroine but also connects dis-

course with institutions at several levels. Te book thus stands in a complexrelationship to the Bangladeshi nationalist narrative, highlighting its ambigui-ties and tensions with everyday lives and imaginaries relating to wartime rapeduring 1971.

How to Do Ethnography of Memory, History, and Violence?

How to conduct ethnography o violence is an important ethical and meth-

odological question. I sought to avoid making the women conspicuous, toprevent exacerbation o their varied social situations, and to contextualizetheir experiences within local politics and history. As a result, my work ex-plores the circulation, dialectics, and social context o the testimonies orape, rather than mirroring the prevalent practice o providing a linear, voy-euristic description o accounts o sexual violence. In the ollowing section, Iexplore specic ethical and methodological issues o memory, positioning,and authority.


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Te historical trajectory o Bangladesh contains many ruptured pasts, in whichone identity has prevailed over another at different times. oday the historyo the war is a estering, unreconciled one. What are the roles o historyand memory? Academics and nonacademics within and beyond Bangla-desh situate them in a hierarchy o credibility. alking about my research,I would ofen be asked: “Memory! How would you know it is true?” Peopledistinguish memory rom history through a series o oppositions: whereasmemory is subjective, authentic, and individualized, history is objective, re-constructed, and collective. Rather than valorizing and romanticizing eitherhistory or memory as distinctive authentic tools, my work ocuses on the dis-

cursive, circulatory, intertextual, and dialogical account o public memories.

Both history and memory draw rom dominant narratives that can also sup-ply the very terms o recall. As Antze and Lambek have argued: “Memoriesare never simply records o the past, but are interpretive reconstructions that

bear the imprint o local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions, discur-sive ormations and practices and social contexts o recall and commemora-tion” (1996, vii). An ethnographic perspective on the public memories o war-time rape o 1971 allows us to explore the multiple voices and their individual

and social aspects o remembering (as well as orgetting) within political andhistorical contexts.

Exploring the public memories o wartime rape o 1971 within the contexto the “institutionalized memory” o an Awami League government was

bound to have an impact not only on what o 1971 people remembered butalso on how they recalled and transmitted those memories to others, includ-ing me. So rather than a search or “the core o knowledge,” through whichinormants “may be dressing up differently in different genres” (Vansina 1985,

32), I try to examine the orm that people’s retelling takes and the reasons thisorm seemed more suitable or the birangonas to narrate their experiences.In particular, it is important to understand how people repeated rumors tonegotiate uncertain situations, and I was careul to explore how people beganand closed their retellings.

Interviews, discussions, oral histories, and testimonies also cannot beunderstood outside the “constitutive social relationships and ramework o ex-change” (onkin, Macdonald and Chapman 1989, 90) between the narratorand the interviewer. Following Shahid Amin, I have “not used oral historyas a seasoning to enliven documentary evidence” (1995, 194). My attempt has

been to arrive at an enmeshed, intertwined, and imbricated web o narratives


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rom every available source. It is the exposition o the ramework o exchange between the narrator and the interviewer and the conditions under whichthe testimony is produced that can alone provide an ethical and subjective-objective understanding o the narrative.

Although I stayed with one o the powerul amilies in the village (they eltthey had to host the oreign researcher), I started my eldwork by inter-

viewing various liberation ghters in the village and the surrounding areas.My research assistant, Khokhon, helped me connect with people. In duecourse, the women invited me to visit them and talk to them about their ex-periences. In the midst o the discussions about the 1990s, the women started

talking to me in ragments about their experiences o 1971. My in-depth par-ticipant observation in the villagetalking with the women in their homes,accompanying them to visit their relatives’ homes, and meeting with localcouncil leaders and liberation ghtersgave me multiaceted insights intotheir daily interactions. It also helped me map their claims on and encoun-ters with the state at the local and national levels. At the same time, my inter-

views and discussions with local liberation ghters and villagers contextualizedthe women’s rape during 1971 within the local politics and history o 1971 and

the 1990s.I have predominantly worked with the our women in western Bangladesh,

as well as seven other women in other parts o Bangladesh. Various inter-personal connections and public testimonies in newspapers led me to work

with these women in particular. My multiple subjectivitiesa single, young,middle-class, Bengali Indian woman with an upper-caste Hindu surname,

based in Calcutta and studying in London were interrogated by variousBangladeshis. I was an insider-outsider, which both enabled and hindered

ethnographic connections, as well as maniested in novel ethnographic maya (attachments), dilemmas, and encounters. Tis was “eldwork at home,” toa certain extent, enabling me to relearn our common and different histories.Tough I would reiterate that I was rom India and not rom Bangladesh,people would rationalize that, since I was working on the Muktijuddho andsince I am Hindu (as is apparent rom my surname), I had to be sympatheticto the Awami League because o its pro-Hindu and pro-India policies.

My “upper-caste Hindu” identity proved to be a hindrance in establishingthe authenticity o my personhood. I was living in a Muslim household, andpeople considered this inconsistent with my Hindu norms. Was I actuallyMuslim and hence Pakistani (as I was considered air-skinned)? A photograph


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showing my mother tall and air-skinned, stereotypical physiological mark-ers o the “military”the term used in Enayetpur to reer to the Pakistaniarmyonly exacerbated their uncertainties. News spread o my present lo-cation in London, that I have a white moner manush (person o one’s own“heart”), and that I consumed beeall o which made me a Christian. Spe-cically regarding narratives o rape in Enayetpur, people would tell me that

being unmarried and changra (a colloquial term to mean young), I would notunderstand the bodily processes o a sexual relationship and hence couldnot discern the violence o rape.

I picked up Bengali Muslim practices relating to language and ood, whichhelped me connect with various communities. Choice o words and languageis a signicant indicator o the speaker’s Hindu or Muslim identity in Bangla-

desh. When I was in Bangladesh, I got into the habit o using the word pani or water, like my Muslim interlocutors. But minority Hindus in Enayetpurcontinuously criticized me or doing so (they used the word jol; Mookherjee2008a). I realized that my position o privilege allowed me to engage withMuslims in a way that the Hindus in Enayetpur might not. Ten, on urther re-ection, it occurred to me that my “crossing over” was blurring the “authentic-ity” o my personhood. For the Hindus, my adoption o what they perceived as“Muslim” practices suggested something about my “bad” amily background

and upbringing; it was also a threat to the practices themselves that were im-portant to them in upholding their identity as a minority Hindu community,

which they already perceived to be under threat.Given the sensitive and diffi cult nature o the topic o wartime rape and

the involvement o the lives o individuals affected by it, I have elt discom-ort in carrying out this research and am troubled by issues o authorship andrepresentation. I negotiated a complex terrain o power dynamics with in-ormants among the local village elites and also among lef-liberal intellec-

tuals in Dhaka. Tis showed me how conguring power as emanating onlyrom the anthropologist toward the inormants is limited in the context othe dilemmas relating to my multisited research, and which George Marcus(1998, 121) has cautioned us against (see chapter 9). In this world o multi-sited ethnography, multiple actors rom weak, ambiguous, and strong positionso power all manage ethnographic engagement. I straddle two boats: Spivak(1993) cautions that research and representation are irreducibly intertwined

with politics, power, and privilege. aussig (1987) challenges anthropologiststo be sel-critical o their historical and contextual positions and to speak outagainst the injustices they encounter in their research “habitus.” Althoughthe women were hostile to me initially, over time their trust and riendship


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emerged in response to my role as an advocate o their causes (I was verycareul in this role and did not make any alse promises). Tey instead wor-ried about my vulnerability when traveling alone as a oreigner and a changra (young) woman. As a result, my role was not necessarily always endowed

with power: they chose to ignore me when they wanted and narrated theiraccounts in their own way and their own time.

Over the years and beore my eldwork, the women had written variousletters to the prime minister requesting a meeting to allow them to narratetheir experiences o injustice (see chapter 4). Tey sent these letters via

various individuals who were notable, national gures in the eld o humanrights with access to the head o state. An inherent tension exists betweenthe researcher and those she works with given the imbalance between the

attempt to uncover problems and the ability to solve them. Tere was a moralimperative or me to communicate to the national actors the birangonas’need to highlight t

Documents

The Spectral Wound by Nayanika Mookherjee