Review from Syed Badrul Ahsan
. . . Tales of the piercing kind
Women, War and the Making of BangladeshRemembering 1971
Yasmin Saikia
Women Unlimited
An associate of Kali for Women No one goes looking for a war. It comes suddenly, taking people unawares. And once it does, there is that sure, eerie feeling that huge havoc will be the consequence, that people will die and with them an entire set of values. That being the historical truth over the centuries, there is that other reality of war being a time when heroism and villainy make their appearance. Individuals die defending the nobility of a cause, thwarting the evil designs made by other individuals for whom the idea of a good life comes in a destruction of the lives around them. Some soldiers win wars. Others, rendered or proved qualitatively inferior to their adversaries, end up losing them, with results whose ramifications can last generations. But that is not the image of war which Yasmin Saikia brings forth in her rather unsual work on Bangladesh's struggle for liberation in 1971. Her image is distinctly different. War, she seems to be arguing, is not so much a matter of heroism as it is of collateral damage. It is damaged lives that war claims as its legacy. In Bangladesh, it was its women --- two hundred thousand of them, in official estimates --- who were left forever scarred by the conflict which eventually was to claim the lives of as many as three million Bengalis. Saikia remains perfectly aware of the historical factors which went into the outbreak of the crisis between East and West Pakistan in March 1971, one that was to go on until Bangladesh emerged as a free country in December of the year. Over the years, much has been written and said about the war, in Bangladesh and in Pakistan and elsewhere as well. Only, it was the damaged lives that by and large went unreported. In war, nothing can be more devastating than the impunity with which the participants go about, unconsciously, of destroying or severely affecting, the lives of non-combatants. In Bangladesh, the severity of the conflict was a great more pronounced than at any other time or place in modern history. Pakistan's soldiers, while telling themselves that they were engaged in the job of saving their country's unity and integrity, in fact went about killing men before hurling themselves on the women. In a very large number of instances, it was the local collaborators of the Pakistanis who proved instrumental in having the soldiers go after the women. For nine whole months, Bengali women throughout the occupied country lived in a state of insecurity. Many moved from a village to another and then another. And yet the soldiers had their ways of swooping on them, often in groups. The women were raped in gangs, for weeks and months on end. And then came the war babies. The story of Beauty is a highlight in this riveting work. Shunned by society, unable to straighten her life out, Beauty persuades her mother, Nur Begum, into recalling the terror she went through at the hands of the soldiers. It makes for horrific reading and yet read we must, for the good reason that in all the decades which have elapsed since the end of the war, women like Nur Begum have suffered alone. To call them birangonas (women who paid a price through being molested by the Pakistanis) is all right, but only up to a point. The bigger question relates to what successive governments in Bangladesh have done for them, if they have done anything at all. Nur Begum speaks up loud and clear: 'I was marked with violence in 1971. Look at the bite marks on my breasts. When I was first captured, the Pakistani military kept me naked . . . The Pakistanis came in group after group. You seem surprised to hear it. They did it in front of everyone.' Not until the coming of liberation were Nur Begum and others like her rescued. Listen to her again: 'They (freedom fighters) turned the bunker upside down and found us without bany clothes. The freedom fighters took off their shirts and hid our nudity. They were looking away from us.' These are tales of the piercing kind here. Firdousi Priyabhashini's is of course a well-known narrative by now. Even so, her retelling of the horrors she was subjected to by the soldiers rekindles the old disgust you once felt, still feel, about the animal instincts which drove Pakistan's soldiers in 1971. Priyabhashini's problems were twin-fold and that too before the war. She was beautiful and she was poor. As she is not afraid to tell the writer, 'My continuous poverty was the root cause of why men took advantage of me.' And then the war came. Priyabhashini's courage, a will to survive as it were, kept her going. 'I was struggling to stay alive being raped by five men,' she informs the writer. Post-liberation, she was 'not allowed to attend wedding ceremonies because (my family) considered me inauspicious. The only person who did not say anything rude or mean to me was my mother.' Memories underpin Saikia's work. And the memories go beyond the agonizing tales of rape. Heroism in women worked at other levels as well, a facet of the war the writer brings to light through recapturing such narratives as that coming from Dr. Syed Ahmed Nurjahan. Women, like Mumtaz Begum, who waged war on the battlefield are portrayed in the full measure of their patriotism. Being the conscientious historian she is, Yasmin Saikia listens to the other side as well. The other side is of course the Biharis, an ethnic group which remains notorious in Bangladesh because of the rabid support it provided to the Pakistan army in quelling the Bengalis. Once the war drew to an end, it was Bihari women as also men who faced Bengali wrath. Saikia does not flinch from noting their sufferings. The objectivity is admirable. Syed Badrul Ahsan is with The Daily Star
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