War, Healing, and Trauma: Reading the Feminine Aesthetics and Politics in Rubaiyat Hossain’s Meherjaan

The Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal set up in 2010 to investigate war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity during the 1971 war and activist efforts to seek justice for the mass survivors of wartime rape, form the backdrop to the controversial reception of Rubaiyat Hossain’s debut film, Meherjaan (2011). In official and unofficial histories, and cultural memorializations of the 1971 war for Bangladeshi independence, the treatment of women’s experiences—more specifically the unresolved question of acknowledgment of and accountability to birangonas, “war heroines” (or rape survivors)—have been met with narratives of erasure and victimization. By contrast, the film revolves around the stories of four women during and after the war. In this essay, I investigate the anxieties underlying the responses to Meherjaan, particularly in association with themes of trauma, non-normative gender frames of national sexuality, and the notion of loving the Other. Drawing from transnational feminist theories of vulnerability, ethics and love, I explore these themes at two levels: the film’s political messages, and its aesthetics and affects. Finally, I comment on the film’s potential, as feminist art, for furthering a transnational dialogue around healing and ethical memorialization in relation to 1971 in Bangladesh.