Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh

In 1971 two wars broke out in East Pakistan. One was a civil war fought between West and East Pakistan, and the other an international war fought between West Pakistan and India. In the wars ethnicity colluded with national interests and state politics, and the armies of West Pakistan and India became involved in violence, mainly targeted against the civilian population of East Pakistan, particularly women. Both the Pakistan and Indian armies were occupying forces and were assisted in their activities by local supporters. The Bihari community (Muslim Urdu speakers and recent migrants to East Pakistan from India after the partition in 1947) supported the West Pakistan army in the hope of saving a united Pakistan. A sizeable number of Bengalis, members of the Muslim League, the political organization that had conceived and created Pakistan, also supported the West Pakistan army. The Indian army, by and large, was supported by the nationalist Bengalis of East Pakistan, both Muslims and Hindus. With the help of the Indian government, the Bengalis created a local militia called the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army). The combined forces of the Indian army and Mukti Bahini defeated the West Pakistan army and forced them to surrender. At the end of the civil war the Pakistan government lost legitimacy in its eastern province; the international war resulted in the partitioning of Pakistan and creation of an independent nation-state of Bangladesh. The two wars of 1971 are generally referred to by a single name: the Liberation War of Bangladesh.

The current historiography on the Liberation War is focused solely on the investigation and discussion of conflicts between the armies and militias of West Pakistan, East Pakistan, and India, and the external contexts of battles between the different ethnic groups of Bengalis, Biharis, and Pakistanis.¹ The inner conflicts within the communities that led to rampant violence against women in the wars are overlooked and women's voices are actively silenced. As a result women's experiences and memories of the war are rendered invisible in the official history of 1971. To overcome the silences concerning gendered violence and to document a people's history of 1971, I have undertaken to reconstruct through oral history, fieldwork, and archival research the experiences of survivors—men and women in

Figure 1.

Protest poster showing family brutalized and killed in 1971. Courtesy of the Liberation War Museum.

Figure 2.

Salina Parveen, journalist, abducted and killed in 1971. Courtesy of the Liberation War Museum.

Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India who participated in, experienced, and witnessed the Liberation War. My aim is to probe into the moments of violence, the victimization of women, the actions and experiences of men, and the trauma produced as a consequence. Through this exploration of personal and collective memories, I hope to demonstrate the linked, though conflicting, experiences of suffering of people in the subcontinent and to construct a story of survivors of the Liberation War. This research is also an attempt to rethink communal and state violence in postcolonial South Asia and arrive at a clearer understanding of the legacies of the partitions of 1947 and 1971.

Encountering the Elusive Archive

A summer research grant enabled me to travel to Bangladesh in 1999 and launch a pilot study on women's experiences during the Liberation War, as well as their later memories. During this initial visit to Bangladesh, I found that nothing was recorded about women in the traditional sites for historical research—in archives and libraries. In the media, however, I heard the shrill voices of politicians invoking the violence of 1971 and demanding redress. In this political-public discourse every man from Pakistan was reduced to the generic label of 'perpetrator' and every Bangladeshi man became a mukti judha, a war hero. In this national political memorializing, women were tellingly absent, even though a count of 200,000 rape victims was used by politicians to mobilize anger against Pakistani enemies several decades later. Such narratives created and clearly demarcated societies...