Third Lane ~ You started working on gender-based violence in the “Bangladesh War” sometime around 1995. Back then the situation was quite different. Why did you get interested in this topic? What kind of challenges did you face while researching this?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ Thank you for your interest in my research and asking me to talk to about my research which is based on my book The Spectral Wound. Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971(published from Duke University Press) graphic novel and animation film: Mookherjee, Nayanika and Najmunnahar Keya. (2019) Birangona: Towards Ethical Testimonies of Sexual Violence during Conflict.
This research on the public memories of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war of 1971 was triggered by my outrage and despair as an undergraduate student in Calcutta, India, over the unfolding of inter-communal violence after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India on 6th December 1992 by Hindu communalists. Being confined at home during the imposition of curfew and depending on Doordarshan (the Government TV channel) for news, the role of rumours became significant. Though the state of West Bengal apparently experienced less violence, rumours of inter-communal sexual violence were common. Widespread instances of sexual violence in Gujarat during 1992 (Agarwal 1995) further reiterated how a woman’s body becomes the territory on which men’s political programmes are inscribed, a point which was reconfirmed in the violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. According to Communalism Combat (2002), 200 Muslim women were raped in the communal violence in Gujarat in February 2002.
One of the main questions that troubled me as an undergraduate student in the early 1990s is why women were raped in the contexts of conflict. This was also the time when sexual violence in Bosnia and Rwanda were occurring. In these two events racialized differences and hierarchies were evident and it was clear that sexual violence during conflict is not treated similarly. The United Nations left Rwanda without resolving the conflict and allowing the attacks to continue. On the other hand, the events in Bosnia made Europeans wonder how sexual violence of women is occurring in Europe fifty years after it said ‘never again’ in the context of the second world war. In 1995, the UN declared rape as a war crime and demands were being made on Japan to apologies for its role in the sexual slavery of ‘comfort women’ during second world war.
All these events were significant triggers for my research in Bangladesh. My research also drew inspiration from the rich scholarship on Partition violence in 1947 published in the 1990s by Veena Das, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon. In 1994, I also started my MA in JNU in Delhi. In conversations with my professor T. K. Oomen, it became important for me to think about the term birangona in Bangladesh which I knew was the label the government had conferred on the women raped during the Bangladesh war of 1971. Since I read, write and speak Bangla, I thought of exploring this topic for my Phd research.
The challenges that I faced when researching this topic was counter to all the assumptions that can be made. When I arrived in Bangladesh, I found there was no silence about the wartime rape during 1971. Instead, there existed a public memory about the history of rape during the war as evidenced in testimonials in newspapers, oral history projects,[i] exhibits in museums, literary and visual representations. There were various birangonas who were coming forward to share their experience of wartime rape. In deciding to follow up the women who had publicly come forward to talk about their wartime experience, I found they were quite upset with the testimonial process as they felt their experiences have been recorded without their consent. As a result, throughout my research, I did not ask them what happened to them in 1971 as there was nothing more to say. The women, their families and communities were keener to talk about the testimonial process through which their testimonies were collected. These unethical testimonial processes were felt by them as a double set of transgression and left them really upset. This experience of the birangonas reminded me of the film Kamla of the 1980s when Marc Zuber as a journalist wants to show how Adivasi (played by Deepti Naval) women are sold. In trying to highlight this issue, he also tries to get Deepti Naval photographed with her bare shoulders when she is visibly uncomfortable with all the media focus on her. This showed as if her experience could only portray if she is frozen in her ‘adivasi’ entity without any focus on the context within which she is being photographed. Drawing from this experience of the birangonas we have co-authored a graphic novel and animation film: Mookherjee, Nayanika and Najmunnahar Keya. (2019) Birangona: Towards Ethical Testimonies of Sexual Violence during Conflict. (University of Durham. [Online] Freely Available in Bangla & English which was the Recipient of the 2019 Praxis Award and also Part of Royal Anthropological Institute’s https://illustratinganthropology.com/nayanika-mookherjee/. This can be accessed at https://www.ethical-testimonies-svc.org.uk/how-to-cite/) The graphic novel and animation film sets out ethical guidelines through which testimonies of sexual violence are to be collected. These outputs are being used for teaching in educational institutions as well by governmental and non-governmental organisations for training like the UK government’s PSVI (Prevent Sexual Violence Initiative), Dr Denis Mukwege Foundation, Research Initiatives Bangladesh among others.
Third Lane ~ Did you find any discrepancies between public perception on the topic and the realities reflected in the archival records?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ It is important to clarify what we mean by public, which public/s and which archives. It is often assumed that wartime sexual violence is kept under silence and it is deemed to be more so the case in the case of a country which is Muslim. This is because the stereotypes and assumptions of gender relations, patriarchy, notions of shame, honour, stigma are often negatively associated with muslim communities even though these fractures and regressive practices are prevalent among all communities. However, contrary to this assumption of silence there is no silence in Bangladesh about the birangonas and instead there exists a public memory of the history of 71’s wartime rape.
Also, some of the survivors I worked with were poor, landless women. Since 1971, these women had lived since 1971 with their husbands and children in villages where I did year-long multi-sited fieldwork. During my fieldwork, when I would return to Dhaka, people – NGO activists, human rights lawyers, intellectuals, writers, journalists, academics, feminists who knew about my research – would invariably ask the following questions about the war-heroines: Are they married? Do they have a family, children, kutumb? Did their husband know of the incident of 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 before 1971, in spite of the rape. These frequently-occurring, repetitive questions point to a sedimented, horrific imaginary of the war-heroine among the activist community who assume birangonas don’t have any circle of nurturance. So in the literary and visual representations as well as in press accounts the birangona exists as a horrific figure who cannot be understood without her wounds.
So the publics here are of the international public who cannot imagine Bangladesh as a Muslim country can refer to raped women birangonas/brave women as early as 1971. At the national level, the feminist and human rights community assume poor birangonas have not been accepted by their families. Birangonas on the other hand want to highlight the process through which their testimonies were collected rather than give an account of 1971. Archives include international press as well as national literary and visual representations which assume the birangona to be a horrific figure only. In the last two decades, the literary and visual representation in Bangladesh is however addressing many of the nationalistic blindspots related to 1971 and birangonas.
Third Lane ~ You have worked extensively on public memory. Is there a methodology for detecting the biases in public memory?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ The debate of objectivity and subjectivity/bias is rife in all disciplines. To say one is objective is also a subjective position. So, one of the things we focus on in anthropology is to identify the research based on our various positions (class, gender, race, religion, sexuality etc) which determine the research material. Many people asked me, on hearing that I work on memory, that how would I know it is true. When working on public memory, we obviously cross check information and narratives across a cross section of informants to understand multiple perspectives and voices. In the case of public memory what is important for us as researchers to ask is not whether narratives are true or false. It is important to ask why people are saying what they are saying even if they are lieing or if they are false. To contextualise the untruth gives us an insight into the information as to what people are willing to share with us.
Third Lane ~ Why do you think wartime rapes are observed universally in all the major wars in History? Why women are targeted so systematically? Why rape is more prevalent than murder?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ Feminists have theorised rape not only as a matter of individual lust but also an affirmation of women as objects of pleasure which underlines the power of men. If women as gender female are defined as sexual beings and violence is eroticised, then men violating women has a sexual component. Other feminists[i] have however successfully complicated the universalizing tendencies in feminist analysis, which comprehend rape as ‘a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’.[ii] Examples of sexual violence in times of conflict show how the violent encounter brings together the institutionalized forces sanctioned by various modes of social power linked to discourses of nationalism, religious identity, caste, ethnicity, sexuality and politics.[iii] Rape during conflicts becomes an ‘explicitly political act, a ritual of victory, the defilement of honour and territory of the enemy community’ as explored in the context of sexual violence inflicted in Surat in the context of post-Ayodhya riots in 1992[iv] and in Gujarat in 2002. Through this, a violent dialogue between men is conducted–this being the other side of ‘the matrimonial dialogue between men in which women are exchanged as signs’[v] . Agarwal shows how the disrobing of Draupadi in the Hindu epic Mahabharata is an instance of how political discourses constructed by collectivities have consciously contextualized rape exclusively in the problematique of the contest between two nations or communities, thus transforming it into a morally defendable act, in fact into a much-needed political strategy.
Third Lane ~ Tragic incidents like large-scale rape give the nation a certain kind of legitimacy, but does the nation do enough to improve the conditions of women and rape victims to lead a dignified life?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ The prevalence of sexual violence in any situation of armed conflict (i.e. war, riots) between communities and countries seems globally omnipresent. Few measures have been taken to address and seek justice for women who have been raped during conflicts. Yet accounts of rape of women have always been used for propaganda purposes by nations. However, it is commonly assumed that there has been a complete silence about wartime rape within the communities and nations concerned. The public invocation of war-time rape in Bangladesh made me ‘unlearn’ these assumptions of ‘silence’ about 1971.
The Bangladeshi government not only carried out the unprecedented task of referring to women raped during the war of 1971 as Birangonas. In 1972, the independent government of Bangladesh set up rehabilitation centres for Birangonas, undertook abortion,[vi] put their children up for international adoption, arranged their marriages, trained them in vocational skills and often ensured them government jobs.[vii] Wartime rapes were widely reported in the press from December 1971 until the middle of 1973, after which it was relegated to oblivion in government and journalistic consciousness for 15 years, re- emerging once again in the 1990s. The term birangona was the government’s effort to ensure birangona’s are not ostracised after the war.
Third Lane ~ Did the title “Birangona” help the women escape the public humiliation associated with rape? In other words, did the post-war Bangladesh society change the way it looked at a raped woman? Did the public-scorn change to public sympathy?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ The term birangona has multiple connotations and impact on the lives of the survivors depending on their various contexts. Among the rural survivors they were not aware of the term birangona and feel only those who have spoken about their experience are birangonas. For their community they were aware of what happened to the women during the war. The community is subjecting the women to khota/scorn only in the 1990s as they don’t see the reason for the women to testify in public given they can’t bring the perpetrators to justice. So the term public humiliation is not a blanket phenomenon and is a wrong assumption on the part of those who continue to ascribe to the birangona a horrific image. So many feminists and human rights activists also assume that since the community are rural and poor, they must be bigoted and religious and subjecting the birangonas to scorn. Also, as the survivors show. the use of khota often happens in order to settle interpersonal rivalries, everyday infractions to shut up, humiliate, belittle the other into silence. However, many of the survivors also speak back to anyone giving them khota to say, they are the birangonas. Those giving khota are ignorant. So when we ask these questions we also need to question the basis of these questions and only close ethnographic analysis can highlight the complexity of the situation. These issues cannot be comprehended from the vantage point of narrow, stereotypical, limited, blanket frameworks. Again, another narrative would show the complex ways in which the experience of birangonas need to be comprehended. There are various accounts in my book. Morjina Khatoon’s story would tell us more:
During the war Morjina’s brother went away to fight. Since he had recently married, he asked his sister to look after his newlywed wife. As a result when the Pakistani military came to their house, Morjina hid her sister-in-law and another beautiful cousin and put herself forward. For four months, every night a military jeep came and picked her up to be raped and dropped her back in the morning. Her parents cried for her every night she was picked up but also knew she was protecting the other women in the family. Nonetheless, like Ferdousy’s experience, after the war, neighbours referred to her as a collaborator and so she left for Dhaka to find work. When she heard that she was being called birangonas she did not tell anyone but she glowed with pride. Eventually, she married, had children, later got separated from her husband. Today her children have government jobs. She worked as a cleaner in a government hospital and has recently retired. As she poignantly and powerfully says: ‘The military took me by force but they got nothing from me.’ While Morjina’s continuous rape enabled the protection of other women, this protection and nurturance was not extended to her after the war.
Mookherjee Nayanika and Najmunnahar Keya, 2019. Birangona and ethical testimonies of sexual violence during conflict. Durham University.
Third Lane ~ By bestowing the title “Birangona” Mujib tried to honor the rape victims. But why no attempt was made to protect and honor the war children (Juddhosishu)?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ The radical thing that the Bangladesh government did was to ensure that the birangonas continue to be active citizens in independent Bangladesh. This was also necessary given the large numbers of war heroines. However the government’s position towards the juddhoshishu was different and ambiguous. On one hand the children were referred as jaroj sontan (bastard child) as they were born as a result of the rape of the women. In carrying out abortion and adoption as part of the rehabilitation programmes, the children were put up for adoption in Western European and North American countries.
Third Lane ~ You extensively worked on War-museum. How the memory of the contribution of women in the war is preserved there in the museum?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ The inclusion of the birangona in the earlier and more recent Liberation War Museum follows the horrific template. I have last seen the exhibits in 2019. I think the attempt is to horrify the audience about the state of the birangona. As a result we don’t understand the long-term effects of the violence of wartime rape on the survivors.
Third Lane ~ We know a huge number of women were raped and tortured during the war. But do we have more granular data to reflect on the categories of the victims like according to their religion or wealth or any other variable?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ The historiography of the number of women raped varies between 100,000/200,000/300,000/400,000 (Banglar Bani, Genocide Issue, December 1972; Hasan 2002). 200,000 is the official number as stated by the Bangladeshi government. Newspaper articles in 1972 gave accounts of rapes in villages, reiterated the numbers of ‘violated mothers and sisters’ through reports describing their state when ‘recovered’, the violence inflicted on them, the number of women committing suicide, the sight confronted by the writer of the articles upon hearing the cries of women. These accounts also attempted to map out the characteristic of birangonas by referring to whether the women raped were Hindu or Muslim, young, middle-aged or old, university-educated, shombrahnto (from respectable, well to do families) or illiterate, middle class or from peasant households. According to the press reports, the numbers of pregnancies were 1,95000 while around 3000 war babies were born as a result of the rapes. The uncertainty about the numbers reflects the situation that confronted the new nation with the pregnancy of a large number of women and the birth of their children. It is suggested that less than 10% of the total raped women visited these centers (Hasan 2002). In most cases abortions for 88,200 women were done locally by and efforts were taken to keep this a secret. Moreover, according to Hasan (2002) among those who were less than three months pregnant in early 1972, 162,000 Muslim women and 131,000 Hindu refugee women simply disappeared, assimilated into the vast population, without any report at all. Many women chose to go away to Pakistan with the soldiers (Doinik Ittefaq 1972).
Third Lane ~ And the last question, Did East Bengali women take a more active part in the liberation war?
Nayanika Mookherjee ~ Although there was no specific women’s agenda in the nationalist movement, the mobilization of middle-class women during the Bangladesh war was critical. A small number of women also took up arms and joined the underground resistance in 1971 (though few of them also engaged in actual combat). The fact that these images became so dominant within the national pantheon show that not only were the women symbolically equal members of the national collectivity, but that as symbols of national culture and tradition, they were also symbols of modernization, liberation and insurrection. The bodily practices of middle-class East Pakistani Bengali women became a provocative and visible symbol of resistance. Through their clothing (sarees), adornments (flowers in their hair and wearing teep) and actions (singing the songs of Tagore that were banned by the Pakistani government, celebrating Bengali New Year’s Day and sending their daughters to music and dance school and allowing them to perform on stage), they became the icons of Bengali ethnicity, a vehicle for marking cultural (and territorial) boundaries. Women therefore played an important role in forming middle-class nationalist identities in Muktijuddho as they represented all that was simultaneously culturally oppositional to Pakistan and distinctive of Bangladesh.
References Cited:
Agarwal, Puroshottam. 1995. ‘Surat, Savarkar and Draupadi: Legitimising Rape as a Political Weapon’, pp. 29-57, in U. Butalia and T. Sarkar (eds.), Women and Right-Wing Movements: Indian Experiences, Zed Books, London.
Akhtar, S. S. Begum, H. Hossein, S. Kamal and M. Guhathakurta (eds.) 2001. Narir Ekattor O Juddhoporoborti Koththo Kahini (Oral History Accounts of Women’s Experiences During 1971 and After the War). Ain-O-Shalish-Kendro (ASK), Dhaka.
Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Secker & Warburg, London, 1975, pp. 78-86.
Communalism Combat. 2002. Genocide Gujarat. March-April, 8 (76). Retrieved on 28th February 2006 from http://sabrang.com/cc/archive/2002/marapril/index.html
Hasan, M.A. 2002. Juddho O Nari (War & Women), War Crimes Facts Finding Committee (Trust) and Genocide Archive & Human Studies Centre, Dhaka.
Guhathakurta Meghna 1996.‘Dhorshon Ekti Juddhaporadh’ (‘Rape is a War Crime’) in the Bulletin of Ain-O-Shalish Kendra, February 1996, pp. 6-8;
Ibrahim, Nilima 1994, 1995. Ami Birangona Bolchi. (This is the Birangona Speaking), Jagriti (Vol.1 and Vol.2), Dhaka.
Levi-Strauss, C. 1969. Elementary Structures of Kinship. Revised ed. translated byJ.H. Bill and J.R. Sturmore, Rodney Needham, George Allen and Unwin, London.
Mardorossian, C. 2002. ‘Toward a new feminist theory of rape’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27(3), 2002, pp.743–75.
Mookherjee Nayanika 2007. ‘Available motherhood: Legal technologies, ‘state of exception’ and the dekinning of ‘war babies’ in Bangladesh.’ Special issue, The state and children’s fate: reproduction in traumatic times. Childhood: a journal of global child research 14[3]), August 2007: 339-354.
Mookherjee Nayanika 2015. History and the Birangona www.m.himalmag.com/history-and-the-birangona-bangladesh/
Mookherjee, Nayanika 2015. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971, Duke University Press 2015; Zubaan, Delhi, 2016.
Mookherjee Nayanika and Najmunnahar Keya, 2019. Birangona and ethical testimonies of sexual violence during conflict. Durham University.
Yuval-Davis, N. and F. Y. Anthias (eds.), 1989. Woman-Nation-State, Macmillan London.
Cooke M. and Rustomji-Kerns (eds.) 1994. Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women on War, Westview Press, Colorado, 1994, pp.136-146.
[i] See C. Mardorossian, ‘Toward a new feminist theory of rape’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27(3), 2002, pp.743–75.,
[ii] Susan. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Secker & Warburg, London, 1975, pp. 78-86.
[iii] See N. Yuval-Davis, and F. Y. Anthias (eds.), Woman-Nation-State, Macmillan London, 1989; Puroshottam Agarwal,‘Surat, Savarkar and Draupadi: Legitimising Rape as a Political Weapon’, pp. 29-57, in U. Butalia and T. Sarkar (eds.), Women and Right-Wing Movements: Indian Experiences, Zed Books, London, 1995.
[iv] Purushottam Agarwal, Ibid. p.31.
[v] C Levi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship. Revised ed. translated byJ.H. Bill and J.R. Sturmore, Rodney Needham, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1969
[vi] Women did not go for the abortion as it was not available. The state introduced it without any legal fiat.
[vii]See Nayanika Mookherjee 2007. ‘Available motherhood: Legal technologies, ‘state of exception’ and the dekinning of ‘war babies’ in Bangladesh.’ Special issue, The state and children’s fate: reproduction in traumatic times. Childhood: a journal of global child research 14[3]), August 2007: 339-354.
[i] See Akhtar 2001, Guhathakurta 1996, Ibrahim 1994, 1995.
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