The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971

by Nayanika Mookherjee

Following the 1971 Bangladesh War, the Bangladesh government publicly designated the thousands of women raped by the Pakistani military and their local collaborators as birangonas, ("brave women”). Nayanika Mookherjee demonstrates that while this celebration of birangonas as heroes keeps them in the public memory, they exist in the public consciousness as what Mookherjee calls a spectral wound. Dominant representations of birangonas as dehumanized victims with disheveled hair, a vacant look, and rejected by their communities create this wound, the effects of which flatten the diversity of their experiences through which birangonas have lived with the violence of wartime rape. In critically examining the pervasiveness of the birangona construction, Mookherjee opens the possibility for a more politico-economic, ethical, and nuanced inquiry into the sexuality of war.

 

Genres: Bangladesh, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Pakistan

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2015

Reviews

[Fawad Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The year 2021 marks the fiftieth year of the horrific Operation Searchlight and the war of liberation of Bangladesh.

The book is a brilliant study to say the least. It's a complex book and it does not try to comb/hide the angularities of the truth. It'll take me some time to digest my experience of this book. I do intend to write a detailed review of it. But let me highly recommend it to anyone who is interested the history of Pakistan/Bangladesh/War and sexual crimes during the war and its depictions and appropriations and repercussions.

[Becca w · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and excellent. Learned a lot. Will use some of these ideas in my own work :)

[Katarina Ahmed]

also forgot to log - read for different history course (south asian focus) for essay on bengali birangona women (300,000 women raped by pakistan army during 1971 war of liberation). my first time reading about the conflict through the lens of gendered violence / constructions of femininity (usually literature focuses on nationalist sentiment and colonialism). strength of thesis is that it is grounded in analysis of gender constructions and norms in south asia at large, and is made more nuanced by contextualising norms as an extension of pakistan hinduism vs bengali islam. enjoy is the wrong word for this book but highly informative considering that the level of violence that occurred between south asian states themselves is largely unknown in comparison to knowledge of violence sanctioned by Britain. i wouldnt recommend it as an introductory book to the partition and war of independence - better to build basic understanding of events first (difficult to understand religious tensions underpinning the sexual assaults without first comprehending the conflict).

[Declan · Rating 4 out of 5]

(read for class) this was so thorough, a both insightful and intuitive. will revisit later

[Rajita Banerjee]

Nayanika Mookherjee reminds us that the experience of rape cannot be homogenised, since each and every instance of rape is different. Via the construction of an image (that of a 'Birangona' or a brave woman), the Bangladesh government ensured that the memories of the 1971 Liberation War remained relevant.
The ethnographic material provides us with fragments of the thought processes of some of the victims of wartime rape. The book makes us ponder on questions related to the roles ascribed to a gender (how the husbands of the women who were interviewed were 'demasculinized', or the kind of roles that victims were encouraged to train for, and take up in the rehabilitation centres). The narrative also includes the visual representations of the war and the crimes related to it, in Bengali films that were released after the war. Literary accounts and books are also included in the narrative. Mookherjee writes that following international developments in the 1990s (such as the Japanese government rendering an apology to 'comfort women' who were abused by members of the imperial army, and the recognition of rape as a war crime).
Overall, reading this book was by no means, an easy feat, since it covers a lot of ground (and be prepared to deal with a lot of Bengali words too!); but it makes you think deeply about some of the issues related to the manner in which rape is discussed and viewed by society, particularly in South Asia.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5