Why Isn't this Common Knowledge?
the events of 1971 #booksbywomen
If 400,000 Americans had been captured and put into rape camps, where many died, the world wouldn’t be allowed to forget. It would be as much a part of common knowledge as America’s civil war and 9-11. And when I learned—and only because I’m doing this women writing around the world project—that it happened to other women in my lifetime, I was outraged that I didn’t know.
And I would have known very little, because it’s so hard to get books in translation, if not for the wonderful work of a dedicated, self-published author, Dr Nusrat Rabbee, who was a child at the time. She wrote The Spirit of 1971, a memoir of her parents, as well as translating the book Ami Birangona Bolchi (I am the War Heroine Speaking) into English as War Heroines Speak.
This is a painful subject, especially because I relate to it from personal experience. And yet—just as in my life—these women are more than their trauma, so much more. This is reflected in the literature about it in poetry, oral history, memoir, and fiction.
I’ve never asked this before—but I hope you’ll share this post so that others can know, too.
But before I get to their stories, I need to share a bit of history so we can understand how and where and why these camps existed.
In the lead-up to Britain relinquishing control of the Indian subcontinent there were various proposals for how it would be done. Hindu leaders wanted to form a single nation where the majority Hindus would continue to be the dominant group. Muslim leaders wanted independence for their people, who formed the majority in different areas of the subcontinent. The Lahore resolution initially advocated for several Muslim states based on geography.
Muslim Bengalis, too, were keen to have their own country. But in the end, political interests on the part of everyone else resulted in a simple partition of the subcontinent into a single Hindu country—India—and a single Muslim country. It was a horrible mistake.
The Muslim country was comprised of West Pakistan and East Pakistan (which is now Bangladesh). But although a single country, they were separated by 2200 km, had different languages, ethnicities, history and culture. All they had in common was their religion.
From 1947 to 1971, the majority of the population in these two Pakistans lived in the east, but the country’s government—made up of leaders from the west—put the bulk of its investment into their homeland, the territory of what we now know as Pakistan.
The military and civil service were also dominated by West Pakistanis, who perceived Punjabis (their major ethnic group) as superior to Bengalis. (The British recruited Punjabis into their army, seeing them as brave and strong, a “martial race” unlike the Bengalis.) This also meant that contracts and jobs supporting the military and civil service, which were the major source for good jobs, all went to those in the west. And what of East Pakistan? It was impoverished and plundered for whatever it could give.
There were periodic rumblings against the domination of West Pakistan. But late in 1970, things came to a head. After a cyclone devastated East Pakistan, killing 300,000 people, the government’s response was feeble at best. There was no relief, little acknowledgement of this huge tragedy as if—again—what happened in the east didn’t matter, as if its people were an underclass.
In early 1971, that became the catalyst for student protests, general strikes, and a coalescing of the movement for greater autonomy. A proposal for a system that would give them a parliament within Pakistan—sort of like Scotland within Britain, or the American states—was floated.
That March, for the first time, a national election was won by an East Pakistani political party (the Aswami League), winning nearly all the seats in East Pakistan and a majority in West Pakistan, too. Its leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was immensely popular. But the ruling elite of West Pakistan had no intention of allowing the results of the election to go forward. No Bengali was going to be the leader of Punjabis.
While stalling for time, pretending that he was earnestly engaging in negotiations between Rahman and the losing leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (who refused to resign), the president of Pakistan ordered the military to prepare to push into East Pakistan.
Then the president, Yahya Khan, launched Operation Searchlight, and Sheikh Mujibur Rhaman signed a declaration of independence:
Today, Bangladesh is a sovereign and independent country. On Thursday night, West Pakistani armed forces suddenly attacked the police barracks at Razarbagh and the EPR headquarters at Pilkhana in Dacca. Many innocent and unarmed have been killed in Dhaka city and other places of Bangladesh. Violent clashes between E.P.R. and Police on the one hand and the armed forces of Pakistan on the other, are going on. The Bengalis are fighting the enemy with great courage for an independent Bangladesh. May Allah aid us in our fight for freedom. Joy Bangla!1
The Pakistani president’s strategy—a common one in the history of war—was to sow chaos by devastating the population and eliminating leadership. He first targeted the country’s intelligentsia and professionals for execution. In addition, the army was directed to brutally kill as many people as possible in a short time in order to cow the rest into submission.
This is how Dr Nusrat Rabbee describes2 her parents’ response—both of them leading physicians, her father as a specialist in cardiology and internal medicine and her mother, an obstetrician and gynecologist—as the war erupted:
On the night of the March 25th, when the Pakistani army first cracked down and killed thousands of students, faculty and innocent people sleeping at night in Dhaka [the main city], Dr. Rabbee and his wife quickly moved to organize medical and financial help for thousands of people injured by the atrocities. Dr. Rabbee and his colleagues not only performed surgeries on bullet wounds, burn victims, rape and torture victims, but also hid their Hindu and Muslim friends, who were well known artists, bankers, faculty members from the atrocities of the Pakistani army. Dr. Rabbee paid for many individuals and their families to flee to refugee camps in adjacent India. He helped the families of those who had already been killed in any way he could.
Bangladesh wasn’t ready for war. Its people had no military expertise and the brutality of the Pakistani army was unanticipated. Resistance was disorganized. In the first few days, unlike Dr Nusrat Rabbee’s parents, many people were immobilized by shock or simply trying to flee from the onslaught.
In addition to army actions, collaborators—mainly migrants from West Pakistan—formed death squads that roamed the streets. They randomly killed civilians and snatched young women. These women were assaulted, beaten and sent to camps, where they were humiliated and recreationally raped by soldiers until the end of the war, nine months later.
From I am the War Heroine Speaking: (Meherjaan’s story):
One day in the late afternoon, there was a scream: the military had arrived in our village. Everybody ran to his or her own home.
All of a sudden, it appeared that the entire village was being engulfed in fire. There was noise of intermittent gunfire...At that moment, an olive colored military jeep came to the front of our house and stopped with a loud jerk...Someone was speaking to the officers in Bengali, “Yes, Saab. This is the home of Meherjaan. She is a very beautiful girl.” I felt paralyzed in fear! A loud kick was felt on our bedroom door. On the second kick, the door broke open...We were pulled out...I resisted their pulling me as much as I could with whatever little strength I had in my small body.
They lifted me up into the jeep by my hair. My mother gave out a deep scream. The bastards pointed their guns at my mother and [baby brother] Milu and opened rounds of fire!...I let out a scream from my heart and immediately got an obscenity hurled at me, “Shut up you whore”! How could they address me like this? I am from a decent family, a student of the eighth grade. Suddenly I became kind of wooden.
This mental stagnation would leave me after a very long time. I changed places and captors many times since that afternoon. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes with other girls...I would think of myself as a bodiless entity or as a skeleton, or a ghost, but still I could not end the life in this body.
She was in the eighth grade, a young teenager.
Another woman, Tara Neilson (formerly Bannerjee), also spoke of a kind of emotional paralysis alternating with spirited resistance in this excerpt from I am the War Heroine Speaking:
I sat there like a still mass with no feelings or emotions. For many days my head didn’t work at all...And I got passed around to so many men and simply put up with their rape and sodomy. When I could, I bit my lips with my teeth and screamed, “Joy Bangla...Where I grew up in the village, there was a saying that the soul of a female is just like that of a cat or the tortoise. No matter how much you torture, it still lives. It doesn’t die.
The brutality of the invasion, instead of pushing the people of Bangladesh into submission, had the opposite effect, and fired up their determination to fight back. However, with few resources and little military expertise, the Bangladeshi militia would have been overcome if not for the intervention and assistance of India.
As always in politics—however presented for public consumption—going to war was not a moral decision. The prime minister of India at the time was Indira Gandhi, India’s first and only woman PM (no relationship to Mahatma). She calculated that joining the military conflict would cost less than the millions of Bengali refugees expected in India if Pakistan won.
At the end of the war, in a vengeful last act to undermine Bangladesh just as it was gaining its freedom, the Bengali intellectuals who had survived the purge in March were now targets, including the father of Dr Nusrat Rabbee:
[The] Pakistani army surrendered on December 16th, 1971...On December 15th...at about 4 pm approximately, about a hundred of Pakistani soldiers surrounded our home with members of the Bengali collaborator groups...Despite many requests from his wife, Dr Mrs Jahan Ara Rabbee, they handcuffed him, blindfolded him and marched off with him at gunpoint. His body was recovered in the morning of December 18th, 1971.
The cost of independence had been high, and it was disproportionately borne by women, as in every war.
The term Birangona—meaning war heroine—was coined by President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in a speech a few days after Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan. He intended it to be a term of respect. Tragically, however, the word birangona became a term of derision and stigma in a country that was still imbued with traditional views of women’s “virtue” and regarded rape victims as shamed.
The women who were liberated from camps were often injured and in poor health and many spent time in a Women’s Rehabilitation Centre set up to treat their physical and psychological wounds. Those who were pregnant from their rapists were offered abortions.
Some of the war heroines were accepted back into the family as long as they never talked about the ordeal they’d been through. For others, the shame of the loss of their “virtue” and the dishonour it brought their families meant that they were abandoned. In one case, money intended for the victim’s recuperation was used to build an extension for her family’s house, though the woman it was intended for would never be allowed to live there.
A young man who did stand by his wife, on the other hand, said:
[T]hey are Muslims and in their religion one can marry a girl who is even sold in a market place. Her husband told her, ‘I have already committed a crime by not protecting you. How can I commit another crime by leaving you? I have no face to show Allahas it is. I must give you full respect as my wife.’”
For Tara Neilson, remaining in Bangladesh, where her family rejected her, was unberable. She begged a doctor at the rehabilitation centre to help her leave, and a scholarship at a nursing school in Bulgaria was obtained for her, the government footing the bill for the rest of her expenses. A classmate from Denmark invited Tara to go home with her for a visit. While in Denmark she met a journalist at a party. They fell in love, and she settled in Denmark.
Dr Nilima Ibrahim, the author of I am the War Heroine Speaking, is a scholar of Bengali literature and was a social worker in the rehabilitation centre. Twenty years later, she was able to reconnect with seven of these women. She wrote about her interactions with them and recorded the stories of their time in the camps, their liberation, and their subsequent lives. This book, thankfully translated and self-published by Dr Rabbee, is both heart-breaking and a testament to human resilience and spirit.
At an International Alliance of Women conference in the early 1990s, Dr Ibrahim encountered one of these young women without recognizing her at first. This is how Dr Ibrahim described her:
[Mrs. Neilson appeared to be] about thirty years old. She was exquisitely beautiful...She had curly, dark hair, which covered almost half her back...I noticed that her eyes were dark like her hair. Her eyes seemed to be restless...I could tell she had a joyous personality. I felt drawn to her for some reason....Did I know her from before?
When they met privately after a meeting, Dr Ibrahim learned that Mrs. Neilson was Tara Bannerjee, one of the girls she had worked with so long before, a university student before she was captured shortly after the invasion began.
About the stigma of being a “war heroine,” she said this to Dr Ibrahim:
I screamed shame, shame, shame in my mind—not to myself, but to the diseased and unclean social value system of Bangalis. Social customs and rules are more important than fellow human beings to them!
Ten years after leaving Bangladesh, now successful, married, and with a son, she returned home for a visit, and her family—seeing her like that—saw fit to reconcile with her.
Mehrjaan remained in Bangladesh, but she, too, lived with dignity. She said to Dr Ibrahim:
Life is not a set of straight and parallel lines. I do own my life, but what determines fate – did you say, God? Are you mad? God directs the life of a Bengali girl? If that were true, then what would the Mullahs be doing for a living? Or for that matter, who would the politicians be lecturing to?...I am very much aware and deeply believe that I am a war heroine. My country has given me that acknowledgement, my father and mother have embraced me with open arms, but I could not go back to them because of the terror and violence of my own society. I have understood the essence – that above everything I am a female. I have seen the lusty, cannibalistic nature of man, tolerated his rape and torture for eight long months [in 1971]. Every moment I thought I am a woman but not less! Born as a female, we are given the power to create life and to feed the newborn our milk. That is why I am also the mother of a child. I did not get the affection of a husband, a happy family, but I still stand tall on my two feet with self-respect.
As pointed out by South Asian feminists at Stanford, no other government has ever acknowledged the price paid by women who were raped by the enemy in war as heroic. Rape isn’t unique to the army of Pakistan (nor is the brutality). This happens in every war. So, it’s all the more noteworthy that Bangladesh was the first, and as far as I know the only, government to offer these women help and respect.
The legacy of the War of Independence is a central theme in the literature of Bangladesh to this day. It shows up in a number of novels by one of Bangladesh’s pre-eminent literary figures, Selina Hossain, who received her MA in Bengali language and literature three years before independence. A prolific writer, she is the mother of modern Bangladeshi literature and believes that “art for art’s sake was dismissed several centuries ago. Social responsibility is the realization of every creative being.”
To that end, she often writes about the poor and the oppressed to raise awareness. The one book of hers I could find in translation—and that as an ebook—is River of My Blood, about the War of Liberation from the point of view of an ordinary rural woman.
As an aside, I have to say here that I’m appalled that it’s so hard to find translations of the literature of a country of nearly two hundred million people, even by an author as important as Selina Hossain. However, several of her short stories are available in translation online: A Wild Flower, In Retrospect, and Parul’s Motherhood. I’m grateful to the site hosts and the translators for making it possible for us to read them.
And I was able to find Bangladeshi women’s poetry in translation online, too.
From “I Want to Pierce with the Arrows of my Voice” by Bangladeshi poet Shamim Azad, 2012 (translated by Manzoorul Islam):
I wasn’t born without complaints. I announced with piercing shrieks the first fault of this earth’s seasonal wheel... Here, without hunger, there are no gaping mouths, no forest without thorny trees. Without the sweat of slaves there’s no society, without huge stones no rushing stream could take its rippling turns, without the launching of missiles there is no war. And I know— without the burning of neglect love cannot be measured. The wayward embrace reveals renunciation’s all-absorbing root. Rage exhausts itself in a cascade of sweat, touch comes to climax in a sudden blow, and in the gigantic build-up of starvation on a massive scale Ethiopia is announced to the world. So I want to leave my mark on every Namibia, on 1971, through my complaints in the spring, by piercing everyone with the arrows of my voice.
A note below the poem informs us that spring, here, refers to the Language Movement of 1952, and the shooting of Bengali students during protests against the imposition of Urdu, the language of West Pakistan, as if their own language had no merit or existence. And 1971 is the year that atrocities instigated the War of Liberation. (The mention of Namibia isn’t explained in the note, but presumably it’s a reference to the concentration camps set up by the German colonialists in the early 20th c, which resulted in the genocide of the Herero and Nama people.)
The range of literary work on the women’s experience of the War of Liberation speaks to a contradiction about the acceptability of women speaking to their experiences. There’s been public discourse about the mass rapes (including the government’s acknowledgment), which makes it seem to some scholars that silencing was a myth. Yet many individual women have reported that they were rejected if they weren’t quiet about it.
This is consistent with the experiences of other trauma survivors. For example, women of Algeria who’d fought in their war of independence were expected, afterward, to get on with a traditional woman’s life and not disturb it with their views and experiences. This was also true of holocaust survivors. But in every case, time changed the perspectives of everyone concerned. As a new generation grows up, space is made to speak and to hear. And honestly, as someone who’s experienced severe trauma, I can say that talking about it is painful and can be retraumatizing, but with support and distance, it becomes healing.
Over the years, war heroines and their advocates pushed for a different term for them: freedom fighter. This isn’t just a matter of semantics. A freedom fighter is someone who fought in the War of Liberation and has a special place in Bangladeshi society. Freedom fighters are entitled to tangible benefits for themselves and for their families. It acknowledges not just sacrifice, but an active part in the building of a nation. And these women’s stories are a tribute to just that.
Finally, In October, 2015, the Bangladesh government declared that the Birangona were indeed freedom fighters.
I’m going to give the last words to Dr Nusrat Rabbee, quoting an email from her with her permission:
Sometimes angels appear and it cannot be explained by cause and effect. Except for this: truth never dies and souls who perished are here and keep pushing us to bring justice and light to their sacrifices.
The memoir was my family story. But it is a vehicle to deliver the cargo: the history of my country (its birth and what it took). An almost forgotten genocide.
The war heroines stories speak for themselves. But the translation process nearly killed me. Took a while and I had to live through each girl or young woman to be able to truly tell their story in English. I learned so much and I knelt in respect for their courage , resilience and simplicity.
You are a sister in the journey, Lilian!
To our sisters—may we remember and honour them.
Meaning victory to Bangladesh; this became the rallying cry of the War of Liberation
I first discovered Dr Rabbee’s work on Anushay Hossain’s blog. She is currently on Substack writing about the politics of women’s health.
Thanks for posting, Lilian! You are awesome
Moving beyond measure, Lily.