Today I am on my way to Bangladesh to carry out research for my postgraduate dissertation. I can’t even begin to explain how nervous and excited I am about the next month – so much to do and so many people to talk to. Although I’ve been to Bangladesh a few times before, this trip is definitely a lot more different from all the previous ones. I feel like I’m going there with a fresh pair of eyes – everything seems a bit newer, now that I know why and how this country came into existence.
The focus of my dissertation is to look at the legacy of the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence and how it exists in rural memory. Why am I even doing this? Believe it or not, answering that question isn’t easy. Sometimes I forget why I even chose this topic. This is definitely one of those moments, hence the blog entry – I’m trying to remind myself why this work is important, and not in the sense that I’m only doing it to try and get a good mark for my course. The truth is, Bangladesh’s history – like so many other nationalist histories – is an extremely complex and sensitive one. It happened so recently (only 40 years ago) that the historiography that surrounds it is thin as it is scarce. A lot of it is dominated by emotional accounts, which are hard to rely on if you’ve been trained as a historian in the European way. Plus, you’d think that the fact that my family and so many people I know witnessed this war would make my work easier, but it almost does the exact opposite. Doing justice to something so horrific is a hard task, especially when you know people who experienced it first hand.
I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know about the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh until I was about 16 or 17 years old. For anyone who may not know the history: after partition in 1947, Pakistan had two wings - West Pakistan and East Pakistan; after years of cultural, economic and political subjugation, East Pakistan gained independence in 1971 through a bloody 9 month war with its Western counterpart and became Bangladesh. The first I’d heard of it was when my dad and his siblings were talking about times during ‘juddho’ (the war). ‘What war are they talking about,’ I remembered thinking, ‘Dad never mentioned a war.’ A few months later, I looked it up on the internet. I was literally in shock. A war where allegedly 3 million people were killed and hundreds of thousands of women were raped within 9 months…and my parents were there??? ‘This didn’t make sense, why did they not mention this?’ I kept checking different websites – 3 million; 3 million; 3 million. Although it is widely debated whether this figure is even true, it kept persisting in every single web page I came across. I sat at my desk for a long time, trying to get my head around it: ‘I had no idea. I had no idea. Why didn’t anybody tell me? I had no idea.’
I asked my mum this question last year, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell us?’ She said that she thought we weren’t interested, that we were busy living our lives in a completely different country that was far away from a conflict that happened decades ago; it didn’t matter that we didn’t know what they’d experienced during that war. I asked her if she saw any dead bodies and she nodded. I then asked her where she saw them and she said in her home village of Tangail, a rural district just outside the capital. She closed her eyes and described the body she saw to me: ‘It was a young man, about 20 or 21. The first thing I saw were his intestines hanging out of the left side of his body and there was blood everywhere. Even though I turned my head away as soon as I saw it, I still vividly remember it’. She shuddered before opening her eyes again.
My mum has seen a dead body; a dead body that had died in battle. This may not seem like a big deal, but I couldn’t believe that my mum had seen something as horrific as that when she was only 18. The words came back to my mind: ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me? I had no idea.’
These past few months, I’ve heard about how my parents both listened to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s famous speech on the radio, ‘this time the struggle is for our freedom;’ when they both saw Bangladesh’s flag for the first time; how they walked for days to their grandparents’ village homes to seek refuge; how some of my dad’s university friends became freedom fighters engaged in guerilla warfare; how my mum’s cousin was taken away and murdered; how my paternal grandfather was captured and tortured but thankfully wasn’t killed; and how my mum’s elder brother and sister went to a public execution of war criminals the following year and came home crying. I found it amazing that my family had lived through times like these. They witnessed the birth of a nation. I do think that sometimes they don’t realise the magnitude of what they experienced. Or maybe they just don’t want to talk about it. Either way, this was the beginning of a country called Bangladesh. A place where my ancestors are from and I was curious as to what Bangladesh actually meant to people. What did it mean to Bengalis to be free? What did it mean to my parents to not be classed as East Pakistani?
My master’s course has allowed me to explore my curiosity with the Liberation War, and I am lucky to have found a university tutor in London that specialises in Bangladesh’s history. One thing that is prominent in a lot of the literature I’ve come across on the war is the overwhelming emotion. Some historians argue that Bangladesh continually exaggerates its position as the victim in its own history and consequently downplays certain aspects that may discredit its character. There is no significant evidence to substantiate the 3 million death toll and many Bangla textbooks fail to mention the rape of non-Bengali women by Bengali men. Instead many accounts place a lot of emphasis on the victimisation and heroism of Bangladesh, thereby giving way to emotions rather than the facts.
I’m not saying I agree with this, nor am I saying that I’m going on this trip to find out exactly what happened and how many died. That is impossible. The point of my research is to understand how and why this sort of history is written in Bangladesh and how it exists within the space of memory. My focus is on rural memory in particular as this has been neglected in academia. Although 92% of Bangladesh’s population were rural inhabitants in 1971, this isn’t reflected in the literature at all – a lot of it deals with events in Dhaka and Chittagong. So many revolutionary movements had occurred in the countryside long before 1971 and they had dispersed to Dhaka – the rural areas had clearly played a huge long-term role in the shaping of Bangladesh. My aim is to understand what nationalism meant to these people back then and today, and how important they think it is to commemorate the war and inform the post-war generation. Why even bother doing this? Because for the last 40 years, Bangladesh’s history has been dominated by 'official' history and influenced by high level politics. My study is an attempt to give a voice to the people who actually drove this war and let them contribute something to their nationalist narrative. As Benedict Anderson has argued, nationalism is an imagined community, and I want to understand what these peoples’ political imaginings were of Bangladesh. What did an independent Bangladesh mean to them, in 1971 as well as 2011?
Sarmila Bose, a South Asian Politics Professor at Oxford University, recently released a book which deals with both sides of the war (it is hard to get hold of any literature that deals with Pakistan’s viewpoint). Her book was slated by many Bengalis because they felt that she did not give a fair analysis of Bangladesh. However, others have applauded her for concentrating on the facts and considering the war’s multiple dimensions, thereby challenging the official histories which were full of absurd exaggerations and one-sided claims. Although I can understand why she was criticised, I can also see why her work is so important. The truths about this war will never be known, but Bose is one of the first people to make a significant attempt at it. As all historians know, you cannot just gather all of your evidence from one side, especially when it is as complex as the topic we’re dealing with. I understand that, as part of my research, I will be dealing with many people whose views have been conditioned by these official histories. But even this will indicate how the role of memory can operate within the nationalist discourse.
Logistically speaking, I have a lot of organising to do when I reach Bangladesh. I am worried that I won’t get all the work I need to get done, as I have a huge task before me (I am starting to think maybe a month-long trip wasn’t enough time). But I am also excited, because this is an opportunity for me to understand the Liberation War at a grassroots level. I will never know what those people truly went through, that is not the point of my study. Instead, I want to begin to understand how and why people like my family wanted a country called Bangladesh. And I want to focus upon the complex interplay between history and memory, and how they can shape a nation’s past. Did Sheikh Mujibur Rahman really achieve emancipation for the country? Or did they just replace one military regime with another? I guess, the ultimate question is – has Bangladesh ever really been free? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer that…but I’m going to give it a shot.
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