In the land of buried tongues : testimonies and literary narratives of the war of liberation of Bangladesh

This book is about testimonial and fictional narratives emerging from the War of Liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. It ended when winter came but the chill persisted for long. The spectres of war were resurrected with accounts of vigilante violence against those who opposed the liberation, predominantly Urdu speakers. The assassination of top leaders of the freedom struggle and the war, the rise of military dictatorship, the execution of Mujib's killers in 2010, and the trial and execution of Razakars recently, remind one of the deep wounds of war. War literature from Bangladesh and Pakistan continues to appear in spite of officially authorized remembrance and forgetting. In placing testimonial accounts beside fiction, a complex picture of the legacy of a violent time becomes visible. Recent studies into the war have not dealt with the fund of insights provided by the fiction that commemorates the second partition of the subcontinent. In dealing with memories and spectres of suffering, fiction helps to negotiate the 'archives of silence' (Yasmin Saikia's phrase) and allows us to analyse narratives of victory and loss. In articulating the deeply gendered universe of War, the fuzzy borders between perpetrators and victims are made visible. This book argues that as writers or memoirists are compulsively drawn towards the ethical task of remembering 1971; in the gaps and slippages of these narratives the strains of nationalistic accounts begin to show. In attempts to renegotiate these spaces in the works of Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Tahmima Anam, Intizar Husain, Kamila Shamsie, and Sorayya Khan lies the evidence that a politics of possibility cannot bury the traumas of the past. This work treats the events of 1971 in East Pakistan as a liberation war in order to contend with its memories, inheritances, and silences. Delving primarily into literature from Bangladesh, it also considers the tripartite site of history by bringing in responses in fiction from India and Pakistan. In addition to history and testimonial writing, fictional narratives are critical to understand the complex traces of those intense nine months in the history of the subcontinent. To facilitate this, the book takes stock of memoirs and testimonies of women and men in separate sections in order to underline the gendered nature of war. It then moves to fiction from Bangladesh and in the final chapter from Pakistan and India as well. Since the memories and representation of war is inseparable from its aftermath, these works clearly hint towards the unfinished task of memorialization, which is a process that cannot be reduced to monuments commemorating victory or rationalizing of defeat/loss. It is true that 1971 has been a casualty to nationalist historiography in all three countries. But as this reading of memoirs, testimonies, and fiction will demonstrate, it is possible to listen to the buried voices of 1971 as much in nationalist accounts as in less compliant ones. If we are to appreciate the violent, traumatic legacies of 1971 and its continued relevance to our lives, a multi-genre study involving victims of wartime rape, memoirs by combatant and non- combatant men, military accounts, and fiction from transnational sites might add to our current understanding of 1971. "This book is about testimonial and fictional narratives emerging from the War of Liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. It ended when winter came but the chill persisted for long. The spectres of war were resurrected with accounts of vigilante violence against those who opposed the liberation, predominantly Urdu speakers. The assassination of top leaders of the freedom struggle and the war, the rise of military dictatorship, the execution of Mujib's killers in 2010, and the trial and execution of Razakars recently, remind one of the deep wounds of war. War literature from Bangladesh and Pakistan continues to appear in spite of officially authorized remembrance and forgetting. In placing testimonial accounts beside fiction, a complex picture of the legacy of a violent time becomes visible. Recent studies into the war have not dealt with the fund of insights provided by the fiction that commemorates the second partition of the subcontinent. In dealing with memories and spectres of suffering, fiction helps to negotiate the "archives of silence" (Yasmin Saikia's phrase) and allows us to analyse narratives of victory and loss. In articulating the deeply gendered universe of War, the fuzzy borders between perpetrators and victims are made visible."--Résumé de l'éditeur