Ethical Issues Concerning Representation of Narratives of Sexual Violence of 1971

Ethical Issues Concerning Representation of Narratives of Sexual
Violence of 19711

? Nayanika Mookherjee2


‘The exclusion of individual interpretations and social context in human
rights modes of employment has worked its way through the process
whereby life becomes text becomes genre and has transformed survivor’s
own interpretation (in public, at least) of human rights abuses. This
relationship between facts and interpretation and representation conveys
the conditions under which knowledge is constructed and represented’
Wilson (1997:146)3.

The aforementioned relationship between facts, interpretation and
representation is of significant importance when historical silences are being
renarrativised after having surfaced or being ‘retrieved’ from the cracks and interstices
of the national project where they have been consigned to, for decades. This becomes a
particularly pertinent issue in the case of representing histories of sexual violence of
Muktijuddho, (Liberation War of Bangladesh, 1971) whose articulation, discovery and
excavations have been a predominant feature in the 1990s in Bangladesh. This paper
based on my fieldwork in Bangladesh on the histories of sexual violence of 1971
undertaken between 1997-1998 and between 2002-2003, attempts to point out the
ethical considerations in representing the voices of women who are survivors of that
violent history of 1971 and particularly in the context of the website:
www.drishtipat.org ’s campaign for these women. It also attempts to map out the
context within which the renarrativisation of accounts of sexual violence of 1971
emerged in Bangladesh in the 1990s and among various other narratives highlights one
such survivor, Champa’s, ‘story’. This paper explores the processes through which
history of rape during 1971 and birangonas are being remembered and their

1 Excerpts from Mookherjee, Nayanika (2002), 'A Lot of History': Sexual Violence, Public Memories
and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, D. Phil thesis in Social Anthropology, SOAS, University
of London. Please do not cite without author’s permission.

2The author is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University
of Sussex, UK (till September 2003). From October 2003, she joins the Department of Sociology,
University of Lancaster, UK.

3 Wilson, R ed. 1997. Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives. London:
Pluto Press.

Nayanika Mookherjee/September 2003/www.drishtipat.org/1971
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experiences are transformed into narratives. This would hence enable a
reconceptualisation of oral history as a methodological tool for representation of such
narratives.
The historical trajectory of Bangladesh, within which the history of sexual
violence is articulated, is a witness to varied ruptured pasts, mutilayered negotiation of
one’s identity. Thus there exists today a festering, unreconciled history, with the
memory and the wound still raw, open and unhealed. Following Tonkin (1989:1)4 it is
important to ask how did the past lead to the present, how does the present create the
past? Clearly memory addresses the present in its recovery of the past. Tonkin (1992)5
argues, that the past is not only a resource to deploy, to support a case or assert a
social claim, it also enters memory in different ways and helps to structure it.
Following Tonkin (1989, 1992), Antze and Lambek, (1996)6 I argue that the various
dynamics of identity construction influence not only what of 1971 is remembered, but
also how it is recalled, transmitted to others, embedded in national culture and
history? Which past gains hegemony and what are the processes by which this
competition for a privileged past occurs?

Histories of Rape after 1971:
In 1972, the Bangladeshi state adopted a policy to accord a new visibility to
the 200,000 women raped during Muktijuddho by eulogising them as birangonas (war
heroines), which coincided with a new genre of public persuasive rhetoric and was an
attempt to reinstate them in marriage and reduce social ostracism. A Relief and
Rehabilitation Board was set up by the government in Bangladesh for the purpose of
setting up Rehabilitation Centres throughout the country in order to provide relief and
rehabilitation, set up abortion clinics, marry the women off, provide vocational

4 Tonkin, E., M. McDonald and M. Chapman. ed. 1989. History and Ethnicity, ASA Monograph 27.
London and New York: Routledge.

5 Tonkin, E. 1992. Narrating our Past: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

6 Antze, P. and M. Lambek 1996. eds. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. London:
Routledge.

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training to ‘war-affected’ women i.e. primarily women who have been raped during
the war.
The issue of rape during the war was reported in the press after 1971, till mid
1973 after which the birangonas received a token mention in the State speeches as the
‘200,000 mothers and sisters’. After 1975 the birangonas disappeared from the State
discourse, though remaining a literary, cultural and cinematic focus through the 70s to
the 90s. The re-emergence of the history of sexual violence in the public discourse
occurred with the front-page press (Bhorer Kagoj 27/3/92; Doinik Jonokontho
28/3/92) photograph of three birangonas at Gono Adalat (People's Tribunal), a
movement held on 26th March 1992 which was attempting to try Gholam Azum, a
leading Razakar (generic term for collaborators with the Pakistani army in 1971) who
had been reinstated in the political-scape of Bangladesh. In the Gono Adalat various
testimonies of affected individuals i.e. those who had lost their father, brother or son
were narrated. These narratives were juxtaposed with the ‘testimonial’ presence of the
aforementioned three women (among whom I primarily did my fieldwork) who had
been raped during the war.

Historicising rape in the 1990s:
Since 1992, accounts of the history of sexual violation have re-emerged in the
public discourse. Nationally the, reinstatement of collaborators and the lack of
bringing to trial those Razakars who are implicated in the killings of intellectuals
during the war, rise of fatwas, international reference to Muktijuddho (occurring at the
conjuncture of Cold War politics) as a civil war in the international legal language of
human rights7, or Indo- Pakistani war,8 the need for the history of the war to be
transmitted to the projonmo (younger generations) and hence the lack of
acknowledgement of its genocidal birth represented the unresolved, unreconciled
history of the nation. To the call for trial of collaborators was added the need to
establish a War Crimes tribunal where the Razakars could be tried and the demand for

7 As cited in the International Commission of Jurists, 1972. The Events of East Pakistan, 1971: A Legal
Study. Geneva: Page 27.
8 A search for Muktijuddho on the Internet showed 45 sites while a search for 1971 Indo-Pakistan War
provided links to 3323 sites. A few examples of such sites are: www.subcontinent.com/1971war;
www.kids.infoplease.com/ce6/history;www.lycos.infoplease.com/ce6/history;www.freeindian.org/1971
war;www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/History/1971war;www.asia.yahoo.com/arts/humanities/history;
www.historyguy.com/indo-pakistaniwars.html.
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an apology from Pakistan was raised. The documentary ‘War Crimes File’ made in
1993 in London traced the war crimes committed by three collaborators who were
based in London’s East End and added further fuel to the fire. Internationally, the
Declaration of rape as a war crime in the Beijing session in 1995, followed by events
of apology by the Japanese Government to the Comfort women, developments around
Bosnia, Rwanda, the setting up of the International War Crimes Tribunal spoke
profoundly to the Bangladesh situation. Above all the publication of the two volumes
of Nilima Ibrahim’s Ami Birangona Bolchi (This is the War Heroine Speaking) in
1994 and 19959 provided personalised accounts of sexual violation of eight women
with whom the author had been in close contact when she worked in the Women’s
Rehabilitation Centre in 1972.
The need to document histories of sexual violation had already arisen from
1992 with the picture of the three women in Gono Adalat. From the ‘statistical
anonymity’ of 200,000 war heroines, this provided the image of a ‘realistic,
evidentiary, authentic’ birangona--this realistic vein would be followed in the
subsequent oral histories through which narratives of rape of
1971 has been documented in Bangladesh. True to this realist, testimonial
genre one would find frequent presence of portraits of ‘newly discovered’ war-
heroines in newspapers in the 1990s along with their narrative of experience of sexual
violence of 1971 particularly during the months of commemoration of the war in
December and March (See illus. 1).


The methodological use of oral history is also
an attempt to highlight a subaltern historiography
whereby the voices of unknown, grassroots birangonas
and Muktijoddhas may be given their due place in the
history of Muktijuddho. Various
Illus. 1. Heading: Birangona Rizia is leading a life
of poverty. (Doinik Songbad 16/3/97).


9Ibrahim, N. 1994, 1995. Ami Birangona Bolchi. (This is the Birangona Speaking) (Volume 1 and 2).
Dhaka: Jagriti.

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important ethnographies have taken recourse to oral history (Butalia 1998; Menon and
Bhasin 1998)10 as well as the experiences of survivors ‘to provide a corrective to the
understanding of history as an exclusively specialist activity’ (Das 1990:307; 1995)11;
and furthermore, to provide a ‘profound understanding of the experience of historical
events and that their meaning can never be settled’ (Menon and Bhasin 1998:18); and
finally to provide ‘a common context of struggle….as resistance is encoded in the
practices of remembering and writing’ since ‘as women of Palestine, Algeria
remember wars, they figure their agency’ (Mohanty 1991:7, 38)12. In fact, oral history
and testimony enables ‘a documentation of both the witness as he makes testimony
and the understanding and meaning of events generated in the activity of testimony
itself’ (Young 1988:157-71)13. However it is the exposition of the framework of
exchange between the narrator and the interviewer and the conditions under which the
testimony is produced can alone provide a ethical and subjective-objective
understanding of the narrative.
In the following section I explore the narrative of Champa--a woman who has
survived the experience of sexual violence during 1971, the press reports about her
and the discourse of narrativisation that lies therein.








10 Butalia, U. 1998. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Viking
Penguin India; Menon, R. and K. Bhasin, 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition.
Kali for Women: New Delhi.

11 Das, V. ed. 1990. Mirrors of Violence: Community, Riots and Survivors in South Asia. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press; Das, V. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on
Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

12 Mohanty, C. T. 1991. ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ in C. T.
Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres eds. Third World Women and The Role of Feminism. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.

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Telling Champa’s ‘Story’:
I came to know about Champa from a
newspaper article in Bhorer Kagoj (13/5/98)
with the headline ‘Birangona Champa in the
Mental Hospital’ with a picture of a woman
who seemed to be in her mid 40s (see illus. 2).


Illus 2: Above: Heading: Birangona Champa in Mental Hospital (Bhorer Kagoj
13/5/98).

The report in the article follows:

“By losing her chastity for the sake of Liberation, Champa has lead a life of
imprisonment for the last two decades in the Pabna Mental Hospital. In the
midst of the chaos of the war in 1971, 13-year-old Champa strayed off and
lost her parents. When she was searching for everyone, then the Pakistani
army took her to a camp. There along with a few other imprisoned women
Champa was subjected to brutal torture (i.e. rape) by the Pakistani soldiers.
After being raped continuously she lost her mental stability. At the end of
September 1971, the liberation fighters took over the camp and freed the
imprisoned birangonas. Champa bearing the marks of rape on her body was
then unconscious. After independence Champa was under medical treatment
for two years in the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre in Dhaka. Since this
treatment did not cure her, the matron of the Rehabilitation Centre Meera
Choudhuri admitted Champa in the Pabna Mental Hospital.
In the Register of the hospital, the date of admission of Champa is
22nd October 1972. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, Champa was cured within
six months. It was also written in the hospital register that most probably the
Pakistani army raped her. Letters were sent many times to her father Abdul
Gani, resident of Barisal so as to ask him to take her back to her family.
Having received no reply from him, the hospital authorities gave up any
chance of returning Champa back her family. In all these years since she has
been cured, Champa has been working as an attendant of the patients in the
hospital. Champa also reminiscences of her childhood and memories of her
family are still vivid. When the journalist writing the report asked about her
imprisoned life in the Pakistani camp her eyes brimmed with tears and she
said she would not say anything. Though Champa had expressed that she
wanted to spend rest of her life in the Mental hospital, at the end of the
interview with the journalist she pleaded that she wanted to spend the last
few days of her life among normal people. Hence she continuously reiterated
that she knew needlework, and would be able to do other jobs-she pleaded
that arrangements be made to free her. The article continued that a few

13 Young, J. F. 1988. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and Consequences of
Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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attempts have already been made to free Champa into a normal life. The
lawyer Eleena Khan from Manobadhikar Bastobayon Songshtha (MBS from
now on meaning Organisation for the Realisation of Human Rights) had
visited Champa and has taken measures to bring Champa to Dhaka. For two
decades, by suppressing her pain, Champa has spent her days in the Pabna
Mental Hospital.”

Another article was written in Bhorer Kagoj on 16th June 1998, after she had
already been brought to Dhaka by MBS. The article was accompanied with a picture
of Champa looking sideways, her face expressing discomfort with her situation. The
article emphasised in its report:

“After twenty six years Champa came out of the Mental Hospital and hence
MBS, the Human Rights organisation provided Champa the opportunity to
experience the light and air under the open sky for the first time after 26
years. Describing Champa the article stated that even though she was
healthy and physically capable of working she looked otherwise. Having
worked with mental patients, Champa’s psychological growth has not taken
place. Even though she is apparently healthy, it would seem she is ill. She
does not speak much; even if she speaks her words get entangled. It also
narrated how Champa had suddenly decided to stay in the hospital and
declined to go to Dhaka when the members of MBS came to take her. She
agreed to go finally on the assurance that she would be allowed to come
back to the Hospital if she did not like being in Dhaka.”

I met Champa on 1st June 1998 around two weeks after the first article was
written and in the duration between the publications of the two articles. The Pabna
Mental Hospital is one of the main mental asylum in Bangladesh and in recent years
the press has critically reported about its appalling facilities and infrastructure, its
laying off of staffs and dismissal of patients who were not totally cured. The hospital
on the other hand claimed that this was due to lack of allotment of State funds towards
its operation. Located on the outskirts of Pabna town, the very organisation of
architecture and space of the mental hospital seemed to render a sense of distance and
peripherality. Before I came across the main building of the Hospital, I travelled
through the bare hospital grounds in a rickshaw for twenty minutes. The surroundings
seemed to be stripped of any vegetation or traffic of vehicles or individuals. On
reaching the hospital, the Director of the hospital introduced me to a Matron and the
latter asked me to wait in an annex room for Champa. She refused to meet me initially
as she thought that I was somebody from Dhaka and came into the room muttering
that she would not leave and does not want to leave. When I told her that I had come
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to just talk to her and not take her to Dhaka she was reassured and even wanted to
show me around the wards and meet some of the patients who were her friends.
She spoke clearly and articulately and said she does not know how she ended
up in the mental hospital and remembers of her times in the village as a young girl and
has blurred memories of the beginning of gondogol (chaos meaning the war of 1971).
But she said she has no recollection of the year of the war. She said that many people
had asked her about the year of the war, but she has not been able to remember
anything. She reiterated that either she wants to return to her family in the village or
she wants to continue working in the Mental Hospital. Rather than stitching clothes,
doing craftwork or looking after other people’s children in Dhaka, she emphasised
that she would rather continue working in the hospital and not go away to an
unfamiliar environment in Dhaka away from all the people she had to come to know.
She reiterated that the mental hospital had become her home, she had friends here and
people cared for her there.
Coincidentally I also met the journalist who wrote the article when I was in
Pabna. He confirmed he had not given an accurate’ account of Champa’s narrative,
had not met her and his report was based on accounts given by MBS.

Reading Champa’s ‘Story’:

It is important to explore the disjunctions between Champa’s narrative as
accounted to me and the narrativisation in the article in the press. Some minute yet
significant contradictions would draw our attention to the discursive nature of the
description of sexual violation during the war. In the breadth of the same article is
mentioned that Champa was under medical treatment for two years in the Women’s
Rehabilitation Centre in Dhaka which was established only in February 1972 after
which she is admitted to the Mental Hospital which is contradicted by the fact that in
the Register of the hospital, the date of admission of Champa is 22nd October 1972.
Also the notion of probability as recorded in the register that Champa might
have been raped by the Pakistani army is followed up in the article in contradiction of
the facts it ‘excavates’ by mentioning on one hand Champa’s denial to narrate the
accounts of 1971 as she does not remember anything of 1971, which on the other hand
is preceded by a detailed account of sexual violence. Instead of exploring Champa’s
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‘blank-out’ of the events of 1971, which might provide comprehension of how
memories are contained through the acts of forgetting, or what function acts of
forgetting may encode, the reader is instead given a clean, gory description of sexual
violation in Pakistani army camps. I must hastily add that I draw attention to these
minute disjunctions to explore the assumptions that might have influenced the
narrativisation of Champa’s ‘story’ on the part of the journalist. The assumptions at
play here seem that Champa’s narrative embodies evidence of a ‘hidden’ history
whereby the journalist can archaeologically unearth, excavate her experience of rape
in her denial. The objective thereby becomes the need to stage a vision of an authentic
oppressed, violated woman. Thus the horrifying genre adopted in the description of
sexual violence precisely links Champa with ‘marks’ that characterise her and make
her a ‘case’.
Champa’s relentless reiteration that she wants to go back to the village or
continue working in the hospital and not go to Dhaka and the authorities lack of
engagement with her wishes should be comprehended in the context of the hospital’s
lack of funds, attempts to layoff staff and dismiss patients. Hence it would seem ideal
to chanellise Champa’s labour productively and thereby engage her in some work like
looking after children in nurseries etc. in Dhaka under the aegis of MBS.
Further the horrifying genre is re-emphasised by the connotation of the
institution of mental hospital within which Champa has led a life of ‘imprisonment’
for the last 26 years. Hence the influence of having spent all these years in the mental
hospital is apparent to the journalists and the readers from the fact that ‘she looks ill,
does not speak, her words are entangled when she speaks.’ These observations made
when Champa is taken to Dhaka, seems to me to reflect her bewilderment and
alienation in being uprooted from her familiar surroundings in the Mental Hospital
after all these years. But this enables the article to chart a traumatic trajectory for
Champa by emphasising the ‘oppressive’ connotation of a mental hospital and as a
result to get away from its ‘abnormality’ the article reiterates that Champa ‘wanted to
spend the last few days of her life among normal people’. The stress on the
‘imprisoned’ conditions of the Mental Hospital enables the article to strongly
legitimise the moment of rape by mapping out the consequences of traumatic
trajectory from that ‘critical event’ (Das 1995) through the subsequent two decades.
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The double horrifying genre of sexual violence by the Pakistani army and its
consequential life spent in an ‘oppressive’ institution precisely provides the
accountability factor necessary for identifying rape as a war crime globally for
Bangladesh. It also enables the location of causality of the second horrifying genre in
the first along with an emphasis on her dislocation from her family i.e. since Champa
was raped by the Pakistani army, she was not taken back into her family and hence
spent an oppressive life in a Mental Hospital.
A life lived in ‘oblivion and suppression’ needs to be resurrected. The need for
MBS is to free her from the miseries of a mental institution and hence naturally free
and liberate her from her trauma. This would thereby ‘give her life a breath of air and
ray of light’. Infact the moment when MBS takes her out of the hospital is reported in
the article as: “Last Sunday, at 12.30pm after 26 years, Champa enjoyed the free air
and light of the outside world.” It is important to note here that a year ago it was this
newspaper, which had brought out Champa’s ‘story’ and narrated how she had
nowhere to go whereby MBS had taken up Champa’s case. Thus through the reportage
of Champa’s case and the role of MBS we find what Veena Das (1995) has referred to
as ‘the professional organisation of knowledge’ whereby personal narratives gain
credibility from the saviour paradigm inherent in an authoritative body of knowledge,
here of that of journalism and human rights.
Champa was brought over to Dhaka in June 1998 and attempts by the author to
meet her in Dhaka then was impeded by various commitments on the author’s part and
also by the terrible floods that occurred in 1998. In the brief fieldwork between 2002-
2003, the author enquired about Champa with MBS and was informed that she is
working in Dhaka as an ayah looking after other people’s children, a job which
Champa had specifically said she did not want to do.








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