Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh

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Abstract
In 1971, two wars broke out in East Pakistan. One was a civil war between East and West Pakistan, and, the other, an international war fought between India and Pakistan. In the wars soldiers and civilians – Punjabi, Bengali, Bihari and Indians – who served as state and non-state/community actors violated, brutalized and terrorized women in East Pakistan in an attempt to instil fear and force enemy groups into submission. After the war the traumatic experiences of women were suppressed in the national narratives of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India and the memory of gendered violence was actively forgotten. Why? In this paper, I probe into the production of silence – social, cultural and political – and investigate some of the plots that silence conveys. By ‘speaking silence’ my attempt is to interrogate the official narrative of 1971 and insert the people, left out of the existing histories, at the center of the narrative. Finally, I tell women’s stories to bear witness to the violence inflicted on them and write from within it a history that could urge an ethical and political thinking in our era of global war violence.

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