Dibarah Mahboob looks back on the many contributions of women in the 1971 War of Independence and how their role in the grand narrative is reduced to victimhood
Historically, war has been understood to be a man’s domain. Therefore, the narratives of war also focus typically on the male actors who dominated the military and political event in question. The Bangladesh War of Liberation is no exception, with women visible mainly as victims in the accounts. Their appearance in literature is also cursory, and the knowledge of their roles and participation vastly passed down orally.
Unlike for men, there is no definite, official list of female freedom fighters. Thus the exact number of women who directly fought the battle is unknown. But women’s participation, training, and mobilization in the 1971 War of Liberation are undeniable even if it is shadowed. While some fought as soldiers, many others played crucial roles in the entire eco-system that led to the eventual victory– as informants, nurses, cooks, and even leaders. Yet when we imagine women during this time, we only imagine them as the weaklings without their male protectors, reduced to mere rape victims, receiving accolades as survivors rather than active participants.
However, women had undergone training for guerrilla warfare, first aid and the like – records indicate instances where there were more than 200 women in some training camps. Most of them had lost their family members and had mobilized with the resolution of revenge. The food at the training camp for women was paltry but they persisted in their missions.
However, the war of liberation was not fought only in the battlefields with guns. Following liberation, the term “Birongona” (meaning war heroine) was granted by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1973 to commend the contributions of women who had partaken in the war. This had included those women who have supported the freedom fighters with food, shelter, funds; who had nursed the wounded and hid weapons risking their own lives as well as the volunteering of those who had willingly given their sons to war, alongside those who had lost their loved ones and those who survived to tell their stories. Women even tied grenades to their bodies and threw themselves on the road in order to kill as many of the enemies as possible. Many women devoted themselves to taking care of the refugees in the camps during the war.
Only two of the several female freedom fighters received public recognition for their contribution to the battlefield. Taramon Bibi was the first of the only two women who received the Bir Protik award, the fourth highest gallantry award in Bangladesh in 1973 for her role in resisting the Pakistan occupation forces with weapons. She had initially joined the Mymensingh-Tangail camp as a cook and a cleaner. But noticing her resilience, bravery, and strength, Taramon’s godfather motivated her to become a freedom fighter and taught her how to use arms like rifles and the stein gun, and Bibi first got into combat aged 14. “We were fighting to free our country. The last thing on my mind was worrying about my own safety,” remembered Bibi. Taramon and her camp mates sought refuge in bunkers when the enemy changed their tactic and started air-bombing. She narrated that the Pakistan army raided the camp a few times and hurled bombs killing several people. Fortunately, Taramon escaped death and lived to tell the tale. “I fought against Pakistani troops with arms in hand and collected information in disguise. Death and panic couldn’t touch me then and it can’t touch me now,” said Taramon Bibi.
Many women provided assistance at the 480-bed makeshift hospital in the eastern region of Bangladesh known as the ‘Bangladesh Hospital’. Captain Dr. Sitara was the Commanding Officer of the hospital, and the only other woman to receive the Bir Protik award. The injured freedom fighters were treated and cared for in this “hospital”, and it was supported by final year female medical students as well as volunteers from the UK, reportedly. This group of young women dedicated themselves as medical attendants often without pay or recognition.
Despite participation in the various facets of war, the role of women in the collective memory and general narratives of the Liberation War became reduced only to the “victim” role. In the nine months preceding the independence of Bangladesh, estimates range from 200,000-430,000 women of ages 7-75 were systematically raped during the war period. This estimate still remains one of the highest rates of rape per capita during a conflict. “The army tied our hands, burned our faces and bodies with cigarettes. There were thousands of women like me. They gang raped us many times a day. My body was swollen, I could barely move. They still did not leave us alone. They never fed us rice, just gave us dry bread once a day and sometimes a few vegetables. We tried to escape but always failed. When the girls were of little use they killed them,” narrated Aleya Begum who was kidnapped at the age of 13, gang-raped for seven months and rejected by her family after the end of the war. Accounts narrate that many women had to serve a different man or groups of men every night in the Pakistani army camp, and were moved from camp to camp every few weeks. The term ‘comfort woman,’ was coined in these camps. They were often left naked without food or water.
Many tried to commit suicide. “Although thousands of young women were killed, the most attractive among them were captured to become sex slaves in the military cantonments. When the girls tried to hang themselves with their clothing, their garments were taken from them. Then, when they tried to strangle themselves with their long black hair, they were shaved bald. When they became five or six months pregnant, they were released with the taunt: “When my son is born, you must bring him back to me”. Many such infants were strangled at birth,” writes Viggo Olsen & Jeanette W. Lockerbie, authors of “Daktar Diplomat in Bangladesh” (1996).
Historian Christian Gerlach explains that these mass rapes in Bangladesh in 1971 were not based simply on state policy or intent, but were the product of an extremely violent society, including a much longer history of open violence against women in East Bengal with undercurrents from two cultures of contempt and depreciation of women.
As narratives of martyrdom started formulating, the honour of martyrdom almost exclusively rested on the male shaheeds. Although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had intended the term Birongona to signify all women who were involved in the war in any capacity the term soon became a synonym for women who had been subjected to sexual violence. Where the term “Mukti Bahini” (“freedom fighters”) glorifies the role of almost exclusively the male freedom fighters who lost lives during the war, Birongona, became the symbol of raped women who could not be given the same status as martyrs nor be respectably integrated into a largely orthodox Muslim society. The linguistically close-sounding term for a prostitute, ‘barangona’, came to dominate the imagination of a nation still suffering from the collective trauma of war. Women themselves were reluctant to claim this title. The celebration of the “Birangona” title could only be kept alive when the individual experiences of the women were silenced and decimated into a homogenous whole.
Taramon Bibi lamented that neither she nor any of her counterparts had received any kind of monetary benefit from any of the governments till date. The country has given recognition to many freedom fighters and also provided a certain amount of financial assistance to them. She mentioned that they were ignored because they were a woman and people don’t take women freedom fighters seriously. The woman who had risked her life at age 14 now resides with her farmer husband and two children in Kaliakoir, Comilla.
For the Birangonas, the recognition itself came with a darker side. “The actual rape is followed by a “second rape”: the ostracism of the women from those communities and their own families, where they become pariahs,” described sociologist Liz Kelly, Wars Against Women. Not only was the terror of torture and abuse followed by social exclusion from the conservative Muslim society, the social stigma also maintained a culture of silence around the issue of wartime rape, denying women “agency and access to legal justice, social justice, and personal healing.” Attempts were made in the 1990s to address this, but the stigma of women coming forward with details of their wartime rape only worsened — “by that point the main crime had become not the rape itself but the women’s disclosure of it.”