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The Birangona
The birangonas, 'war heroines,' are women and girls who survived sexualized violence during the 1971 Liberation War fought by East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) against West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan) after the Pakistani Army sought to brutally suppress the Bengali nationalist movement and impede the democratically-elected Awami League from becoming the dominant voice in East Pakistan's parliament.
An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 women and girls were raped by the Pakistani Army and allied forces within East Pakistan. Although the Bangladeshi government made attempts right after the war to honor these women and prevent their ostracism, decades of military rule led to the suppression of public memory of the crimes committed against them.
In the past several years Bangladeshi society has sought once again to honor the birganona and legally recognize them as "freedom fighters," a status that grants them compensation for their suffering.
Moreover, second and third generation Bangladeshis are showing a renewed interested in the long-suppressed past. The film "Rising Silence" is an example of how they are seeking to understand the trauma associated with the country's independence. The film is directed by Leesa Gazi, a British-Bangladeshi playwright whose father was himself a freedom fighter. She began interviewing birangonas for the film in 2013 and sought, in her words, to "see these women on their own terms, beyond labels and statistics."
Watch the film trailer below and scroll down further for more resources on sexualized violence and genocide in Bangladesh.
Further Resources
Lisa Sharlach
"Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda"
According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of an ethnic, national, or religious group and/or ''deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part'' constitute genocide. Rape certainly may cause serious physical and/or mental injury to the survivor, and also may destroy the morale of her family and ethnic community. However, this Convention does not explicitly state that sexual violence is a crime of genocide. The Convention should be expanded to include mass rape, regardless of whether the victims are raped on the basis of racial/ethnic, national, or religious identity.
Nayanika Mookherjee
"The Birangonas (War Heroines) in Bangladesh:
Generative Resilience of Sexual Violence in Conflict
through Graphic Ethnography"
The use of rape was common during the 1971 war in Bangladesh. Six days after the war ended, the new government publicly declared that any woman raped in the war was a birangona or ‘war heroine’. There exists a public memory of wartime rape through various literary, visual and testimonial forms, ensuring that the raped woman endures as an iconic figure. However, women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence are often explained through the limited lenses of silence, voice, shame, honour, gender, patriarchy, stigma, trauma and ostracisation, which help to create the figure of the horrific raped woman – meaning that birangonas are often assumed to have a horrific life trajectory. This can undermine the very resilience that characterises many of the women who were raped. In contrast, this chapter focuses on generative resilience, as offering a different narrative of sexual violence that emphasises women’s abilities to continue to live with and pass on the experiences of sexual violence in ways that are uniquely relational. It is this contextualised and social ecological understanding of resilience that needs to inform adaptive peacebuilding, in order to foster a nuanced understanding of the effects of rape as a weapon of war.
Kajalie Shehreen Islam
"Breaking Down the Birangona: Examining the (Divided) Media Discourse on the War Heroines of Bangladesh’s Independence Movement"
Rape, commonly used as a weapon of war, was long seen as an inevitable by-product of battle. Recent research finds that war itself is gendered and that the implications and consequences of violence in battle differ for women and men. Against this backdrop, this article explores the issue of wartime rape during Bangladesh’s liberation movement against Pakistan in 1971. It examines the discourse surrounding the women who were raped in wartime and, after independence, awarded the title of “birangona” or “war heroine.” It explores the representation of the birangona in the postwar Bangladeshi media, the media’s role in challenging or reinforcing the discourse, and the implications of these for war heroines who lacked agency.
Nayanika Mookherjee
"The Spectral Wound and New Lines of Flight: A Reply"
The author of the book, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971, replies to responses to her work and offers an analysis of the pitfalls of reframing the birgangonas as "freedom fighters."