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Written by Priavi Joshi
In 1971, multiple wars broke out in East Pakistan: a civil war between East and West Pakistan, with East Pakistan aiming to create a separate nation-state of Bangladesh, an internal war between the Bengali and Urdu-speaking populations of East Pakistan, and an international war between India and Pakistan. The war ended on 16th December 1971 with the creation of the independent state of Bangladesh. While these wars are well documented in history, one that has gone by relatively undocumented in formal history is the gender war that broke out against the women of East Pakistan (Saikia 3). In less than nine months, 200,000-400,000 women were raped, and tens of thousands were forcibly impregnated (Takai 193). After the war ended, the newly elected government of Bangladesh eulogised the women victims of rape by giving them the title of Birangona, i.e., brave women, and launched a rehabilitation programme for them (Saikia 64). While these are the statistics for one ethno-nationalist war, evidence for similar gendered wars being waged on women’s bodies can be found for almost all of them — what explains the pervasive nature of sexual violence during ethno-nationalist wars?
Through this paper, I aim to analyse the relationship between using motherhood as the dominant image through which women are symbolised in nationalist projects and the violence perpetrated against them during and in the aftermath of ethno-nationalist wars. I argue that the imagined position of women as reproducers of a nation and markers of its cultural boundaries leads to the violation of their bodily autonomy being interpreted as a transgression of the collective’s boundaries and hence, forms an essential motivation behind the wide-scale perpetration of sexual violence during ethno-nationalist wars. I move on to show that in the aftermath of war, the state recasts women into the same positions as mothers to further its nationalist agendas. To do so, it re-narrativises women’s experiences while simultaneously silencing the voices of individual women that pose a challenge to this narrative. This shapes a distinct form of epistemic violence against women in which they are stripped of their agency to share their own experiences. I study this relationship between the position of women in nationalist discourses and the violence against them through the case study of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.