THE COLONEL WHO WOULD NOT REPENT: THE BANGLADESH WAR AND ITS UNQUIET LEGACY
Salil Tripathi
Aleph; 382 pages; Rs 595
The year 1971 and the word "war" have different connotations in India and Bangladesh. On our side of the border, it was the finest moment of Indian defence forces and the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. In Bangladesh, the "war" was one for liberation from Pakistan. In the aftermath of the war, there were no further expansionist expectations from the Indian political leadership, but the Bangladesh leadership that took charge of the nation faced the challenge of making the country be what people dreamt it to be in the course of the liberation movement.
Yet for the major part of four decades plus that Bangladesh has been in existence, it has been, as Salil Tripathi notes, a pale shadow of Pakistan. Clearly, the legacy of the liberation war has not been as exemplary as the Indian national movement's. The manner in which the nascent Indian nation-state shaped its destiny after independence became an inspirational model for countries breaking free from colonial bondage in the 1950s and the 1960s. True that in recent years, Bangladesh made significant economic progress and took remarkable strides in a few areas of human development. Yet most of its social and political problems are rooted in what the author defines as an "unquiet legacy".
Mr Tripathi uses the tools of a desk-bound academic with the ability of a sensitive journalist or ethnographer to ferret out oral histories of representative characters who otherwise find no space within histories of events. Every character that appears at various junctures of the book has her or his unique narrative, but none of them are merely isolated individual characters: their stories mirror experiences of several others who experienced the same historical events. The findings from the field, collated on several trips to Bangladesh over a number of years, get corroborated by numerous sources. Similarly, observations from field studies or trips reflect what other scholars may have argued or theorised, either about Bangladesh or other nations that went through similar sub-processes.
In a book that uses diverse tools, the challenge is often to contextualise and situate the book in a geographical setting and period. Mr Tripathi does this, correctly almost at the outset, in an evocatively titled chapter: "The Land That Wasn't Easy to Carve". Besides having been East Pakistan and India previously, Bangladesh had gone through a much longer historical process in which colonisation interfered with the process of nation-building, just as it did in the entire subcontinent. In the film Komal Gandhar, director Ritwik Ghatak dramatically depicted how artificial lines were arbitrarily drawn to divide Bengal, but Mr Tripathi recollects this sequence at a precise point in his text and points out that neither India nor Pakistan understood Anasuya's anguished scream.
Mr Tripathi describes significant watersheds in Bangladesh's history in considerable detail: the political build-up to the liberation war, the emergence of the Mukti Bahini, and the petty and immature rejection of the adversary by the two women who dominate the nation's political space - Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia. The book also examines the enigmatic personality of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, his rise within the context of Bengali nationalism, his epochal call for mukti or liberation, his inability to govern, his fallibility and his assassination, and analyses regimes that followed the man called Bangabandhu by his supporters.
Mr Tripathi is at his best in the most difficult chapter - titled "The Brave Ones" - depicting the atrocities heaped on women who were systematically raped, tortured and abused during Bangladesh's war of independence. The author demonstrates rare sensitivity to Bengal's cultural heritage; while taking readers on a journey through the hinterland makes a casual mention of Tangail, home to famous saris, and Natore, the town immortalised by Jibanananda Das in his poem Banalata Sen, for many people the symbol of feminine mystique.
It is not easy to meet women and take them back to the times when they were brutally raped by Pakistani soldiers, Razakars, their agents and maybe many others who spotted an occasion to indulge in primordial possession. Besides the professional challenge of securing the trust of these women, it is a huge task to understate their sufferings and not be remotely voyeuristic. Bangladesh is the only country, Mr Tripathi tells his readers, that has given the women who paid the price of the liberation with their bodies an official name: Birangona or "war heroines". Yet he observes with sadness that their stories are unfinished and abandoned, and tales of orphans of the liberation war or infants who were given away in adoption remain unexplored terrain.
More than three decades ago, Mrinal Sen told this reviewer that to comprehend Bengal's travails over the past century it was essential to know about Bengal's partition - both the failed attempt between 1905 and 1911, and the eventual separation in 1947; the famine of 1943, and the political turbulence of the 1960s and the early 1970s, also called the Naxalite movement. It would be useful to add the story of Bangladesh's creation to this list of essentials. Mr Tripathi's book will be a useful primer on this.
The reviewer is author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times (Tranquebar, 2013)
nilanjan.mukhopadhyay@gmail.com
Salil Tripathi
Aleph; 382 pages; Rs 595
The year 1971 and the word "war" have different connotations in India and Bangladesh. On our side of the border, it was the finest moment of Indian defence forces and the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. In Bangladesh, the "war" was one for liberation from Pakistan. In the aftermath of the war, there were no further expansionist expectations from the Indian political leadership, but the Bangladesh leadership that took charge of the nation faced the challenge of making the country be what people dreamt it to be in the course of the liberation movement.
Yet for the major part of four decades plus that Bangladesh has been in existence, it has been, as Salil Tripathi notes, a pale shadow of Pakistan. Clearly, the legacy of the liberation war has not been as exemplary as the Indian national movement's. The manner in which the nascent Indian nation-state shaped its destiny after independence became an inspirational model for countries breaking free from colonial bondage in the 1950s and the 1960s. True that in recent years, Bangladesh made significant economic progress and took remarkable strides in a few areas of human development. Yet most of its social and political problems are rooted in what the author defines as an "unquiet legacy".
Mr Tripathi uses the tools of a desk-bound academic with the ability of a sensitive journalist or ethnographer to ferret out oral histories of representative characters who otherwise find no space within histories of events. Every character that appears at various junctures of the book has her or his unique narrative, but none of them are merely isolated individual characters: their stories mirror experiences of several others who experienced the same historical events. The findings from the field, collated on several trips to Bangladesh over a number of years, get corroborated by numerous sources. Similarly, observations from field studies or trips reflect what other scholars may have argued or theorised, either about Bangladesh or other nations that went through similar sub-processes.
In a book that uses diverse tools, the challenge is often to contextualise and situate the book in a geographical setting and period. Mr Tripathi does this, correctly almost at the outset, in an evocatively titled chapter: "The Land That Wasn't Easy to Carve". Besides having been East Pakistan and India previously, Bangladesh had gone through a much longer historical process in which colonisation interfered with the process of nation-building, just as it did in the entire subcontinent. In the film Komal Gandhar, director Ritwik Ghatak dramatically depicted how artificial lines were arbitrarily drawn to divide Bengal, but Mr Tripathi recollects this sequence at a precise point in his text and points out that neither India nor Pakistan understood Anasuya's anguished scream.
Mr Tripathi describes significant watersheds in Bangladesh's history in considerable detail: the political build-up to the liberation war, the emergence of the Mukti Bahini, and the petty and immature rejection of the adversary by the two women who dominate the nation's political space - Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia. The book also examines the enigmatic personality of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, his rise within the context of Bengali nationalism, his epochal call for mukti or liberation, his inability to govern, his fallibility and his assassination, and analyses regimes that followed the man called Bangabandhu by his supporters.
Mr Tripathi is at his best in the most difficult chapter - titled "The Brave Ones" - depicting the atrocities heaped on women who were systematically raped, tortured and abused during Bangladesh's war of independence. The author demonstrates rare sensitivity to Bengal's cultural heritage; while taking readers on a journey through the hinterland makes a casual mention of Tangail, home to famous saris, and Natore, the town immortalised by Jibanananda Das in his poem Banalata Sen, for many people the symbol of feminine mystique.
It is not easy to meet women and take them back to the times when they were brutally raped by Pakistani soldiers, Razakars, their agents and maybe many others who spotted an occasion to indulge in primordial possession. Besides the professional challenge of securing the trust of these women, it is a huge task to understate their sufferings and not be remotely voyeuristic. Bangladesh is the only country, Mr Tripathi tells his readers, that has given the women who paid the price of the liberation with their bodies an official name: Birangona or "war heroines". Yet he observes with sadness that their stories are unfinished and abandoned, and tales of orphans of the liberation war or infants who were given away in adoption remain unexplored terrain.
More than three decades ago, Mrinal Sen told this reviewer that to comprehend Bengal's travails over the past century it was essential to know about Bengal's partition - both the failed attempt between 1905 and 1911, and the eventual separation in 1947; the famine of 1943, and the political turbulence of the 1960s and the early 1970s, also called the Naxalite movement. It would be useful to add the story of Bangladesh's creation to this list of essentials. Mr Tripathi's book will be a useful primer on this.
The reviewer is author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times (Tranquebar, 2013)
nilanjan.mukhopadhyay@gmail.com