journal of south asian development 2013 das 136 8

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DOI: 10.1177/0973174113477014 2013 8: 136JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN DEVELOPMENT

Chaity Das Bangladesh War

Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971Book Reviews: Sarmila Bose. 2011.

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136 Book Reviews

Journal of South Asian Development, 8, 1 (2013): 127138

background of the above discussion, Pahi Saikias work assumes importance towards reinforcing the need for a platform where communities can come together and discuss in an interconnected and wider platform, and is an important contribution to cross-cultural understandings.

Northeast India is today more interconnected in conflict and peace than never before, and this interestingly presents a set of challenges and prospects at the same time. The interconnectedness, the meandering pathways of conflict and peace, the diverse ethnic claims and contestations, all of these require at the same time, a separate understanding of the conflict dynamics, and a concerted, coherent and connected vision of peace for the entire region, which cannot be done in a piece-meal fashion. In order to make the success of counter-insurgency efforts of the government and outcomes of the past few years translate into tangible and sus-tainable peace in the region, the peace efforts and interventions must be informed of the meandering nature of the pathways, and the recognition that these are not essentially straight lines, or be explained in black and white.

The intricacies and contours of peace processes in Northeast India, in order to be successful in the long run, have to be understood in a holistic manner, and taken forward similarly. Pahi Saikias book is part of a process by which we understand the complex history and dynamics of these tribal movements, and she points out future markers of research, as she is aware of the need of a more wider and intensive inter-disciplinary approach towards taking this understanding and dialogue through research forward. There are many ways by which testimonies and stories of peace, violence and resilience is carried across communities, and this book connects understandings of three case studies in more ways than one.

Mirza Zulfiqur RahmanIndian Institute of Technology, Guwahati India

Sarmila Bose. 2011. Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War. Gurgaon: Hachette India. ISBN-10: 0231701640: ISBN-13: 978-0231701648

DOI: 10.1177/0973174113477014

When Sarmila Bose uses the description Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, one expects it would fall into one of the gaps that scholarship on 1971 has left unexplored, except in native accounts. Scholarly and journalistic versions of the war in 1971, such as that of Sisson and Rose and Anthony Mascarenhas, offer a limited account of the build-up, diplomatic manoeuvring and violence and none on the aftermath of the conflict. The author invites the reader to treat her conclu-sions as revelatory for what emerged from her research surprised her. It was General A.A.K. Niazis (the Eastern Commander of the Pakistani forces in 1971) wisdom that has admittedly guided her: Early in the study, after interviewing General Niazi, I mentioned to him that I was trying to write about 1971 without

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Book Reviews 137


emotion. No keep the emotion, he had said, your writing will be the better for it. Over the years I have come round to agreeing with that view (p. 12). Bose, undoubtedly, writes a passionate account. In her hands though, memories become competitive.

When she examines allegations of excesses of Pakistani soldiers, she pits the memories of individual soldiers against their victims. This method lends arbi-trariness to her conclusions. While she cites Anthony Mascarenhas to corroborate her charge of Bengali violence against Biharis, she dismisses other observations on the Army excesses and genocidal action which were part of his famous Sunday Times article, insinuating that most of it was only rumour regurgitated as eye-witness account. The mass killings of Hindu refugees at Chuknagar during 1971 is sought to be dismissed as sheer banditry (p. 123). Obviously then the local Bengali Awami League politician who still seeks official recognition for this mas-sacre of Hindus lacks credibility since his uncle was a well-known Razakar (col-laborator) and had probably led the military to Chuknagar! Her respondents tell her of Bihari military while her sources in the Pakistani army remember nothing of such an incident. The matter rests, it seems, for Bose with a sudden tone of moral righteousness recommends that the army investigate the band of twenty-five, thirty men behind the genocide which brought a nation and its army lasting disgrace. While historians will clearly have issues with her book, my quarrel with it is that while she uses the word memories to set the tone of her research she uses them opportunistically, sometimes as alternative history and sometimes as motivated recall depending on who her subject is. Second, the prominence of oral sources in current research is important for the affective dimension which traditional historiography cannot address. Bose is clearly wanting in such aware-ness and her claim that she sympathises with her victims will surely disturb those acquainted with the discourses of secondary witnessing in the study of violence and war. Her criticism of Jahanara Imams wartime classic Ekattorer Dinguli is a case in point. Her choice of the title Ballad of a Tragic Hero to describe Rumis (Imams son) place in the nationalist imaginary is disingenuous. The argument, stripped to its bare essentials, is that Rumi and his friends should have known more about guerrilla warfare than expose themselves to a crackdown by being careful in choosing their hideouts. Also they had morally erred in killing civilians in their attack on military targets. Boses summing up of the horrible torture of suspects (including Rumi) by the military is revealing: Custodial vio-lence is a curse that is endemic all over South Asia and infected both sides of the conflict in 1971 (p. 143). Imams memoir, to those familiar with Bangladeshi war memoirs, shall appear to be a more significant addition to the archives of womens writing on conflict than Bose gives it credit for.

Her refusal to understand the import of words is carking. In her final chapter, Words and Numbers: Memories and Monstrous Fables she takes exception to the Bangladeshi use of the expression hanadar bahini (occupant forces) for the Pakistani military since in 1971 East Pakistan was a province of Pakistan, a coun-try created in 1947 as a homeland for South Asias Muslims (p. 163). It was


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clearly a search for a language that would express both outrage and terror of those nine months, the horrors of the military crackdown on 25 March and the extent of sexual violence. She then prescribes the word enemy as the one with appropriate connotations. The entire edifice of Boses work rests on her attempt to discredit the official figures of the dead and the raped. Therefore, the search for truth leads her to a foregone conclusion visible from the very beginning of the workthe numbers are exaggerated and most Bangladeshi accounts are monstrous fables. Yet when she says that comparisons with the Holocaust are an obvious attempt to benefit from the association with the horrors of Nazi Germany and an insult to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust (p. 183), her impatience with victims accounts and the desire to exonerate the vanquished men in uniform is evident. This polemical tone corrodes the authors attempt to address the important yet under-researched area of Bengali atrocities on minorities in 1971.

Bose is unable to see beyond numbers and almost characterises memories of the war in Bangladesh as a search for its own six million victims. One wonders what benefit would accrue to the survivors and witnesses from comparisons with the fate of Jews in Hitlers Germany. It is true that there are significant diver-gences between the two, both historical and in the nature of violence and memo-ries of survivors. Also while Auschwitz may be invoked as a parallel in accounts of erudite authors, the common unlettered or semi-literate survivors in their testi-monies access no such metaphor. Indeed if Bose had studied the literature of the Lager for reasons other than the details of the dehumanising torture and the num-bers of the dead she would have appreciated the importance of points of reference, analogies and metaphors from the past in articulating mass suffering imposed by the State upon the stranger in its midst. The horrors of Auschwitz are so much part of our vocabulary denoting experience of the inhuman (Agamben has explored this question eloquently in his Remnants of Auschwitz) that summoning it has become almost inescapable. It is worthwhile to critique the framework of the analogy. However, it is particularly amusing that Bose herself draws in the Holocaust arbitrarily towards the end of the book only to suggest that the real victims of 1971 would feel slighted by the reference.

To conclude, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, remains an exercise in glossy revisionism.

Chaity DasAssistant Professor

Kalindi College, University of DelhiEmail: [email protected]


journal of south asian development 2013 das 136 8

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