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Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 . By Yasmin Saikia . Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press , 2011. xx, 311 pp. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Book Reviews--South Asia
Throughout 1971, the atrocities committed by the Pakistani military forces during the national liberation war of Bangladesh drew widespread international media attention. But after the end of the war, the media's attention turned to other troubled spots and the story of the Bangladesh genocide faded from international public memory.
In the four decades following the birth of Bangladesh, only a few academic publications have looked at the national liberation war. Yasmin Saikia's pioneering research, documenting the experiences of women during the nine-month war, is a bold attempt to recover people's history. Her goal, as she herself explains, is to tell the story of the war as a human event that was marked by a "collective loss of humanity" (p. xi). The focus of her study is gender violence, and she explores its impacts on the victims as well as the perpetrators. She collected oral testimonies of women in Bangladesh and of military personnel in Pakistan.
Undertaking this research, more than a quarter-century after the event, was a daunting task. Though after the war the Bangladesh government claimed that more than 200,000 women had been raped and bestowed on them the title of birangana (war heroine), no effort was made to record and preserve their testimonies because...