Nayanika Mookherjee

The “Dead and Their Double Duties”: Mourning, Melancholia, and the Martyred Intellectual Memorials in Bangladesh

Memorialization of valor and losses through war memorials unquestioningly presume that material objects stand for and embody memory. In exploring this relationship, this article focuses on the evocation of mourning and melancholia in the annual commemorations at the site of two war memorials dedicated to the Martyred Intellectuals of the Bangladesh War of 1971. Following a discussion of the increased ethnographic reconceptualization of culture in spatialized ways, the article examines the role of the built environment in simulating an emotional experience for its visitors. The article argues that the different evocations of mourning and melancholia at these memorials are a reflection of the middle-class aesthetics and the political trajectory of Bangladesh since the 1971 war and in the present. This highlights the links among memorialization, the current socio-political condition, differing practices and responses of the visitors, and the historicity of the urban spaces in which the memorials are situated.

The Ethics of Apology: A Set of Commentaries

■ On 13 February 2008, the Australian government apologized to the ‘stolen generations’: those children of Aboriginal descent who were removed from their parents (usually their Aboriginal mothers) to be raised in white foster-homes and institutions administered by government and Christian churches — a practice that lasted from before the First World War to the early 1970s. This apology was significant, in the words of Rudd, for the ‘healing’ of the Australian nation. Apologizing for past injustices has become a significant speech act in current times. Why does saying sorry seem to be ubiquitous at the moment? What are the instances of not saying sorry? What are the ethical implications of this era of remembrance and apology? This set of commentaries seeks to explore some of the ethical, philosophical, social and political dimensions of this Age of Apology. The authors discuss whether apology is a responsibility which cannot — and should not — be avoided; the ethical pitfalls of seeking an apology, or not uttering it; the global and local understandings of apology and forgiveness; and the processes of ownership and appropriation in saying sorry.

The absent piece of skin : gendered, racialized and territorial inscriptions of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war.

This paper addresses how the wombs of women and the absent skin on the circumcised penises of men become the predominant sites on which racialized and gendered discourses operating during the Bangladesh War are inscribed. This is explored by examining instances of sexual violence by Pakistani soldiers and their local Bengali collaborators. The prevalence of these discourses in colonial documents about the Bengali Muslims underscores the role of history, the politics of identity and in the process, establishes its link with the rapes of Bangladeshi women and men. Through this, the relationship between sexual violence and historical contexts is highlighted. I locate the accounts of male violations by the West Pakistani army within the historical and colonial discourses relating to the construction of the Bengali Muslim and its intertextual, contemporary citational references in photographs and interviews. I draw on Judith Butlers and Marilyn Stratherns work on gendering and performativity to address the citational role of various practices of discourses of gender and race within colonial documents and its application in a newer context of colonization and sexual violence of women and men during wars. The role of photographs and image-making is intrinsic to these practices. The open semiotic of the photographs allows an exploration of the territorial identities within these images and leads to traces of the silence relating to male violations. Through an examination of the silence surrounding male sexual violence vis-a-vis the emphasis on the rape of women in independent Bangladesh, it is argued that these racialized and gendered discourses are intricately associated to the link between sexuality and the state in relation to masculinity.

Culinary Boundaries and the Making of Place in Bangladesh

Abstract Food constitutes the central trope of place-making of Bangladesh in West Bengal, through various metaphors of excess and lack. South Asian ethnographies on food have focussed primarily on the cosmological and symbolic characteristics of ‘Hindu’ (read South Asian) food, which appear as bounded experiences. Rather than focusing on ‘Hindu’ or ‘South Asian’ food, this article explores the vegetarian/non-vegetarian culinary boundaries and permeations that lie at the interface of Bengali Hindu and Bengali Muslim food practices in two very different social contexts—middle-class and lower middle-class urban Dhaka and the well-off and poor in the village of Enayetpur. Through this analysis, it seeks to show how different nationalities (read here Indian Bengalis and Bangladeshi Bengalis) are connected or estranged by the foods they consume or refuse to consume, and how culinary boundaries and connections constitute political identities between nation-states that become visible through the food practices of the ethnographer (which in turn become markers of political borders, territoriality and place-making). The troping of ‘place’ via food allows the imaginaries and ambivalences of Bangladesh and West Bengal towards each other to be highlighted. We shall see that in this context food actually emerges as a mnemonic, capable of mobilising emotions relating to the ravages of the war of 1971 and the irreconcilable, divided past of the two Bengals.

Aesthetics, politics, conflict:

This special issue brings together an anthropologically moored trans-disciplinary set of perspectives that explore the relation between aesthetics, politics and conflict. In his 2012 Firth lecture, delivered to the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) annual conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Ghassan Hage (2012) emphasized that aesthetics need not just be about literature, art, cinema, theatre, rituals and carnivals. Focusing on aesthetics as form, or form as an aesthetic subject, he argued for aesthetics as the site for the experience of mutuality. In this themed issue, which comprises papers from a session at that same ASA conference, we follow Hage’s recognition of aesthetics as a phenomenological dimension of form and of the social. But rather than just mutuality, through material and immaterial forms we explore the aesthetic dimensions of social and cultural processes linked to situations of politics, conflict and political intervention. As such, collectively the articles in this themed issue mobilize aesthetics as a key domain through which politics, the political and conflict might be better understood. We do not seek to be prescriptive about how aesthetics might be used in the task of engaging politics and conflict. Rather, the mobilization of aesthetics in this themed issue is intended as a creative, experimental contribution to understanding politics and conflict as always something more – that is to say something in excess of – the political, economic or sociological. This is not to imply any false opposition between the political– economic and the aesthetic, nor to suggest that the materiality of the social is somehow anaesthetic. A rich tradition of Marxist literary theory, notably Raymond Williams’s (1977) notion of ‘structures of feeling’, for example, should serve to remind us that

Mobilising Images: Encounters of ‘Forced’ Migrants and the Bangladesh War of 1971

Abstract In trying to outline the relationship between mobilities and cosmopolitanism, the nation state is always posited by scholars against cosmopolitanism. Mobility of images however, instead of denationalising spaces in fact fortifies the stereotypes of different territories. The cosmopolitan outlook that is deemed to be inherent to critical mobilities can identify with these mobile images and ideas precisely because of what is already perceived about a certain country. The article examines how the mobile images of the ‘Help Bangladesh’ poster and the concert in 1971, reinforces a certain representation of East Pakistan/Bangladesh as only poor and starving. It is this fixing of the image of the nation through mobile images which also comes into play when considering the concept of ‘forced’ migration. In trying to unpick and critique the so called the disjunction between the idea of ‘forced’ migration and migration by ‘choice’, in this article I focus on the encounter between middle class refugees, the poor and the raped migrant woman of the Bangladesh war of 1971 and the resulting displacement. The documentary Muktir Gaan (Songs of Freedom 1995) – billed as a documentary and a ‘road movie’ imbued with adventure, eroticism, pain and prospect of freedom – is the lens through which the paper highlights the encounter between different ‘forced’ migrants as a result of war and its resultant implications for a sociology of mobilities. It also allows an examination of the political economy of different ‘forced’ migrants, their classed and gendered locations. By focusing on romanticism linked to the idea of the adventure of war, the paper reveals who can be mobile or not and the conditions under which this mobility is made possible. In the process, the paper questions the potential of a global economy of signs to nurture a transantional civil society and global public.

The raped woman as a horrific sublime and the Bangladesh war of 1971

This article examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics when invoking the imagery of war-time rape. It explores the prevalent way in which the raped woman of the Bangladesh war of 1971 is imagined in contemporary Bangladesh through the circulation of rumours, narratives of encounters and photographs. In 1971, faced with a large number of rape survivors after the war, the Bangladeshi government publicly designated any woman raped in the war a birangona (meaning brave woman/war-heroine). Over the last 40 years in Bangladesh, there has existed a public memory of wartime rape through various literary, visual and testimonial forms. These aesthetic representations of the war-heroine can be understood through Rancière’s politics by other means – of that of the distribution of the sensible – through the horrific sublime figuration of the birangona. As an idea that is not readily apparent, these diverse oral, visceral and visual strategies make the birangona visible and comprehendible as bhoyonkor (horrific). The figuration of the birangona as a horrific sublime also brings to the surface Lyotard’s formulation of the ‘encoding’ – the underlying moral values and judgment – that are implicit in the feelings that enable the readability of the war-heroine. I interrogate these hegemonic affective aesthetics (the way wartime rape is often narrowly described) through a nuanced ethnographic account of the birangona’s life trajectory. This less categorised, non-semiotic figuration of the birangona is the interventionary mode, the politics – in Rancière’s formulation – through which this idea of the horrific sublime can be disrupted.

Mass Rape and the Inscription of Gendered and Racial Domination during the Bangladesh War of 1971

Bangladesh has undergone a double and disrupted postcolonial trajectory. In 1947, Indian independence from British colonial rule resulted in the creation of a new homeland for the Muslims of India by carving out the eastern and northwestern corners of the country as two widely separated territories, known as East and West Pakistan respectively. In the formation of Pakistan, Islam was the sole principle of nationhood unifying these two widely disparate units, separated not only geographically but also by sharp cultural and linguistic differences. Ostensibly they formed a single nation state. But it is important to remember that the Islam of Bengal, bearing the imprint of different historical and social forces, was not the Islam of Pakistan. “Orthodox” Muslims in other parts of South Asia also interpreted the practice of Islam in Bengal as too Bengali, equating it to being Hinduised (Hindus constituted a sizeable minority in East Pakistan). Moreover, real military and administrative power lay in West Pakistan and successive Pakistani regimes, reluctant to rely on religious allegiance alone, embarked on a strategy of forcible cultural assimilation towards the Bengalis of East Pakistan. Soon after Partition in 1947, the Bengali language was targeted to be replaced by Urdu as the only state language so as to purge Bengali culture of its perceived “Hindu” elements.