The Liberation War of Bangladesh: Women and the Alternative Narratives of the War

The year 1971 symbolizes an episode of a bloodbath in the history of South Asia. Popularly known as the ‘muktijuddho’, the liberation war of 1971 resulted in the creation of the independent nation of Bangladesh. The history of the liberation war has been extensively documented, and the nation\u27s collective memory is filled with tales of heroism displayed by hundreds of thousands of ‘muktijoddhas’ (freedom fighters). However, such a masculine, selective memorialization of the war escapes women\u27s memories from across communities in Bangladesh, who were significant partakers in the liberation struggle. The lived experiences of the women, who not only suffered the brutalities of the war but were silenced in the years after the nation emerged victorious, remain obscured from the collective memory of the liberation war. Therefore, this research paper aims to revisit the liberation war to comprehend women\u27s experiences of the war and their post-war lives. The paper engages with the idea that nations preserve specific memories of their traumatic past, thereby silencing others. The paper follows an exploratory method, looking into the complexities of the gendered understandings of the collective memory that the nation has upheld, and the systematic silencing of women’s experiences in the post-war decades