Violated Bodies and Truncated Narratives: Mapping the Changing Contours of Violence and Eco-strategies of Resistance in Contemporary South Asian Women’s Writings from Bangladesh

The article aims to portray the traumas and sufferings of female war survivors in pre and post-1971 Bangladesh in Selina Hossain’s novel Hangor, Nadi, Grenade (1976), translated into English as River of My Blood by Jackie Kabir in 2016. By using the feminist political-ecological perspectives of Wendy Harcourt and Arthuro Escobar (2002), the constructive framework of the article aims to analyze the changing contours of violence in the spheres of the body, home, environment, and social-public arenas in the lives of the female war-survivors, especially the Muktijoddhas living in the fictional places of Haldi, Bangladesh as portrayed in the novel. Considering the postcolonial ecofeminist viewpoints of Shazia Rahman (2019), this article focuses exclusively on how the bodies of female war survivors as sites of violence become sites of resilience in the face of socio-cultural, political, and ecological injustices and resistance in the face of objectification in the name of ethnocultural nationalism through an attachment to the place Bangladesh and its more-than-human-environment. Additionally, the article seeks to demonstrate how bringing private violence into the public discourse through South Asian writings works as an intervention into the dominant narratives of patriarchal nationalism, gender discrimination, and biased social structures that have been materialized through honor killing, rape, murder, and verbal abuse, and provides a tool for depicting the symbolic, cultural, and epistemic violence that affects women in South Asia