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We were part of the team that completed one of the most extensive collections of documents on the History of the war of Independence. The 15 volumes are almost entirely based on official narratives/documents, which are official- governmental and administrative or political. However some volumes are partially based on oral evidence. They relate to genocide and the military war. The last volume is a collection of interviews which were done as many aspects were not known and they were expected to fill the gaps.
The genocide-related documents were partly collected from the Bangla Academy archive on the events of 1971.. These documents were handed over to the History Project in 1980. Although they are not always consistently reliable or thoroughly corroborated, they contain many experiences of suffering and genocide, individual and collective that occurred in 1971.
The other volumes that contain some narrated documents are the 3 on military activities of the war. It's a good indicator that the war itself was not formal and documenting was not done systematically. It also includes narratives by non-officers and civilian freedom fighters ( FFs) Another great source of info are materials that were published in the media and interviews taken by the History project researchers.
It should also be noted that the army office didn't wish to share the information with the History project. This was also the case with several ministries including the Foreign Ministry. Later, the army published several volumes of history and they are available for public consumption. The fate of other official Mujibnagar documents is not known.
It was around the early 80s that I was struck by the absence of women in the history of 1971. They were half of the population but except for the mentions in the genocide and repression volume they were absent from any records. So in many ways, it had become a historical documentation of the men's war. But why were women absent?
It's from this point that I began to question the limitations of our own work, that is formal historiography. A history of a liberation war by all definitions should be inclusive but it wasn't because documents only reflect the formal and the official point of view. It's as if the records of the state making had decided that their role was not significant enough to be recorded. They could only be allowed to be victims in the historical narrative and their experience limited to only 1 volume, symbolically speaking.
As time went on, I realized we historians had excluded not just women but society at large. Officials, politicians and the powerful had found space in history but not ordinary people including women. To an extent, it was an inevitable by- product of mainstream historiography and its limitations generated by its role in providing legitimacy to the ruling class.
Building an inclusive history process never took off because the ruling class didn't need it. If anything they needed was to avoid it.
In 2001, I finished producing a documentary on 1971 as an executive producer of Ekushey TV but the authorities refused to air it. We had focused on ordinary people and also lesser known facts and elements of 1971 and the contents didn't fit the ideas that the TV channel had of 1971.
They had the right to exercise that option but the raw footage was not preserved and all were so damaged by neglect that several hundred hours of primary history source materials were lost forever.
We then decided to do a documentary of our own on Women and 1971. The effort was supported by the Grameen Trust and we felt free as we had no political axe to grind so it was great.
We chose women for the reasons explained above. Our objective was to show society in 1971 and we realized that the best entry point were the narratives of women. Here are some excerpts from the documentary.
ROKEYA BEGUM
Rokeya Begum was expecting a child when the war broke out. Her husband used to bring his fellow freedom fighters home that Rokeya used to feed. This brought the wrath of the Razakars upon Rokeya. Following their threat Rokeya decided to take food to the nearby island where the freedom fighters were camped.
To make sure that she was not being followed by anyone Rokeya used to get out at night and reach the island on a boat steering all by herself. She also used to keep their weapons in the well of her house. Sometimes the FFs spent nights in her house and on those nights Rokeya would stay awake to keep a watch. "People said many things, I am a bad woman, I go out alone at night and chat with the Muktis…But fortunately my husband always stood beside me".
WIDOW'S VILLAGE SHOGAPUR
Shohagpur Kakurkandi is located in Sherpur district. One early morning, on the 10th of Srabon, a company of Pakistan army soldiers swooped down and killed the male in the village. It gained the name, the "widow's village" but while the massacre is mentioned, the tale of survival is less told. These widows worked as labourers in the Nalitabari market and did farm work which they had not done before. They not only buried their husbands and male children but looked after the survivors and made sure none died. They starved themselves but didn't let their children die of hunger. In many ways, this was the most symbolic face of Bangladesh in 1971, suffering but resilient with an overwhelming will to go on living and helping others survive.
And it's on standing in these households that society itself survived in 1971. That's where the root and core of 1971 history lie.