In the psyche and schema of the average transnational Bangladeshi, rape is visible and legitimate only when it takes spectacular forms—violent, brutal, deadly. I argue that this is a nationalist rendering of rape that is retained in Bangladesh and its diaspora to maintain the image of the valiant and brave Bangladeshi male freedom fighter who fought Pakistan to liberate his nation, his motherland, and indeed, his mother, cementing the role of men as protectors of women's honor. Meanwhile, it maintains the honor of the Birangona, keeping her sacrifice alive in the memory of Bangladeshis. In doing so, the problem of manush ki bolbe, because what is there to say when one experiences such violent rape, is resolved to produce another: rape is visible only when it mimics the rape of the Birangonas. Structures of feeling make spectacular rape victims/survivors deserving of humanity, although justice is frequently elusive, while the humanity of those whose rape is quiet is thinned, as they remain under the purview of the social norm–enforcing refrain of manush ki bolbe. And in other instances, when rape co-occurs with other forms of violence, rape is erased altogether to surface more palatable, nonsexual forms of violence.

To illustrate what the spectacularization of rape looks like, and the effect it has on producing an understanding of rape, I provide some examples.

Let us first look to Bangladeshi indigenous artist Tufan's 2021 painting that is a representation of a rape victim from his community. In that representation, the woman has a defaced facade, she is made absent-present. The effect of her trauma, that is, the erasure of her face, is present, while her face itself has departed, becoming devoid of affect, perhaps to represent her dissossiated state. Her arm takes the form of the chair on which she is sitting, like furniture, indicating perhaps that her rape is made possible by the objectification of the indigenous female body, after which the body, like an inanimate chair, can be left in the corner of a room, ignored. The image is shared on social media by activists with a quote in which the reader is told that she is foreclosed from a future in which she can live a full life because she was raped (see Figure 5.1). Through such imagery and text, I argue, men are taught that they have the ability to ruin someone's life, a woman's life, by merely raping them. Meanwhile, the representation of a rape victim as completely altered by her rape alerts us to how rape is experienced in the indigenous community, a community that experiences neocolonial violence at the hands of the Bangladesh military on a regular basis. Importantly, it is exactly that reading of rape as a life-altering event that prevents women who experience rape from reporting it and use silence to escape the maiming that Tufan depicts. Indeed, it is not rape itself but how rape victims/survivors are rendered by those who bear witness to their rape and/or their testimony (as victims for life) that shapes their futures.

One of my interlocutors said to me, in that vein, I learned to be okay with the violence I experienced eventually, think of my ex as evil and get over it. What was harder was all the shit that was said about me. My checkered past. My sexual history. I was 22. What sexual history! And everyone participated in it. My friends. My parents' friends—all the aunties. Their friends. It was one big gossip fest. That was the hardest part. Maybe even harder than the abuse.

Similarly, in a 2023 stage production of Nilima Ibrahim's Ami Birangona Bolchi ("This Is Birangona Speaking") by Syed Jamil Ahmed, the relentless hardship and adversity that the Birangonas experienced in 1971 and beyond were enacted on stage. This modern stage production with seven narratives centered the anguish, pain, and importantly, resilience of the Birangonas. However, that resilience was marked by the brutality of their experiences as each of the women articulated the enduring shame that was imposed on them as victims/survivors of wartime rape. An audience member that I spoke with termed the trauma on display as too loud. Another used the word, hahakar, despair, to describe what she witnessed. Indeed, rape, presented as all-encompassing and traumatic, reproduced the spectacularized version of rape that we are already familiar with, a version that is increasingly difficult to consume and triggering for a populace with a range of trauma history. Still, such a representation of rape, I argue, makes rape in interpersonal relationships difficult to spot, muddying the difference between rape and sex. 

In the 2011 film Guerilla, by Nasiruddin Yousuf, we meet Bilqis Banu, who embodies multiple roles of "wife, mother, insurgent, combatant, and ultimately martyr" after her husband disappears when he joins the Liberation War (Chowdhury, 2022, 91). In this rare representation of a female warrior, we find an alternative perspective in which the woman is not reduced to the oppressor's brutality. But that perspective is lost, much like her life, when the threat of rape emerges, to which she responds with murder-suicide. The audience is left with the idea that it is more dignified to take your own life than be raped, for to be sexually violated means to be reduced to the violence endured. Indeed, it is only sexual oppression that has the totalizing power to reduce women to their experience of oppression.

In 2024, a Bangladeshi heavy-metal band, Cryptic Fate, popular among middle-class youth, released an album to pay homage to Bangladesh's Liberation War. The album, titled Noy Mash (Nine Months), a clever play on the nine-month war evocative of a mother that bears a child for nine months, consists of nine songs in which the band travels back in time to inspire Bengalis to rise and fight against oppression so that the nation can be birthed. The Birangona does not feature at all. The only feminized subject is the mother, interchangeable with the motherland, whose freedom is at stake. However, her only acknowledged suffering is in the form of anxiety in waiting for her warrior son to return home. Kedona ma, Don't cry, mother, one of the songs cajoles before going into the chorus, Jachhi judhho joy korte, Going to win the war, perhaps to claim a victory narrative to subvert the ubiquitous victimhood narrative that surrounds Bangladesh's Liberation War.

In the public consciousness, I argue, rape is either made absent by such representations, which makes it appear unimportant and marginal to the grand war narrative, or it turns women into traumatized bodies, mutilated, or dead, to be pitied by others. No one knows that better than a woman who has experienced rape. And that is why women, such as my interlocutors, use silence to protect themselves, as does the state. While women's use of silence can be seen as agentic, the state's cannot. For instance, the military regimes of Zia and Ershad between 1975 and 1990 went silent on the topic of the Birangonas, ostensibly to protect and affirm a masculinist reading of history that focused on the role of male freedom fighters, warriors, many of whom had become members of the Bangladesh Army and/or the government. In doing so, the state sidelined and marginalized both the role that women played during the Liberation War and the effect of that war on women. It is that oppression of silence that would produce the activism of the 1990s while making rape taboo even in discourse about wartime violence, keeping alive a pursuit for shothik itishash, correct history, amid textbook politics and state-sponsored silencing tactics that make Bangladesh's history a site of contestation (Mohaiemen 2020).

Everyone in Bangladesh who was alive in 1971 took part in the Liberation War, either as freedom fighters, as providers of shelter to freedom fighters, as activists, as traitors, or as shubidhabadi, opportunists. During the 1990s—a mere twenty-some years after liberation—and now, fifty or so years after the war—the images of the Liberation War remain real and raw, memorialized and relived every day via state politicians who open their political statements with the acknowledgement of the "sacrifice of our mothers and sisters" and  every year through television programming aimed at keeping war-based masculine nationalist sentiments alive. However, unresolved collective war trauma made potent by military-enforced silence makes the retelling of the Birangona testimonies jarring as narrators infuse the Birangona narratives with their own trauma—how can they not?—becoming a theater of its own, reminiscent of Mookherjee's missive about constructing rape: "What constitutes rape should not be deductively pre-determined" (Mookherjee 2021, 594). Indeed, she is wary that activists attempting to narrate the histories of the Birangonas do so by "exaggerating her trauma" (592). Such forms of spectacularization allow Birangona narratives to be reformulated for co-option and used for other purposes—such as presenting oneself as aligned with the ethos of the Liberation War or, in the current era, strengthening personal ties with the regime of the Awami League, the political party that maintains itself as the pro-Bangladesh entity (while all others are propagated to be aligned with Pakistan), or to achieve other goals, such as justice for war crimes, or legitimize "Bengali suffering" (Chowdhury 2022, 71–72).

Meanwhile, the Birangonas' own emotions are ignored, as they are told that reliving their trauma empowers them, although they themselves feel stripped of agency (Mookherjee 2015b). For example, in the 1990s, a rights-based activist group in Dhaka brought Birangonas together to provide public testimony of their experiences of wartime rape under the guise of meeting the head of state (Mookherjee 2015b). "It was a moment of intense shame (shorom) in front of so many people. I felt the ground under my feet was splitting," Mookherjee quotes a Birangona as saying. Instead of testimony, they used the word jobab, answer, as if one were being interrogated (Mookherjee 2015b, 59), a carceral practice that enters the private space of home as emotional abuse, my interlocutors indicate. As Hesford writes, "Speaking out is not necessarily followed by respect or recognition or agency" (2011, 96). Instead, making wartime rape visible permits the enactment of scripts for how the Birangonas are treated—as victims whose lives are forever foreclosed to any possibility of rehabilitation or restoration.

The Birangona's sentiments reverberated across the village she was from (Mookherjee 2015). The village community did not appreciate the attention it brought to the village as a home to rape survivors. Further, they felt slighted by questions about legitimacy when compensation for the rape of the Birangonas was on the table. Indeed, compensation raises questions about the cost of rape and who is a legitimate rape victim. Further, the vilification of families and husbands who abandoned victims of rape to underscore the enduring plight of Birangonas angered those who had not abandoned their wives and daughters (Mookherjee 2015).

More recently, several Birangonas provided testimony at the 2013 International Crimes Tribunal set up in Bangladesh to try war criminals and collaborators of the Pakistan Army. This time, they had to take a stand in court to provide jobab (answer) to the defense lawyers and accused war criminals as authentic narrators of Bangladesh's history amid what Bina D'Costa terms "erroneous national consciousness" (D'Costa 2018, 160). It is that erroneous consciousness produced by revisionist history that made Birangona testimonies important to those trials, but as we later saw, their testimonies, and indeed, the spectacularization of their rape, was turned on its head.

For example, it was a Birangona's testimony that led to the conviction of war criminal Qader Mollah (D'Costa 2018). However, when his sentence was changed from lifelong imprisonment to capital punishment, ostensibly in response to the Shahbag movement demanding justice for war crimes, understood to mean the highest punishment of the land, the testifying Birangona's credibility came under scrutiny, and her humanity thinned. She was very quickly turned from being the perfect, innocent victim to a naive one; she was presented as a young girl who may not have quite known what was going on because she was only twelve years old at the time. Indeed, the same attributes that were seen as ideal for a victim, the characteristics that allowed the spectacularization of her rape, drawing outrage and, indeed, a conviction, were the same ones that were used to delegitimize her.

Such politics around the Birangona affect the construction of violence, sexual violence in particular, which is coded as legitimate and real when it is spectacular and when the victim is somehow completely without blame. But as we see in the case of the Birangona who testified against Qader Mollah, even that is not always enough. Violence is a tool of state control to be used in the service of the government and/or polity, although they are hardly ever the same. That is why in one instance the rape victim is perfect, and in the next she is not. In one instance, her age makes her the ideal victim, and in the next she is a naive victim. The proverbial throwing of mud, kada chura churi (i.e., slander), about the testifying Birangona after the verdict was overturned serves as a reminder that it is because women's public acknowledgment of sexual violence is met with misogynist, victim blaming public discourse, much of which serves to dehumanize the woman in question (like the Birangona framed as unknowing, unable to speak to her experiences like a full human being), that women frequently decide to remain silent in the face of violence—like some of my interlocutors.

Fifty years or so later, many survivors of wartime rape in Bangladesh remain mostly destitute, illiterate, and socially unaccepted amid symbolic acceptance from the state. Not much has changed since national poet and rights activist Sufia Kamal censured Muslim conservative culture for Bangladeshi society's inability to accept Birangonas back into their own families (Mookherjee 2015b). But it is not just Muslim culture, it is middle-class sensibilities regarding social desirability and respectability that produce manush ki bolbe and, importantly, class position that prevent Birangonas, and other victims/survivors of violence, from being accepted as wives or even sexually agentic beings (Chowdhury 2022; D'Costa 2018).

Indeed, class positionality plays a discursive role in all women's lives. For instance, I found that class protections prevent women from conceptualizing violence in their own lives. For example, one of my interlocutors told me that she thought only poor women got raped, not just during war but in general, ostensibly because the only women she knew who had experienced rape were the Birangonas, until she herself was raped. That presumption about the class positionality of the Birangonas is erroneous, as Bina D'Costa (2018) has shown; women from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds experienced wartime rape as well. The jawans, soldiers, raped poor women, and the army officials raped upper-class women. Indeed, the hierarchy of class was maintained even during wartime rape. Meanwhile, a contentious understanding of rape and sex clouds the perception of who counts as Birangona. Still, middle- and upper-middle-class women are invisible in the national narrative, as they were quickly rehabilitated—either through quick abortions or repatriation to another country where they would remain until the birth of their war babies and beyond (D'Costa 2018). As Elora Chowdhury (2022) has written, Sheikh Mujib, despite bestowing honor on the Birangonas, "declared their progenies tainted, unwanted, bad blood that need to be flushed out to purify the nation" (Chowdhury 2022, 66). Meanwhile, the elite allowed it to happen because middle-class sensibilities cannot withstand the burden of shame and stigma related to any event that can be construed as sexually deviant. To maintain respect and status, one must act according to social norms—or leave the community. And that is why silence is often a location of agency for women, while the state's spectacularization of rape appears to be a silencing strategy.

Spectacularization of rape occurs in a necropolitical landscape, as the film Guerilla suggests. Wartime rape is understood to be so stigmatizing and its effects so dire that Lila Abu-Lughod (2021) asked, like Elora Chowdhury (2022) and Nayanika Mookherjee (2015), during a recent talk, "Is rape worse than death?" The language of sacrifice and honor that is used to describe the contribution of women in Bangladesh's Liberation War suggests that it might be.

Among three of Mookherjee's interlocutors we see various responses to Abu-Lughod's question. One of them prefers that she was raped rather than being widowed. Another likened rape to death, saying they are the same. The third indicated that it would have been better for her to have died. Likewise, Elora Chowdhury (2022), in her analysis of the Liberation War film Guerilla, reminds us that the protagonist commits suicide to evade rape, in line with the notion that "death [is] preferable to rape" (39).

These affective responses align both with how the Birangonas see themselves and how they have been treated. Even among the fortunate ones who were accepted back into their homes, we see a persistence of trauma that plays a distinct role in their everyday lives. Between the multiple interlocutors that Mookherjee refers to, there are signs of poor mental health in terms of posttraumatic stress disorder and anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms such as anemia and ulcer. However, what appears to be most difficult for the Birangonas to deal with is not their own health but how others respond to them—the gossip, the suggestion that they are traitors to have had sexual relations with Pakistan Army personnel. They are called names—beshsha and magi, whores and sluts—by their husbands and neighbors in moments of anger, Mookherjee narrates, reminding me of my interlocutor who said, It is in moments of anger that you will hear what lies in the hearts of people. Like my mother who called me a magi because I had male friends.

Indeed, as I suggested before, what is often worse than the violence is what women have to live with in its aftermath: what people say about them, the shame and stigma, the mental health ramifications, the isolation. My interlocutors' narratives indicate that this is as true for them as it is for the Birangona.

Ultimately, the spectacular, brutal imagery of wartime rape and its consequences, dramatized for both effect and affect by the state and its institutions and artists obscures everyday experiences of sexual violence by making violence legible in public consciousness only in spectacular form. This invisibilization of nonspectacular rape that happens behind closed doors harms victims/survivors who do not speak up, out of fear of being treated like the spectacularized victim of spectacularized rape, or do not recognize their own rape because it does not match their received image of rape as spectacular.

This is an excerpt from "Chapter 5: Birangona–The Blueprint for How Rape Is Viewed" from Intimacies of Violence: Reading Transnational Middle-Class Women in Bangladeshi America (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Nadine Shaanta Murshid is associate professor at the School of Social Work, University at Buffalo, and the author of Intimacies of Violence.