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 honour 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 spectacularisation of rape looks like, and the effect it has on producing an understanding of rape, I provide some examples.

In a 2023 stage production of Nilima Ibrahim's Ami Birangona Bolchi 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', or despair, to describe what she witnessed. Indeed, rape, presented as all-encompassing and traumatic, reproduced the spectacularised 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). 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 totalising 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, 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 Bangalis to rise and fight against oppression so that the nation can be birthed. The Birangona does not feature at all. The only feminised 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", one of the songs cajoles before going into the chorus, "Jachhi judhho joy korte", 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 traumatised 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 marginalised 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", or correct history, amid textbook politics and state-sponsored silencing tactics that make Bangladesh's history a site of contestation (Mohaiemen 2020).

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.