!spectral Wound Book Forum

Andrew Brandel
Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna
Swayam Bagaria
Johns Hopkins University
Jennifer L. Culbert
Amrita Ibrahim
Georgetown University
Naveeda Khan
Naeem Mohaiemen
Columbia University
Veena Das
With a reply by
Nayanika Mookherjee
Durham University
Book Forum edited by

Andrew Brandel &
Somatosphere Presents Todd Meyers
New York University, Shanghai
A Book Forum on
The Spectral Wound

Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971
by Nayanika Mookherjee
Somatosphere Presents
A Book Forum on
The Spectral Wound:
Sexual Violence, Public Memories,
and the Bangladesh War of 1971
by
Nayanika Mookherjee
Duke University Press
2015, 352 pages
Contributions from:
Andrew Brandel
Swayam Bagaria
Jennifer L. Culbert
Amrita Ibrahim
Naveeda Khan
Johns Hopkins University With a reply by
Nayanika Mookherjee
Naeem Mohaiemen Durham University
Columbia University
Book Forum edited by
Veena Das Andrew Brandel &
Johns Hopkins University Todd Meyers
New York University, Shanghai
Andrew Brandel has organized an extraordinary and diverse set of commentaries

on Nayanika Mookherjees The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the
Bangladesh War of 1971 (Duke University Press, 2015). Each intervention is a path that moves
outward from Mookherjees remarkable study, finding ways through the brambles of
memory and history. We hope you enjoy. T.M.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://somatosphere.net/2017/01/book-forum-nayanika-mookherjee-the-spectral-wound.html

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Contents
Andrew Brandel 3 Introduction: The Violence of Life and Its Images

Swayam Bagaria 7 Interiorities of Memory

Jennifer L. Culbert 15 Communicating Violence: Reviewing The Spectral Wound

Amrita Ibrahim 22 The Performance of Public Secrets in The Spectral Wound

Naveeda Khan 28 On Counting

Naeem Mohaiemen 35 Time of the Writing, the Hour of Reading

Columbia University
Veena Das 40 The Grains of Experience

Nayanika Mookherjee 47 A Reply

Durham University
Somatosphere | Feb 2017 Book Forum: The Spectral Wound by Nayanika Mookherjee

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Introduction
The Violence of Life and Its Images
ANDREW BRANDEL
Visiting Fellow, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna
NAYANIKA MOOKHERJEES The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories,

and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Duke University Press, 2015) is a remarkable
examination of the lives of birangonas, war heroines, East Pakistani women
raped by West Pakistani soldiers and collaborators, razarkars. It is an account,
more precisely, of the myriad ways in which these images, of victim and
perpetrator alike, are invoked and constructed in the wake of the Bangladesh
War of 1971, not least by whose suffering they purport to capture. Mookherjee
dwells attentively on her ethnography in Enayetpur with birangonas and
members of their social milieu, left-liberal activists and with intellectuals,
exploring the dynamic relationship between public memory and public secret,
absence and presence, searching and hiding, often in the guise of combing
over. This language of being combed or scraped over returns again and again in
talk about the experiences of wartime rape, and captures this movement
between covering up and making visible that structures the experiences of the
birangona. Mookherjee describes achriye bar korlo as combing through hair (or
testimonies) to find information, and also combing hair over to hide the face or
a wound on the head, a gesture made famous in a photograph of a birangona
after the war Moyna, one of the women with whom Mookherjee worked, says,
pointing to a dog like the way the dog is scraping the ground, we were also
scraped/combed and brought out (23). In each chapter of the book, we find
these two registers play out in different ways: through state historiography; in
activists languages of appropriation; in village talk and secrecy; in the
patronage networks of local politics; and in the de-masculating speech that
takes hold of the biragonas husbands. Mookherjee locates these scenes then in
the register of visual and textual discourses that traffic in the biragonas images,
from state rehabilitation programs, to the captions of photographs that obscure
the violations of men, to human rights campaigns and finally to the womens
own claims on the category of the birangona.
The Spectral Wound demands not only that we reconsider the categories
through which political action, conventionally conceived, receives these stories,
but also how the anthropologist positions herself within a contested field. As

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Veena Das writes in her foreword, the birangonas words are a gift of knowledge
Mookherjee receives, with its ruptures, starts and fresh openings, by refusing
our desire for criteria (xiv) that would hollow out their experiences of those
whose lives and pain are the subject of so much public and private scrutiny. It
is a form of criticism, in which we abide in the small moments of making of
everyday life, which simultaneously nurture aspirations that perhaps
someone will open herself to ones pain (ibid.). Mookherjee concludes with a
set of reflections on the possibilities for activist responses to sexual violence,
and challenges us to consider whether we might receive those experiences in a
way that does not continue to configure the body of the raped woman as a
wound.
Its achievements are many, and the varied contributions to this forum
are testament to the considerable breadth of its fields of engagement. As
Jennifer Culbert reminds us, to respond to these stories is also to become
entangled in their circulation, a morally fraught involvement that challenges
us to trouble our assumptions about how wounds are borne in the register of
everyday life. The spectral quality of the mark left by the event of violence, the
ghotana, is in its simultaneous iterability and illegibility; when it is touched, it
triggers memories which have seeped into the ordinary world, implicating a
field of relations in often unexpected ways. Thus, Culbert asks, what response
could we give? What would it mean to listen? I often think with my experiences
working with exiled writers, many of whom recurrently came up against the
penetrating desire of others to know their pain, certainly in the guise of the
state, but also in the tacit logic of trauma theory, as expressed by journalists,
activists, publishers, and critics offering listening and telling as therapeutic
routes to overcoming violence, on terms structured nevertheless by the
audience. But if among the writers I have come to know, there were those who
chose to offer resistance by bearing remaining unknown, that possibility exists
for the birangona only in small and mundane gestures through which they
work to re-inhabit the everyday.
In the first of Swayam Bagarias lessons from Mookherjee, he writes that
public memory, especially when constructed in the name of the nation or a
social collective, can become an occasion to impute an interiority and use that
ascription as a justification for political action and reification of internal social
formations. The body of the birangona becomes the site through which such
public memories allow for the articulation of a national story and its originary
violence, but also where the public secret of such violations allows for the
maintenance of the social body in their communities. Such a perspective,
Amrita Ibrahim argues convincingly, allows Mookherjee to open up the local

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dynamics of gender, violence, and sociality through attention to how the

modes of scorn and honor are deployed not as structural existences, but in the
work of inscribing inequality. The interruption of the voices of women, by the
states claims on the truth, or the husbands interjections, but also by the logics
of humanitarian and feminist intervention. They subject the woman, her body
and voice to to scorn and humiliation even as they know what they suffered,
not for having suffered it, but for breaking the fourth wall of that stage on
which the public secret is enacted. The sedimentation of a history of language
into memory then, Bagaria posits, reveals how such markings are not simply
ciphers to a past event now lost to present experience, but rather that event
and its re-telling are one, not merely metaphorically but existentially.
As Naveeda Khan instructively suggests, following Stanley Cavell, the
counting and re-counting that occupies so much of everyday life enact or
refract arithmetically precise relations of addition, separation,
differentiation, and parturition, across regions of life, identities and narratives
for example, in the subordination of the muktijoddhos (freedom fighters) to
the birangonas in the calculation of promised goods, in the signification of the
loss of value, or in misappropriation of reparations that leads to charges of
corruption. Words are made to count and re-count in the greater or lesser
telling of what one knows: in recounting, accounts of stories become the sites
of transactions in knowledge that can both redeem and pierce like a weapon,
bringing to light the skepticism that inheres in ordinary relationships.
In traveling deeply into scenes in which we find people at work making
and re-making life in the context of terrible violence, Mookherjee offers us a
way into thinking more broadly about the life of concepts as they are produced
and transformed, in their movement between the register of the everyday and
their figurations in public media, testimony, and discourse. The space between
these regions of circulation to which we normally ascribe distance, even
separation, might be fruitfully rethought through what Veena Das has called in
her new remarks on the book, experiential concepts. Mookherjees
methodology, and so too her picture of anthropological thought, allows us to
see, as Das writes, how the words of the biragonas reveal the grains of
experiences of violence that are open to different kinds of facts from the
world. If we begin then, as she does, from how concepts are awoken to life in
the ebb and flow of daily existence, with their struggle to find a footing in the
world, the book allows us to attend to the moments in which these efforts bump
up against others, to points at which these forces collide into, support, contest,
subvert, reinforce, or run parallel to each another. This field and its ethical
stakes are manifest through Mookherjees focus on fragments painstakingly

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located within overlapping frameworks of exchange, including between

herself and her interlocutors. (See 17-22)
It requires considerable generosity and patience not only to sift through
such a density of material, but to allow its complexity to come through without
giving in to the desire to disentangle it into settled categories. The slowness of
Mookherjees careful ethnography allows her to see across the horizons in
which the multiple stories of the birangona are told, including those which have
emerged only in the last few years (subsequent to her major fieldwork), as
Naeem Mohaiemen draws out in some detail. It allows these stories to be
situated, as he writes, not only in the proximate history of feminist resistance
(and its own occlusions), but also more recent histories of violence and state
discourse. Moohkerjee has taught me to reconsider how we might approach the
interrelations of different trajectories of force in the construction and
transformation of concepts, immanent to the ways they lived, produced, and
received in small gestures or fleeting encounters, in the hands of intellectuals,
and in the rhetoric of political oratory. But more than that, she has shown us
how we can resist asserting the truth of any side we can attend to their
status each as a constitutive (re)telling without falling into a position of
ethical non-commitment. Such a position is simply not available to us, certainly
not faced with catastrophic and recurrently re-enlivened violence. The ethics
of engagement, however, can be articulated through our nuanc[ing] of all
sides. (266)
Several of the commentaries in this forum were delivered as part of a
roundtable discussion on The Spectral Wound at The Johns Hopkins University in
February of this year. Two more have been added, including a response from
Nayanika Mookherjee herself.
In that spirit, my hope is that introduction, and the whole forum, will be
taken as a spur to further exchanges like Mookherjees book itself, an
invitation to conversation.
Andrew Brandel is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in

Vienna. He is currently completing his first book, City of Letters: Figurations
of the Literary, which examines the how literature transforms everyday life in
Berlin, Germany, and co-authoring, with Clara Han, a monograph on familiar
memory and violence, titled Through the Eyes of the Child.

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Interiorities of Memory
SWAYAM BAGARIA
Ph.D. candidate, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
THE NEWLY FORMED Bangladesh declared all women who were raped during
its 1971 war of independence, birangonas or war heroines. This declaration that
coincided with collective declamations of national independence also
effectively located the birangonas as a specter that could be recalled, reassessed,
and re-covered both in the immediate aftermath of the war and its repeated
invocation at different moments in the subsequent history of the country.
Nayanika Mookherjees book carefully shows how these successive and
overlapping constructs of public memory too easily cross the foyer of
intimacy in the name of intervention, thus binding the figure of the birangona
with the muddled history of national politics as well as enclosing the lives of
the birangonas without a recourse except for the one that is made available to
them in these occasions. Alongside, Mookherjee also gives us her inheritance of
mela itihash, chorom itihash (a lot of history, severe history) of the birangonas
making visible within it pieces of a form of collective memory that tries to the
break the possessive hold of rememorative histories and that though not
readily graspable can nevertheless be sensed in its withholding. Divided as the
book is into two parts, the various artifacts and programs in which the
birangonas are presented and her ethnography in the village of Enayetpur, I
share two lessons, one from each, that I learned from The Spectral Wound.
The following is my first lesson. Public memory, especially when
constructed in the name of the nation or a social collective, can become an
occasion to impute an interiority and use that ascription as a justification for
political action and reification of internal social formations. This becomes
further encoded when the bodies of women who were raped during the war are
not only the sites on which are marked the violence of territorial conflict, but
also are then repossessed or recovered so that it is through their rehabilitation
that the nation projects itself as coming into being from its own miasma of
history. In the Spectral Wound, Mookherjee speaks about two circuits of public
memory within which the birangonas are located as traceable; the testimonials
of the birangonas that is then used by the nation of Bangladesh to possess its
own historical imagination as a state arising as a wound from its former past,
and the performative memory in the milieu of Enayetpur, where Mookherjee

8
conducted her fieldwork, that takes the form of public secrecy and is then used
to maintain the social fetters of the community. I will speak briefly about both.
The independence of Bangladesh was accompanied by the almost
simultaneous national declaration of all raped women as birangonas or war
heroines. This initial pronouncement of an event of gendered violation through
which the violence of rape becomes available only through the vicissitudes of
national retrieval, opens up a wound within which the figure of the birangona
comes to enter and exit but only as a specter. The wound here is not a locus of
injury that is then recalled and repaired, but a festering metaphor that
references the episteme around which all the iconic, literary and visual,
configurations of the birangona are circulated and made knowable.
Subsequently, it is on bodies of these women presented as a spectral wound that
several different Bangladeshs then get sketched out.
This declaration of the war heroines as birangonas was accompanied by
the establishment of several rehabilitation centers by the Bangladeshi state
whose foremost concern was to recover these women from their plight and
allow them reentry into the formal networks of marriage, family, and labor.
Through a public redressal of wartime rape, the nation of Bangladesh sought to
have distinguished itself from its immediate historical occupiers, Pakistan, by
envisioning a different form of Islamic practice in which the status of the raped
woman was not relegated to those of the adulteress in the case of a married
woman and a person having immoral sex in the case of an unmarried woman.
Instead, the raped woman became simultaneously identified with the cruelty of
abuse inflicted by the Pakistani soldiers on the Bangladeshis and also with the
immediate need for reintegration of the raped women themselves into the
Bangladeshi society without this reintegration ever signaling a concurrent
reparation of the national wound. It also enabled the first routes of the newly
instated sovereign state to become manifest through governmental measures
of establishing population control and instituting public health that made the
rehabilitation centers halfway houses into making the birangonas, first purified
of their experience of violation, and then into de-individualized, legible citizens
of the state. The idiom of this recovery centered around the image of
maternity, and the event of rape as an experience of transgressive sexuality.
The rehabilitation aimed first at reigning in the latter so that the aberrant
desire that results from the event of transgressive sexuality, however violent,
can then be channeled into its proper maintenance in the wedlock of marriage,
and second, of construing the figure of the birthing mother as one who only has
her place in conjugality and not outside of it. In the case of the latter, the
rehabilitation programs enlisted abortion and adoption as the incumbent ways

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to discipline the maternal sentiments of the women. Mookherjee clarifies that

the introduction of abortion in early 1970s to deal with concerns of forced
pregnancy was unprecedented, but they were instituted to allay discomfort
around the figure of the raped woman as a sexually transgressive figure rather
than just to ensure the maintenance of reproductive health of the birangonas.
Even though the rehabilitation programs were modernist in intent, their
putative claims to reintegration are mired in a disavowal of the multiple ways
in which the birangonas went on to live their lives. The interiority of the
birangonas are constituted here as errant subjects of sex while also being shorn
of any maternal sentiment; the abjection of their bodies had to be concealed in
stretches of dark bordered white saris until their purging was complete to make
them available anew as a collective that was now molded of any individual
histories of rape. Their renewal also signaling the coming into being of
Bangladesh in its own history. This immediate rehabilitation however still left
the national wound intact, silently suppurating, until it erupts again in 1992
when public testimonies of birangonas appear on national news to counter the
uprising of jujuburi or Islamic fundamentalism and reminding people once
again of its ills by making the birangonas, this time, into testaments of the
potentially horrifying consequences of melding religion with nation.
If national rememoration became an occasion to turn the situation of
war time rape into a political case by transforming their stories into
testimonials, then the course of their remembrance in their own social milieus
aligned with the register of the performative by locking the birangonas and their
families into the social strictures of khota (scorn). Rather than public memory
that makes the birangonas knowable as wounded in national projects, public
secrecy is the idiom in which the lives of birangonas are couched in the village
of Enayetpur. Memory circulates here as public secrecy, a clandestine way of
disavowing the experience of rape while preserving its effects through constant
ways in which the women and their husbands were made to face social
condemnation and extrication. The rhetoric of scorn kept alive the codes of
honor and shame that were then used to mark the birangonas as weak and
powerless, who had not only lost their man ijjot (honor) through rape but also
their shame by choosing to speak about their experiences in a public setting. By
simultaneously speaking about the rape of women from other villages in a
generic tone and refusing to speak about the particular events of rape in their
own village, other villagers enacted a performative complicity by which the
fetters of the social bonds in the village were kept intact and the powers that
were constant. If the representation of the birangonas in the national, literary
and visual archive revealed the violence of figuration, then the circulation of

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gossip and rumor and the prevention of storytelling in the village in the
predominant register of khota or scorn reveals the violence of seclusion or
social death.
In contrast to the interventionist initiatives of the states that they used
as an alibi to co-opt the wartime violence of rape into the makings of its own
history, the attribute of secrecy in the village that ordains that the rightful
action for the birangonas is concealing and being silent about their experience
reveals the workings of a sanctioned violence. The raped woman is only truly a
raped woman if she hides the fact of her being raped and enters the
matrimonial alliance without ever disclosing anything. If the raped woman
speaks about her experience then she is doing it for symbolic capital and
material gains and never could have been authentically raped. The
confidence in ready accessibility of the interiority of birangonas in national
parlance is contrasted here with the enforced withholding of the experience of
rape endorsed by secrecy as the only possible way of adhering to its sanctity.
This enforced un-acknowledgement that borders on a persecutory
forgetfulness, achieved only by either entering or maintaining the conjugality
of marriage, comes to hide not only the political-economic lineaments of the
social anatomy of the village of Enayetpur, but also reveals the inner fractures
and false veneers of violence on which the community of the village continue
to memorialize the events of wartime rape. Public secrecy here being a
euphemism for an ideological concealment or trick through which the
community maintains the false bottoms of its own complicity; a complicity that
is then only manifest in evocations of scorn that assesses the loss of honor of
the birangonas by measuring it against the violation of their bodies.
In between this enforced hush and the formerly elaborated public
divergences, how one can one speak about the possibility of any form of
memory that does not slide so easily into a disavowal in silence, treating the
history of rape as non-existent, or a fetishistic re-staging of war time rape as a
history of the nation that is waiting to be restored? Here I get to my second
lesson.
WHAT THIS LESSON IS I will share towards the end. But for now I want to share
two particular scenes and a third one later.
First, in this scene the author is standing with Kajoli, one of the
birangonas. She writes: One day as I stood by Kajoli, who was shouting across
the field to tell her ten year old son to come home due to an oncoming jhor
(storm), she suddenly said I was also caught in a toofan (cyclone) and apnar
bhai (her husband) wasnt even at home during the event. Toofan (storm) and

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its connotative destruction are much feared in Enayetpur. Here, Kajoli let a
reference to the rape and her husbands absence that day trickle out through a
weather metaphor.
Second, towards the end of the book, Mookherjee is quoting from a song
written by Sufia, and I will quote the last four lines:
Koto kotha amar bokkhe, Koshter kotha shunia jaoga,

Amar Dhare boia, Ujan ganger naiya
(I carry so many thoughts in my heart, Come and listen to

my pain, Flow near me, The boat on the rough river)
I cite these two instances because these are the only two scenes in the book in
which two birangonas (I use the quotation marks here to suspend its general
referentiality in relation to the singular lives of Kajoli and Sufia that mark the
authors) make a direct reference to the incident of rape. Mookherjee then
notes the metaphors of the boat and the shore draw on Sufi and Bengali
literary icons that focus on inner contemplation of pain instead of direct
articulation of it. This alone seems to capture the painful experiences of many
of the war heroines.
Toofan and naiya, storm and boat, Mookherjee notes, are both available
resources of language in the region, one as a metaphor and the second as an
icon. The storm trickles out as a fragment not as a referent to the incident of
rape, but as a passage at the end of which there is no exit, and which allows the
transmission of affect without revealing the secret. The boat, an available icon
that is mimed from the resources of tradition is a place holder to mark the
unavailability of the other on whose support the burden of this pain can be
borne, even partially. For Kajoli, the storm here is not only a mnemonic
reminder but also the contingency that reveals the eventual derailment of the
sequence of any narrative about the incident in the course of any remembrance.
The story here is not told because its telling can only be gleaned from
contingent events of weather that makes it impossible for the arrangement
of all the elements, situations, that are required to make up a story. Not because
the elements are not there, but because the story might not necessarily be
about them. For Sufia, the author of the poem, the boat becomes the affective
object, above any human subject, as the only receiving ear to which her pain
can be enunciated. The story also cannot be told because there is no one to
receive it. Mookherjee writes that the storm is a weather metaphor that has
become sedimented in the regional imagination because of the repetition with

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which the exigencies of weather disrupts the region. The boat is an icon of Sufi
and Bengali literary imagination that dignifies pain as sacrosanct only through
inner contemplation. They are both a result of the cachet of the oral-folkloric,
one acquired through phenomenal deliberation and the other inherited
through poetic canon. But rather than emphasizing their traditional and
customary status as tropes that reemphasizes the depth of language, I want to
suggest here that their inclusion in their contexts also make these readily
available resources of language into concepts, literal concepts that show the
textualization of the bodies of these women as bodies thus making any easy
passing on of the message embedded in these figurations difficult or even
impossible. This is not what can be called the region of language that can be
translatable into any form of publicly recognizable form of memory; rather I
want to think of it as a peculiar variation of lingual memory that implicates the
history of the language, rather than institutions and people, in the
sedimentation of memory. Lingual memory is a concept I borrow from Alton
Becker, who wrote that the most important difficulty that lingual memory tried
to address was the question of realizing what is new in the usage of a word, a
phrase, in general a text, and what is a recycling of its past usages (1995). In
between the shuttling of the two, something like a memory in language
emerges. By the inclusion of the metaphor storm and the icon boat, both Kajoli
and Sufia were not merely recirculating old stock resources of language, but
rather made the language complicit in bearing a part of their memory even and
especially because ultimately there can be no neat or straightforward
communication of it. Hasty designations of these utterances as cultural
knowledge only transforms the ambiguity of their usage into the conventional
meanings that the figures of storm and boat might be associated with. This,
in turn, only gives the semblance of a cultural shared ground on which the
violence of rape can somehow become knowable to the ethnographer or to the
reader of the text. Instead, considering these utterances as lingual memory
emphasizes the unique occurrence of the act of utterance much more than a
return to a presumed common ground that can allow embodied memories to be
transformed into knowledge of the event or the past. Lingual memory allows
cultural transmission embedded in language but prevents cultural skirting. The
tenacity of language not only saves this inscription from becoming pilfered by
making access to it forbidden and anonymous but also never results in the
formation of an archive that can moor this utterance to other utterances and
make it into a discursively knowable statement or event (Foucault 1982).
Lingual memory of the oral-folkloric, thus, allows the marking of the body with
the past in a way in which language here does not write a voice, a narrative, a

13
story, or more generally, an interiority, but rather becomes the site at which
the event of the past and its present restitution seems to have become one
and the same, to the point that no amount of cultural quarrying can make the
separation possible.
Here I want to go to the third scene, which is the story of Bokul about
which Mookherjee writes:
She spoke clearly and articulately. She said she did not know how
she ended up in the mental hospital, though she remembered her
youth in the village and had vague memories of the beginning of the
gondogol. As she said this, her eyes welled with tears, and her hands
gripped my hands as we sat in silence, both of us crying. She gestured
silently with her hand over her body and mouthed that too much
had happened to her.
Bokul never told any story. Mookherjee, reads the blanking out as an
example of a traumatic paradox which is a feature of the violent encounter
itself. The speaking of these words, as it passes through Bokuls forgetfulness,
might be read not as just a character of the encounter but also a deliberate
withholding, a withholding Bokul could only express by simultaneously
remaining silent and saying too much had happened to her. Again this is not
a story that can be passed on. Mela itihash, chorom itihash (a lot of history, severe
history) is shot through with the possibility of not speaking about it. If the
emphasis in lingual memory is always on the act of utterance and not on how
the utterance might immediately behold the bridging of time, these silences
become not an inability to speak, but a refusal to be located within its space of
utterance. The simultaneous withholding and revelation of too much having
happened betrays this blanking out or silence as not a slippage into non-
language because of rhetorical insufficiency, but as a deliberate withholding
that does not signal so much an absence of lingual memory but a refusal of its
occasion. The edges of language is shown to have become frayed to the degree
that even an acknowledgement of a shared life in it is revealed by explicitly
delineating a refusal to allow exchange in it. Too much had happened
indicates the possibility of a transmission in language while simultaneously
conveying the refusal to go down that route.
Bokul refuses to speak, while Kajoli and Sufia speak only through
deliberately encoded references like the storm or boat. Only in the
sedimentations of these words or in the refusal of this deposition can one find
a form of memory that neither abandons itself nor refuses itself to a response
or a reading. What is the distance between Bokuls silence and the magnitude
of the storm for Kajoli or the measure of the boat for Sufia? Listening to mela

14
itihash, chorom itihash somewhere here lies suggestions of my second,

perhaps slightly more significant, lesson. My gratitude to Nayanika Mookherjee
for The Spectral Wound.
Works Cited
Becker, Alton. 1995. Beyond Translation: Essays Towards a Modern Philology,

University of Michigan Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans: A.M. Sheridan

Smith), Vintage.
Swayam Bargaria is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Johns

Hopkins University. He is carrying out his research on figures of
immolated women and their religious afterlives in Jhunjhunu (India)
and the textual traditions of Hinduism.

15
Communicating Violence
Reviewing The Spectral Wound
JENNIFER L. CULBERT
Associate Professor, Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
THE SPECTRAL WOUND is an ethically complex text to which to respond.

Particularly for a left-liberal academic type who is far removed from the events
discussed in the book and the individual women and men described in the text
(an academic type like myself, for instance), it is intellectually and morally
presumptuous to comment on the experience of people who have been sexually
assaulted and profoundly wounded during a devastating war. The difficulty of
responding is compounded by the fact that The Spectral Wound calls attention to
the assumptions that underlie such claims of moral scrupulousness and
challenges them. It does so by reflecting on the myriad ways in which anyone
responding to an event, to another person, or even to a narrative is implicated
in networks of power and liability. As a result, even at this great remove from
the ghotona (event, incident) that prompts The Spectral Wound, the book reminds
us all that we risk not only failing to hear the fragments of experience reported
in the text for reasons of class, race, and geography, but also that we risk
profiting from ineptly and most certainly inaccurately retelling these
fragments for our own purposes, thus repeating and perhaps exacerbating the
wrong done during the Bangladesh War of 1971. At the same time, the book
demands the retelling of these fragments. We must tell these narratives, the
book insists, in order to communicate how people fold the violence of wartime
rape into everyday sociality (260).
Of course, as The Spectral Wound observes, these narratives are already
being told. However, when narratives of sexual violence perpetrated against
women and men during the Bangladesh War of 1971 are relayed, they are often
used to promote grand projects of society and state (260). In The Spectral
Wound, Nayanika Mookherjee calls attention to this appropriation and
describes the process, a process of both remembering and occluding (23) in
terms of the metaphor of combing or combing over. According to Mookherjee,
different parties with different agendas comb the fragments of stories told for
information, raking through them for details, searching for material that may
be used in party propaganda and state projects of constitution and
reconsolidation, in trials as evidence against collaborators and/or political

16
rivals, in popular narratives retold in novels, soap operas, and films to educate
and entertain, in histories collected to confirm the valor and sacrifice of
individual men and women for the cause of liberation, and to reaffirm the
power of men, in particular as that power is exercised over women. Importantly,
Mookherjee notes, combing takes place also in the conversation of
acquaintances and the gossip of neighbors. These familiars scour the fragments
they permit themselves or are allowed to publicly remember so as to dishonor
the birangonas (war heroines) or render suspicious their claims to be entitled
to compensation from the state for their service to the state, thus
undermining in one way or another the economic and/or social standing of
these women and their families in the community.
At the same time, Mookherjee argues, these same parties attempt to
cover and veil knowledge from inspection, combing over rather than through
the fragments. So the story of Shiromoni Bhaskar, a famous artist who comes
out as a birangona in the 1999, and who is, unlike almost all other birangona,
portrayed smiling, testifying at a microphone, and being felicitated as a war
heroine by intellectuals, is retold in celebratory documentaries without details
about her relationship with a Pakistani officer. During the war, she worked in a
factory to support her widowed mother and younger siblings where she was
subjected to repeated sexual violence. A Pakistani officer intervened to stop it
and Shirmoni and the officer fell in love (a love that for Shiromoni was born of
gratefulness, the book is quick to say). After the war, Shiromoni married her
boyfriend who continues to be her husband. During the war her boyfriend
helplessly endured what was happening to Shiromoni in the hands of the
Bengali collaborators and Pakistani army. But because of her relationship to the
Pakistani officer, after the war Shiromoni was accused of being a collaborator
and had to constantly move (229).
The story of Birangona Bokul is similarly combed over when it appears
in a newspaper in 1998. During the war, thirteen-year-old Bokul was captured
by the Pakistani army and subjected to continuous brutal torture (i.e., rape,
the book notes). After the war, she was sent to live in a mental hospital where
she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. In six months she was cured, but she
remained unable to speak of her life in the Pakistani camp. In the 1998 article
about Birangona Bokul the explanation given for her silence is that she
remembers nothing of her life in the camp. However, Mookherjee finds that
Bokuls body clearly communicates with tears, gripping hands, gestures, and
long pauses that Bokul is able to remember the beginning of the chaos. The
journalist simply refused to listen, preferring to satisfy himself with the
account of Bokuls case given by a human rights organization and then to

17
represent Bokuls time in the Pakistani camp with gory description of sexual
violation instead of the more difficult, silent truth (219).
Bringing to light the repressed or combed over details of particular
narratives like these is illustrative of how the stories of the birangonas are
presented in various contexts for various purposes. However, calling attention
to what is left out is not sufficient to the task The Spectral Wound sets for itself,
and for us. Again, that task is to communicate how people fold the violence of
wartime rape into everyday sociality. Hence, The Spectral Wound includes
something like more traditional ethnographies of four birangonas. Significantly,
these studies are presented in bits and pieces, assuming at times disorienting
intimacy and at others familiarity with formal and distant state institutions as
well as local networks of patronage. What emerges from these bits and pieces
is the way in which the ghotona is incorporated into the bodies of these women,
taken in but never fully digested, marking them under the skin, as it were, and
sometimes very literally. One birangona, Rohima, suffers from a severe ulcer and
a shrinking alimentary canal so she can eat only mashed rice and other bland
food. Since the rape, she is acutely anemic due to excessive bleeding from her
menstruation. She also experiences continuous palpitations in her heart and
feels startled all the time (112-3). In the bodies of the birangonas then, the
ghotona is present though not visible, made manifest but not evidently so in
every interaction and relation the women have with their own bodies, their
surroundings, and with others. The spectral character of the wound renders it
simultaneously illegible and unspeakable, and yet iterable, so that it can be
cited by the women as well as the people with whom they have more or less
daily encounters as a justification for pain, scorn, mistreatment, suspicion,
pride, dishonor, poverty, entitlement, and feelings of worthlessness.
Indeed, the most provocative argument made by the book is that the
bodily experiences cited by the birangonas and the people with whom they live
are not the effects of past events but are rather triggers of memory. This
argument suggests that iterations of the wound reveal the meaning of what the
women experience, and that this meaning is not determined by a past event but
rather draws from everyday experiences and from outside of the body (115).
In other words, the violence experienced by the birangonas is immanent in the
places and in the relations in which they live. When this violence is actualized
by an unexpected clap of thunder, the sight of a broken wall, or a particular
sensation on the skin it activates memories of violence experienced in other
contexts. Thus, the violence of the wartime rape is folded into the everyday life
of those who have been touched by it.

18
Trauma studies encourage a working through of an injury that is

repressed and cannot be acknowledged, so that the injury may be mourned and
not fester in melancholia. But the working through described in The Spectral
Wound is not the laying down of a burden, or an expulsion, catharsis, or even a
movement toward resolution or dilution of pain, suffering or shock (108).
Instead, the working through of The Spectal Wound is as a thread in piece of
woven cloth worn every day. Hiding in plain sight in the fabric, this thread is
obvious in the stitches that make up the material but is obscured by being
presented (and used) in such a mundane fashion. Nevertheless, the thread
touches everyone who brushes against the piece in which it is essentially
intertwined, unexpectedly hurting them and disturbing their routines.
In this way, the violence of the ghotona is affectively conveyed in the
narratives we must tell. The intensity of the responses of those who are touched
by the narratives responses of denial, hiding, pity, guilt, (self)-righteousness,
sweeping away, pushing back, exhilaration betray as they relay the violence
the narratives communicate. Yet this violence never gives itself away, for it is
part of the fabric of everyday life and cannot be easily distinguished from the
rest of what makes up normal sociality.
Is there any kind of response that can help create a memory that these
women can localize or hold on to so that what they have endured can be
acknowledged and finally set aside? In other words, why must we tell these
narratives and risk (re)inflicting the violence they communicate? Wouldnt it
be better just to listen, as Mookherjee does when she visits Bokul, gripping the
womans hands as Bokul recalls vague memories of the beginning of gondogol,
both of them crying (218)? Or perhaps it would be better to bear witness, as the
prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, fails to do in 1998 when she meets with the four
birangonas Mookherjee has come to know? By then the women had given up on
receiving any material assistance from the prime minister but they still
wanted to tell her about our sorrows beyond 1971 (101). Would taking their
narratives, as Rohimas husband had hoped the prime minister would do, help?
Mookherjee gives the reader little reason to believe that it would. Unlike
other recent discussions of the injustice of not being heard, Mookherjee does
not seem concerned with the ethics of listening or teaching others to listen
well. Perhaps this is because the wound she describes is not alleviated by
recognition or acknowledgement, careful attention to silences or expressions
of sorrow, claims of responsibility for the past or revisions of the possibilities
of the present for the future. On the contrary, Mookherjees brave insight is
that the fragments she has caught may never be put aside or put to rest. Instead,
they are more likely to continue to appear when they can be most effectively

19
used in the daily lives of the birangonas to further some agenda of their own or
the purposes of some other.
I call this a brave insight because it echoes a familiar (resentful and
flatfooted) critique of the anthropologist (and the reviewer) for making a (good)
living off of the stories of the (poor) lives of (distant, suffering) others. Except,
in this instance, those others exploit themselves. But then, as this is the case,
Mookherjees insight might seem to suggest that anthropologist (and reviewer)
is risking nothing indecent when they tell these narratives. In effect, the
exploitation is mitigated by its ordinariness. However, I think Mookherjee is
making a much more important point than such a petty (and invalid)
conclusion indicates. While the victims of The Spectral Wound are specific
women and men who endure their suffering in particular contexts and under
unique circumstances, Mookherjee shows how the violence they experienced
and continue to experience does not persist in the space of a sequestered,
individual conscious or unconscious mind. Rather it endures in everyday life,
shared and private moments in domestic and public spaces, as well as in nature
and man-made objects. When violence is folded into everyday life sociality, it is
difficult to imagine how anyone can interact with anyone or anything else and
not become implicated in the perpetration of violence. Where the very
atmosphere is imbued with force and an empty field may be sown with triggers
of devastating pain, it is not possible to remain safely above or beyond the
fray.
Attending to how wartime violence is folded in everyday sociality,
Mookherjee does not pretend to a distant point of view or detached
interpretation. Mookherjee listens but she is not a passive bystander. As an
interested party, she does not seize the opportunity to pronounce on the truth
of the claims made by or for the birangonas, however. To do so would be to deny
the character of the reality Mookherjee has come to know. Instead, she shows
the reader of The Spectral Wound how she herself responds to the stories that
touch her and in which she finds herself inevitably entangled. She becomes a
character in the stories of the birangonas. Thus, for example, despite her
protests that she has no power or connections Mookherjee finds herself
carrying letters to NGO heads, intellectuals, and feminists on behalf of the
women and families she meets in the village where most of the birangonas she
knows live. She even confronts an activist the women believe has documented
their stories without their consent. However, after doing so, Mookherjee
herself becomes the subject of a newspaper article written by that activist. The
article not only distorts their conversation but also suggests that Mookherjee
is working with him. Fearing that the article may cause the birangonas to lose

20
their trust in her, Mookherjee writes a rejoinder. Mookherjee then finds that
support for her research and her capacity to remain in Bangladesh is
threatened by male colleagues who had otherwise seemed quite progressive
(256). As a result, Mookherjee withdraws the rejoinder.
Commenting on her experience, Mookherjee observes, The
appropriation process had finally come full circle, with myself as the researcher
also having been appropriated like the women from western Bangladesh (256).
Sharing the story of the birangonas, Mookherjee experiences personally a form
of the violence the stories communicate, the violence of being used to further
the purposes of a state or civil society project. Significantly, Mookherjee notes,
the question of rehabilitation for the birangonas the whole point of my
conversation with the activist remained unanswered (256). With this
remark, Mookherjee reminds the reader that conversation does not necessarily
inform or persuade with facts and reason. Instead, conversation brings people
into confused relations of intention, indifference, chance, and consequence.
Mookherjee may have had a point or a question when she started speaking with
the activist but she could not determine what happened in the exchange.
Despite her education and her contacts and her sophisticated understanding of
the context, the conversation took on a life of its own and the activist skillfully
took advantage. On the other hand, in The Spectral Wound Mookherjee has
appropriated the conversation for her own purposes and the activist now
serves the cause of her book.
Still, I am not sure how profound Mookherjee finds or means this
observation about conversation, telling narratives, and the appropriation of the
women of Western Bangladesh to be. At times, particularly at those moments
when she describes the combing over process in terms of remembering to
forget and when she insists on the extraordinary character of the violence of
wartime rape, there are traces of a more conventional idea of the wounded
psyche and of the familiar assumption that particularly horrific experiences
cannot be processed normally. I find Mookherjee most inspiring when her
observations seem to suggest that such a model of the psyche is too autonomous
and self-contained. The ancient ruined city Freud describes to illustrate the
unconscious need not be understood as an internal space but may actually be
experienced in the bits and pieces of the world in which we live. When we see
how people tremble when the sky darkens, we may acknowledge how people
fold the violence of wartime rape into everyday sociality and understand not
only how people cope with extraordinary violation and terror but also how we
all experience the intensities of everyday life.

21
Jennifer L. Culbert is an Associate Professor in the Department of

Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She teaches courses in
political theory and law. She has interests in a wide range of subjects,
including state violence, jurisprudence, ethics, judgment, aesthetics,
and language. She is the author of Dead Certainty: The Death
Penalty and the Problem of Judgment (Stanford University Press,
2008) and the co-editor, with Austin Sarat, of States of Violence: War,
Capital Punishment, and Letting Die (Cambridge University Press,
2009).

22
The Performance of Public Secrets

in The Spectral Wound
AMRITA IBRAHIM
Adjunct Lecturer, Anthropology, Georgetown University
FOCUSING ON THE FIGURE of the birangona (war heroine) Nayanika

Mookherjees The Spectral Wound explores tensions inherent in national public
efforts to acknowledge widespread sexual assault of Bangladeshi women by
Pakistani soldiers during the war of 1971. The term birangona was bestowed on
women to birth a national discourse that would openly honor, rather than
shamefully hide away, these victims of sexual assault. It was adopted as an
active state policy, supported by international and elite Bangladeshi feminists
and humanitarians who believed that the majority of Bangladeshi society was
too traditional to accept defiled women back into the family/in laws
(kutumb). Presenting the birangona as a potent symbol of national suffering, the
state and civil society made efforts to rehabilitate victims through an appeal to
progressive national sentiment.
One thread of the ethnography traces the bureaucratic and bio-political
mechanisms by which the figure of the birangona is identified from within a
larger population wounded by war, then memorialized through political
discourse and in visual and public culture. Through a series of instruments,
such as identity forms, surveys, rehabilitation schemes, and vocational training
centers, the paternalistic state provides rehabilitation for the victims. This
image of rehabilitation is tied to a very specific subjectivity that has to be
brought into being an honorable/honored woman with marital prospects and
a normal reproductive future. By enacting a relationship of kinship and
paternalism with the birangonas [Sheikh Mujibs two hundred thousand
mothers and sisters (138)], the state is publicly restoring honor and dignity
to independent Bangladesh. Marriages are made possible by the economic and
ritual blessing of the state, but also legitimized through discourses of patriotism:
men who marry birangonas are doing their duty by the nation, aiding the
reabsorption of the raped woman into the social and national fabric,
normalizing the reproduction of the next generation, suturing the wounds
inflicted by (sexual) violence.
At the same time, the language in newspaper and government reports
reveals the banal bureaucratic efforts of identifying, categorizing, and

23
rehabilitating. These reports read like a typology of rape (132-33): detailing the
number of raped, the state of the victims when recovered, victims social and
class characteristics: a data set of raped women. Individual women are
substitutable under the icon birangona: an obfuscation occurs between the
figure that is iconized at the level of the national and the individual experiences
of suffering that are being called upon to perform the national image. In the
1990s, selected birangonas are solicited to tell their stories out of the vast
numbers of wartime rape victims. The icon is memorialized through the
naming and photographing of a few whose stories are publicized, but they do
not stand as authors of their own publicity. They experience a silencing, caught
in the crosshairs of contradictory political efforts to shape the narrative of
independent Bangladesh.
Artists, activists, and writers contribute to this performance of national
honor and dignity restored through visual representations, oral history
projects, and exhibitions. The left-liberal community, as Mookherjee
identifies the progressive strand of Bangladeshi civil society, seeks to iconize
the figure of the birangona to mythic proportions. Mookherjee writes, The left-
liberal community locates the real experience of rape in the construction of a
horrifying account such that the more detailed the accounts, the more true [sic]
is the position of a birangona (65). For Mookherjee, the restitution of the
birangona/Bangladesh and her national honor is hinged on a pathological
public sphere (46), which publicly acknowledges and valorizes the raped
woman as a war heroine but can only do so as a static icon of vulnerability and
suffering.
Feminist scholarship focusing on sexual assault and gender-based
violence has substantially critiqued the patriarchal foundations of the social
contract and the public sphere, raising the question what makes this national
public pathological? Recent ethnographies across cultural contexts that have
explored various and overlapping governmental interventions into sexual
assault have argued how the law encourages the active cultivation of
subjectivities (the rapeable woman; a victim not a survivor (Mulla 2014))
or ventriloquizes consent even where a rape victim is testifying to assault (Baxi
2014). Reading The Spectral Wound alongside these ethnographies, the question
of pathology becomes an important one to problematize, particularly given that
Mookherjee does not explicitly theorize her use of pathology in relation to
publics or publicity. Further, to my reading, at the level of the local, it seems
we are not dealing with a public, so much as the entangled web of sociality that
characterizes everyday life.

24
In this second thread of the ethnography, Mookherjee undertakes a

thoughtful exploration of the terrain of the social ramifications of
testimony (68). She takes us through the intimate proximities that both
allow widespread public knowledge of wartime rape to be absorbed within the
community and also makes birangonas vulnerable to the (often) cruel dynamics
of face-to-face intimacy. It is not that other residents of Enayatpur, where the
birangonas live whose narratives form part 1 of the book, deny, ignore, or bury
the fact of rape. Rather, it is the selective exposure and publicity foisted upon
them by the state, humanitarian agencies, even academics that makes
birangonas and their kin vulnerable to scorn (khota) and humiliation in the ebb
and flow of everyday life. Yoked as it is to the promise (if not the delivery) of
material, economic, and symbolic benefits for selective war heroines, the status
of birangona forces them and their families into treacherous and degrading
social terrain. For their neighbors, the willful exposure of that which should
remain hidden even though it is well known (rape), that too for potential
material gain, likens the act of testimony by birangonas to that of a business
specifically prostitution or selling [ones] skin (76). The very act of exposure
allowing their words and images to be captured through which
birangona/Bangladeshi honor is imagined to be restored, becomes a source of
scorn and humiliation amidst the villagers.
Mookherjee argues that the public secret of rape is used as an
intersubjective social tool in this case reinforcing local hierarchies by
invoking notions of shame and honor through scorn. Whether it is relations
between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, between spouses, in
conversations between men over boundary walls or when negotiating labor
rates, everyday relations and interactions in Enayetpur are shot through with
euphemisms that can turn routine disagreements into abject humiliation for
those at the receiving end. Mookherjee writes, Paradoxically, a community
actively does not know a secret and yet discloses it in order to deface the
secret itself and the people involved, contributing thereby to a pathological
public sphere (69).
Setting aside the pathology of publics for a moment, here Mookherjee
offers us a valuable structural intervention into the local dynamics of gender,
violence, and sociality. She draws attention to differential apparatuses of honor
at the level of the local, through which weakness is constructed and inequality
inscribed rather than being a given structural state of existence (69).
Mookherjees attention to how scorn is wielded shows how we might take
discourses of honor seriously when tracing how gender-based violence
constitutes social relations and public cultures, while not also falling into the

25
trap of cultural relativism. Recent scholarship has critiqued the appellation of

honor to crimes against women, arguing that it privileges the patriarchal
discourse relied upon by perpetrators and ascribes an essentialist cultural
specificity to what are global patterns of domestic and intimate violence
(Winegar 2016, Abu-Lughod 2011, Baxi et al 2006, Welchman and Hossain 2005).
Mookherjees treatment of scorn traces the work that discourses of
honor/shame do in absorbing the aftermath of sexual assault in the particular
context of Bangladesh. Adding to ethnographies of institutions such as court
rooms, police stations, and government offices where the performance of honor
disciplines womens bodies, here she describes a socially mediated apparatus
where honor and shame become the means to absorb the knowledge of wartime
rape into everyday life.
The intersubjective domain of public secrecy based on oral circulation
of rumor and judgment (89) that Mookherjee highlights is one to which the
state, NGOs, feminist activist groups, even scholars, cannot do justice. For
instance, upon first arriving in the village, a volunteer with an oral history
project tells Mookherjee that she would have a lot of trouble getting to the real
truth of the rapes, because the women were all talking nonsense, altu-faltu
(49). Mookherjee finds that people have already determined what stories she
had come to capture in her recording devices being familiar with the states
efforts to gather the truth of rape. She writes that men invited her to their
homes to take their wives testimony, interrupting the womens narratives at
times; at others, expressing dissatisfaction at how the stories have been told.
We see gradually how the status of birangona, with the assurances of a good
life (ashash, 73) made by humanitarians and politicians, violently solicits
testimonies from the very women who it is meant to honor. In this sense,
institutional interventions into sexual assault that are premised on a
patriarchal understanding of it are bound to violate and victimize all over again.
Further, the category birangona alienates the victims from others in the village
who may have suffered similar excesses during the war but are not signaled
out as worthy of state attention and so see the ready performance of birangonas
and their families as a form of prostitution, a sullying of whatever honor
individual and collective might be left. They subject the women to scorn and
humiliation even as they know what they suffered, not for having suffered it,
but for breaking the fourth wall of that stage on which the public secret is
enacted. The ethnographic challenges imposed by this stage and its public
secret are not lost on Mookherjee, whose writing is suffused with the ethical
implications of writing about that which must not be publicized.

26
Ultimately through her tracing of the national public icon of the

birangona and its local life, what Mookherjee draws our attention to are two
diametrically opposed assumptions and logics at work in the idea of publicity
or exposure. In addition to adding to our understanding of the local life of
national narratives, this is a much needed corrective to studies of public culture
that gloss over the relations between the national and local in favor of the local
and the global. Where a national public is drawn into global humanitarian
ideologies of bearing witness to suffering and rights-based discourses of
rehabilitation that require the archiving of birangona experience, local
relationships and sociality hinge on obscuring (combing over is the image
Mookherjee offers) this experience so as to absorb it into daily life in order to
move on. While obscuring does not entirely mean a lack of acknowledgement,
nor does absorption leave us with a picture of rehabilitation that softens the
everyday triggers to an imminent sense of hurt. What Mookherjee shows us at
the level of everyday life is an intimate and continuingly violent account of how
life is lived in the aftermath of mass sexual assault.
As an investigation into the power of the public secret of sexual assault
in South Asia, The Spectral Wound must be read alongside Pratiksha Baxis Public
Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India. Baxi deals with the theme of the public secret
in relation to the law, arguing that public secrecy finds specific revelation in
rape trials in India, which does not bring justice to a rape survivor but addresses
and reinforces deeply entrenched phallocentric notions of justice (2014: xxiv).
Mookherjees investigation shows the public secret is enacted in and through
everyday life. Far from being pathological, intersecting (even if differently
deployed) apparatuses of honor and shame structure national and local
memories and discourses of sexual assault. If ethnography takes the
relationship of violence, the body, and memory as one that is socially and
materially constituted; as one that does not derive from a notion of trauma as
a psychological universal, then we have to also question an understanding of
the public sphere as universal, which is made pathological by particular
manifestations of (gendered or ethnic) violence. The Spectral Wound is a valuable
contribution to recent ethnographies of sexual assault that explore how
processes of identification and investigation into sexual assault, its exposure or
concealment, the combing over or through narratives of sexual assault and
gendered violence exist not as ruptures of, but lie at the very heart of, law and
social contracts.
Amrita Ibrahim is Adjunct Lecturer in Anthropology at Georgetown

University, where she teaches courses on media, visual culture, social

27
justice, and policing. She is working on her first book manuscript which
explores the work of electronic journalism in India through the modality
of surveillance and monitoring, particularly with respect to gender,
sexuality, and the body.
Works Cited
Baxi, Pratiksha. 2014. Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Baxi, Pratiksha, et al. 2006. Legacies of Common Law: Crimes of Honour in

India and Pakistan. Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27 (7): 1239-1253.
Mulla, Sameena. 2014. The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and
Sexual Assault Intervention. New York: NYU Press.
Welchman, Lynn and Sara Hossain (eds.). 2005. Honour: Crimes, Paradigms, and
Violence Against Women. London: Zed Books.
Winegar, Jessica. 2016. Not So Far Away: Why U.S. Domestic Violence is Akin to
Honor Crimes. http://womensenews.org/2016/04/not-so-far-away-
why-u-s-domestic-violence-is-akin-to-honor-crimes/#

28
On Counting
NAVEEDA KHAN
Associate Professor, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
I AM VERY PLEASED to be invited by Andrew Brandel to discuss Professor

Nayanika Mookherjees recently published book The Spectral Wound: Sexual
Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Mookherjees
courageous book tells of the fate of women who were raped during the 9-month
military crackdown by West Pakistan on the then East Pakistan, renamed
Bangladesh after its independence in 1971. When I say that this book tells of the
fate of the women, this is not quite right as it is more about the new states
efforts to rehabilitate the women, which they attempted to accomplish first and
foremost through deeming them as war heroines or birangonas. While
Mookherjee marks the unusualness, even progressive intent of this re-
categorization, she shows how the category takes on a life of its own. Thus the
story is less about the fate of the 200,000+ raped women and more about who
could or could not enter the category/claim the title of birangona; the
gatekeeping by both the countrys intellectuals and political leaders, as by
community members, be it urban middle class or the rural poor; the subtle as
well as violent means by which such gatekeeping expressed itself; the
complications of stepping forward as birangona; the vexed narratives of self-
revelation and finally the problematic aesthetics of the visual representation of
this figure of the war heroine.
Mookherjee achieves much with her book not the least of which is to
show how the story is not as straightforward as feminist scholars have
portrayed it, which is that of women violated, excluded from the social body,
silenced in the aftermath of violence. Rather she shows how the birangona has
been a constant presence within the tumultuous nationalist politics of
Bangladesh since 1971. However, public memory functions here more like a
public secret, something about which everyone knows but no one speaks. There
is something of the quality of disturbing remains and the sacred in the
birangona who is known about but who goes unmentioned. This public secret
exists alongside a reabsorption of many survivors into the social fold. This
reabsorption comes at the expense of the womens individuality, which is what
stepping out of the fold to take on the category of birangona gives women but
with very complicated reactions from all around them. As Veena Das writes in
her forward, the book is fascinating in the details it unravels and also deeply

29
disturbing, since it refuses to yield to our desire for criteria that would help us
to unequivocally determine those who are virtuous and those we might detest.
The form of criticism here is much subtler than a simple search for the good
(xiv).
I am very interested in what Das calls the form of criticism effected by
the book. How do we think of form in relation to criticism, that is, how might
the details in the book give us something like the form or forms of narration
that is criticism, in the sense of scorn or disparagement, as well as criticism, in
the sense of critique or evaluation but which may serve as the wellspring for
newness. How can we conceive of disparagement and critique as possibly
conjoined?
Let me introduce my work quickly to show why this question of forms
of criticism is a very insightful line of inquiry that I get from Mookherjee,
opening up what has been a bit of a Gordian knot at my own field site. I also
work in Bangladesh. However, unlike Mookherjee who is made of sterner stuff
than me, I do not come anywhere close to the issues surrounding 1971 which,
as she states has produced Bangladesh as a martyrological landscape, which I
understand as landscape entirely devoted to memorializing the events leading
to 1971 stopping at 1971 and going no further. The obsession with the events of
1971 has also produced an obsession with what Naeem Mohaimen (in this issue)
has called shothik itihash or the correct version of history with many sectarian
variants. I see Mookherjees book refusing to partake in this national obsession
in the telling and re-telling of the stories of 1971 through her refusal to give a
chronological account of the events surrounding the birangona.
I work on a place not unlike Enayatpur, which is the home to four self-
disclosed birangonas, in Part One of The Spectral Wound. Chauhali, like
Enayatpur, is predominantly rural and by and large poor. Both places are close
to the river and frequently suffer from floods and river erosion. And both places
have suffered in the hands of the Pakistani army, as I have gathered through
the frequent references to scorched fields, roaming bands of military men
kicking them about, women hidden in caves, collaborators still loose among
them, and the young freedom fighters or mukhtijuddhos return from war
changed into something fearsome. Thus like Mookherjee, I get a sense of the
horror of the Pakistani army and its collaborators in my field site. But I have
never heard a reference to birangonas and I have never asked. I do know that
while there is much gender segregation and strict sexual codes, there is also an
entire playing field of exchanged glances, secret romances, even incestuous
relations that are frequently uncovered and as quickly assimilated into the
social fabric. I have never witnessed events of public shaming. However, I know

30
that there is a strong emphasis on normativity in Bangladeshi village life and

have taught drifts of a low intensity, continuous sniping to keep peoples
behavior within the range of the permissible.
What has confounded me in the time that I have been doing fieldwork is
that there is a persistence to the language of counting and re-counting in my
conversations with villagers. When I first got there, the interest was in what
development schemes I had come bearing, how many cows and how much
money I was going to distribute as largesse, whose names I was seeming to list
in my notebooks and whether or not those whose names I wrote down were
poor enough to deserve so much of my attention. Initially I thought this
calculative mode was brought on by the fact that many of the absolute strangers
to this area come through the local NGOs and are frequently in the business of
development. I thought that this (mis)understanding of me as in the business
of development would wane after a while, after all I have been going to this
fieldsite for over 5 years without delivering on any of the promises initially
associated with me. But no! The nature of counting has changed but counting
persists in my conversations with people now wanting to know how much I earn
in takas trying to divide it by months, weeks, days, hours and even minutes as
if to get a sense of how much I earn just by simply breathing. Furthermore, I
notice that this calculative, even economic mode is in almost all conversations,
such as, how much is owed in loans and debts, how much land under water is
worth, how many tins went into the creation of a new building, how many lacs
of takas were lost to erosion when the buildings and trees slipped into the river,
etc. I have long taken note of these narrative forms and wondered how I am to
understand them, as a developmental logic, neo-liberal subjectivity, avarice, or
all of the above?
I was awash in dj vu reading specific parts of Mookherjees The Spectral
Wound that were saturated with the computational. Here are some instances
from the book to give you a sense of what I mean:
(1) Rafique, who is the husband of one of the four self-identified

birangonas in Enayetpur, relates to Mookherjee, After the war,
Bhulen as the Mukhtijuddho commander asked us to give the names
of our wives as affected, violated women, as he said that would get
us money, house, and medical help. Since that time our name has
been on the list (58).
(2) Kajoli, one of Mookherjees interlocutors in Enayetpur, relates: I

remember that it was a day of roja [fasting] when our liberation

31
fighters took us to Dhaka. That is when we were given the name

birangona, and since then we have lost everything (58)
(3) Mookherjee writes in her comments: The discourse of ashash

initiated by the civil society movements continued through the
1990s, and in each instance the women were assured that they would
receive house, land, tin, jobs for children, and Vulnerable Group
Development cards to get wheat and rice if they were photographed
or their narrative of 1971 was recorded. The women believe all these
goods much have been sent to them, but must have been
appropriated by the local liberation fighters (60).
(4) The women would also repeat the names of national and local
actors who had given them false assurances and the goods that had
been appropriated. They strongly believe that money has been made
in their name through the photographs and narratives, asking
questions such as, Are they doing business by using us? Otherwise
what is the use of so many tapes and photographs? They must have
a value. Do they show it national and internationally and get money?
(62)
(5) Korban, Moynas husband, said that while arguing with a neighbor
about the boundaries of their vegetable path, he suggested building
a brick wall. His neighbor retorted sarcastically that since lakhs (one
hundred thousand) of taka (Bangladeshi currency) were coming
from his wifes babsha (business), Korban would have a brick house
soon and live off his wife (71).
(6) And, on the occasion of meeting the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina
who referred as Sheikher beti [daughter of the Sheikh]: She handed
them gifts and gave each of them a check, posed with them for the
photograph, and being hurried by others left, (100) leaving
them disappointed that she did not talk a little while with them to
lighten the load on their hearts.
Mookherjee takes these statements head on. She understands that it is

khota or scorn or disparagement, delivered through economic refractions,
that it is part of a political economy around khota that silences women (69-
70). In other words, she sees such talk of false promises, exaggerated gains and

32
enumeration as the appropriation of voice through the creating of an

impossible situation in which, speaking out can only be understood in the
register of seeking material gain. This is a language game that entangles the
self-proclaimed birangonas, their husbands, their neighbors, their leaders and
ultimately I would argue even those in politics who feel that they must offer
gifts and checks to pose for photographs with the women and those in civil
society who feel that they must continually deflect material claims upon them,
while occasionally trying to set up members of the birangona families with jobs
or health services.
Reading Mookherjee alongside a favorite essay of mine by Stanley Cavell
Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The Winters Tale (1987/2003), I am
reminded that numbers do not only exist intransitively, such that lakhs of taka
do not only stand on their own with no relation or reference to anything outside
itself. The examination of the quotes I have provided above allow us to sketch
out a veritable universe of relations and understandings of them developed
through computation. Let us start with an obvious point. Numbers have
transitive quality in so far as they link to objects and they produce connections
between objects. For instance, in quote (1), the promise of money and other
goods link the birangonas or war heroines to the muktijoddhos or freedom
fighters, making the former dependent on the latter for these promised goods.
This is clearly a relationship of subordination and it confounds the early
nationalist effort to make muktijoddhos and birangonas historically coeval
and equal for the purposes of commemoration and compensation.
Quote (2) says something further about the transitive nature of numbers,
which is that the relations they enact are arithmetically precise, such as those
of addition, separation, differentiation, to which Cavell will add parturition or
giving birth that combines many of the arithmetic relations listed above. In the
quote, we hear Kajoli note that coming forward as a birangona, that is, as an
individual sufferer from let us say a more undifferentiated social fold, did not
mark her as singular but as a zero, a loser of everything. Obviously financial
promises were made but they were never delivered so they were not yet Kajolis
to lose. What then did she lose? What of the child in parturition? How do we
account of this figure alongside the birangona?
The faultfinding as to why the birangonas didn't get what was promised
to them assumes familiar forms of critique within the political economy of
Bangladesh. The women in quote (3) suspect that the freedom fighters have
misappropriated what is their due, charging the men with corruption. In quote
(4) they scale up their criticism to members of civil society (journalists,
investigators, human rights activists, feminists) who seek them out with more

33
promises of goods and services in exchange for their pictures and/or narratives.
The women ask of Mookherjee, how exactly do these people profit from us? This
is both indicative of a suspicion that there is only financial interest involved in
seeking them out and of a curiosity to know how suffering is financially
lucrative.
While I can well imagine the women savaging their local leaders for
corruption, quote (4) still stops me in my tracks because it feels so much like an
echo. I can hear not only the birongonas asking how others are benefiting from
them, but also being asked by other women in whose midst they live how they
themselves are benefiting by proclaiming themselves as birangonas. Given the
high rates of domestic violence and rape within marriages in Bangladesh, it is
almost as if the birongonas are charged with betrayal by other women for
claiming suffering and the imagined profits from it as theirs alone. Could one
say that the birangonas stand to lose their footing in the world of women? What
is the value of this footing? What is the ontological status of this particular
world? Here I draw on Marilyn Stratherns incredibly challenging but
rewarding essay Divided Origins and the Arithmetic of Ownership in which
she considers that men and women may occupy two different worlds.
It is noteworthy that the men charge the husbands of the birangonas
with something quite different all together. They intensify what Cavell has
called the masculine shading of skepticism towards the world, which takes the
form of uncertainty whether ones wife loves one exclusively and whether ones
issues are really of ones loins. To say to Korban, Moynas husband, that he is
positioned to benefit from his wifes business is not to reference her capitalizing
on her suffering but that she has and continues to make herself available to
other men.
The birangonas fight back with words, with the awareness noted by
Cavell, one can always tell more or less than one knows, an awareness that often
accompanies the narratives of Mookherjees interlocutors. She quotes them as
saying triumphantly, I did not get myself captured in front of the camera, or
lamenting I have given my words. Furthermore, words transact, from
suffering loss, to redeeming, to paying back or getting even. And words count
and recount. The desire for a world without counting, would be a world without
promises, gifts, exchanges, extractions, penalties, a skeptical move towards the
world, a desire to be free of language games, to be done with the possibility of
loss and damage. Could one say then that the enumerative logics and the
economic terms that we may mark as elements of developmental logics,
neoliberal subjectivity, avarice, or in Mookherjees words, the pathological

34
public sphere in Bangladesh, are the very aspects of the everyday that needs to
be recounted?
I hope to have provided a small demonstration of how this book, which
talks so perceptively of a national obsession in Bangladesh, is also well attuned
to everyday forms of criticism that includes both scorn and disparagement, and
critique through computation intended to produce interrelating. To end with
two further questions for the author, would she allow this reading of mine or
push back? And if she pushes back, what hopes would she pin on the birangonas
highlighted in her book, with whom she shares a strong bond, to attempt a new
world through their unexpected sense of disappointment expressed in quote (6)
that when Sheikh Hasina finally met them and provided them the much longed
for acknowledgement through remuneration, she did not stop to provide them
succor.
Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins

University. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and
Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke 2012) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Re-
evaluating Pakistan (Routledge 2010).

35
Time of the Writing, the Hour of Reading1

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Ph.D. candidate, Anthropology, Columbia University
NAYANIKA MOOKHERJEE ACKNOWLEDGES that The Spectral Wound has taken a

long time (xxi) to write. She narrates the early morning thought struggle, as
well as the ethical challenges involved in crafting this work. At the time she
started her research, there were no major English language works on the
birangonas, the officially sanctioned term for victims of rape during the
Bangladesh independence war. In the intervening years, several researchers
have begun looking into similar terrain, possibly intellectually and emotionally
inspired by elements Mookherjee also cites in her journey. These elements
include the Ain o Salish Kendra oral history project, the Nilima Ibrahim book and
related works Ami Birangona Bolchi (I am Birangona Speaking), the codification
of the birangona in plays and films (e.g., Leesa Gazi and Komola Collectives
recent work), and the evolution of a visual literacy (we may say skepticism) that
has led anthropologists to go back and look at some of the horror images
produced in the aftermath of the war. This visual anthropology has included
works that problematize the male gaze on the birangona, as in Sayema Khatuns
Muktijuddher HIS-STORY: Ijjat o Lojja (His-Story of Liberation War: Honor and
Shame) in the Public Anthropology series (Rahnuma Ahmed ed.). Ahmed herself
has parsed Naibuddin Ahmeds famous image of a rape victim (Distances, New
Age, March 26, 2008), and that reading can be productively placed alongside
Mookherjees rereading of Naibuddins photographs.
In the last five years, three English language books have appeared that
also touch or focus on the role of women in the 1971 war, including the category
of the birangona. I center these particular works here because they have come
from researchers primarily based in the west, publishing in American and
European presses. This is the same context in which Mookherjees book will
most widely circulate; therefore her audience will read these other works
alongside hers. They may also inadvertently overlook works like that of Khatun,
unless it is translated. Among the English language publications, the most
analogous is Yasmin Saikias Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh (Duke,
1
This essay was originally published in Economic & Political Weekly (February 13,
2016) and is expanded from a public discussion organized by Dina Siddiqi and
Seuty Sabur of BRAC University, Dhaka.

36
2011), which received a very different, noticeably chillier, reception in

Bangladesh. The second book is Bina DCostas Nationbuilding, Gender and War
Crimes in South Asia (Routledge, 2011), which included the Bangladesh war
crimes case within a multi-country study. Finally, there is the notorious
revisionist history of 1971, Dead Reckoning (Hurst, 2011) by Sarmila Bose. In
claiming that the Pakistani army behaved as per the rules of war, Bose
dismisses charges of targeted killings of Hindus, as well as war rapes. Nayanika
Mookherjee was one of the first critical respondents to Boses work, responding
to the essay in Economic & Political Weekly (September 9, 2006; December 15, 2007),
and to the book in The Guardian (June 8, 2011)2. Through these responses, as well
as a series of linked academic essays, Mookherjee has actively engaged with the
ecology of research around war crimes in 1971.
One benefit of the books long gestation is the ability to go back and
revisit her ethnography in Enayetpur, as well as a large visual record
(photography, cinema, publications, and theater). Mookherjee has repeatedly
used the term achrano (combing), gleaned from one of her interviewees, as well
as from a comment of a student at Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh and
David Cohens Combing of History. She has deployed this metaphor of combing
over as something that both reveals and obscures. Her ethnography has also
been enhanced by a combing process, showing us nuances, slights, and hidden
objects that reveal over the long duration. The research obstacles that she
describes frankly were also possible because of the longer engagement with this
project. The book contains ethnography that looks not only at what is spoken,
but the eco-system within which such speech is made possible. She tells us early
on that a researcher warns her she will have to hear altu faltu (nonsense) (49),
but in fact what she finds are talkable ithash (history) (57). She notes astutely
the role of the gatekeepers of the narrative (61) in guiding stories down certain
channels, so much so that Mookherjee stopped asking directed questions about
ghotona (the event) and instead the women found their way through their
stories.
The second layer of ethnography is of the story circulation environment.
One of the books important interventions is a direct cataloguing of the
management of the birangona story, and some of this will be uncomfortable
reading for those who have chosen to be silent about this performative element
for fear of treading on sacred grounds. We read that some of the initial
2
When I wrote my own response to Bose, also in Economic & Political Weekly
(September 3, 2011), I focused on other aspects of the book because the issue of
wartime rape had been comprehensively addressed by Mookherjee.

37
birangonas were given ashah (assurance) (60) by civil society movements about
material gains (e.g., houses, land, jobs) for consenting to be photographed and
having their stories told. Such compensation may have been an ethical
necessity given the time away from livelihood, as well as to offset the social-
economic stigma that could result in villages as a result of going public. Such
stigma included the chain of khota (taunt) (67) that the book documents in the
Bringing out the Snake chapter. We also note the birangonas own discomfort
with the process, as when they refer to being offered murgi pulao (chicken with
flavored, spicy rice) when they would prefer shaak (greens) (61), and the nod to
the instrumentalization of victims in the quotes Are they doing business by
using us? and Our prices have been raised in the market (62). We note the
errors of overreach that occur in the rush to publicize the experience of sexual
violence, as when Moyna is asked to name an accused national war criminal
directly, and unexpectedly blurts out she kida? (who is he) (59).
This uncomfortable grey area is one where a long gestation has assisted
the book. If in the 1990s, at the early stages of the birangona documentation arc,
Mookherjee had published an account of these moments, I suspect a large
portion of the coalition that is broadly referred to in her book as left-liberal,
and elsewhere as shushil shomaj (civil society) or by the increasingly contested
category of secular, many, including myself, would have taken umbrage. But
the experience of various levels of accidental or deliberate instrumentalization
in recent years, as well as critiques of the Bangladeshi NGO-industrial complex
by anthropologists Rahnuma Ahmed, Lamia Karim, Dina Siddiqi, Nazneen Shifa,
and others has meant that the critical parts of the book will also be met with
nods of recognition. Mookherjee writes toward the end of the book about a
moment of disagreement with left-liberal activist networks, and how she
transforms in that moment from amader (our) Nayanika to bhindeshi the
foreign, other Nayanika (257). Other recent researchers have similar, private
stories of the convenient deployment of kache tana (pulling close) to
appropriate, and dure thela (push away) to delegitimize.
The passage of time has added sedimented new meanings to this book,
and that can best be seen in the political context within which public memory
of birangonas operates. Mookherjee has documented some of this shifting
political environment, both in this book, and in two essays: The Dead and their
Double Duties in Space and Culture journal (May 2007) and Denunciatory
Practices and the constitutive role of Collaboration in Traitors: Suspicion,
Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building (University of Pennsylvania, 2009; edited
by Sharika Thiranagama & Tobias Kelly). A reading of this changing
environment can be mapped onto the dates of her initial interest in this topic

38
(1992), the initial period of fieldwork (1997-2001 and later between 2001-2003),
the subsequent journal articles (2006-2013), and the publication of this book
(2015). The terrain of remembrance in Bangladesh has gone through a radical,
transformative, and disruptive change over this timespan. This was clearest in
the aftermath of the 2013 Shahbag movement (demanding death penalties for
accused war criminals), which has placed the former unity of the urban left-
liberal alliance in crisis. In the early 1990s, during the initial phase of this
research, the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda, the demand for restitution of
Japanese comfort women, and the 1995 UN classification of rape as a war crime
had brought the issue of 1971 birangonas to center stage. By the time
Mookherjee began her fieldwork in 1997, Bangladesh had an Awami League
government for the first time since 1975, and we began to see an opening in the
area of birangona testimony, with support of civil society NGOs. By the time she
was, I presume, writing up her dissertation, Bangladesh was again under a
Bangladesh Nationalist Party government, and the opening for 1971 narratives
began to be stifled again. In the period when her journal articles started being
published, the country transitioned from a Caretaker (military) government to
the third Awami League government and the beginning of the long-awaited war
crimes trials. However, by the time of the books final publication, the countrys
progressive forces were unexpectedly and sharply divided, struggling to make
sense of the implosion of liberal politics in the aftermath of Shahbag.
I want to suggest that when Mookherjee began her research, the project
of birangona testimonies, indeed the entire initiative of oral history of 1971, was
a site of feminist resistance to a hostile state, to the rise of fatwas, and to
forms of imposed piety. However, by the time we reach 2015, a transformed
situation suggests that not always is the remembrance of the war automatically
tied to a progressive project. Progressive and feminist projects can also have
their own forms of silencing, and we see this in the reception of Yasmin Saikias
book, especially in the palpable discomfort over a survivors testimony that also
indicts sexual violence in Bangladeshi society before and after 1971. Even more
disturbing than these quiet blind spots are the way feminist struggles can also
be appropriated by the war on terror project. In the 1990s it may have been
logical, and tactically effective, to link 1971 rape crimes with the 1990s spate of
anti-women fatwas in villages. Today, conflating forms of piety, as well as
Islamism (what Mookherjee calls jujuburi (ghost) of Islamic Fundamentalism
(254)), with 1971 narratives, can actually be counterproductive. The risk of
appropriation of feminist concerns by a global project of perpetual war on
terror have been signposted by, among others, Rahnuma Ahmed in New Age,
Seuty Sabur in Alal o Dulal, Nasrin Siraj Annie, and Saydia Gulrukh in Thotkata.

39
Meanwhile, opposition to the war memory project comes from two

different sources the first is internal to Bangladeshs polarized political
landscape which prevents political parties from finding common cause even
over foundational narratives; the second is external and specific to the project
of revisionism inside Pakistan which also seeks to suppress left-liberal forces
inside that country. Academic audiences can read Mookherjees analysis of
some of the problems in the war photographs of Kishore Parekh (recaptioning
(163)), Naibuddin Ahmed (rumors of staging (193)), and Rashid Talukdar (the
politics of pose (205), after Allen Feldman), and parse these as examples of
open semiotics (173) and an alternative to Benjamins fear of the deadening
effect of mechanical reproduction (188). However, similar examples of
misrecognition or recaptioning have been deployed by authors such as Sarmila
Bose to argue that the problems in these artifacts are evidence that the entire
project of public memory around 1971 is a hallucination or subterfuge. I would
argue that these faulty public memory objects could be productively reread
within the flexible discursive space created by a brutal war and its uncertain,
contested aftermath. But that argument requires patient readers who are
willing to let go of absolutes, and in the present moment binaries of true/false
have more adherents within discursive contexts in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
This is the volatile and contested terrain into which this book and its arguments
now enters.
Mookherjee began her project at a time when political and social forces
in Bangladesh were arranged around fewer, clearer polarities of power and
memory. The 1971 memory project was, at that time, in oppositional and
resistant mode. Today, it sometimes can have unusual and unexpected alliances
with forms of local and global power. Similarly, the revisionist account that
wishes to deny the existence of genocide also has new transnational alliances,
and sophisticated forms of discursive power. Mookherjees extensive
ethnography on public memory and secrets needs to be reread within that
changed environment, where forms of uncertainty may be the only things we
are certain about anymore.
Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology

at Columbia University. His essays include Dead Reckoning: Waiting
for a Real Reckoning on 1971 (Economic & Political Weekly) and his
most recent film is Last Man in Dhaka Central.

40
The Grains of Experience

VEENA DAS
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Humanities, Johns Hopkins University
THE SPECTRAL WOUND IS ONE of the most sensitive, subtle, and thought-
provoking anthropological texts on sexual violence in the context of war
(Mookherjee 2015). I have already expressed my admiration in the foreword to
the book for its nuanced rendering of the interplay between the national
imperative to memorialize, the desire for justice on the part of human rights
advocacy or left liberal organizations; the unfolding feminist politics around
issues of sexual violence; and, the way experience is rendered and traded in the
local context. In this brief comment, I want to take up an issue that Nayanika
Mookherjee opens up with her finely drawn descriptions of the way recounting
of war rape would swell up in everyday interactions and the distance between
these experiences and the figure of the birangona (heroic woman) to designate
such women, she tracks in the images, testimonies, and other forms of public
media. What does this distance tell us about the nature of experiential concepts?
In debates on testimony and trauma the discussion veers around the polemics
of speech and silence but how about the specificity of the grains of experience?
In his highly influential work on concepts, Gareth Evans (1982) proposed
that the content of experience is non-conceptual only when one has shifted
from experience to judgment based on that experience has one moved from the
non-conceptual to the conceptual content of experience. Taking his example
from colors, (to stand in for other kinds of perceptual experience) Evans argued
that the conceptual ability to recognize colors as when we know what is red,
green, or burnt sienna, is not enough as this naming and the capacity it
represents is coarser in grain than the finer shades and details of our color
experience. Thus, for Evans, there is something in experience that evades
description in terms of conceptual content. This notion of the non-conceptual
content of experience is tied to two different thoughts that could be
interrogated further. The first is that concepts are by definition abstract
entities rather than concrete or empirical ones; and, second, that a concept is
embodied in a word, rather than in everything that goes on in the world with
that word (Benoist 2010). As McDowell (1996: 56) puts it, But why should we
accept that a persons ability to embrace colour within her conceptual thinking
is restricted to concepts expressible by words like red or green and phrases
like burnt sienna? The conceptual capacity might then be thought of not only

41
as the ability to name (to perform a kind of baptism Wittgenstein would say)
but to grasp that an experience, even though singular, can be recognized in its
recurrence (and not necessarily in abstraction from the concrete to the general)
hence our conceptual ability consists in being able to move or project the
experience to other domains. For instance, when I master the notion of what is
color, I can say not only that this sari is red but also render my anger in terms
of color I saw red. On feeling sad I might say I am feeling blue. 3 The
conceptual capacity with regard to color is demonstrated here not because I can
decompose my experience of being angry into many components, one of which
is that of color, but because color finds a footing in the world (as do notions of
lightness and heaviness in the context of moods) whereas moods are not
habitually described in terms of, say, geometrical figures (e.g. I am feeling
hexagon). I am interested in this set of issues because I think an important
question hovers in the scenes of violation described by Mookherjee viz., if
the figure of the birangona evacuated the actual experience of the violation felt
by the women, then must we conclude that the women were silenced, co-opted
in this nationalist project of naming and honoring them in language that was
strange to them? Or could we identify other ways in which ordinary language
was able to give expression to the fine grains of experience that languages
honed in public media or from literary history could not address? Is it
important to think that moments of judgment did not rise in the movement
from the non-conceptual to the conceptual, but in the way the social world
came to be apprehended in the thick of relational experience itself?
An early introduction to the concept of birangona in The Spectral Wound,
says the following. The frequency with which the birangona is evoked, brought
into existence so that she can be effaced and exited, inscribes her with the logic
of a specter (p.25). After a careful demonstration of this claim over several
chapters, Mookherjee concludes that, An affective imaginary of the birangona
emerged through the circulation of various visual and literary representations
of the history of rape after the war and their recirculation after the 1990s. While
3
I am not proclaiming anything universal about the specific use of color
categories for I am well aware that the feelings around blue might be different
in other languages or cultures. I am making the point that the conceptual ability
around color consists of learning how it might be applied to what McDowell
calls both outer experience and inner experience in a specific world. It is
also important to underscore that I do not think of statements such as I saw
red as metaphorical statements on the logic of representation since red is not
functioning here as a sign of anger but is the anger itself.

42
the imageries of innocent birangonas fulfill these womens role of victimhood

for the nation, the authenticity of an acceptably traumatic and truly raped
woman and her self-representation is guided by differential values of
personhood, embedded in gendered narratives, of middle-class sensibilities
The experiences of 1971 come to be poisonous, a burden of distrust that the
women always carry (p. 246-47).
Let me start by recounting Mookherjees acute observation that within
a logic of representation the imagery of the birangona at the national level
manages to remember the war heroine on condition that she can be
disappeared through death, suicide, insanity, or departure for India in the case
of Hindu women. In her words, The real person of the birangona thus having
exited, the account brings back her haunted specter to feed the national
imaginary. (p.182) Thus, the variations in the life trajectories of the individual
women have to be tamed so that a common national narrative can emerge in
which, as she says, a sameness can be extracted. Now it is not as if a
representation can coincide with what is represented so Mookherjees
critique seems to be more with a typification of experience that the
representations strive to make available for national and international
audiences because in the process of this typification, a normativity is introduced
by which the birnagona must be depicted as abject and frozen in the moment
of her violation.
It is here that one must caution against the idea that the four women in
the village whose life in the everyday is captured through stunning
ethnography in this book are the real birangonas for surely there is no
common essence of their experience that one can simply extract. It would also
be problematic to render the distinction between the public figure of the
birangona and the recounting of the event in the fragments that emerge in the
village as corresponding to a distinction between public memorialization and
private expression that cannot be captured in concepts. Instead, I suggest that
each fragment of experience recounted takes life from the genres within which
it is framed. The genres that appear in the womens recounting are very
different from the ones that frame the figure of the birangona at the national
level but they show how even the singularity of the experience of rape depends
on some kind of shared genres to find expression.
For the sake of brevity let me take a few examples. One example is from
Kajoli who was shouting across the field one day to tell her ten year old son to
come home because of a brewing storm. As Mookherjee describes it, she
suddenly said, I was caught in a toofan (cyclone) and apnar bhai (referring to
her husband) wasnt even at home during the event (p. 110). Mookherjee

43
glosses this reference to the storm as a weather metaphor (Kajoli let a

reference to the rape and her husbands absence that day trickle out through a
weather metaphor (p. 110).) But what seems to me to be significant here is the
long aesthetic tradition in Sanskrit and Bangla of rendering sensory experience
of dread, foreboding, fear, as openness to impressions from the world in the
form of the sounds of thunder, lightening, and rumbling of clouds4. It seems
possible, at least for one to think that what Kajoli is telling is not simply a lived
experience (though it is that too) but an experience which contains a
conceptual content that is concrete, empirical and yet belongs as much to
thought as to what the body has come to forcefully know. I am not suggesting
that the use of the weather imagery makes Kajoli consciously put her
experience in terms of the aesthetics through which the scene of abduction was
rendered in poetry in Sanskrit or Bangla but that what she does with this
experience finds a footing in the world through an imagery that she can evoke.
At another time Kajoli recalled how even as she was being raped by the
military, she was thinking if she would lose her entitlements to rice and clothes
in her conjugal home a theme repeated in a number of other accounts in
which unbidden thoughts about future losses come looming even as a woman
is being violated and perhaps even facing death. Rashida recounted that When
I was being raped I thought my life was over I thought that I had been married
for just a year, so my husband may not keep me at home, may not give me rice
and clothes (p. 111). In these statements we find years of experiences of
women, the rendering of the precariousness of a womans life in her natal and
conjugal home due to fights between co-wives, the hostility of in-laws, stories
of abandonment and the importance of sexual chastity become distilled in that
episode of the specific violation. Mookherjee displays the power of
ethnography in being able to catch the smallest details and the subtle shifts of
voice. In my own work, I have talked of such stories as acquiring a footing in
the real through being embedded within a field of force made up with swirling
words, other stories, gestures and much else (Das 2007). In Wittgensteins
compelling comment on how we come to know the physiognomy of a word we
encounter the same idea of a field of force. How do I find the right word? ... It
is possible to say a great deal about a fine aesthetic difference. The first
thing you may say, of course, be just: This word fits, that doesnt or
something of the kind. But then you can discuss all the extensive ramifications
of the tie-up effected by each of the words. That first judgment is not the end of
4
I am bracketing for now a discussion of how aesthetic genres moved between
Sanskrit , Persian and the vernacular languages in the early modern period.

44
the matter, for it is the field of force of a word that is decisive. (Wittgenstein
1968: 219e).
One way to render the difference between the experiences that come
up in the accounts of the women and the coining of the word birangona in the
public media lies in the fine grains of the first and the coarseness of the second.
Yet it might have been interesting to ask what genealogical connections does
the term birangona have with earlier literary tropes. This might have taken the
notion of trace in a slightly different direction than that of the ghostly. Very
briefly, the term in Hindi (virangana) arises within the vernacular kavya
(aesthetics) in 1862 and is primarily connected in the celebration of the heroism
of Rajput women. Brijlal Shastri contributes to this genre in a play written in
1924 in which the heroic deeds of twelve Rajput women are celebrated during
the first war of independence (or mutiny) of 1857. Mookherjee makes a
reference to Michael Madhusudan Dutts book Virangana Kavya or Birangona
Kabb in Bangla) written in 1869 but does not comment on the imaginary epistles
written by the wives of great heroes or on the subsequent book by Ramkumar
Nandi (1873) imagined as a sequel to Dutts book and containing replies by the
heroes to their wives5. In North India at least, there were popular vernacular
tracts not only on Rani Jhansi and Begum Hazrat Mahal as viranganas but also
on courtesans and women of lower castes (now claimed as dalit viranganas)
who contributed to the war against the colonial rule. (Bhatia 2010) Clearly there
is a paradox that the heroic figure gets transformed into a figure of abjection
and pity in the context of the Bangladesh war but it is not as if the figure is
conjured out of nothing6. It might perhaps be interesting to see its double edged
character it claims a footing into the aesthetic tradition in Bengal even as it
evacuates the particularity of the experiences of women who end up bearing
the burdens of having been muscled into becoming its referents.
The women in Enayetpur had to bear the weight of having been located
and put on the national stage as birangonas. It is not that their status as marked
by the event of rape was a secret in Enayetpur the stigma and the social
humiliation they had to bear in the village in the gestures and implied words
indicating khota (scorn) are evidence of the burdens they had to bear. However,
going on the national stage to give testimony as birangonas when they felt that
5
These texts are briefly described in Lal (1992) and though I have read Dutts
various books I have not been able to find a copy of Shastris play.
6
As an aside I note that in Uttar Pradesh one can find schools and clinics named
after famous women with the prefix Virangana such as Virangana Laxmibai
High School.

45
their experience had been wrested away from them in projects that they did
not comprehend the Sheiks daughter did not even have time to listen to them
and cry with them as one of them said in sorrow made them infuse the
national project with a different affect than that of the human rights workers.
It is important, though, to underscore that this does not mean that they gave
up any claims of owning that history. As they explained to Mookherjee it is
their words (kotha), extreme history (charam itihas) lot of history (mela itihas)
that they are giving her. The fine grains of experience in the social world are
not simply enactments of social scripts that typification of experience often
implies even among anthropologists who should know better. The men married
to these women did not automatically abandon them in the name of honor, but
they too suffered. Mookeherjees ethnographic voice is so nuanced that we can
hear the half articulated sense of grief at the humiliation a husband has had to
endure and even an understanding on the part of a woman as to why her
husband might find it difficult to sleep at home. The words of Kajoli, Moyna,
Rohima, Rashida do not give us an ontology or, for that matter, a hauntology of
rape in times of war. What their words show is that the experience of violation
remains open to different kinds of facts from the world whether these are facts
about which stories are to be traded for what resources or facts about the
treachery of a mother-in-law, or facts about a caring husband who does not
have a cure any more for the grief of his wife. In allowing their experience to
be marked by what is happening beyond the singular event of rape, and yet
never erasing that event, the women give birth to more humble concepts, more
quotidian than the weighty concept of birangona. It is thus that the fine grains
of experience lead us to the work of anthropology as a mode of thinking
through living much as the novelist must learn to live partly with the life of her
characters.
Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and

Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author most recently
of Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham University Press,
2014) and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the
Ordinary (University of California Press, 2007), as well as co-editor of
The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (Duke
University Press, 2014) and Living and Dying in a Contemporary
World: A Compendium (University of California Press, 2015).

46
Works Cited
Benoist, Jocelyn. 2010. Concepts: Une Introduction la Philosophie. Paris: Les ditions
du Cerf.
Bhatia, Nandi. 2010. Performing Women/Performing Womanhood: Theatre, Politics,

and Dissent in North India. New York: Oxford University Press.
Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dutt, Michael Madhusudan.. 1867. Virgana Kvya: Mythological Poems in the

Form of Letters Written by Celebrated Heroes by their Wives. Calcutta.
Evans, Gareth. 1982. Varieties of Reference (ed. by John McDowell). Oxford:

Clarendon Press.
Lal, Mohan (ed.). 1992. Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature. Delhi: Sahitya Academy.
Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2015. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories,
and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press
Nandi, Ramkumar. 1873. Virangona Patrottar: A Sequel to the Virgana of Michael

Madhusudan Dutt, Containing Replies to the Letters in that Poem. Serampore.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1966 [1953] Philosophical Investigations (translated by

G.E.M. Anscombe). London: Macmillan Publishing.

47
The Spectral Wound and its fine grains

of conceptual experiences
A Reply
NAYANIKA MOOKHERJEE
Reader/Associate Professor, Socio-Cultural Anthropology, Durham University
ONE LATE OCTOBER MORNING in 2015, my phone rang and I got a missed call
(a call where the caller hangs up before the receiver can answer as a way of
establishing a pre-agreed decision, in my case being that I needed to call back)
from Moynas daughter. The Spectral Wound had just been published. I rang back
right away and was greeted by the ecstatic response:
It is up, it is up. Their names are in the government gazette and they
would get monthly bhata/compensation. But they are being referred
to as liberation fighters. I dont know why.
The inclusion of the names of the birangonas in a government gazette is

not an overnight process. Two decades of appeals and petitions to the
government by the birangonas were required to give recognition to their
demands. It is precisely the long time and thought struggle that Naeem
Mohaiemen starts his essay with in this collection (when describing the context
of the writing and reading of the book) that has in turn resulted in the
Bangladeshi government to respond to the recurrent requests of the birangonas.
The names of the birangonas who are publicly known, the identities of the
husbands/fathers and the details of their addresses is all available online as
part of the government gazette. As we speak, this is a growing, online, public
list in Bangladesh and birangonas receive a regular bhata/compensation which
goes straight to their bank accounts. And yet the discontent about being called
liberation fighters is also not surprising. Once they have gone public, the
women would prefer to be known as birangonas rather than the euphemism of
liberation fighters. Here all the directives we receive as postgraduate students
to maintain anonymity and confidentiality flies in the face of these everyday
realities within which the birangonas, their families and communities live.
Rather than being anonymised, they enquired why their real names were not
in my book. And liberation fighters also do not consider them to be fighters as
birangonas have only been raped as a result of the war. So as Naveeda Khan

48
reminds us in her essay, the reality of the birangonas confounds the early and
also current nationalist effort to make muktijoddhos (liberation fighters) and
birangonas historically coeval and equal for the purposes of commemoration
and compensation.
The process of commemoration and compensation has also become
further complicated since this government announcement in 2015. Scholars
talk of how this process has become a racket as one is promised the names of
50 birangonas to be made part of the governments list in return for sharing the
compensation money. Government officials bemoaned how those seeking to
harass the birangonas would wait outside the banks and ask the women to pay
them half of their compensation payment. I refer to this as the respect
economy and expectation economy in the book:
The tactics among the birangonas emerge in response to the state

rhetoric of a respect economy, linked to the honor that the
national actors would like to bestow on the women and their
testimonies. Referring to this rhetoric of honor in terms of economy
allows us to account for the social relationships, inequality, and
power, as well as shared meanings generated by this semantics of
respect. Along the same lines, the rhetoric of respect has generated
an expectation economy in Enayetpur whereby the tactics of the
birangonas families is linked to the way they evaluate the legitimacy
of the respect they come across and gauge what they might fairly
expect from this rhetoric of honor. (Mookherjee 2015:92)
The inclusion of their names in the gazette and the subsequent

distribution of compensation has led to further contestations among these
women in Enayetpur. I realised this aspect of their relationships when I was
visiting them in January 2016 after Spectral Wound was published. Initially, while
all their names were part of the gazette, Rohimas name was left out by mistake
(this has now been included and she is also receiving her compensation). Hence
at a commemoration ceremony in Bhashkhal where they were being given
these compensation cheques by the local liberation fighters, all the other
womens names were called and Rohimas wasnt. She recalls how she sat there
in humiliation kuttir moto like a dog waiting for the crumbs to be thrown
at her. She got angry with the other women and said that they should have not
accepted their compensation cheque when they realised that she had been left
out. After all she said:

49
we have gone through everything together: nirjaton, ashash, khota

(the violation, the false promises, the scorn). So we have to receive
our bhata (compensation) also together.
Within the call for togetherness also lies the complexity and
competitiveness of victimhood among the birangonas where the other women
could not turn down the compensation offer in case it is never offered to them
again in the future and if, as a result of their refusal, it gets lost in the pockets
(appropriated) of the Liberation fighters. This demand for solidarity by Rohima
has also been intrinsic to the relationship among the women. In the face of
scornful sister in laws (in the case of Kajoli and Rashida), husbands with mixed
emotions, jealous neighbours, a community in relative poverty these women
have provided succour for each other. Solidarity here exists not because of an
essentialised gendered feminine attribute which views all female relationships
to be friendly without any contestation existing among them. Demand for
friendship and solidarity among women does not play out as smoothly in
practice and sisters in law (are not stock figures as readers might assume) of
Kajoli and Rashidahave been a source of constant emotional injury. Among the
birangonas a critical solidarity has often existed in the form of a collective dark
humour towards their husbands. I provide here an extract from the book
(Mookherjee 2015: 119):
Rohima said that Imarot accepted her. He did not say anything about
the rape to her but just sat and cried. But he did not return home
after he heard of the rape and instead stayed next door at the home
of Shajeeda Bibi (an elderly woman) for a month and a half, eating
his rice there. Shajeeda remembered Imarot crying while eating his
rice, and she recalled trying to explain that what happened to his
wife was due to force. Imarot ate rice from Rohima only after
spending this period at his neighbors house. However, soon after, in
anger and sadness, he disappeared for eight months to do business
selling wheat and rice. Rohima agonized about not getting any news
from him, thinking that he was dead. She was already suffering from
bleeding and the effects of rape soon after having given birth, and
with three children to look after, including three-month-old Karim,
her physical health suffered. She sold everything to sustain her
family. She and her children worked as domestic servants at
Bhulens, for which they received just stomach payment (i.e., food).
Moyna, poignantly reflecting on Rohimas condition, said that she

50
struggled a lot. In her outspoken style, Moyna also reasoned that

Imarot left due to scorn by neighbors and only came back because of
the talk of compensation for women raped during Muktijuddho.
One afternoon, when all of us, including Moyna and Kajoli,
were joking and chatting at Rohimas house, Moyna mentioned that
Imarot had left his wife after the war because of her event. Imarot,
usually very articulate, stuttered that he had gone away for business.
Rohima and Moyna laughed together at his answer, and Rohima and
I exchanged a long look.
The solidarity reflected among the women reminds me of the solidarity

of Rena and Danka Kornreich the two sisters. Dankas family supported the book
symposium at JHU where these essays were presented. Writing on Holocaust
Memorial Day I am reminded how in the face of dehumanising horrors of
starvation, beatings, forced labor, and the constant threat of death at Auschwitz
the Kornreich sisters provided fortitude to each other to survive the camp and
fulfil their promise of taking care of each other. 7 Almost animated by their
spirit themes that emerged in these responses were not written in an
adversarial genre. Rather, they were richer for having extended the debates in
the book. Here I want to particularly address Swayam Bagarias idea of the
lingual memory; Veena Dass position on thinking as experience; Andrew
Brandel on the point of refusing criteria, Jennifer Culberts engagement with
responsibility and trauma, Amrita Ibrahim on the pathological public, Naeem
Mohaiemen on the questions of contexts and end with responding to Naveeda
Khans questions on enumeration.
The role of language and the birangona is central to the book and is
astutely addressed in all the comments. As Ibrahim points out the paradox of
my ethical implications of writing about that which must not be publicized is
visible across the book; that we are implicated in the very act of talking about
sexual violence (Jennifer Culbert) and that one of the lessons of this nuanced
account is that it becomes impossible to speak publicly about such matters
without using language that is freighted in one way or another (Lambek 2016).8
Swayam Bagarias introduction of a peculiar variation of lingual memory that
implicates the history of the language, rather than institutions and people, in
7
Berlin, Jeremy, et al. 2015.
8
Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2016: Review by Prof. Michael
Lambek. Volume 22, Issue 4: 1001-1002.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12517/full

51
the sedimentation of memory is particularly instructive. He is right to point

out that when Kajoli and Sufia refer to the storm and the boat they are not
merely recycling the reservoirs of linguistic frameworks. Instead they made
the language complicit in bearing a part of their memory even and especially
because ultimately there can be no neat or straightforward communication of
it. This is a powerful description as it also allows me to insist, following
Rokhshana, about the womens right to be silent and to not speak. As a result,
the deliberate withholding is not about an absence of lingual memory but a
refusal of its occasion. In asserting that a memory in language emerges
between the new usage of a word and the recycling of its past usages, I am eager
to explore these linguistic concepts in the light of the following extract from
the book:
Rohima remembered that in Dhaka they were taken by car to a

crowded room and were asked to talk about the ghotona. The women
described their experiences sketchily because according to Rohima
it was a feeling of intense shorom [shame] in front of so many people.
I felt the ground under my feet was splitting. This vivid image is
similar to the account in the Hindu epic Ramayana when Sita asks
for Mother Earth to split so that she can disappear when her husband,
the Hindu god Ram, becomes suspicious of her chastity and asks her
to go through a second ogniporikkha (a mythical test by walking
through fire).i For Rohima, this phrase connotes the intense desire
to make oneself physically disappear from the gaze of being named
a birangona due to humiliation and shame. Shame made her the agent
of her own desubjectivation, her own oblivion as a subject. Also, was
Rohima employing the idiom of chastity and the political trope of
purity with which Sita is associated in the Hindu pantheon (whose
stories are narrated among rural women in Bangladesh) in an
attempt to recover her honor in the face of this exposure? Their
visual testimony in the photograph frames the women in the midst
of people Moyna is squatting, Kajoli and Rohima are sitting,
huddled together, and Rohima seems to be cowering. Moyna and
Rohima are also looking down but seem to be aware of the gaze of
the crowds around them; a vacant expression clouds their faces,
while Kajoli, frowning, looks sideways, away from the camera.
(Mookherjee 2015: 58)

52
I am rethinking how I have read Rohimas phrase I felt the ground

under my feet was splitting following Bagarias idea of lingual memory in
conjunction with Veena Dass powerful formulation of thinking as experience.
This powerful, poignant phrase of feeling the ground under my feet was
splitting is not just a metaphor from the Ramayana. In fact this concept which
emerges in its field of force as an experiential concept, embedded in the grains
of experiences of violence is not only registering various facts of the world, but
also creates the subjective as an aspect of this facticity. The thought of splitting
the ground under ones feet is also the poignant experience of humiliation and
the wish to defy and embarrass those responsible for these moments of
violation and exposure. Rather than a conceptual and non-conceptual binary,
here the humiliation of the exposure is apprehended through the thickness of
the relational experience such that one can only humiliate the others through
disappearing into the split ground. Hence as part of the everyday present, rape
for these birangonas and its repercussions are worked out as Jennifer Culbert
beautifully puts it:
as a thread in piece of a woven cloth worn every day. Hiding in plain
sight in the fabric, this thread is obvious in the stitches that make up
the material but is obscured by being presented (and used) in such a
mundane fashion. Nevertheless, the thread touches everyone who
brushes against the piece in which it is essentially intertwined,
unexpectedly hurting them and disturbing their routines.
Rather than the transnational empty word of trauma, I show how the
memories of the event is triggered through the world external to the
birangonas which provides what Das refers to as the shared genre for
expression. Hence the conceptual content of the toofan/storm is not only
aesthetically rendered, but as Veena Das has poignantly put it: what she does
with this experience finds a footing in the world through an imagery that she
can evoke. Hence Rohimas conceptual experience of the ground splitting
under her feet also draws on the world through literal and symbolic
visualisations that she can conjure.
The genealogical connections that the term birangona has emerged from
(as pointed out by Das) are literary as well as religious tropes. Along with the
various North and Eastern Indian texts it also draws from the book Muslim
birangonas, who according to the theological author Moinuddin, were the
eminent historical and religious Muslim women who fought gallantly in the
battlefields alongside their husbands for the sake of defending Islam (1978, 5).ii
In the Dhaka University library, two copies of the book Muslim Birangona
(Moinuddin 1978) bear different cover images (See Figures 1 and 2). These were

53
not part of the Spectral Wound as their artistic parameters did not fulfil all of
the publishers criteria. One image depicts a woman on a horse heading for the
battlefield with an open sword. This image has resonance with illustrations of
Queen Razia and the Hindu queen Rani Jhansi. First published in 1920 in Pune
by Chitrashala Press as a chromolithograph,iii it has circulated widely in South
Asia since then. The woman in the other image looks more like a Mughal queen
either in court or on horseback, clothed in war armor. The term birangona has
also historically referred to Ila Mitra, the revolutionary activist of the Nachol
peasant revolt (Doinik Bangla, April 11, 1972). When a Bangladeshi minister
proposed that the government formally mourn the death of renowned mp
Bodrunnessa Ahmed in May 1974, he called her a birangona (Shaheen. Akhtar et
al. 2001b, 18) in parliament. I elaborate further in the book (chapter two) on the
contradictory aspects of the virangana in Kathryn Hansens discussion.
Figure 1 Cover of Muslim Birangona (Moinuddin 1978).

54
Figure 2 Cover of Muslim Birangona (Moinuddin 1978).
All the panellists note that the form of criticism in the book aims to
refuse criteria that can take recourse to understanding languages, so that
experience is not typified and there is no normativity about what counts as
authentic in the experiences of the raped woman. It is this criticism which
enables the book to open up the local dynamics of gender, violence, and
sociality as noted by Ibrahim through attention to how the modes of scorn
and honor are deployed not as structural existences, but in the work of
inscribing inequality. Yet even when the book argues against such structural
concepts through ingrained ethnography one wonders what the stakes are in
referring to such illustrations as battikrom/exceptional by some in Bangladesh?
This is where I argue that narrative closure and narrative license plays a
significant role in upholding the given state of existence. Even in the
contemporary references cited by Mohaiemen these kinds of narrative closures
continue. At the same time, while showing how the discourses of honor/shame
absorb the aftermath of sexual assault in the particular context of Bangladesh,

55
these narratives are being constantly restaged and re-narrated by the women
themselves. As Brandel clearly notes: This language of being combed or
scraped over returns again and again in talk about the experiences of wartime
rape, and captures this movement between covering up and making visible that
structures the experiences of the birangona.
Ibrahim is right to interrogate the implication of the pathological public
which seem to operate primarily at the national level. In Enayetpur, what exists
are not only entangled webs of sociality in the everyday. There also entails a
detailed discussion of ideas of justice, intentionality, rationalities and
socialities on the part of the women and their communities made possible
through a veritable world of computation. Khans intervention and call for the
enumerative precisely brings into play how these numbers, files, visiting cards
has affective value among the women and their families. For the women the
enumerative and the computational has come full circle with the inclusion in
the gazette and the granting of the compensation. Does this acknowledgement
help the women? Yes they do, even though it comes with its own complexities
related to what I refer to as the expectation economy and respect economy.
At this point of the commentary where I myself have come full circle, may I take
the opportunity to profusely thank all the reviewers for their fascinating and
affective engagement with The Spectral Wound. To Andrew Brandel and the
family of Danka Kornreich, I offer my appreciation for getting us together for
the symposium in the first place. And finally my utmost thanks to Veena Das
for staying with the book, its conversations, with such scholarly affection and
warmth.
Nayanika Mookherjee is a Reader/Associate Professor of Socio-Cultural

Anthropology in Durham University. She has published extensively on
anthropology of violence, ethics and aesthetics. As
a British Academy mid-career fellow she is carrying out new research
on transnational adoption. Her book The Spectral Wound: Sexual
Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War (2015, Duke
University Press, 2016, Zubaan, Foreword by Prof. Veena Das) was
among the top two shortlists of BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed
BBC/BSA Best Ethnography Award (online here the book is discussed
by judges from 16-24 mins). She was also interviewed on the book on the
same programme by Laurie Taylor (online here from 14 minutes).

56
Notes
i
Rohimas organizing metaphor might not necessarily be this epic account
(though it could be, given the popularity of Ramayana in the public culture of
Bangladesh [Roy 1983]).
ii
Amin (1996) shows that in 191517 the Bengali journal Al-Eslam ran a series
titled Moslem Birangona, written by Eslamabadi. The series was aimed at
introducing young women to the great deeds of the various wives of the
Prophet.
iii
I thank Christopher Pinney for this point. Also see Harlans (1991) critical
analysis of Rani Jhansi, who was constructed as the gendered site par
excellence of a progressive Indian modernity with deep roots in
tradition. For further reflection on the relationship between women and
martial culture in Bengal, see T. Sarkar (1984) and P. Bose (1996).
Works Cited
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Andrew Brandel

Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna

Book Forum edited by

The Spectral Wound

Andrew Brandel has organized an extraordinary and diverse set of commentaries

Andrew Brandel 3 Introduction: The Violence of Life and Its Images

Swayam Bagaria 7 Interiorities of Memory

Jennifer L. Culbert 15 Communicating Violence: Reviewing The Spectral Wound

Amrita Ibrahim 22 The Performance of Public Secrets in The Spectral Wound

Naveeda Khan 28 On Counting

Naeem Mohaiemen 35 Time of the Writing, the Hour of Reading

Veena Das 40 The Grains of Experience

Nayanika Mookherjee 47 A Reply

NAYANIKA MOOKHERJEES The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories,

dynamics of gender, violence, and sociality through attention to how the

located within overlapping frameworks of exchange, including between

Andrew Brandel is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in

to discipline the maternal sentiments of the women. Mookherjee clarifies that

Koto kotha amar bokkhe, Koshter kotha shunia jaoga,

(I carry so many thoughts in my heart, Come and listen to

itihash, chorom itihash somewhere here lies suggestions of my second,

Becker, Alton. 1995. Beyond Translation: Essays Towards a Modern Philology,

Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans: A.M. Sheridan

Swayam Bargaria is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Johns

THE SPECTRAL WOUND is an ethically complex text to which to respond.

Trauma studies encourage a working through of an injury that is

Jennifer L. Culbert is an Associate Professor in the Department of

The Performance of Public Secrets

FOCUSING ON THE FIGURE of the birangona (war heroine) Nayanika

In this second thread of the ethnography, Mookherjee undertakes a

trap of cultural relativism. Recent scholarship has critiqued the appellation of

Ultimately through her tracing of the national public icon of the

Amrita Ibrahim is Adjunct Lecturer in Anthropology at Georgetown

Baxi, Pratiksha, et al. 2006. Legacies of Common Law: Crimes of Honour in

I AM VERY PLEASED to be invited by Andrew Brandel to discuss Professor

that there is a strong emphasis on normativity in Bangladeshi village life and

(1) Rafique, who is the husband of one of the four self-identified

(2) Kajoli, one of Mookherjees interlocutors in Enayetpur, relates: I

fighters took us to Dhaka. That is when we were given the name

(3) Mookherjee writes in her comments: The discourse of ashash

Mookherjee takes these statements head on. She understands that it is

enumeration as the appropriation of voice through the creating of an

Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins

Time of the Writing, the Hour of Reading1

NAYANIKA MOOKHERJEE ACKNOWLEDGES that The Spectral Wound has taken a

2011), which received a very different, noticeably chillier, reception in

Meanwhile, opposition to the war memory project comes from two

Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology

The Grains of Experience

the imageries of innocent birangonas fulfill these womens role of victimhood

glosses this reference to the storm as a weather metaphor (Kajoli let a

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and

Bhatia, Nandi. 2010. Performing Women/Performing Womanhood: Theatre, Politics,

Dutt, Michael Madhusudan.. 1867. Virgana Kvya: Mythological Poems in the

Evans, Gareth. 1982. Varieties of Reference (ed. by John McDowell). Oxford:

Nandi, Ramkumar. 1873. Virangona Patrottar: A Sequel to the Virgana of Michael

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1966 [1953] Philosophical Investigations (translated by

The Spectral Wound and its fine grains

The inclusion of the names of the birangonas in a government gazette is

The tactics among the birangonas emerge in response to the state

The inclusion of their names in the gazette and the subsequent

we have gone through everything together: nirjaton, ashash, khota

struggled a lot. In her outspoken style, Moyna also reasoned that