Analysis Of Survivors Speak By Yasmin Saikia

Yasmin Saikia is the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies and Professor of History at the Arizona State University, USA (Saikia 1). Her intellectual work features acclaimed peer-reviewed essays, articles, chapters, reviews, conferences and award-winning books that present a historical focus on topics of identity, memory, religion, peace, war and women of both pre-modern and contemporary India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Saikia 1). Her most recent book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, won the Oral History Association Biennial Best Book Award in 2013 (Saikia 1). This book recognises the marginalized and vulnerable females of the South Asian society who experienced the Bangladesh Liberation War. She is passionate about
Part I, entitled “Introducing 1971”, presents the theoretical and methodological frameworks utilised in her research and writing of the topic where she presents a humanist approach through personal narratives, memory projects, trauma studies and peace studies. Part II, entitled “Survivors Speak”, outlines the main body of the work where the female narratives of experiences during the war are retold. In Part III, entitled “A New Beginning”, Saikia shares her own views on the 1971 war which state that the types of wars varied within the Bangladesh Liberation War: a gender war, an international war and a political
Saikia incorporates the perspective of the male perpetrator to present an alternate focus of the story of the women of 1971. An anonymous offender, referred to as Kajol, confessed his attempted rape to Saikia. He expressed that at the time of the Liberation War, Bangladeshi men labelled Bihari women as nothing more than pro-Pakistani supporters and resorted to sexual violence as a means through which they could inflict domination and revenge on them. Like Kajol, other male perpetrators confess that in that time humanity no longer existed, people did not think of each other as human but as the enemy or ally in