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Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. By Yasmin

Saikia.

Article  in  Oral History Review · April 2015

DOI: 10.1093/ohr/ohv031

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164 | ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. By Yasmin

Saikia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Hardcover, $89.95;
paperback, $24.95.

Yasmin Saikia’s book is a good example of an oral history study that serves sev-
eral purposes concomitantly; for example, it exposes truths behind a “made-up
glorious past” of modern South Asia, and it also provides some justice to the
real victims (or survivors and heroes as she prefers to call them) of the
Bangladesh War of Liberation of 1971, namely women who were raped, tor-
tured, and then marginalized (x). Drawing on gender narratives of the war,
Saikia analyzes the recent history of the region from a new perspective and at-
tempts to redefine the meanings that the states involved—Bangladesh, Pakistan
and India—created around the war of 1971. In order to write a people’s history
of the region, her multisided methodology relies on oral history, the scholarly lit-
eratures on memory and Holocaust and gender studies, and on archival mate-
rials, most of which are usually difficult to access.
Rape and war, for the most part, have always gone hand-in-hand; it has
been part of conventional wartime violence, one that specifically targets women,
even though, in the aftermath of war, none of the combatants—victorious or
defeated—likes to give an honest account of these incidents in their historiogra-
phy. Repercussions of this gender violence are so deep that they not only cripple
the victims, as Saikia meticulously points out, but also endanger the very sense
of justice and humanity in a society. With her detailed account of gender vio-
lence that women of various ethnic and religious backgrounds experienced dur-
ing the war of 1971, she articulately illustrates how states and societies have
dealt with the outcomes of these deplorable incidents, how such outcomes have
affected the fates of the victims, and what the implications have been for the
future that these societies have the potential to build for themselves. As part of
her critique, Saikia recommends that societies involved in such atrocities need to
resort to a cultural and religious principle, insaniyet (a shared sense of human-
ity), to resettle unresolved grievances and liberate women from this undue bur-
den as both victims and representations of victimhood. The survivors repeatedly
brought up insaniyet, or the loss of it, during their interviews to explain the rea-
sons for and to give a meaning to the violence to which they were subjected.
Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh is divided into three parts. In
the first part, Saikia addresses the theoretical and methodological issues con-
cerning her study and a wide range of other topics such as the commonality of
violence and women’s agency with regard both to the violence during the war
and to settling wartime disputes between nations and societies. The second part
of the book is its heart, presenting the experiences of women from a multidi-
mensional perspective, not only as victims but also as caregivers and fighters
 Book Reviews | 165

during the war. The diversity of these women’s roles informed, for Saikia, the
complexity of women’s agency in war, especially given various nationalists’ at-
tempts to present and define women and their role in certain, narrow ways. The
final part of the book consists of the testimonies of Pakistani and Bangladeshi
soldiers; it is an interesting addition to the whole project, providing the views
and feelings of the perpetrators, which ranged from a complete sense of guilt to
utter indifference.
Saikia’s book is a groundbreaking study for several reasons. First of all, it
challenges the one-sided and nationalist historiographies of South Asian states.
Secondly, it uses a multitude of sources that have not been explored thus far.
Thirdly, framing the study from the perspective of insaniyet shifts focus onto
the female victims and their role in the aftermath of war and away from more
traditional perspectives that look for reasons for violence or seek to blame one
or the other side for the brutality. And finally, her most important contribution is
that she clearly demonstrates that “no single group had a monopoly on commit-
ting violence” during the war of 1971 (48).
With that said, however, there are a few minor issues that went unad-
dressed in her work, most of them due, undoubtedly, to the magnitude of the
task undertaken. For a start, Saikai does not distinguish between the military ca-
pabilities of Pakistani and Indian armies, Bengali insurgents, and ordinary people
in committing violence. She also does not discuss some very important issues,
like the implications of her study for the women involved or the social move-
ments taking place on the grassroots level. And her usage of insaniyet is a little
vague—it is not entirely clear how exactly it can be used as a principle on a
practical level, such as for reconciliation, or why it disappeared during the war in
the first place. More importantly, though, it is clear from the stories presented in
her book that women are not only forgotten or made invisible in both historiog-
raphy and public sphere, but they were also blamed and ostracized for their
alleged complicity in the violence to which they were subjected. This is an impor-
tant point, possibly one on which Saikia does not comment as it would compli-
cate her solution for victims’ reconciliation with perpetrators.
Notwithstanding these issues, the stories of one hundred and fifty women,
ten of whom Saikai chose for the book because of their value as representatives,
changed her and changed this reader too. In short, personal narratives have a
transformative power and Saikia does a great job of conveying the stories of
these extraordinary women in both an analytically informative and meaningful
way. Her book is a significant contribution to the fields of oral history, women
and gender studies, and the history of South Asia, and would clearly make very
stimulating reading for graduate courses in these fields. The detailed accounts of
Saikia’s interactions with the women, along with the informative introductions
before each piece of testimony, helped me contextualize and understand these
166 | ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

narratives better. Also, her focus on the meanings of the interviewees’ pauses,
that the violence these women endured was so great that they could not, at
times, articulate the cruelty, shows the power of oral history to bring voice to
the voiceless, especially when that voice is punctuated with profound silence.

Sevil Çakır Kılınçoğlu

Leiden University
doi:10.1093/ohr/ohv031 Advance Access publication 2 March 2015

Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers. By Anne

Balay. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 192 pp.
Hardbound, $34.95.

In a time when so many in the mainstream LGBT community are arguing that “it
gets better,” Anne Balay offers Steel Closets, an honest and intimate window
into the lives of hard-working, queer steelworkers whose lives stray far from the
gets-better narrative. She demonstrates how for steelworkers, and many other
working-class queers, visibility more often hurts rather than helps, driving
them further into the closet rather than out of it. With the publication of Steel
Closets, Balay adds the voices of working-class LGBT people to a historical re-
cord largely dominated by urban, middle-class, white gays and lesbians.
Focusing on rural, working-class queers in the diminishing US steel industry, she
deftly navigates the complex intersections of class, race, work, sexuality, mascu-
linity, and gender expression in the mill. More than just preserving the life stories
of LGBTQ steel workers, she troubles the standard LGBTQ progress narratives.
Balay interviewed forty LGBTQ-identified steelworkers, mostly in northeast
Indiana, who face violent homophobia every day in the mills. All but a few narra-
tors are closeted and hide their queer lives from other steelworkers. While many
queer people find community in gay bars and community events, steelworkers,
because of their demanding and inconsistent work schedule, find their main
support systems among their coworkers. Yet this support is limited—Balay’s in-
terviewees discuss the dangers of sharing personal information, which forces
some to lie or not share at all. Balay’s analysis shows how this isolates queer
steelworkers, and the secrecy about their lives serves to push many further into
the closet.
Steel Closets offers a sustained discussion of masculinity, a central lens for
understanding mill workers. Balay found that women and lesbians, only a small
fraction of the mills’ workforce, are more accepted because of their masculinity;
this seeming contradiction can function in their favor. Women continue, how-
ever, to experience extremely high rates of sexual harassment and violence in
the mill, and are met with little support. For many gay men, doing the

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