“Writing this History is Like Touching Madness”: Gender in 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War

This chapter articulates the gendered histories of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War through literary testimony, arguing that fiction operates as a critical supplement to formal historiography in narrating sexual violence, displacement, and moral ambiguity. Drawing on Veena Das’s formulation that writing this history is akin to touching madness, the chapter explores how women’s wartime experiences of rape, survival, and agency have been simultaneously acknowledged and constrained within nationalist discourse. Focusing on the figure of the Birangona, it traces how the postwar Bangladeshi state conferred recognition and honor while producing a stabilizing narrative that obscured heterogeneity, desire, and dissent. Through a close reading of Dilruba Z. Ara’s novel Blame, the analysis demonstrates how porous literary forms unsettle binary distinctions between victim and hero, truth and fiction, and history and testimony. Engaging Jacques Derrida’s theorization of testimony and supplementarity, the chapter shows how fiction creates a space to recover marginal voices that remain unassimilable within official archives. It argues that attention to such narrative strategies is essential for understanding how geopolitical violence produces gendered displacement and how literature enables a more ethically responsive engagement with the unresolved legacies of war within South Asian memory, politics, historiography, ethics, responsibility, and feminist critical scholarship.