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War, Violence and Memory: Gendered National Imaginaries in Tahmima Anam, Sorayya Khan and Contemporary Sri Lankan Women Writers

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Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction

Abstract

In contrast to Kiran Desai’s postnational novel discussed in Chap. 2, this chapter focuses primarily on diasporic fictions that explore the national narratives of Bangladesh and Pakistan. However, these nations are narrated through the experience of nation-formation for women not centrally involved with the 1971 secession of Pakistan that led to Bangladesh becoming an independent state. Around one million Bengalis are believed to have been killed by the Pakistani army in what Bangladeshis refer to as the Bangladeshi Liberation War of 1971. As noted in the introduction, diasporic writers Tahmima Anam’s and Sorayya Khan’s shared focus on subcontinental crisis and the trans-regional gendered violence of subcontinental national imaginaries makes the case for examining these works of fiction as a cohesive body that extends the gendered and transnational agenda offered by the previous generation of South Asian anglophone writers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Priyamvada Gopal is one of the few critics to touch on Noor. See Gopal (2009), pp. 75–77.

  2. 2.

    For pioneering, gendered histories of partition that break the silence around issues of gendered violence, see Butalia (1998), Menon and Bhasin (2000), Hasan (2000), Mohanram (2011) and Rahman (1991).

  3. 3.

    Kaul (2001), p. 11; emphasis added.

  4. 4.

    Menon and Bhasin (2000), p. 41.

  5. 5.

    Kaul (2001), p. 10.

  6. 6.

    Anam’s traditionally realist style further shifts the expectations of readers conditioned to expect Rushdie’s magic realism and what Amit Chaudhuri terms the template of ‘the Big Indian novel’. Chaudhuri (2001), p. xxv.

  7. 7.

    See also the novels of Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Chandra; for novels on Bangladesh see Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments (1994) and Manzu Islam’s Song of Our Swampland (2010).

  8. 8.

    As we have seen, Kiran Desai’s multigenerational family saga engages with the constellation of forces that shape the lives of the privileged and the destitute in Kalimpong and erupt in the insurgency of the 1980s that sought to empower the ethnic Nepalese. Shamsie also explores conflict and crisis in Pakistan by tracing connections between the gendered spheres of nation, religion and family, as we will see in Chap. 4.

  9. 9.

    See also feminist critiques of the nation that examine the position of women in discourses of family and home and assert the centrality of women as emblems of national identity through their role in home and family. For example, McClintock (1995), p. 354, and Grewal (1996), p. 7.

  10. 10.

    Chatterjee (2004), p. 20.

  11. 11.

    Roy (1997), p. 19.

  12. 12.

    Sangari (2008), pp. 1–33.

  13. 13.

    Anam (2007), p. 274.

  14. 14.

    See Elleke Boehmer’s (2005) discussion of women and nationalism.

  15. 15.

    Anam, audibleblog.co.uk/2013/10/20/interview-with-tahmima-anam.

  16. 16.

    For a conceptualising of South Asian women’s fiction and life-writings as ‘archival sites and history-in-the making’ see Burton (2003), p. 26.

  17. 17.

    See the body of feminist scholarship on the patriarchal underpinnings of the powerful configuration of the mother figure as a signifier of national and communal identity in South Asia. Rehana’s sexual affair with the Major disrupts both her symbolic value as a sexually chaste symbol that sanctions nation building and the gendered discourses of nationalism that contains female sexuality within the arena of nationalist struggle where, as Radhika Coomaraswamy observes, ‘sexuality is seen as an evil, debilitating force…and self-sacrifice, austerity and androgyny are put forward as ideals’. See Coomaraswamy (1996), pp. 8–10, 10.

  18. 18.

    Khan’s novel Noor alludes to the construction of Bengalis as improperly Muslim, as we will see.

  19. 19.

    Sarmila Bose makes this point. However, other claims made in her book have met with controversy (Bose 2011).

  20. 20.

    Khan (2003), p. 19.

  21. 21.

    Khan (2003), p. 221, Interview with Cara Cilano. Khan singles out Agha Shahid Ali’s ‘Your history gets in the way of my memory’ in her lecture on ‘Silence and Forgetting in War’. This citation is also the epigraph of the novel. Khan is one of a handful of women writers of Pakistani origin to probe this dark period in Pakistan’s history. See also Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002), Maniza Naqvi’s Mass Transit (1998) and Moni Mohsin’s The End of Innocence (2006) on the repercussions of 1971 partition and the ways in which this war is memorialised in Pakistan.

  22. 22.

    Whitehead (2004), p. 83.

  23. 23.

    Caruth (1995), p. 11.

  24. 24.

    Whitehead (2004), p. 86.

  25. 25.

    See also Arundhati Roy’s problematising of a single narrative and citation of John Berger in the epigraph to The God of Small Things: ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one’.

  26. 26.

    Rothburg (2009), p. 3.

  27. 27.

    Whitehead (2009), p. 124.

  28. 28.

    On memory and partition see also Pandey (2001).

  29. 29.

    See for example, Saikia (2004), pp. 274–286 and Mookerjee (2006), pp. 433–450.

  30. 30.

    Gunne and Thompson (2010), p. 3.

  31. 31.

    Gopal observes, ‘But what, [Manto] finally seems to ask, of the men who are as much part of these processes?’ (Gopal 2001, pp. 242–249).

  32. 32.

    Bourke (2007), p. 116.

  33. 33.

    Spivak (2002), pp. 17–31.

  34. 34.

    Felman and Laub (1992), p. 2.

  35. 35.

    Kabir (2010), pp. 146–164, 156.

  36. 36.

    Khan (2009), p. 129.

  37. 37.

    Urvashia Butalia suggests around 75,000 women were abducted and raped during the partition of India (Butalia 1998, p. 3).

  38. 38.

    This rich second volume of Anam’s planned trilogy on Bangladesh will be discussed more fully in the next chapter.

  39. 39.

    Anam (2011), p. 70.

  40. 40.

    Kaul (2001), p. 5.

  41. 41.

    For example, Qadri Ismail asks whether Sri Lanka’s ‘conflict’ was best understood as being about ‘ethnic’ or nationalist violence, things that separate us (the ‘non-violent’ West) from them, or about peace and democracy, concerns we all share (or are at least supposed to) (Ismail 2005, p. 4).

  42. 42.

    Sontag (2003).

  43. 43.

    In contrast to Mukti Bahini and Tamil Tiger women fighters.

  44. 44.

    Anam reflects on how the 1971 war can seem like a crucible for new possibilities: ‘the women’s situation in 1971 war laid the groundwork for what has become the modern feminist movement in Bangladesh which is very strong. Bangladesh is a traditional society in many ways and there’s still a long way to go, but the Constitution was written in a very progressive way affording equal right to everyone, without discriminating on the grounds of gender, ethnicity, race or religion’ (Chambers 2011, p. 18). See also my discussion of the significance of Rehana leading the prayers in the following chapter.

  45. 45.

    See for example the work of Radhika Coomaraswamy, Malathi de Alwis, Kumudini Samuel, Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake and Neloufer De Mel.

  46. 46.

    See Rebecca Walker’s discussion of the effects of violence on Sri Lankan Tamil women during the civil war, where she argues that uncertainty and risk become ingrained in everyday practices but never become normal or ordinary (Walker 2013).

  47. 47.

    Arasanayagam (1995), p. 42.

  48. 48.

    Arasanayagam (1995), pp. 32, 36.

  49. 49.

    Kodituwakku (2006), p. 53.

  50. 50.

    This theme is also explored in the Sri Lankan author Ameena Hussein’s novel The Moon in Water (2009), discussed in the following chapter.

  51. 51.

    For an analysis of some of these portrayals see De Mel (2003), pp. 55–74. See also Sri Lankan-American Nayomi Munaweera’s portrayal of Tamil Tigress Saraswathi in her novel Island of Thousand Mirrors (2012). V.V. Ganeshananthan’s forthcoming second novel centres on a female suicide bomber.

  52. 52.

    Coomaraswamy (1996), p. 10.

  53. 53.

    See Young (2009).

  54. 54.

    See also diasporic Sri Lankan women writers Karen Roberts’ (b. 1965, Sri Lanka/USA) July (2001) and Ru Freeman’s (b.1967, Sri Lanka/Australia/USA) On Sal Mal Lane (2013), novels that are centrally concerned with the anti-Tamil violence of July 1983 and describe its frenzied explosion.

  55. 55.

    This appears to be a fictionalised version of the fate of LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingham.

  56. 56.

    Ganeshananthan (2008), p. 71.

  57. 57.

    For a discussion of this aspect of Sivanandan’s fiction, see Ranasinha (2007).

  58. 58.

    Aw (2007), p. 20.

  59. 59.

    Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) engages with this critical juncture in Sri Lanka’s civil war: its entanglement with the Sinhalese Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurgency against the government in the South. More recently, diasporic writer Minoli Salgado’s novel explores lives ‘enmeshed in this hidden war that failed to make international news…masked by the shrieking headlines on the larger war between the government and the LTTE…that lacked the comfortable logic of race and ethnicity, religious, cultural difference, easy distinctions favoured by those who liked to keep things simple and clean’ (Salgado 2014, p. 76).

  60. 60.

    See for example ‘Tearne has the gift of scratching beneath the surface of the headline’ in Wheelwright (2008).

  61. 61.

    For a discussion of representations that naturalise a certain colonialist understanding of Sri Lanka as a place of endemic violence and the apparent fixity of the violent present, see Ranasinha (2013), pp. 28–39.

  62. 62.

    Tearne (2009), p. 217.

  63. 63.

    Fernando (2012a), p. 77.

  64. 64.

    Fernando (2012b).

  65. 65.

    Huyssen (2003), p. 19.

  66. 66.

    For a discussion of the role of postcolonial writers in this regard, see Durrant (2003) and Craps (2012).

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  1. Department of English, King’s College London, London, UK

    Ruvani Ranasinha

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Ranasinha, R. (2016). War, Violence and Memory: Gendered National Imaginaries in Tahmima Anam, Sorayya Khan and Contemporary Sri Lankan Women Writers. In: Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40305-6_3

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