Writer and feminist Germaine Greer was one of the strongest voices at the ongoing literary festival in Thiruvanthapuram.
She’s widely regarded as a “legendary left-wing feminist” but Australian writer Germaine Greer prefers to skip the labels. She believes that even for a cause, you can’t distort the truth. At the summer palace of Travancore kings - the venue for the Hay Literary Festival where Greer will be speaking on Saturday - this penchant for the truth, however harsh, was evident as she spoke to DNA, defending her stand against the inflation of the number of Bangladeshi women raped by Pakistani soldiers in 1971.
Reports that 3,00,000 Bangladeshi women were raped by Pakistani soldiers still make her uncomfortable. The figure came as a shock, she says. She voiced her disbelief decades ago, saying that the numbers had been exaggerated. She is still being reprimanded for her stand. Feminists called her a “traitor to their cause”, but Greer still believes that falsifying reports cannot help a cause, only to losing one’s credibility.
“I was always a bit worried about the stories of 3,00,000 women raped, and then they said, ‘No 4,50,000 women were raped’. But for the figures to be true, there just weren’t enough soldiers!” she said. “But no one wants to take a re-look at the rape story as it is a spectacular story. And now, it’s too late for the truth.”
One of the problems with the reportage was that they used an Australian doctor’s account for the truth, she said. “The Guardian took the figure from him. He had no skills as a reporter and didn’t know how to go about collecting data - how to sample the population or even how to take evidence.”
“The real problem was that the men, who sympathised with the soldiers and resented the elite, played collaborators and delivered these girls to the cantonment to be raped and tortured.” During her visit to Dhaka right after the war, Greer spoke to women staying at the hostels for rape victims, and they all told her the same story.
“American feminists claimed that the families rejected these women. But it was the men in their families who brought in these pregnant women for abortions,” Greer said. She also cited accounts of women who were forced to prostitute themselves in pressing circumstances. Not all of these cases can be bunged under the term ‘rape’, she said.
“I am not saying these women are lying. All I’m saying is that it is a very confused individual situation,” she said, adding that the figures nevertheless are overblown. “The Punjabi soldiers were almost all British-trained officers, and they were never given the order to ‘kill all able-bodied men, and impregnate the women’. It’s just nonsense, there was no such order.” Greer’s talk to the public is scheduled for the last day of the festival.
The inaugural session of the festival was a conversation between two legends of Malayalam literature, MT Vasudevan Nair and M Mukundan. They spoke about how they started writing at a time when books hard to come by, and the writers had no notion they could earn money out of what they wrote.
The other “star” who took the stage was member of parliament Shashi Tharoor . He almost wafted into the Palace Hall just before the inauguration. To his credit, he didn’t look wee bit uncomfortable as he laughed off BBC presenter Anita Anand’s gentle dig: “rockstar politician”.
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