Systemic rape continues to plague all ongoing conflict points in the world. In this backdrop, The Search assumes an ominous air.
The Search
Shaheen Akhtar
Translated by Ella Dutta
Zubaan
359 pages
Rs395
How do you explain the slow murder that rape is? Or how women’s bodies become the most brutal of war weapons, spoils of war? The biranganas — heroic women, literally — of Bangladesh, who speak through Shaheen Akhtar’s novel, The Search (Talaash), can probably explain this best.
No one will ever know the exact number of women raped during the Bangladesh war of liberation in 1971. Conservative estimates say close to 4,00,000 women were raped repeatedly by gangs of Pakistani soldiers. Post-independence, politicians hailed these women as ‘biranganas’, the pride of the nation.
But the agony of rape doesn’t end with the act, these women soon learnt. Gang rape left most of them pregnant. Bangladesh passed a special ordinance in 1972 to arrange for abortions. The biranganas queued up at abortion clinics in rehabilitation centres. A hundred abortions and deliveries took place every day. The babies of those who crossed the fourth month of pregnancy were allowed to be born. Nurses from Mother Teresa’s charity home came by, saying: “We’re here to save the war-babies,” and after delivery, most of these babies were sent abroad for adoption.
The honorary title soon became a slur, ‘birangana’ now a synonym for whore. Relatives hardly took them home. Shamed, ostracised, and burnt by the stigma, the agony deranged many. The few who managed to find homes tried to bury their past.
Set in this damned world is The Search. Here, Akhtar tells the story of Mariam. The men in her life are visitors who come in uninvited and vanish when she needs them most. Those who raped her are faceless.
“She did not know a thing about all those who raped her day after day — their names, addresses, family, education, marital status. All the men looked similar, their behaviour did not vary much. How many men were they — a hundred, fifty, a score — but they all summed up into one abstract male.”
Twenty-eight years after liberation, the government decides on a survey of those who experienced the war, and young Mukti is asked to interview biranganas. What Mukti hears in the course of her interviews — Mariam’s musings, delusions, the men in her life, history of the war — are the diverse perspectives colour The Search.
The voices in it are stark. Probably because they stem from Akhtar’s research on the independence struggle. For five years, she studied publications related to the war and interviewed biranganas.
The Search is difficult to read, simply because of the awful nature of the tale. Writing about sex without making it titillating is tough. But Akhtar describes the horrors of gang-rape painstakingly, cutting out explicit scenes which could eroticise the act. The post-war abuse of 30 years is tougher to digest. The landscape is eerie too — marshlands, lonely trees laden with fruits, abandoned houses, floods... Akhtar brings the human context of war alive with terrible beauty. The lack of linear progression compounds the desolation. Systemic rape continues to plague all ongoing conflict points in the world. In this backdrop, The Search assumes an ominous air.
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