The trauma of rejection : contemporary literary encounters with the 1971 Bangladesh war

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore contemporary novelistic representations of the 1971 Bangladesh war in relation to those narratives frequently disregarded by the state-circulated history. The official narratives of the state often mechanistically present and guardedly omit issues of utmost importance, such as the problematic presentation of wartime rape victims and their “unanticipated” offspring, the unresolved case of the Bihari community, and the 1974 famine. To understand how these apparently unrelated war events concatenate holistically, I investigate fiction’s attempts to represent what the official narratives of the state sideline and forget or partially remember and selectively present to serve the state’s purpose. As is evident, the state’s attitude towards those narratives is one of rejection. This truth about the state directs me to contextualize rejection in the history of Bangladesh. Rejection impacts, in crucial ways, the history of Bangladesh since its independence. The mediating role of rejection goes as far back as the Partition of India. Considering how rejection and trauma inform each other and resonate affectively, I explore, in this thesis, how literary space, as a hospitable site, can offer reconciliation for non-negotiable rejection that produces and sustains trauma. Instead of approaching the two terms—rejection and trauma—separately, I propose the trauma of rejection as an analytical method to surface those overlooked narratives through literary analysis, a potential alternative to state-sponsored history.