ABSTRACT
This chapter studies co-existent narratives of displacement, emplacement with their subversions in the rehabilitation of the ‘birangonas’ in Bangladesh. Rehabilitation centres were established for birangonas after the 1971 Liberation War to cater to the needs of multiple identities of war heroines to rape victims, and add the post-Independence state’s validity with terms like ‘married’, ‘useful citizen’ and ‘productive worker’ with vocational training for them. While archival documents foreground interjecting tropes of exile, re-integration; the hierarchies within the space of the rehabilitation centres re-narrativize ‘placement’ narratives of these women. Lack of ‘personal histories’ in the archival documents of the Bangladesh Central Association for the Rehabilitation of Women and the National Board of the Bangladesh Women’s Rehabilitation Program is substantiated by the literature of the ‘birangonas’ – stories, memoirs challenging the politics of care into a saga of partial information, accidental incorporation, forcible recognition, and ultimate denial. Co-existence of displacement and emplacement in Partition, exile, and memory literature enables a further study of these paradigmatic challenges so that the narratives of forgery, lack of information, partial acceptance in the familial and the religious setup in South Asia is understood within ‘placement’ and its varying implications.
