An Oxford University Press Pakistan publication Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, written by Yasmin Saikia, has won the Oral History Association's 2013 Book Award.
The Oral History Association of the Georgia State University, USA, seeks to bring together people interested in oral history as a way of collecting and interpreting human memories to foster knowledge and human dignity. Established in 1993, the Oral History Association Book Award recognizes a published book that uses oral history to make a significant contribution to contemporary scholarship and to the understanding of important theoretical issues in oral history.
Yasmin Saikia and Sean Field are co-recipients of the award, the citation for which released by the selection committee of the Oral History Association reads as follows: "Saikias and Fields works are model community studies that counter nationalist and official histories, but they also provide more universal insights about interviewing about sensitive topics in sensitive situations, how individual trauma affects families and communities, how the powerless assert their agency and question immorality. Both books have global relevance in helping us understand the impacts of injustice, the courage of ordinary people, and provide some attempts at recovery by documenting the hidden stories that re-orient the history of these places."
Based on several oral accounts, Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh traces the numerous incidents of gender violence in the 1971 war of Bangladesh. The author relates the story of the war as a human event of individual losses and personal tragedies suffered by both women and men. Women talk of rape and torture on a mass scale, and of the loss of status and citizenship. In addition, a few men recollect their wartime brutality as well as their post-war efforts to regain a sense of humanity, to reconcile and heal unresolved traumas. By combining oral testimony with archival research, this book sheds new light on the social, political and cultural history of the subcontinent after Partition to show the gaps between people and their governments, memories and history.
Yasmin Saikia is Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies and Professor of History, Arizona State University. She is the author of numerous articles and two books, In the Meadows of Gold and Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India.