43 years have passed since the 1971 Bangladesh War in which 4,00,000 women were raped over nine months, 3 million people massacred and 70,000 foetuses aborted. The horrors of Operation Searchlight, perpetrated by Pakistan, still haunts survivors who recall how the horrors unfolded. Now, a true-life film on this dark period of history is coming up. Deebashree Mohanty met up with filmmaker Mrityunjay Devrat who traces the journey of some of the victims whose troubled lives have been highligted in his film titled Children of War
It was a sunny afternoon in May 1971, when I sensed the tension in my family for the first time. They were talking agitatedly — my mother was hysterical, my father was pacing. ‘They are here...’ we heard my grandfather whisper. Suddenly, my mother caught hold of me and shoved me on top of an almirah. ‘Whatever happens, don’t make any noise’ were her instructions. Just then the door burst open and an angry group of eight people barged in. They were carrying big knives and screaming at the top of their voices. My brother started to run but they stabbed him to death. They pulled my mother to the cot and two of them got on top of her. She was screaming in pain but I couldn’t understand why. The cot was shaking terribly but these men were not letting go of her. My father ran away. My grandfather sat there on his arm chair, motionless. He was no more. The men left after an hour. Thankfully, they had not bothered to look up. I gathered the courage to jump from where I was hiding. My mother was still breathing but there was a lot of blood around her. It was as if she was urinating blood. There were cuts on her chest as well. I ran to get help but it was too late.
— Urmila Ghosh (name changed) who works as a domestic help in Jal Vayu Vihar, Noida, recounting the horrors of Operation Searchlight in which women were gangraped. Ghosh survived and escaped with her neighbours to India
The time is 6 am on a foggy winter morning as Urmila Ghosh rings the bell of her master’s home in Jal Vayu Vihar, Sector 30, Noida. She has been working as a house help for 15 years now. Her eyes are mostly downcast and hands trembling but Urmi let her work speak for herself. She is often called the ‘master bartan wali’ — someone who completes her task in no time. Her employers say Urmi might have spoken hardly five lines or so in an entire year and keeps aloof most times. Her credentials are little known and her identity card is suspect but as long as she does the chores cheaply no one in this posh society is complaining. It took a Mrs Bhanu Bishwas in Flat No 216 to unravel the mystery behind this woman.
“Rain, sunshine or bitter cold — Urmi would brave it all but not miss a single day at work. I have to push her to take a day off to take care of her son. She has been our cook for eight years. Her husband, a rickshaw puller, passed away in 2010 but this made Urmi only more strong. On December 21, 2013, I was busy preparing for my mother’s return from the US after a month long trip that I noticed Urmi was more nervous than usual. She looked scared. When I asked her what the problem was, she broke down and muttered: ‘That man is asking me to get a police verification’. She told me that her identity card and verification papers had been forged 30 years ago when she came to Delhi in search of work. Urmi was a Bangladeshi who had managed to escape that afternoon of torture,” Bishwas tells you.
Urmi’s problems multiplied when she sneaked into India with her neighbour without valid papers. She had been raped umpteen times by his 24 year-old son who ‘liked’ to torture her before giving her food. There were a host of other problems but Urmi had to be with them. “She was finally rescued by a Bengali rickshaw-puller in Malviya Nagar 25 years ago but her problems did not end. “All her troubles here help her forget the nightmare of that May afternoon which separated her from her family forever,” Bishwas says.
The Bengali Sansthan, one of the few registered official Bengali maid agencies in New Delhi, has so far placed around 40,000 Bangladeshi women in Delhi alone. They are in huge numbers in Kolkata and Mumbai as well. Agency brokers help these maids get a new identity by giving them aliases and fake ID papers.
“In the 1990s, many of these women complained of ill-treatment. They were sacked the minute they shared details their details. Everyone in India knows what had transpired during Operation Searchlight. They felt awkward keeping a help who had either been raped or was the result of one. We had to do something to restore their sanity. Some of the agencies advised these helps to lie about their origins to be in their jobs. They have followed this pattern ever since,” Manohar who owns this agency says.
Four decades after this genocide by Pakistan, Mrityunjay Devrat, a Delhi-based filmmaker, has decided to make a motion picture on this huge human tragedy. “This film has not been an easy one. When I decided to make this socially relevant film with a direct message, little did I realise that I had set my sights on one of the most pathetic plight of women which was crying for attention. Children of War deals with the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 and dwells on the genocide in which 4,00,000 women were raped and three million people slaughtered,” Devrat says, adding that the film, to be released on February 21, had to be renamed from the original The Bastard Child to Children of War due to Censor Board issues.
As a child, Devrat lived in Dhaka, where his parents worked, not far from former Bangladeshi president the late Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s house and this helped him build the ambience of his debut venture. “We obviously were not allowed to shoot this film in Bangladesh so we had to be content with Indian locales,” he says.
Because genocidal rape was used as a war tool, Devrat decided to focus on that. “I wanted to name the film The Bastard Child but the Censor Board did not agree. I was initially frustrated with this double standards in the film industry but realised this was a part and parcel of Indian Cinema,” he says.
The film will be released in India before it going to any international film festivals but Devrat says he has got a positive response from the world’s best distributors.
Given that this operation was one of the most darkest periods of history, how did Devrat manage to do his researchIJ “The movie is based on historical evidence and true stories. Some parts are fictionalised because no one really knows the extent of the rapes and torture that took place back then. There is no documentation available as the Governments (Pakistan and India) don’t have any supporting files,” he explains.
Meenavati Vardan, a Maharashtrian NGO worker, had opened a recognised counselling-cum-training centre (hostel) for Bangladeshi refugees who managed to flee to west Delhi in March, 1972 (it is believed that Vardan had kept this building’s identity a secret). The hostel called Pannah was a two-storeyed dilapidated building housing 278 people who had escaped from East Pakistan back then. Although Vardan kept this hostel her best guarded secret till 2005, after her death, her elder son Murali brought down this building to construct a duplex for his family.
“My mother dedicated her life to the uplift of people. She may have given shelter to a few refugees from East Pakistan during 1971 but Panaah was not constructed only for refugees. It was just a hostel for the homeless. The housemates got jobs and moved out. The last occupant Gopal (49) died in 1983,” he recalls.
However, locals have a different story to tell.“When Madamji was fit and involved in the activities of Panaah, these inmates had something to look up to but once she started keeping ill, they were driven away. There was a 35-year-old widow Nazneen. She was Vardan madam’s favourite. She was married into the household of a prosperous landlord in East Pakistan but Operation Searchlight took everything from her. Her husband was killed, her eight-month-old daughter abducted, her in-laws beaten to death and she was kidnapped for 13 days before she managed to break a windowpane and flee. In those 13 days, Nazneen says she was raped by many men, seldom given food or water and beaten each time she resisted. When she finally fled and took shelter at a policeman’s house in the vicinity her troubles doubled.
“In November 1971, she found herself pregnant. Since the baby was already into the second term there was no chance of an abortion. Nazneen had to give birth to a child whose father she did not know. Barely some hours after delivering her baby, she burnt him alive. She worked with me for nine months but her life was in tatters. We admitted her to a rehabilitation centre for orphans and women in New Delhi. We haven’t heard from her since 1995,” Dr Ritesh Kalra, an occupant of Kidwai Nagar (east), says. Nazneen and many other women, he recalls, couldn’t come to terms with the horrors of those days which had serious implications on their health.
Devrat agrees. “Many men and women who survived the atrocities couldn’t live for many years. The memories of those months were torturous. Imagine living in a rape camp for days where many men violate you and then you are thrown into the street and forced to bear their children. The Pakistani Army and their razakars (local Bengali confidantes) would carry lists of Bengali women to be abducted and raped, sometimes 20 a day,” Devvrat says, explaining that the idea was to get them to bear children from Pakistani soldiers and thus, genetically engineer the future race of the region.
There has been a lot of talk about this and many who have braved to write about their experiences but lt Gen JFR Jacob’s books Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation and An Odyssey in War and Peace are considered the most true-to-life.
“I don’t like to talk about that summer. I can’t bear to recall the atrocities committed by Pakistani Armymen. I knew Tikka Khan, the then Pakistani General, very well. He was my student in Deolali in 1947 and a brilliant boy. But they called him the ‘Butcher of Bangladesh’ for a reason. Very seldom have I come across a man who can so cold-bloodedly order the murder and rape an entire generation of women. He commanded his men to rape and do so violently. He told them to kill without compassion. They slaughtered students at the Dacca University,” lt Gen JFR Jacob (retd), who was Chief of Staff of the Eastern Command during the 1971 War, recalls.
It was his strategy that defined India’s victory in that war within a span of 12 days. Jacob, now 90 plus, lives in Delhi with his family. Devrat, meanwhile, says that documenting such horrific tales on the big screen looked impossible but he got as close to reality as possible.
“Raima Sen plays a woman who was brutally raped. She was very moved while doing this film as was the entire starcast. There were times when my actors needed a break just to let go of the horrific journey. It was difficult for them to detach themselves from the roles they were playing,” Devrat says.
The starcast and the moving stories they tell in his film, Devrat feels, will make COW a hit because they have the power to connect with the audience. “While Pawan Malhotra has essayed one of the toughest roles and done a phenomenal job, Tilottama Shome portrays an inspiring character in the film. Besides Raima and Indraneil, veterans like Farooque Shaikh who is no more and Victor Banerjee brought to my film a huge temple of learning,” Devrat says. A boy and his father who fled to India in the 1970s also feature in the film.“They have sung a few numbers and the child has enacted a few scenes. He is superb,” the director says.
According to one statistics, there about 70,000 foetuses were aborted in those nine months in East Pakistan. It is believed that more than 40 per cent of these women managed to flee to India while some remained in Bangladesh. “Australian doctor Geoffrey Davis, who performed thousands of late-term abortions following the mass rapes during the war, compared this kind of atrocities to the Nazi lebensborn programme. For my film, I got a lot of information about this war through his papers,” Devrat says.
“You may get to see them as cooks and cleaners in our homes but in reality these people used to be very rich and powerful. They were sethjis in their own land. But when they lost everything, they came here to stitch back what was left of their lives by doing odd jobs,” Devrat explains with an example. Maushami and Bijoy Roy (names changed) owned one of the most popular jewellery stores in East Pakistan. With annual earnings of up to Rs 10 crore and more, the Roys were easily the richest people in Bangladesh. The childless couple used to visit AIIMS in New Delhi to explore fertility solutions. little did they know that they would become permanent residents of Neb Sarai and work as part-time attendants at this same hospital in the coming few months.
“Their four-storey bungalow in the heart of East Pakistan was burnt down to ashes. Bijoy’s parents were sleeping inside the house when this incident occurred. Their shop was raided and every item stolen or destroyed. There was no way that the Roys could recover from this loss.
Finally, after hiding in a secluded basement for two days without food or water, Bijoy managed to take a train to India. He was hoping that friends and relatives in Kolkata would help in starting afresh. But no one did. Then Maushami asked her AIIMS gynaecologist for help.
“Dr Geetika Maheshwari was the head surgeon at that time and a very warm person. She offered us her barsaati in Neb Sarai for a paltry sum of Rs 200 a month. We had no money, not even enough money to buy clothes. We borrowed some clothes from the doctor. She got us the job attendants in the hospital. For the first year, we worked for free and used to get food and sometimes a sleepover in the hospital. later, we were paid Rs 2000 a month.
“My husband died the next year because he couldn’t cope with the pressure. I continued working in the Gynaecology department. It was such an irony that a childless mother had to assist to-be mothers in delivering children. I used to treat each delivery as my own, each child as mine. I loved my job and took training as a nurse too,” Maushami recalls.
Today, this 88 year-old former head nurse of the Gynaecology and Pediatrician Department stays with the AIIMS hostel warden and is recuperating from dengue. She doesn’t want to be photograped nor does she want to tell her story. The nightmare of 1971 is best locked in the forgotten part of her brain.
“I would like to erase that part of history but that is not possible so I will go ahead and watch this film by Mrityunjay Devrat. I will also shed a tear or two but I will come back home happy to be alive,” she concludes.