DEAD RECKONING Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War. SARMILA BOSE. Dead Reckoning Memories ofthe 1971. Bangladesh '~far. SARMILA BOSE. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. OXFORD VNIVERSITY PRESS. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective. Jun 16, 2011. The book - Dead Reckoning is by Sarmila Bose.

1. Dead Reckoning By Sarmila Bose Pdf Free Download

Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is a controversial book on the Bangladesh Liberation War written by Sarmila Bose.^[1] The book caused an uproar in Bangladesh, where it has been accused of flawed and biased methodology, historical revisionism and downplaying war crimes.^[2][3][4][5]

• 2Controversies
  • 2.1Criticism

Overview[edit]

Bose uses personal interviews from all sides of the war.^[6] It accuses Bangladeshis and Pakistanis of 'myth making.'^[6]

Controversies[edit]

Criticism[edit]

Bose's study has been criticized by various Indian historians and academics for numerous inaccuracies and excessive reliance on Pakistani military and government sources, thereby giving a low estimate of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.^[7] Researchers have accused her of flawed and biased methodology, historical revisionism and downplaying^[8]war crimes.^[9][3][4][5] In several cases, she misquoted her interviewees and other academics that she cites as reference.^[10] Bose has been criticised for her bias towards Pakistani Army in the language she deploys – Bangladeshi accounts are labelled 'claims', Pakistani officers' accounts are straightforward accounts.^[11] Bose's impartiality has also been questioned due to her role as an advocate of US arms sales to Pakistan.^{[12][13][14][15][16][17]}

Srinath Raghavan, the author of 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, calls Bose's book a 'disturbing misrepresentation of the 1971 war'^[18] and further writes that 'it is impossible to review the entire catalogue of evasions, obfuscations, omissions and methodological errors that suffuses the book'.^[19]

Minimization of rapes[edit]

The most severe criticisms against Bose report that Bose's claims that allegations of genocide and rape by the Pakistan Army were exaggerated by Bangladesh and India.^[20][21][22] She is alleged to have presented selective interviews of witnesses in favour of her opinions.^[9][16]

Bose has been criticized long before publishing the book for her research methodologies. She accepts the statement of Pakistani Brigadier Taj that no women were tortured in Rajarbag to be true even though Taj was not present during the operation. But she invalidates the testimony of an eyewitness of the incidents of rape done by Pakistani Army as the witness is illiterate. In another case, she asserted that since one rape victim feared for her life, she must have consented to having sex with Pakistani soldiers.^[23]

Bose's book implies a claim to being the 'first' to dissect the death toll of 3 million in 1971, Zunaid Kazi had already documented 12 different media estimates of death tolls.^[1]

Response[edit]

Bose has responded to three of her most notable critics – Naeem Mohaiemen, Urvashi Butalia, and Srinath Raghavan.^[24] Sarmila Bose has responded to her critics,^[24] and maintains that her research is unbiased and those she calls her critics who were accusing her of 'betrayal' were 'those who have profited for so long from mythologizing the history of 1971.'^[6] Bose also maintains that books written by Pakistanis on Pakistan Army's atrocity during 1971, were 'limited'.^[25]

References[edit]

Dead Reckoning By Sarmila Bose Pdf Free Download

1. ^ ^abLawson, Alastair (16 June 2011). 'Controversial book accuses Bengalis of 1971 war crimes'. BBC. Retrieved 30 December 2013.
2. ^Ahsan, Syed Badrul (13 July 2011). 'Sarmila Bose and bad arithmetic'. The Daily Star. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
3. ^ ^ab'Naeem Mohaiemen, 'Flying Blind: Waiting for a real Reckoning on 1971', Economic & Political Weekly, vol xlvi no 36, 3 September 2011'(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on 25 April 2012. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
4. ^ ^ab'Sarmila Bose, 'Dead Reckoning': A Response'; Naeem Mohaiemen, 'Another Reckoning'; Economic & Political Weekly, vol xlvi no 53, 31 December 2011'(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on 23 July 2013. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
5. ^ ^abZeitlin, Arnold (17 November 2013). 'Thoughts on Dead Reckoning'. The Daily Star. Retrieved 16 December 2013.
6. ^ ^abcBose, Sarmila (9 May 2011). 'Myth-busting the Bangladesh war of 1971'. Opinion (1). Aljazeera. Aljazeera. Retrieved 3 May 2017.
7. ^Bergman, David (24 April 2014). 'Questioning an iconic number' (1). The Hindu. The Hindu. Retrieved 28 September 2016.
8. ^Bhaumik, Subir (29 April 2011). 'Book, film greeted with fury among Bengalis'. aljazeera. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
9. ^ ^abSahgal, Gita (18 December 2011). 'Dead Reckoning: Disappearing stories and evidence'. The Daily Star. Retrieved 19 December 2013.
10. ^Mohaimen, Naeem (3 October 2011). 'Flying Blind: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971'. The Daily Star. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
11. ^Butalia, Urvashi (13 August 2011). 'She Does Not Know Best'. Tehelka. Archived from the original on 18 July 2013. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
12. ^Sobhan, Zafar. 'Bose is more Pakistani than Jinnah the Quaid'. The Sunday Guardian. Retrieved 16 December 2013.
13. ^Mookherjee, Nayanika (7 June 2011). 'This account of the Bangladesh war should not be seen as unbiased'. The Guardian. Retrieved 19 December 2013.
14. ^Raghavan, Srinath (30 July 2011). 'A Dhaka Debacle'. The Indian Express. Retrieved 19 December 2013.
15. ^Zia, Afia (12 January 2012). 'Reading and writing 1971'. The Express Tribune. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
16. ^ ^abNasir, ABM (14 March 2011). 'Return of Sarmila Bose'. bdnews24. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
17. ^Milam, William (11 April 2005). 'The right stuff: F-16s to Pakistan is wise decision'. The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 16 December 2013.
18. ^http://indianexpress.com/article/news-archive/web/a-dhaka-debacle
19. ^http://indianexpress.com/article/news-archive/web/a-dhaka-debacle/
20. ^Woodrow Wilson Center Woodrow Wilson Center Book Launch event
21. ^Anatomy of Violence: Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971Archived 25 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine by Sarmila Bose in the Economic and Political Weekly, 8 October 2005
22. ^Losing the Victims: Problems of Using Women as Weapons in Recounting the Bangladesh WarArchived 25 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine by Sarmila Bose in the Economic and Political Weekly, 22 September 2007
23. ^Rahman, Mashuqur (December 2007). 'The continuing rape of our history'. The Daily Star. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
24. ^ ^abBose, Sarmila (31 December 2011). ''Dead Reckoning': A Response'. Economic & Political Weekly. 46 (53): 76–79. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
25. ^Bose, Sarmila (2011). Dead Reckoning. Columbia University Press. p. 195.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

The eyes would widen and the head move from side to side in the striking Bengali gesture of affirmation. 'How many were killed?' we would ask refugees who had fled from areas where the Pakistani army and its auxiliaries were attempting to suppress the Bangladesh independence movement. 'Lakhs and lakhs!' came the answer. Journalists who covered the Bangladesh war in 1971 remember the phrase with a mixture of amusement and frustration. Lakh is the Indian word for 100,000, and it sometimes seemed as if the majority of Bengalis knew no other number, or, if they did, it was 'crore' – ten million – at least when describing the atrocities and depredations of their West Pakistani oppressors. Reporters had no doubt that there were such atrocities. Some of them witnessed bloody incidents or their aftermath, but for the most part correspondents had to rely on the accounts of others. Between the protestations of the Pakistani military, for whom all Bengali deaths were those of 'miscreants' or criminals, and the manifest exaggerations of inflamed and sometimes bereaved East Bengalis, it was difficult to steer a measured course.

The numbers mattered, and matter still, because they make the difference between seeing the war as a tragedy and seeing it as a terrible crime, indeed as a genocide. That in turn is important because it profoundly affects the way in which the peoples of South Asia understand both their separate and their common histories. Much that is both wrong and dangerous in the subcontinent today, from Pakistan's paranoia to India's extreme self-righteousness and Bangladesh's sense that it is neglected and ignored, can be traced to the 1971 conflict, even if the roots go back further still. Sarmila Bose's attempt to set the numerical record straight in her aptly named book is a contribution to a debate that ought to have taken place a long time ago but instead has hardly started. It is a grim kind of accountancy, because even when she concludes, as she often does, that fewer, sometimes far fewer, died than claimed, still we are dealing with murder, rape, unnatural deaths and the destruction of individuals and their families in a land that had joyously embraced the idea of Pakistan less than a generation before.

Her method is to take the worst of the alleged atrocities, and then to attempt to reconstruct and quantify them by interviewing the participants on both or, rather, all sides. She wove back and forth between Pakistan and Bangladesh, seeing mainly retired Pakistani officers in the west, and survivors of killings and their relatives in the east, as well as members of the non-Bengali and non-Muslim minorities. Bose (pictured) seems to have been the first to do this. It is a method not without its problems. My own feeling, remembering how charming Pakistani officers, like their Indian equivalents, can be, is that she may have been a bit too ready to accept the honourable, just-trying-to-do-our-duty image that those officers naturally prefer to convey, and that she may also be too convinced that the received wisdom needs to be entirely overturned. Yet when she underlines how stretched the Pakistani forces were, how unready they were for the role of suppression that was thrust on them, and how perplexed they were in the face of a Bengali hostility that seemed to them so disproportionate, what she writes rings very true.

Bose's case-by-case arithmetic leads her in the end to estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in 1971. One lakh, in other words, at most. One cannot say that she absolutely proves this, but her evidence points in that direction, and, in any case vastly away from the figure of 3 million still proclaimed in Bangladesh and India. The wider revision of the conflict's history she implies exonerates the Pakistani government of any plot to rule the east by force, suggests that the Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman let the genie of nationalism out of the bottle but could not control it, and insists that the conflict was a civil war within East Pakistan. The killings by Bengalis of non-Bengali minorities, of Bengalis who stuck with the idea of a united Pakistan, and even of some Hindu Bengalis – all of whose deaths were attributed at the time to the Pakistani army – needs to be reckoned in any fair balance. The notion that the Bangladesh movement was non-violent, even Gandhian, was always fantastical. Bose has written a book that should provoke both fresh research and fresh thinking about a fateful turning point in the history of the subcontinent.

• This article was amended on 4 July 2011. The original referred to a 'crore' as one million. This has been corrected.