Ami Birangona Bolchi/A War Heroine, I Speak (2023)
First published in 1994, Neelima Ibrahim’s Ami Birangona Bolchi is a painful and unhealed wound that encapsulates the testimonies of seven Birangonas (War Heroines) from seven separate walks of life. These poignant accounts of imprisonment, torture and rape of Bengali women in Pakistan Army camps during the War of Liberation (1971), emanate from a tailor’s daughter and the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, from a high-ranking government official, to the daughter of a politician. The single common factor in the lives of all these women from diverse social, political and family backgrounds is that none of them have known defeat in the face of the harrowing struggle they were plunged into.
Time and time again, the Birangonas of this land have been subjected to ceaseless ostracization and oppression. First, during the War of Liberation at the hands of the Pakistani soldiers and their local collaborators, only to be vilified at the hands of most Bangalis in post-war Bangladesh. In both cases, the feminine got exploited – in the dual role of a weapon of war for Pakistan, and a token card for Bengali nationalism.
Born out of three months of arduous rehearsals in 2023, the production Ami Birangona Bolchi presented by Spardha ITC wholly draws from the real-life accounts of the seven Birangonas published in Neelima Ibrahim’s documentation in its entirety, except for a few edits in the vernacular. In this gargantuan and landmark endeavor, Spardha has been enriched by the role of a force of allyship played by Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.
The production was revived again in 2025, in the aftermath of July 36 Uprising, when the Birangonas were once again systematically erased from public remembrance by the patriarchy.
