The Search
Shaheen Akhtar
Translated by Ella Dutta
Zubaan
359 pages
Rs395
How do you explain the slow murder that rape is? Or how women’s bodies become the most brutal of war weapons, spoils of war? The biranganas — heroic women, literally — of Bangladesh, who speak through Shaheen Akhtar’s novel, The Search (Talaash), can probably explain this best.
No one will ever know the exact number of women raped during the Bangladesh war of liberation in 1971. Conservative estimates say close to 4,00,000 women were raped repeatedly by gangs of Pakistani soldiers. Post-independence, politicians hailed these …