A war inherited: Birangana Sabitri Nayek's tears tell of the real cost of 1971

"I thought I would die. I thought I would die for my country. So be it. I would have no regrets."

When Sabitri Nayek said this over the phone from her Habiganj house, she was not speaking metaphorically. She was describing a calculation she made in 1971, in the middle of the night, when Pakistani soldiers dragged her out of her home.

"There was a military camp in Surma Tea Garden," she told me. "I was sleeping beside my mother at my elder brother's house. Around 10pm, they kicked the door open and took me away."

Her mother tried to stop them. Sabitri said she was struck on the head with a rifle.

At that moment, Sabitri believed she was being taken to be shot. She believed death was certain. What mattered to her, she said, was that it would happen for her country.

Instead of execution, she was taken to the camp.

She was held there for eight months.

What Sabitri described sits inside a wider, documented reality of 1971. Sexual violence was used as a weapon of war to terrorise communities and break resistance. But her words – "no regrets" – point to something often missing from how that history is remembered.

Women did not experience the war only as victims.

They experienced it as participants.

Some women participated openly, with weapons.

Taramon Bibi, later awarded Bir Protik, joined the Mukti Bahini as a teenager in Sector 11. She received arms training and fought in direct combat.

Kakon Bibi infiltrated Pakistani camps disguised as a beggar to gather information; she was captured, tortured, raped, and later returned to the frontline.

Sakhina Begum took part in local resistance operations and killed armed collaborators during an attack in her area. The machete she used is now preserved at the Liberation War Museum.

We know these names because they were recorded. Many more women participated in ways that were essential but less documented, and therefore easier for history to overlook.

Women sheltered freedom fighters, cooked meals, stitched clothes, hid weapons, carried messages, and moved information between guerrilla units. 

They transported arms by boat at night, concealed rifles in rice barns, and stood guard while fighters slept. In refugee camps and border areas, women served as caregivers and nurses, treating wounded fighters under severe conditions.

Sabitri's participation took a different form.

"For eight months, I had only a blouse and one piece of cloth," she said. She remembers being given bread and water, sometimes dog meat, and being threatened with a gun if she refused.

When Bangladesh became independent, she said she heard victory processions from inside the camp.

"I thought maybe God would save me now," she said. "Then I feared they would kill me."

One night, she was thrown into a ditch beneath tea saplings and left there. She survived. A young man found her the next morning and took her home. Her mother sold household items to pay for treatment. A doctor treated her without charge. It took three months before she could walk again.

Finding Sabitri was not a straight line; it was a relay. A freedom fighter and filmmaker – Khijir Hayat Khan, my mentor at university – gave me a name at the Liberation War Museum: Amena apa. 

Amena apa connected me to Akash Munda, the person responsible for ensuring freedom fighters' rights in Chunarughat area of Habiganj. And Akash, after a few calls and careful introductions, finally connected me to Sabitri Nayek. By the time her voice reached my phone, it felt less like I had "found" an interviewee and more like I had followed a living chain of memory – carried from one keeper of 1971 to another.

After the war, the country gave women like Sabitri a name: Birangana – war heroine; she now receives an allowance of Tk30,000 every three months from the state.  

The title was meant to place honour where society often placed shame. It was also an admission that what happened to these women was not a private tragedy; it was part of the nation's history. Even then, recognition could not guarantee belonging. Rehabilitation existed. Acceptance did not always follow.

We grew up in a Bangladesh that was already free. For many of us, 1971 arrived in neat shapes: chapters, slogans, songs, red-and-green posters appearing every December. Victory Day could feel like a finished story – an ending we stepped into without imagining the middle.

Then Sabitri spoke.

When she said, "I thought I would die for my country. So be it," she wasn't performing bravery. She was describing a decision made in the dark. That sentence changes the temperature of everything we think we know about 1971. 

It reminds us that freedom was built not only in battlefields and negotiations, but also inside ordinary homes – and inside the bodies of women who were dragged out of them.

And it clarifies something else: women were not only acted upon during the war. They acted. That fuller picture matters, because it restores women to the category history often denies them – participants.

This is where the present begins to enter – not as a slogan, but as a mirror.

Because the inheritance from 1971 is not only the flag. It is a kind of readiness: to keep doing what must be done even when safety is uncertain and applause is not promised. That is why Sabitri's sentence stays with us. We hear its echo in the women who keep classrooms running in neglected places, who document abuse, who defend others in courtrooms, who work in clinics where resources are thin, who challenge violence and exclusion in ways that rarely trend and rarely get rewarded. Different battles, different uniforms – the same refusal to wait for perfect conditions before acting.

Sabitri told me something else, "When 16 December comes, when I stand under the flag, tears come to my eyes." I keep thinking about that – how victory arrived to her first as distant noise, heard from inside captivity. For us, Victory Day is often public: parades, speeches, the anthem playing cleanly through loudspeakers. For her, it is also private: memory returning like pressure in the chest.

So when we say we are inspired, it cannot be a soft sentence. It has to mean we are willing to carry the harder part of what they left us – not only celebration, but responsibility. Not only remembrance, but the courage to keep choosing the country, again and again, in our own time.