‘Cartographies of struggle’: remapping the plight of Bengali women in/after the 1971 war in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ethnic conflict influences the lives of people beyond geopolitical boundaries. In the last two decades, literature from Bangladesh and India has produced narratives of the women who experienced the 1971 war of Bangladesh. Few works have portrayed the stories of Bengali women who migrated to Pakistan after partition to escape their economic struggles and social stigmas. Kamila Shamsie, in her novel Kartography, portrays the lives of people in Karachi amidst the 1971 ethnic struggle between Bengalis and Pakistanis as well as the 1980s ethnic struggle between Pathans and Muhajirs. The novel exemplifies how women become vulnerable targets in any ethnic conflict even if they do not have direct involvement in it. Shamsie’s novel shows that women form cartography contingent upon their narratives of struggle because mapping their existence might not correlate with the political map of a nation. This paper discusses Shamsie’s approach to elaborating on how the lives of women were affected by the 1971 war, connecting them in a single map beyond political lines.