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Students across the country have collected over 53,000 oral accounts of the 1971 liberation war from eyewitnesses, building what the Liberation War Museum says is the world’s biggest collection of oral stories.
Most of the stories were collected from elderly relatives and neighbours who were adult enough during the war to narrate their experiences at that time.
The students sent the stories to the Liberation War Museum. The museum authorities have published 10 books and 32 wallpapers from select stories of 40 districts so far. Collecting such oral stories started in 2004 while more will come in the coming days.
“This is the largest collection of oral stories about the liberation war as well as the related movements and conflicts. Such a big collection about a single event exists nowhere in the world,” Satyajit Roy Majumder, manager of education and publication at the Liberation War Museum, said.
“The students receive a thank-you letter from the museum in recognition of their role in collecting oral stories. We keep the list of all students and publish it in books,” he said.
At the school level, the Liberation War Museum authorities first started promoting the spirit of the war among students at a high school in Panchagarh in 2004.
Later, a bus was included in the programme in 2007 to transport war-time artefacts and documents to different schools. This bus later became known as a mobile liberation war museum. Another such museum was later included in the programme.
All 64 districts have been covered by the two mobile museums, some two to three times. Since 2004, this has evolved into a collection of more than 53,000 oral stories.
The students were encouraged to interview their relatives who had witnessed and taken part in the war, write those accounts down, and send those to the museum authorities.
The Liberation War Museum operates mobile museums for school, college, university, and madrasah students. Artefacts are presented to the students, who learn about the liberation war from those.
Till December last year, the mobile liberation war museums reached 2,253 educational institutions in 433 upazilas. 14,14,441 students visited the museums along with 10,81,551 general people. Mobile museums stay for 15-30 days in a district and go to educational institutions in different upazilas every day.
“By visiting the museums, students learn about the liberation war as well as its causes and consequences along with the events of the Pakistan period. They also learn about global humanity and the Bengali tradition of communal harmony,” Satyajit said.
“Pictures, paintings, and other artefacts teach students about the time and events that happened during and before the war,” he said.
Along with photographs, mobile museums display weapons used in the war, cameras, ropes, and different wartime documents. However, all those are replicas.
A teacher in each school coordinates between the institution and the museum authorities. They are called network teachers. Their work includes maintaining communication with the museum authorities in collecting stories and designing the curriculum that involves deciding how the chapter on the liberation war in the textbook will be taught.
So far, 2,639 teachers have been included in the programme and they are maintaining communication with students as well as the museum authorities.
The museum authorities also invite students of different educational institutions in Dhaka to visit the main museum. So far, 3,08,100 students from 979 educational institutions have visited the museum.
Fahima Yesmin, a ninth-grader at Raigonj Pilot School, collected a story of two women from her aunt Tania Begum, who was 15 in 1971. The two women had been raped by the Pakistani army and became mentally unstable. They would roam around aimlessly.
“Bleeding started when I was in a paddy field. I was leaving the village, and it was raining a bit. The military was firing. We went to the road in this situation. I was having labour pain.
“I could not stand up properly and fell on the ground. At that time, my daughter was born. The firing started again. My mother-in-law and I started running with the newborn to the camp of freedom fighters,” Anita Sarker told this story to her granddaughter Joysree Sarker, a ninth-grader at Rajoir Girls School.
Genocide, crimes against humanity, rape, torture, looting, religious humiliation, killing, the struggle of women and elderly people, the role of perpetrators, and many other aspects of the war have been reflected in the oral accounts.
“Along with the true narration of the war, we are trying to instil world humanity in students’ minds so that they can think in an unbiased way and become informed and conscious citizens,” Satyajit said.
