Dead Reckoning : Memories Of The 1971 Bangladesh War

Sarmila Bose

Sarmila Bose is an Indian-American journalist and academic. She is currently a senior research associate at the Centre for International Studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, allegedly a propaganda a book on the Bangladesh Liberation War. In her book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, Bose claims that atrocities were committed by both sides in the conflict, but that memories of the atrocities had been "dominated by the narrative of the victorious side", pointing to Indian and Bangladeshi "myths" and "exaggerations" which were not historically or statistically plausible. While the book does not exonerate the West Pakistani forces, it claims that the army officers "turned out to be fine men doing their best to fight an unconventional war within the conventions of warfare". The book was criticised by Bangladeshi anthropologist Naeem Mohaiemen in the BBC for an alleged bias in the selection of her sources; Mohaiemen also criticized her articles in Economic & Political Weekly on the same subject.[9] She has responded to three of her most notable critics — Naeem Mohaiemen, Urvashi Butalia, and Srinath Raghavan — in the same publication.[10]She has also authored Money, Energy, and Welfare: the state and the household in India's rural electrification policy, published by Oxford University Press in 1993