Jahanara Imam

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jahanara Imam (May 3, 1929—June 26, 1994) was a Bangladeshi writer and political activist. She is most widely remembered for her endeavor to bring war criminals of the Bangladesh Liberation War to trial.

1 Biography
2 Effort to try war crimes
3 Literary Works
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Picture taken by Mufti Munir
From http://www.adhunika.org

Jahanara Imam was born in a conservative Muslim family in Murshidabad, now in West Bengal, India. She, however, received higher education and studied in Carmichael College in Rangpur and institutions in Kolkata. After the partition of India, her family moved to Mymensingh. Imam joined them after completing her studies from Kolkata and started teaching at a local girl's school. In 1947, she married Shariful Alam Imam Ahmed. They moved to Dhaka after a few years, and Jahanara Imam started teaching at Siddheswari Girl's School, of which she became the Headmistress later. After taking training in education in Dhaka, she went to USA as a Fullbright scholar in 1964-65 to get further training in education. Jahanara Imam later got a Masters degree in Bangla literature from Dhaka University.

In 1971, the Bangladesh Liberation War broke out. Jahanara Imam's eldest son, Rumi, joined the Mukti Bahini to fight the Pakistani forces. Bottled in Dhaka with no information about her son, Jahanara kept a diary to express her thoughts. Rumi never returned from the war, and Shariful Imam died following an interrogation by the Pakistan army. After Bangladesh achieved independence, Imam stareted a literary career, and her most notable publication was that of her diary. In 1981 she was diagnosed with mouth cancer. In nineties, Jahanara Imam became the central figure of a political movement to try the 1971 war criminals. Imam died of cancer in 1994.

[edit] Effort to try war crimes

Jahanara Imam led a relatively quite life until 1992, when she suddenly came to the forefront of political dynamics of Bangladesh. She helped organise the Ghatak-Dalal Nirmul Committee(committee to exterminate killers and collaborators), and became its public face. The committee called for trial of people who committed crimes against humanity in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War in collaboration with the Pakistany forces. In a highly controversial symbolic act, Ghatak-Dalal Nirmul Committee set up mock trials in Dhaka known as Gonoadalot (Court of the people) and sentenced war criminals. Jahanara Imam and 24 other intellectuals were charged with treason. The charges were never dropped.

Though Imam and her associates were seeking to try crimes 20 years old at that point, their acts caused deep reverberations in the political arena of Bangladesh. In the first free elections in decades, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) had just come to power. Imam's effort was seen by the government to undermine its power. Many of the people charged by the Gonoadalot were from Jamat-e-Islami, an Islamist party many saw as supportive of the BNP government.