In this book Mustafa Chowdhury describes the journey of the first contingent of 15 war babies that were embraced by their adoptive parents and family members as their own children when they reached their new homes in Canada back in July 1972. Products of one of the most outrageous crimes, the war babies were conceived by Bengali women who were the victims of sexual violence committed by the Pakistani military personnel during the Bengalis’ struggle for independence. Having given birth and relinquished their “unwanted” babies in secret anywhere between late December 1971 and early September 1972, the distressed birthmothers disappeared in anonymity.
Using rare historical records from the archives of the International Social Service, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Library and Archives Canada; as well records of the governments of Canada and Bangladesh and a variety of correspondences of provincial children’s aid societies (CAS) with prospective adoptive parents through the Montreal-based Families For Children (FFC), for the first time in history, Chowdhury reconstructed the story of sexual violence and its fall out – birth, abandonment, adoption of a number of war babies in Canada along with the adoption outcome.
Chowdhury touches on a volley of questions: Is there, in the minds of the adoptees, a feeling of loss from their country of birth? Or, while growing up in a multiracial family, did the adoptees fear a risk of losing a sense of how they present themselves to the world? Chowdhury examined the well-being of the war babies and their parents through the years with anecdotes of their rearing, nurturing, and becoming adults in Canada, the country they call “home” having successfully developed and negotiated their own sense of values and identities in multiracial Canada in a way that became positive and enriching. Readers would soon learn how, having no ambivalence about their identities in Canada where they came as mere infants, today they are proud of who they are.
As the first ever known book on the war babies of Bangladesh, their adoption in Canada and the outcome of that adoption, this book marks a new dimension in the historical narrative of the War of Liberation of Bangladesh having filled the historical gap in the historiography of Bangladesh.
A Canadian of Bangladeshi origin, Mustafa Chowdhury has graduate degrees in English Literature, Library
