FICTIONALIZING THE FALL OF DHAKA: A NEW HISTORICIST READING OF SARMILA BOSE'S UNDER SUCH A SHELTERING SKY

Abstract

This paper offers a New Historicist reading of Sarmila Bose's novella Under Such a Sheltering Sky (2021), which narrates the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War through the intertwined perspectives of a Bengali family in Dhaka and a West Pakistani army officer. Drawing on Stephen Greenblatt's and Louis Montrose's accounts of the reciprocal "historicity of texts" and "textuality of history," the paper argues that the novel does not function as a transparent record of the Fall of Dhaka but as a text that actively participates in producing a particular kind of historical meaning. Close analysis of the novel's dual focalization, its selective compression of mass violence relative to individual encounter, and its consistent relocation of political stakes into domestic space shows a text structurally organized around the plurality, rather than the settlement, of historical truth a position the novel states nearly explicitly through its own recurring aphorism that “one man's freedom fighter is always another man's terrorist.” Reading the novel alongside the contested historiography of 1971, including the documented controversy surrounding Bose's own earlier nonfiction, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War (2011), the paper argues that the novel's silences particularly its near-absence of the war's extensively documented sexual violence are as significant to its historical positioning as its inclusions. The paper contributes what appears to be the first sustained literary-critical treatment of this text, and proposes a method for reading contested war fiction that treats historiographical dispute as a co-text for literary analysis rather than a standard against which fiction must be verified.