In the reproduction of national identity, there is an emphasis on the significance of privatised domestic space, women's involvement in the national struggle, and a feminised collective memory in historically male-constructed nations. Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age (2007) and Roma Tearne's Bone China (2010), in this context, represent the positive transformation of women's roles in the public and private spheres, as well as the understanding of femininity and masculinity in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh during the independence war. This article aims to discuss gendered parameters of national identity and collective memory in contemporary South Asian women's writing. Her courage, tolerance, intelligence, perseverance and self-respect deconstruct the traditional passive role of a woman in a colonised nation.
Rehana suppresses her motherly affection and inspires her son Sohail and daughter Maya to fulfill their mission of liberating Bangladesh.
Rehana, a spirited widow based on Anam’s grandmother, is born and brought up in Calcutta, married and widowed in Karachi and struggles a lot throughout the novel as a refugee in West Bengal to get the legal custody of her children as well as to establish her own social identity. Anam emerges as a native writer from the shell of her diasporic identity while dealing with the suffering of Bangladeshi people in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan turning three million people dead, thirty thousand women brutally raped and millions others migrated. Such traditional representation of the exploitation of women’s body in history has been deconstructed by Bangladeshi diasporic novelist Tahmima Anam in her debut novel A Golden Age (2007).
Women had always been portrayed as exploited figures in the war history where the brutality of war and the suffering of nation are measured with the number of victimised and raped women of that particular nation.
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