Barani Institute of Information Technology, Rawalpindi

UNKNOWN 237

Book: Of Blood and Fire
Part: First 70 pages.
Bibliographic Entry: Imam, J. (1990). Of Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of
Bangladesh's War of Independence. Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.
Introduction:
Jahanara Imam, the famous author witnessed the whole Liberation war and the
struggle firsthand. From her journal we get a window through which we can get
an overall idea of what was happening on a daily basis during the war. The
author was born in Murshidabad of India in the year 1929. She belongs to a
Muslim Family. She completed her Master's and Bachelor's degree in Bengali
literature and in Education respectively. She completed both the degrees from
Dhaka University. She got a scholarship in the USA as she was really a good
student. Again she went to the USA as a visitor in a program as a writer. The
great author died in the year 1994. The well-known author Jahanara Imam was
present during the entire war for liberation, and the book she kept during that
time offers us an idea of what daily life was like at the time. In her previous
works, the author would routinely leave off the last three days of May as well as
the first day of June. The length of the struggle for independence would have
necessitated a book that is 270 pages long if it were written in the traditional
diary format; instead, the book only has 168 pages.
On April 3rd, 1986, the imam said that she had learnt that the Pakistani army
had launched a catastrophic offensive on a region of historic Dhaka known as
Jinjira via Rafique, a friend of the imam's husband. She had obtained this
information from Rafique. Tanks and artillery were used to begin the onslaught
that was undertaken by the Pakistani Army in Jinjira. The military of Pakistan,
on the other hand, did not provide permission to any of the outlets to publish
such an article. They, on the other hand, asserted that they were the ones who
were in violation of the rules. That indicates that they were killed in the process.
However, the conduct in and of itself was not acceptable. According to what
Jahanra Imam has written, there were two more people who were murdered.
Because the book is structured similarly to a diary, all of the events are
presented in the order in which they occurred. The author began maintaining a
diary on March 1 of this year. It was immediately apparent that the author had a
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