Remembering the dead without graves

by Aanmona Priyadarshini

On July 19, 2024, Md Sohel Rana went to join the protest; he never returned home and has remained missing since then. His mother often visits the Rayer Bazar Public Graveyard, where more than a hundred unidentified bodies were buried during the July mass uprising. — Sabrina Afroz Sabonti

WHILE many of us remember the July Insurgency with wounds still tender, flesh unstitched by time, grief pulsing beneath the skin, the state, having failed to enact any meaningful reform to tend to our wounds, offers instead a rehearsed performance of patriotism, a carefully scripted spectacle to honour July. Hatirjheel’s sky shimmers with choreographed drones, while the North City allocates 24 crores for building monuments and sculptures at Bijoy Sarani. Down south, a 90-foot phallic spire is planned to be raised at Osmani Udyan, bearing the engraved names of the July martyrs. And yet, amidst this blaze of light and orchestrated pride, a mother kneels before a mass grave in Rayerbazar that does not bear her son’s name — Mohammad Sohel Rana — who was brutally killed during the July massacre. For her, the grandeur of monuments offers no refuge. Rather, she pleads: ‘Ami tor kachhey shudhu ekta jinish chaisilam. Amar babar kobor ta amare de.’ (I asked only one thing of you. Give me my son’s grave).

While the state carves memory into stone and steel, the grief of countless families remains — unwritten, unmarked and without a place to rest. Their cries are drowned beneath the clang of construction, the shimmer and thunder of drone-lit skies and the constant hum of myth-making machinery, where political narratives swell louder than grief. In this dense air of noise, those lost lives dwell not in the repetition of slogans, but in the pauses between them — in the silence, that shadowed another space where the dead linger, unburied and unacknowledged, waiting without graves.

But this silence is neither passive nor mute; it is a quiet force that expresses what words cannot endure to hold. In a country where everyone is speaking, through chants, headlines, Facebook posts and proclamations, perhaps it is silence that speaks the loudest. It carves out a space that insists we sit with the uncomfortable and ‘unpatriotic’ questions: whose lives are grievable? Who gets to decide who deserves remembrance? What happens when the dead are denied even the dignity of a grave with a name? How does a nation fail to grieve its own disowned children? And the most aching but unanswered question of all: how is this ‘spectral absence’ produced, and why is it allowed to endure even in post-July Bangladesh?

Part of the answer is woven into our blood and bone. As the uprising swelled, borne of fury against corruption, deepening inequality and authoritarian rule, the fascist regime of Sheikh Hasina responded not with dialogue, but with lethal, deliberate force. Within days, hundreds were killed, many disappeared and countless others were buried in haste, anonymously, without names, without rites, without mourning. Bodies were removed before families could identify them. Some were dumped in municipal burial grounds, some were thrown in the river, others reportedly cremated. Testimonies from witnesses and hospital workers describe truckloads of bodies taken under cover of darkness to the city’s edges, where mass graves were dug quickly and without record. No ledgers held their names; no prayers sealed their passing. Only the earth remembers, its silence heavy with the weight of witness.

According to a Daily Star report, 80 unclaimed bodies were buried in July, and another 34 in August, at the burial ground beside the Rayerbazar Mass Killing Site Memorial by the volunteer organisation Anjuman Mufidul Islam. But the numbers exceed what has been officially recorded. As of now, the Health Directorate’s website lists 834 confirmed names and identified bodies of those killed, while other sources, drawing on available data, estimate the death toll to be between 1,400 and 1,581. This stark discrepancy reveals that nearly half of those killed remain unidentified. The violence inflicted upon them did not end with the taking of life; it extended into erasure, a deliberate attempt to strip their deaths of political meaning, to render their absence unseen.

This active silencing of the dead persists, even in swadhin, independent Bangladesh, where freedom was once meant to carry their names. An interim government, born from the blood of these very bodies, and political parties whose members once fought alongside the fallen, take no meaningful steps, make no urgent call, offer no names to the unnamed graves. DNA testing continues at a sluggish pace. A special cell established to invite families to register their lost one’s names who were killed, disappeared or buried as unclaimed still remains largely ignored, not because families lack the desire to know the fate of their loved ones, but because the government has repeatedly failed to gain their trust. They fear being harassed, humiliated or dismissed by the very law enforcement agencies implicated in their loss.

Why do a government that claims the legacy of July and political parties cloaked in the promise of an ‘inclusive nation’ remain indifferent to the task of making remembrance itself inclusive, to extending the dignity of memory to all who died, not just to the few deemed worthy of recall? The answer to this question lies in a grim and unsettling truth: a moral economy of the dead, where lives lost are weighed and measured by the quiet, enduring violence of class. Most of the unidentified bodies belong to the calloused hands of the working class, whose names are politically deemed too insignificant to trace, even in death. On the other hand, the July uprising has handed the state — and those eager to inherit its power — an abundance of middle-class martyrs: familiar faces from schools, colleges and universities, poised to captivate public imagination and stir the nation’s grief into patriotic fervour. Therefore, they feel no urgency to identify the unnamed dead of the working class, whose labour-worn bodies evoke little sympathy in a middle-class conscience that too often recognises grief only when it bears a familiar face.

The heroic tales and heart-breaking video clips of Faiyaj, Abu Sayed, Snigdho, Nafiz and many like them are deemed sufficient, echoing through speeches, igniting processions and shaping accusations and counternarratives that ricochet across television screens, social media feeds and public squares. So, the unfilmed others, those without footage, remain buried in silence, unacknowledged in ditches. Wounded student soldiers, with their scarred faces and broken bodies, are made into symbols, paraded with pride and displayed at political rallies and assemblies. In this carefully curated spectacle of valour, there is little appeal in bringing Abdul Jabbar, another forgotten working-class warrior of July, to political meetings, to plead for the ‘unsensational’ dignity of identifying his brother Mahin Mia’s grave.

Commemorating July, thus, laid bare a quiet truth, that even in death, worth is measured unevenly. In the ‘new’ Bangladesh, the dead without graves matter only as numbers, threads to be woven into a grand tapestry of national sacrifice. Their worth lies not in who they were, but in what they can symbolise in the calculus of glory. While every party seeks to claim ownership over history, and over certain dead, many families still wait, not for glory, nor for power, but simply to reclaim the right to weep beside the bodies of their beloved, to bury what was never returned.

But these forgotten martyrs of July are not the last to await a grave. In the quiet routines of daily life, many more continue to join them, carrying new stories and enduring different wounds, this time under the watchful guard of the interim government. Among them are those claimed by extrajudicial killings — some felled by bullets to the head, others riddled with wounds, bearing the same brutal marks as the martyrs of July. But many are not granted even this sorrowful grace. They die slowly, through long, harrowing suffering. Their emaciated, deformed and barely recognisable bodies disappear into unmarked earth. Their deaths are not claimed by the nation, rather, they are disavowed as criminal, disposable or inconvenient. And their families, gripped by fear, dare not ask, dare not mourn aloud for what remains unseen, untouched.

For others, death falls from the sky on an ordinary day, piercing spaces meant to nurture life. Families still wait for the remains of their precious ones consumed by fire, reduced to fragments of skin and bone in ‘new’ July, when a Bangladesh Air Force jet tore through a school building where children once sat wide-eyed, cradling tender dreams of growing up. The state declared a day of mourning. Political parties draped themselves in solemnity, they were shokahoto, grief-stricken. But sorrow, too, is hurried away, brushed aside before it can settle. The nation turns instead to argue about which heroes made it into the grand narrative of the July uprising, as curated by Al Jazeera, and which were left behind. Meanwhile, the wails for the missing are muffled by the thunder of other jets roaming across our sovereign sky.

How should we mark this ‘new’ July on the anniversary of the 2024 uprising? How do we carry in memory a violence that is not past, but is endlessly renewed, woven into the very fabric of the present? Can the dead without graves be remembered by merely looking back, by recounting what happened in the past? Or must we turn our gaze to our everyday lives shaped by what has unfolded since?

The answer lies in the political act of grieving that dares to recognise that this enduring violence, this relentless production and reproduction of the dead without graves, is no aberration, but the very logic of corrupted power laid bare. It is the echo of a system where impunity reigns as doctrine, a legacy sculpted under Hasina’s fascist reign and now borne forward, undisturbed, by the interim government that claimed to dismantle it. This refers not merely to the failure to reform law enforcement, but to the deliberate shielding, even rewarding, of those who pulled the triggers in Red July and now. It is the maintenance of a killing machine, fuelled by power and stroked like a loyal beast of the new regime. It is to treat some lives like pages of a calendar, turned once, then forgotten, their days discarded as if they never bore the weight of time. It signifies that history returns, not in mere repetitions, but with its own distinct textures, meanings and narratives.

And in this entangled breath of past and present, where violence does not cease but shifts its shape, the dead without graves continue to remain unburied, beneath no stone, inscribed into no name, held by no rite. They do not rest in peace. Instead, they circulate, they haunt, they linger as unfinished stories. Their absence is not a void but a persistent presence — an affective weight that disturbs the political, ruptures the rituals and settles into the bones of the living by transforming grief into an open wound that refuses closure.

To feel the weight of the dead without graves is to attune oneself to silence, to listen closely to the quiet rituals of the living: the sister who, without thinking, sets a plate for her missing brother at the dinner table; the son who tenses at each ring of the doorbell, wondering, ‘Could it be father?’; the mother who cannot bring herself to enter the morgue, choosing instead to wait alone at the school gate where she last saw her daughter, now reduced to ash and memory.

To remember is, therefore, to mourn in the conditional — if he is dead, if she was there, if we ever find them. It is to reimagine mourning without monuments, to craft memory in absence. It is to witness how, even in their disappearance, the dead insist on their presence, haunting courtrooms, lingering beside protesters, murmuring through generations. To remember is to acknowledge that what they leave behind is not a void, but a stubborn, unyielding trace, a radical persistence of memory where no monument stands, and no stone bears their name.

Aanmona Priyadarshini is a writer and visiting lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, Texas, USA.