INTRODUCTION

WHY STUDY THE LITERATURES OF THE PARTITION (1947)?

'Parthion literature of the early period - of which Sa'adat Hasan Manto's
devastating stories are the outstanding examples - was largely confined to the
strife-tom areas of Punjab and its environs in the decade or so after Partition.
The violence of the times does not appear to have become a central motif in the
Bengali literature of the post-Partition period. . .. while the famine of 1943
deeply moved Bengali writers 'the Partition of Bengal. .. never became a
dominating theme of Bengali fiction even during the 1950's or shortly
thereafter.' - Gyanendra Pandey, In Defense of the Fragment

In 2003, while I was translating some short stories from West Bengal and Bangladesh

(erstwhile East Bengal/East Pakistan) dealing with the Partition of 1947, I came across
the words that I quote at the beginning. These and many others like them have troubled
me because of their validity and authenticity. The Partition in the eastern part of the subcontinent has been a neglected area, particularly its literature, although some recent works
have drawn our attention to the region. 1 In the course of my readings, I came across
virtually unknown (outside Bengal) and un-canonized (in the Bangia literary canon)

Historiography on the Bengal Partition and its aftermath is quite slender as compared to that on
Punjab. In recent times, a few studies have come out like Joya Chattetji, The Spoils of Partition:
Bengal and India, 1947-1967, Cambridge, 2007; Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland:
Beyond State and Nation in South Asia, London, 2005, some articles in the two volumes of Sukanta
Chaudhuri, ed., Calcutta: The Living City, Delhi, 1990, and Tai Yong Tan and G. Kudaisya, eds,
Partition and Postcolonial South Asia: A Reader, London, 2008 are illuminating. Sankar Ghosh,
The Disinherited State: A Study of West Bengal, 1967-70, Bombay, 1971, Partha Chatterjee, The
Present History of West Bengal, Essays in Political Criticism, Delhi, 1997 and Sekhar
Bandyopadhyay, Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in post-independence West
Bengal, London, 2009 are studies of post-Partition West Bengal. Explorations of the Partition's
refugees like Gargi Chakravartty, Coming Out OfPartition: Refugee Women ofBengal, Delhi, 2005
and Pradip Bose, ed., Refugees in West Bengal: Institutional Practices and Contested Identities,
Calcutta, 2000, have inspired me profoundly. Kanti B. Pakrashi, The Uprooted: A Sociological
Study of the Refugees of West Bengal, Calcutta, 1971 and Ranabir Samaddar, ed., Reflections on the
Partition in the East, Calcutta, 1997 remain notable works. In Bangia, Sandip Bandopadhyay's,
Deshbhag: Deshtyag, Calcutta, 1994, Prafulla Chakraborty, Prantik Manob, Calcutta, 1997 and
Hiranmoy Bandopadhyay, Udvastu, Calcutta, 1970, Tushar Sinha, Moronjoyee Sangramey
Bastuhara, Calcutta, 1999 continue to remain invaluable. Sandip Bandoppadhyay's Deshbhag:
Smriti Aar Satta, Calcutta, 2001 is also important. Literature and the Bengal Partition have been
discussed in a recent volume by Shemonti Ghosh, ed., Deshbhag: Smriti 0 Swobdhota, Calcutta,
2008. The two volumes by Jashodhara Bagchi and Subhor~njan Dasgupta, eds, The Trauma and the
Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, Calcutta, 2003 and 2009 also contain interesting
material.

authors. 2 At one point of this study, I was fi11ed with despair if I could ever do justice to
the enormously rich and varied literature that Partition has produced amongst the Bangia
speaking peoples ofWest Bengal, the North East and Bangladesh. 3
The Partition of 1947 has generated extensive literature ranging from scholarly
works, historical monographs, reminiscences to novels and bestsellers. The complex
political mosaic of a pluralistic society, the growth and acceleration of the nationalist
struggle, the changes in Hindu-Muslim relations, popular protests, and British
imperial policies have resulted in a proliferation of writings on the various aspects of
the Partition. A look at even the currently available material convinces one of the
impossibility of grasping all the various issues involved - national, communal,
imperial in their social, religious, economic and political connotations. The emerging
trends in Partition Studies have also emphasized that the Partition in Bengal have not
received adequate attention from scholars and the vivisection of the subcontinent still
throws up faulty perspectives and false surmises. Certainly, a more balanced view of
the events leading to the Partition is now possible with access to new material
available in The Transfer of Power ( 1942-47) series edited by Nicholas Mansergh and
Penderel Moon and the Muslim League documents (1906-47) compiled by Syed
Shafiruddin Pirzada while the Towards Freedom volumes are invaluable for archival
materials from India. 4 The diaries of British Governor Generals like Wavell and the
accounts of British historians, describing the last twenty years of the British rule in
2

The literary canon dealing with the Partition in Bengal is comparatively larger than its
historiography. However, many authors who have written on the Partition and its effect have
remained unknown outside Bengal, leading to fallacies of perception that no sizeable Partition
literature exists in Bangia. Also, some authors remain un-canonized and unread even by a
discerning Bangia readership. Shaktipada Rajguru's novel on Dandakaranya and Dulalendu
Chattetjee's two novels (that I discuss in chapter 4) are examples that come to mind. Porimal
Goswami is another author who seems almost forgotten. I have not found a single discussion on
them in notable books of Bangia literary history including one that discusses Partition literature
exclusively, Ashrukumar Shikdar, Bhanga Bangia 0 Bangia Sahityo, Calcutta, 2005.
Short stories, dealing with Partition themes like riots, displacement, refugee-hood, are many and
varied. For a list of notable short stories see Sanjida Akhtar, Bangia Choto Golpey Deshbibhag,
1947-1970, Dhaka, 2002. For a discussion of Partition novels see Sahida Akhtar, Purbo 0 Paschim
Banglar Uponyash: 1947-1971, Dhaka, 1992. For a discussion on some Partition plays, see Jayanti
Chattopadhyay, 'Representing the Holocaust: The Partition in Two Bengali Plays' in S. Settar and
Indira B. Gupta, eds, Pangs ofPartition: The Human Dimension, vol., 2, Delhi, 2002, pp. 301-312.
Syed Shafiruddin Pirzada, ed., Foundations of Pakistan: All India Muslim League Documents,
1906-47, 2 Vols. Karachi, 1969-70 and P.N.S. Mansergh et al, Constitutional Relations Between
Britain and India: The Transfer Of Power, 1942-47, 12 vols., London, 1970-83. See also Sumit
Sarkar, ed., Towards Freedom, vol., I (1946), Delhi, 2007.

India, are also available. 5 On the Indian side, the multi volume Collected Works of

MK. Gandhi, Selected Works of Nehru, and correspondences and private papers of
public figures like Sardar Patel, S.P. Mookerjee, Meghnad Saba, Renuka Ray, Ashoka
Gupta are valuable source materials. The writings by Nirmal Kumar Bose, Saroj
Mukhopadhyay, Abani Lahiri, Hiranmay Bandopadhyay, Manikuntala Sen, Soofia
Kemal and Renu Chakravartty provide rich details, particularly about Bengal.
Institutional papers like the AICC files, government reports and the Assembly
proceedings6 also contribute to our understanding of the Partition not only as a
division on the map but a division on the ground and in the minds of the people - the
uprooting and the looting, the rape and recovery operations, the riots and their fallouts
that marked these moments ofuncertainty in the political and social life of the people
in the subcontinent. Recent anthropological and sociological studies of Partition's
legacy of violence have also prompted considerable questionings especially of the
idea that the Partition's unfinished agenda of nation building in the subcontinent
remains largely flawed and problematic. 7
The Partition of 1947 meant massive population migration across the borders
of the newly independent nation states of India and Pakistan. Fifteen million people
5

Penderel Moon's Divide and Quit, London, 1961 and H.V. Hodson's The Great Divide: Britain,
India and Pakistan, Karachi, 1985, remain essential readings.
A special mention must be made of the book by S. Dutta and M. Dutta, The Interaction,
Confrontation, Resolution: the Economic Issues in Bengal Legislature, 1921-51, Calcutta, 1998 that
helps in understanding the tug and pull of politics in the context of the Partition. Government
reports are also numerous. Two Years Since Independence: A Resume of the Activities of the
Government of West Bengal 1947-9, Directorate of Publicity, West Bengal Government, Calcutta,
1949 gives an important account of the two traumatic years after independence.
The Partition's legacy of violence and communalism has been studied in some detail by A.A.
Engineered., Ethnic Conflict in South Asia, New Delhi, 1987, Veena Das, ed., Communities, Riots,
Survivors: The South Asian Experience, Delhi, 1990 and Veena Das, Violence and Subjectivity,
London, 2000. Selected Writings on Communalism, Delhi, 1994 brings together a selection of
essays on the subject by Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra and K.N. Pannikar. Ravinder Kaur, ed.,
Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia, New Delhi, 2005 looks at the
construction of 'communal' and seeks to open up the term through the complicity of state and
religious mobilisation. Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories, Delhi,
2006 is concerned with the 'routine violence of our history and politics' and seeks to study the
conditions, whether it is history writing or the construction of minorities and majorities, as shot
through with violence. For West Bengal, Sajol Basu, Politics of Violence: A Case Study of West
Bengal, Calcutta, 1982 remains important. Another study that I personally found helpful is G.G.
Deschaumes and R. Ivekovic, eds, Divided Countries, Separated Cities: the Modern Legacy of
Partition, Delhi, 2003 to understand questions of the Partition's diasporas. An introduction to
communalism in colonial India is Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in
Colonial North India, Delhi, 1992 and Mushirul Hasan, ed., Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in
Colonial India, Delhi, 1981.

crossed the newly defined boundaries; in West Bengal alone an estimated 30 lakhs of
refugees entered by 1960. For over a million people, it was death in various violent
encounters involving Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. For an estimated 80 thousand
women, in India and Pakistan, it meant abduction and sexual assault. Although
ordinary people suffered these traumas of displacement, murder and mayhem, the
dominant hegemonic structures of public memory of the Partition, issued by the state
and the majoritarian nationalistic discourses, have paid very little attention to these
voices. However, in the last decade, some shifts in Partition Studies can be discerned.
In the late nineties, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin commented on the abundance of
political histories of the events equalled by a 'paucity of social histories of it'. 8 They
also noted an absence of feminist historiography of the Partition. Around the same
time, Urvashi Butalia began to retrieve through interviews and oral narratives the
stories of the smaller, invisible players of the events: the women and the children and
the scheduled castes. Butalia's contention was that we can not begin to understand
what Partition is about 'unless we look at how people remember it' .9 These works, as
well as others like Kathinka Kerkoff-Sinha's study of the Momins in Jharkahand,
Sarah Ansari's study of the Muslim refugees in Sind and Papiya Ghosh's work on the
Biharis in Bangladesh, question the homogeneity of nationalist discourses and have
marked a significant break from an exclusive concentration on high politics. 10 These
explorations have also seen marginal communities in a constant dialogue. with
hegemonic state structures even as they i~temalize hegemonic perspectives. Other
studies that look at the 'unfinished agenda' of nation building especially the
participation of the Dalits and minorities in the formation of the nation state as well as

Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition, New Delhi,

1998, pp. 6-9. For an emphasis on social issues like abduction, displacement and communal
violence when Menon and Bhasin was writing see D.A. Low and Howard Brasted, eds, Freedom,
Trauma, Discontinuities: Northern India and Independence, New Delhi, 1998.
Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, New Delhi, 1998, p.
18. See also Kuldip Nayar and AsifNoorani, Tales of Two Cities, Delhi, 2008 for personal accounts
of the trauma that transformed the subcontinent.
Kathinka Kerkoff Sinha, Tyranny of Partition: Hindus in Bangladesh and Muslims in India, New
Delhi, 2006. See also Sarah Ansari, 'The movement oflndian Muslims to West Pakistan after 1947:
partition-related migration and its consequences for the Pakistani province of Sind' and Papiya
Ghosh, 'Partition's Biharis' both in Tai Yong Tang and Gyanesh Kudaisya, eds, Partition and PostColonial South Asia: A Reader, Vol1, London, 2008, pp. 241-258 and 144-169.

issues of social mobilisation have also opened up the complexities of the Partition.

11

On one hand, these studies have recognised and documented violence to see the
importance of personal memory to demonstrate the plurality ofhow we remember the
Partition even within the same community just as they demonstrate that gender, caste
and class variegate the memories of a community as the communities in tum are
constantly reinvented and reconstituted at particular moments in history. 12
Mushirul Hasan sees this shift in focus as being animated by the intellectual
resources made available to us by creative writers as 'they expose the inadequacy of
numerous narratives on independence and partition, compel us to explore fresh themes
and adopt new approaches.' 13 Only literature evokes the sufferings of the innocent by
exploring the experiences of communities. So, in the last few years, historians have
begun to pay serious attention to literary representations of the Partition, despite the
claim that fictional representations are few, especially in Bengal.

14

The dimensions of

experiences of the common people have been constructed through oral narratives and
imaginative readings of their silences as well as from literary renderings of the Partition
events. All this has meant that Partition studies have undergone a new and critical
sensitivity that take representations more seriously than ever before. This call for new
resources for remembering and representing the Partition means that social relations,
locality as well as memory, that make up a subjectivity come under the historian's
scrutiny. The ambivalent nature of memory, its healing and transformative role
constructing individual and collective identities, also receives critical attention. As a
form of representation and construction, memory is vitally implicated with imagination,

11

12

13

14

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics and the Raj, Bengal 1872-1937, Calcutta University
Monograph 5, 1990 and 'Mobilizing For A Hindu Homeland' in Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki
Nakazato, eds, The Unfinished Agenda: Nation Building In South Asia, Delhi, 2001, pp. 151-195,
give us an understanding of the lower caste identity formation in Bengal.
Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992, Delhi, 1995, interrogates the
construction of people into a nation by questioning the nationalist master narrative in relation to the
events in Chauri Chaura, 1922.
Mushirul Hasan, 'Memories of a Fragmented Nation: Rewriting the Histories oflndia's Partition' in
Mushirul Hasan, ed., Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India, New Delhi,
2000, pp. 39-40.
Pradip Kumar Bose states that given the magnitude of the Partition there is a 'virtual absence of any
socio-political analysis or evaluation of a human disaster of such magnitude' and even 'fictional
representations of the refugee problems have been few and far between.' See P .K. Bose, 'Refugees
in West Bengal: The State and Contested Identities' in Pradeep Bose, ed, Refugees in West Bengal:
Institutional Practices and Contested Identities, Calcutta, 2000, p., I.

so an engagement with literature can be an important and significant way to enter the
hidden and silenced narratives of the Partition. 15
An early interest in Bangia Partition literature had set me thinking about
Hindu-Muslim politics, breakdown of their relationship and the extant syncretic
traditions (if any) often celebrated in Bengal's chequered history. Even before the
Partition of 194 7, the politics of the religious communities in India complicated the
nationalist dream of freeing the country. 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' politics had begun
muddying the course of Indian political advance from 1905 onward in Bengal
(Tagore's The Home and the World reveals to what extent) and although secular
nationalists took up in earnest the task of combating communalism, by 1930s its
tentacles could be seen in all aspects of the province's politics. Some earlier studies
that explore the communal divide like Joya Chatteiji's Bengal Divided and Suranjan
Das's Communalism in Bengal cover important ground. The first text looks at the
enthusiastic role played by the elite Hindu bhadralok (and to a lesser extent the
'communal mobilization' of the lower castes in Bengal) in bringing about the
Partition and the latter, the convergence and playing out of elite and popular
communalisms in cases of violent conflagrations. 16 I also examine the period before
the 1940s to gain an understanding of the agrarian and economic situation of Bengal
between the two Wars and the rise of nationalist ideology both among the educated
and the peasantry (while the Civil Disobedience and the Revolutionary Terrorist
movements played out) to understand the ways in which political parties act and how
factional quarrels take their toll on the Hindu-Muslim political unity. 17 The history of
communalism and the history of the reproduction of the 'majorities' and 'minorities'
15

16

17

I am grateful to Sudeshna Baneijee whose presentation 'Public Memory, Personal Memory and the
Historical Moment: Rethinking Partition Here and Now' at the seminar-consultation 'The Partition
oflndia Revisited: Thinking Through and Beyond Violence, Trauma and Memory', New Delhi, 24. 26 August; 2005, has urged me to think through many issues that I grapple with in this work.
Joya Chatteiji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition: 1932-1947, Cambridge, 1995,
Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal: 1905-1947 Delhi, 1991 and Rakesh Batyabal,
Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali, 1943-1947, New Delhi, 2005.
Some studies that were helpful were Tanika Sarkar's Bengal: 1928-34: The Politics of Protest,
Delhi, 1987 and Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal: 1875-1927, Delhi,
1984. For the agrarian question Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and
Politics, 1919-1947, Cambridge, 1986 and Srimanjari, Through War and Famine, Bengal1939-45,
Delhi, 2009 are useful. Asim Roy, Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, Princeton, 1983 gives a
valuable introduction to the complexities and growth of Muslim identity in East Bengal. See also
Joya Chatterji, 'The Bengali Muslim: A Contradiction in Terms? An Overview of the Debate on
Bengali Muslim Identity' in Mushirul Hasan ed., Islam, Communities and the Nation: Muslim
Identities in South Asia and Beyond, Delhi, 1998, pp. 267-282.

remain as enigmatic as ever, so I think that it may be instructive to study questions of

Muslim identity formation in the years immediately before the Partition. Muslim
experience of the communal divide particularly in Bengal is an important aspect of
the period I am studying. I especially want to assess how the motif of abduction has
been represented in literary works to see whether the violence of a historical event
translate into fiction, particular in the East where abductions have been much less than
in Punjab. 18 Scholarly works on the violence accompanying the Partition (that the
historian Gyan Pandey once lamented are not being written) are finally corning
centre-stage with recent studies based on aspects of witnessing and traurna.

19

As I

look at these issues through the literatures of that time (because reading literary texts
is an essential part of my disciplinary practice) I begin to be interested in questions of
subjectivity, the dimensions of the experiences of ordinary people, their trauma and
their tragedy. I realise I am looking at literary texts as a kind of 'source', analogous to
other sources that may be found in archives, to ask specific questions relating to the
Partition like the postcolonial experience of living as a refugee in a camp or the
experience of an eye-witness to a riot. Very soon, I have a project in mind - I want to
look at some of these issues but through the optic ofliterary texts in Bangia.
My plan to research intensively the Bengal Partition through the region's
literature is not an attempt to nullify the importance of the historical archive but a way
to foreground a reading practice. It is an endeavour to juxtapose perspectives, not an
attempt to replace one .history with another. Poststructuralist

~nd

postrnodemist

theorists have demonstrated history's own constructed narratives about the past and
the textuality of all past evidence. This textuality is in many ways similar to the
textuality of a cultural product of a novel or a short story, in that they both 'read'.
Postrnodernisrn particularly has also overthrown generic distinctions between literary
and other discourses with far-reaching influences for the practitioners of literature and
history. Therefore, in the last few decades we have seen a fresh awareness in
historiography as historians tum to newer reading practices, and like the literary critic,
18

19

Kenneth Mcpherson, The Muslim Microcosm: Calcutta: 1918 to 1935, Wiesbaden, 1974. See also
Patricia A. Gossman, Riots and Victims: Violence and the Construction of Communal Identity
Among Bengali Muslims 1905-47, Colorado, 1999.

Tarun K. Smnt, Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction, New Delhi, 2010 states that
Partition violence cannot be neatly fitted with the Holocaust especially in respect to the nature of
violence. See also Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives Among Punjabi Migrants of
Delhi, Delhi, 2007. Partition's other themes like Diaspora of the Bihari refugees have been
memorably studied by Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent, London, 2007.

have begun to pay great attention to rhetorical strategies of 'texts' although differing
generic texts employ differing strategies. 20 To look closely at a literary text is to ask,
like a historian, some fundamental questions about the time of composition, the
rhetorical elements used by the narrative, its genealogy, its location, its audience and
its ultimate purpose. When we look at history through a literary text, we are trying to
pose new questions about life and society that sometimes stretch the severe
constraints that historical narratives operate under. Literature and History may be at
odd with each other in their disciplinary approaches, yet both are concerned with the
dichotomy between the notions of experience and representation. With thematic and
structural cross readings of other narratives (memoirs, diaries, essays, poems) in the
corpus of literature through a period of twenty odd years, I hope to see the patterns
through which people (writers, activists, political workers) remember and negotiate
concrete experiences with the exigencies of the historical events that they are
witnessing. The way I have planned my project also encompasses my real sense of
urgency in bringing together evidences not only from written texts but oral sources as
well. The vast hinterland of Calcutta is home to hundreds of refugee colonies, in
Bijoygarh, Bagha-Jatin, Ranikuthi, Netaji Nagar, Ranaghat, and other areas of the
districts ofNadia and Hoogly. Many of the inhabitants of these colonies are now old
and feeble. There is very little time left to record their memories and experiences and
preserve them before they are lost forever. 21 I am also greatly influenced by a work I
came across even before I began seriously thinking on this topic. In 2002, Pradip K.
Bose edited a path-breaking book Refugees in West Bengal that still remams an
important addition to the subject. In an article the editor states that:
.... one important aspect of the refugees in West Bengal that has rarely been
addressed either by the government or by the scholars is the cultural dimension
of the refugee-hood. The experience of the refugee is profoundly cultural and
the disjunction that refugees face between their familiar way-of-being and a
new reality, compels them to resolve the problem of meaning and interpret
their experience continuously. ' 22 [Italics mine]
20

21

22

Hayden V. White, The Context of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation,
Baltimore, 1987 began the debate between history and literature with far reaching effect. White
stated that 'we experience the 'fictionaliztion' of history as an 'explanation' for the same reason that
we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author. In
both we recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it
seeks to inhabit comfortably.' (p., 99)
A wonderful beginning has been made by Jadavpur University to record and preserve the
experiences of East Bengali refugees in Kolkata. See Tridib Chakraborty et al eds, Dhongsho 0
Nirman: Bongiyo Udvastu Shamajer Swakothito Biboron, Calcutta, 2007.
Pradip K. Bose, 'Refugees in West Bengal: The State and Contested Identities', p., 2.

I am deeply interested in studying this cultural aspect of refugee-hood through

a cultural product: the short story or the novel that will show how the migrants
interpret their experience of the new reality ofhomelessness and relocation.
I am aware that my project will study a specific region with its own localised
customs, habit, cultures and its own historical processes. In the last few years,
academic studies foregrounding a particular region have thrown up important issues
and debates, particularly in Social Anthropology, Cultural Studies as well as in
History, especially because a regional perspective acts as a counterpoint to a large
macro-history of the nation state. 23 In the process of aggregation that is the Nation,
regional perspectives get erased in many vital ways. This is keenly felt today in
Partition Studies. The narratives from the West and East Punjab have in many ways
smothered the other histories of the Partition, particularly from the hinterlands of
Bengal and the North-east of India. Issues that are peculiar to these regions can be
explored effectively through the literature written in the post Partition years both in
West Bengal and East Pakistan, later Bangladesh. Diaries, reminiscences, as well as
fiction, 'history's creative counterpart' can be valuable sources to look at the Partition
through the experiences of the common people, especially of women and children,
their trauma, tragedy and rehabilitation and the shades of violence they are subjected
to, both during and after the Partition. 24 These writings can fashion a critical
sensitivity and create a new optic for remembering the Partition, taking representation
much more seriously than ever before. Of course a novel or a short story that directly
or indirectly deals with the Partition and hence specifically contextualised in its time
has no obligation to faithfully represent that time, yet these questions cannot be
avoided altogether in such a study as this. The current critical attention to the
language of memory and traumatic forgetting has called forth new resources that can
23

24

For example, Shail Mayaram, Against History, Against State: Counter-perspectives from the
Margins, Delhi, 2003, gives an account of the Meos in Rajasthan as well as Veena Das's
ethnographic work among the Punjabi refugees in Delhi. Also, a text like Shahid Amin's, Event,
Metaphor, Memory, Delhi, 1995 that looks at a historical event of Chauri Chaura as a metaphor
aiding remembrance.
Recent memoirs that have come out in Bangia have been nuanced and complex depicting the
experiences of those who came away from East Bengal and also those who stayed back. See
Sunanda Shikdar's Doyamoyeer Katha, Calcutta, 2000, Shanta Sen, Pitamohi Calcutta, 2009, Adhir
Biswas, Deshbhager Smriti, 4 vols., Calcutta, 2005, Tarapada Roy, Tomtompurer Golpo, Calcutta:
Ananda Publishers, 1992 and Mihir Sengupta, Bishadbrikkho, Calcutta, 2005. Also select sections
from Jashodhara Bagchi and Sukhoranjan Dasgupta, eds, The Trauma and the Triumph, Calcutta,
2003 and 2009.

be roughly assigned to the domain of subjectivity. The post Partition years in Bangia
literature is a period of difficult negotiations and dilemmas fashioned within a set of
complex questions regarding livelihood, identity and place of sojourn. In reanimating
this history we need the sensibilities of a critical tradition, a self-reflexive tradition
that looks significantly to enrich the empirical event of the Partition. I am also aware
that the shadow-lines of states and boundaries have constructed national archives and
created fault-lines in what we choose to remember. My study will juxtapose literary
texts written roughly between the years 1946 and 1969 (I stretch this time frame and
look at two texts written in 1980 and 1996 because they are so topical to my
discussion), with other archival materials both conventional and non-canonical, and
then go on to reflect on the historical issues of violence, the struggle and resettlement
of refugees, issues of gender and the growth of political and cultural identities
amongst displaced people from East

P~kistan.

Fiction can be of great help in making

us see the hidden histories of the Partition, and in showing the cultural dimensions of
that momentous event in the life of our nation. My effort will not be to 'interpret' the
national and state archives but to weave archival material and literary text into a thick
description; this way I hope to map and make visible a jagged continuum of themes
and regular/irregular discursive practices. Necessarily interdisciplinary, I employ in
this study insights gained from current literary and cultural criticisms and focus on
certain modulating influences of specific histories rather than attempt to develop a
macro-historical perspective on the Partition. 25 Bangia short stories about the Partition
form a wide range of narratives. Short stories from West Bengal and Bangladesh in
general explore some important themes of the Partition - the loss of a homeland, the
new life of a refugee, the fragility of borders in the construction of identities and the
continuities and disruptions of memory and how culture and nature of the East Bengal
bind them together. However, if we compare the first stories written immediately after
1947 in West Bengal and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) we find them distinctly
different. In East Bengal, called East Pakistan after the Partition, stories published
25

The micro history of Bengal's Partition and post Partition years is seen in many articles that have
come out through the years. Some of them are: Annu Jalais, 'Dwelling on Marichjhapi', The
Economic and Political Weekly (henceforth EPW), 23 April, 2005, Ross Mallick, 'Refugee
Resettlement in Forest Reserves and Marichjhapi Massacre', Journal Of Asian Studies, 58:1, 1999,
W. van Schendel, 'I am not a Refugee', Modern Asian Studies, 37:3, 2003, M.K.A. Siddiqui, 'Life
in the Slums of Calcutta,' EPW, l3 December, 1969, Pabitra Giri, 'Urbanisation in West Bengal
1951-1991 ', EPW, 21 November, 1998.

10

around 1949 are decisively propagandist in tone and overtly support a nationalist
cause that celebrates the birth of a new nation. If we look at some of the stories
written in West Bengal during this period we find stories that deal with the refugee
problem, the angst and pain of leaving one's homeland, the horror of riots and the
slow erosion of values in the public psyche. So there is a difference not only of
themes and motifs but also of structure that is worth investigating.
In dealing with the Bengal Partition I take 1946 as the starting point. With
only brief and minor breaks, the 1940s are marked by the rise of communalism as a
recurrent theme in social, political and literary life of Bengal. It is also the time of
intense peasant and workers' struggles, notably the Tebhaga Andolan in parts of
North and East Bengal. Consequently, I focus on the August riot in Calcutta and the
one in Noakhali, then go forward till the post Partition years to explore the
consequences of the Partition in diverse spaces like the metropolis of Calcutta,
Dandakaranya, Marichjhapi, Barak Valley and then tum back once again to 1946 as I
explore a novel from Bangladesh based on the Tebhaga Andolon. I also want to begin
with 1946 because that year is definitely a watershed in modem Indian history, the
penultimate and worst phase of communal violence in pre-Independent Bengal, and
creates, for the first time, a migrant population who flee their places of sojourn due to
insecurity and fear. The Calcutta and Noakhli riots are also significantly different
from preceding instances of Hindu-Muslim violence for it is the first time that
religious and political issues (and not natural calamities or economic oppression) that
come to dominate the reasons why people leave their homes.
Even when I am ticking off the themes that I shall look into, I am also
particularly sure that in this study I want to go beyond trauma, violence and memory.
I am deeply indebted to recent studies on these issues especially with a focus on
gender (Jill Didur's work comes to mind) 26 but Bengal's case is different. I am
interested in finding out in what ways is it different from the experience of the
Partition in the west. It is undoubtedly true that public memory of the Partition
deploys spatiality as power. Although there is no public memorial of the Partition in
the subcontinent, nations have played cartographic politics, claiming this portion of

26

Jill Didur, Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, Delhi, 2006.

11

land or that as belonging to it. The power of maps that transforms land into territory is
a living reality in South Asia. It is also true that Radcliffe's Line, drawn in haste and
with very little judgement, amputates people's lives and places of sojourn with very
few options. Territoriality has thus meant that space becomes an element of politics
and can be used to classify people into 'citizens' or 'aliens. '

27

The most enduring

image in my mind whenever I think of what people suffered in 1947 is the scene in
Ritwik Ghatak's Komalgandhar (1961, the second film in his Partition trilogy) where
the protagonists, Bhrigu and Anasuya, travel to the last railhead that separates India
and East Pakistan. They stand at the barricade that closes off the railway line, gazing
out at the river Padma, to a land where they had once lived and where they would now
be treated as aliens. This is a moment of epiphany and has symbolized for me the
intense expressive mode of a landscape that brings together subjectivity and spatiality.
I realize now that the scene is given its power because Ghatak explores the spatial
parameters of the Partition experience: he unearths a history of the Partition through
landscapes in his films. Anasuya and Bhrigu's rootless lives touch the countryside

that lies in front of them and render it visible to us: the land becomes a marker of their
lives, and through them, the lives of thousands who are just as rootless. All the texts
that I read through this study have reaffirmed this idea within me: Partition is not just
an event, or a date but a long duree that lives within each of us; we can never get rid
of it but can only acknowledge its existence. In the texts that I explore and analyze,
this acknowledgement is made through the landscape, the setting through which the
characters move. The landscape is given meaning by the suffering subjectivity and the
landscape, in tum, is expressive of that suffering. Each works upon the other to
construct the meaning and power of the narrative. 28 Michael Shapiro's contention that
'it is a propitious time to rethink the ethical and political history of space' because
cartography and identity are closely linked is a point that comes under close scrutiny
in this work. 29

27

Ranabir Samaddar, The Biography of a Nation: 1947-1997, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 276-281, sees
space as an element of politics because 'the political and cultural geography' changes at the cost of
collective identities.

28

I am grateful to Shri Kumar Sahani for sharing with me his understanding of this particular film.
Michael Shapiro, 'History, Politics Space: Unmapping the Imperium' in S.P. Udayakumar, ed.,
Handcuffed to History: Narratives, Pathologies, and Violence in South Asia, Connecticut, 2001, p., 29.

29

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I do not see the topography of Bengal as a stage upon which actors enact
significant historical events: rather the very topography of the land, bound by mighty
rivers like the Padma and the Brahmaputra, is significant and alive- throwing up rich
spatial representations (memoirs and literatures of Noakhali or Calcutta or
Marichjhapi) through which the memories and experiences of partitioned people find
new expression. Undivided Bengal is the 'landscape ... of the mind' and imprinted in
the collective memory of its people. Its 'scenery is built up as much from strata of
memory as from layers of rock. ' 30 The imprint of the Partition on these landscapes demographic, social and cultural - are profound and long term. 31 In this study I
therefore touch upon how Partition transform places, either through the influx of
refugees or through violent confrontations between people. Literature captures these
moments, rendering visible that which has lurked hidden beneath the statistics and
figures in government reports. For example, the riots in Calcutta in August 1946
results in a number of novels and short stories that look at the city in crisis and the
quotidian experience of the days of rioting. The texts ask questions about how we can

witness these horrors as well as the impending freedom of the new nation state.
Calcutta is also transformed when the thousands of refugees crowd its bus stations
and rail yards, die on its pavements or protest on its streets. The urban concentration
of refugee colonies in the Calcutta Development Area is a special feature of the effect
of Partition. From social and economic surveys we know that apart. from the wellmarked waves of migration of Hindus from East Pakistan into Calcutta and other parts
of West Bengal, for many years after the Partition there has been a steady flow of
people going out. This has meant enormous demographic, social and other changes in
Calcutta's urban landscape: 'refugees are now settled in nearly all Bengali residential
wards' with a specially high concentration in some southernmost and south-eastern
wards. It is also significant that 'many of these wards were formerly inhabited by
Muslim labourers and artisans. ' 32 The changes that the city undergoes while trying to

30

Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, New York, 1996, p., 279.

31

Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, ' Capitol Landscapes: the imprint ofPartition on South Asian
capital cities' in The Aftermath OfPartition in South Asia, London, 2000, pp. 163-203.

32

The wards where this demographic change had taken place were 3, 14, 16, 33, 34, 77, 78, 79 and 80 of
the Calcutta Metropolitan Area. See Nirmal K. Bose, Calcutta, 1964: A Social Survey, Calcutta, 1968, p.,
33. Also S.K. Munshi, Calcutta Metropolitan Explosion: Its Nature and Roots, New Delhi, 1975.

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accommodate the newcomers can be mapped in the literature that discusses the advent
of the refugees, the cramped life lived in camps or colonies, the changes that occur in
the refugee women's lives (in Sabitri Roy and Sunil Gangopadhyay's works).
However, it is not just the city of Calcutta that changes so do the 'marginal' (to the
central metropolitan spaces) places like Dandakaranya or Marichjhapi or Barak
Valley. What sediments does the Partition leave behind in the physical topography of
these places? In what ways are landscapes 'memorials' of traumatic events? Is
landscape an adequate way in which we can gauge and map out some of the hidden
histories of Partition? The literature that I read therefore are just not texts, but a way
of unearthing the sediments ofhistory that lie hidden in the topography through which
the refugees travel; they are the landforms and the geography through which
Partition's history can be mapped in a new way because different geographies throw
up different ways of representation. Although there is a mirroring of themes and
motifs, each landscape has a different story to tell and recreates a space that is in
direct contradiction to the territoriality of the new nation state. Exile is a kind of
recreation that tries to restore the original place of sojourn that is now lost. Thus a
novel set in the forests of Dandakaranya tells a different story than the one set in the
banks of the Jamuna though both the texts talk of the marginalized farmers and
peasants of the lower castes whose stories have never gained prominence in Partition
debates. Yet the representations of their struggles by the two writers (Rajguru and
Elias) are very different. In this study, however, I dq not see the landscape as a sign
system that brings to life some meanings of the past but rather the landscape as
integral to the message that the author/filmmaker/poet is hoping to convey. His/her
understanding of the network of linkages between people and the land on which they
choose or not choose to reside forms the central theme of many of the literatures that I
study. The 'sedimenting of history' and 'sentiment in the landscape' therefore form
two overarching themes in the Partition narratives that I take up for study. 33 I am also
33

I borrow the two terms from an essay by Howard Morphy, 'Landscape and the Reproduction of the
Ancestral Past' in Eric Hirsch and Michael O'Hanlon eds, The Anthropology of Landscape:
Perspectives on Place and Space, Oxford, 1996, p., 186 where he argues about the Yolngu speaking
people in Aboriginal Australia having a conception of landscape that is central to their relationship
between the individual and ancestral past. See also Donald Wesling, Wordsworth and the Adequacy
of Landscape, London, 1970, pp. 5-8, that speaks of the descriptive and topographical elements in
Wordsworth's poetry having moral dimensions.

14

'

aware that the experience of the Partition cannot be mapped in trite formulations: it
was too vast, too complex and too heartrending to be put into neat theories of identity,
habitations or modernity. But I do try to make sense of the cultural representations
that have been brought forth by suffering and rootlessness by situating them in their
particular spaces and in their times. Thus, I look at Calcutta, Noakhali, Dandakaranya,
Marichjhapi, Barak Valley and some areas ofBangladesh as spaces where Partition's
victims play out their life stories. In tum, the literatures that use these places as
settings do so deliberately: by questioning the validity of boundaries and by
demonstrating the impossibility of separating memory and geography in the way
Partition is remembered, especially in Bengal.
As I had stated earlier, the project is an interdisciplinary one, maybe even an
overtly ambitious one. I scan geography, history, literature, economics and
anthropology to make sense ofwhat happened in 1947 and after. I am aware that such
an interdisciplinary work depends on taking certain risks, a risk that comes from what
Foucault calls 'the art of reflective insolence', a peril that a critic describes 'of never
being erudite enough to satisfy the demands of all disciplines that one is using,
addressing, and inhabiting'. I know I have been trained as a literary critic and many
of the methodologies known to a history student may be unfamiliar to me. However, I
believe that responding to history through literary texts can be a very fruitful exercise,
an interdisciplinary exercise that, while ensuring historical detail, may add another
layer to our understanding of the politics of culture in a significant period of our
history.
There remains of course the question of readership and language through
which the literature I study can be reshaped and communicated. The texts that I
explore often use dialects of East Bengal that are impossible to translate and to make
intelligible in the pages of this study. As Shahid Amin asks, 'What linguistic and
cultural communication must precede the work of the historian? .. .In other words,
what must readers know beforehand in order to empathize with this shifting tale of
an ... event with a long afterlife?' 34 I try to set out the difficulties without trying to

34

Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory, p., 5.

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provide answers to all of them. I translate some important passages or lines from the
texts that I study, not to erase the differences between languages but simply to give
my readers a sense of the import of the words used. After all, even the anonymity of
the speakers does not belie the utterances they make: their words draw blood, even
after so many years after the partitioning of their homeland.

Komolgandhar (1961)

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