In his foreword to Debjani Sengupta's book of Partition short stories, Mapmaking (2011), Ashis Nandi has already addressed the necessity of revisiting the Bengal Partition stories from the two Bengals from a different angle. Politically conscious writers have produced novels and short stories about riots, starvation, significant historical events, and nationalist movements. However, the results of these carefully chosen literary works—memoirs and short stories in particular—have been varied and provide multiple perspectives on Bengal's Partition with varying levels of artistic and thematic content.
As a result, this post will attempt to highlight the literature from 1947 and 1970, shift away from discussing the effects of the massive refugee crisis in West Bengal, and investigate thematic parallels and divergences between the two Bengals. The creation of Bangladesh gave rise to an alternative aesthetic urge that attempts to revisit ethnicity and geography as Partition's aftereffects that would not otherwise have been discussed. However, memoirs and short tales, like Dayamoyeer Kotha by Sunanda Shikdar and other short stories in the collection Mapmaking, depict the extension of a specific time and space. This pre-partition world takes shape under the aura of Bangladesh. These stories also cover how the declaration of Partition in 1905 and the subsequent Second Partition in 1947, which further widened the gulf between an otherwise linguistically and culturally homogeneous unit along sectarian and religious lines, affected relations between Hindus and Muslims (Sengupta 194).
According to official history, the British separated India into two new nations, Pakistan and India, when they withdrew. This division was made in accordance with the idea of the two nations. Immediately after these two new nations were established, this decision caused riots and intercommunal strife throughout the subcontinent. Thousands of people were killed as a result of the communal violence, and millions more were displaced while looking for a new place to call home away from home. They left their own country after Partition because it became hostile, seeking safety and tranquillity on the opposite side of the border. People were forced to flee their country of origin during the horrific Partition in order to survive and endure abuse, humiliation, and violence in a foreign land. Still, though, even after receiving partial rehabilitation, many members of the middle and lower classes felt alienated because they were forced to spend years in refugee camps and were unable to resume their previous occupations. In contrast, those who were relatively well-off were able to rebuild their lives in the new country with relatively little difficulty. The evacuees were left with just recollections of their former "desh" and the excruciating pain of losing friends and family members during riots and community unrest.
The Indian subcontinent saw several partitions between 1946 and 1971, which resulted in the displacement of millions of people from East Bengal to West Bengal and especially to Calcutta. People kept migrating in the years after the Partition, even after sixty years of Independence. Nevertheless, the West Bengal administration decided on a strategy of classifying migrants after much consideration. "Old migration" refers to migration that occurred between October 1946 and March 1958, while "in-between migrants" are those who arrived between April 1958 and December 1963. "New migrants" were the increasing number of immigrants who entered the state after 1963 and continued to do so until the late 1970s.
Those who arrived in India in 1947 began to leave in various directions. Because of their closeness to East Bengal, few people ventured into the Brahmaputra and Barak Valleys; instead, a second wave travelled to Tripura, Mizoram, and Manipur. The border districts were a site of preference for the displaced Bengalis who came to India because of their similar geographical characteristics. A protracted flow of migrants emerged between the communal unrest in Barisal in 1950 and the outbreak of the Noakhali riots in 1946. Almost 1.25 million people had migrated to West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, and other North East states during the first ten years of Partition; by the twenty-five years following Independence, the figure had risen to five million. The public areas of Sealdah station, the first destination for waves of East Bengali refugees, faced an uncertain future.
The enormous influx of refugees caused unprecedented social, economic, and cultural issues in the state as they clogged railway platforms and city sidewalks (Sengupta 185).
Nonetheless, a number of factors initially contributed to this widespread movement. East Bengal's declining economic status, the high cost of food and grains, sporadic disputes between communities, and social harassment also fostered a climate of mistrust. Moreover, it reinforced the belief held by a large number of Hindus that East Pakistan could no longer be referred to as their home (Sengupta 184).
A historical narrative focuses on the main points of the event, elucidating its causes and timing. Still, it may never be able to address the subtext of "marginalized history," where memory takes over where history ends. The literary works included in this study defy categorization; some tales are fictional, while others may be autobiographical accounts depicting the hardships faced by Muslims or Hindus during the Partition. Through their works, several writers from the Partition have deftly combined communal and subjective memory. We can examine these literary works within the framework of social, political, and cultural history and see literary history as a subset of broader cultural history.
A well-known critic of Partition discourse, Anasua Basu Raychaudhury, states that "each refugee story is a tale of individual loss, of escape and survival in a new land; a narrative rendered especially poignant by the sudden whiff of nostalgia for a lost homeland or "desh "in her article "Nostalgia of "Desh", Memories of Partition." The term "desh" has come to mean national enthusiasm in the more jingoistic present. However, as the individual accounts in this piece demonstrate, "desh" will always be a refugee's home, albeit one that is only preserved in recollections. Because of this, the migrants' only remaining possessions are their memories, which serve as a bridge between the past and present even though their "desh" is completely hidden. As a result, although these refugees' memories are subjective, they can nevertheless serve as a valuable archive of the millions of people who experienced mass displacement. Even after years of "exile," the concept of "desh" is still linked to certain cultural and geographical characteristics for these people in refugee status. Now that they have been driven from their bases, the word "desh" has a particular meaning. The idea of a lost house evokes sentimentality and brings back memories of looking for a new place to call home away from home.
According to Chandrima Karmakar's article "The Conundrum of "Home" in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora," living in the diaspora calls into question one's sense of belonging, which is a continuum of one's past and present. The concept of "home" emerges as a problematic space for the diasporic community. She raises concerns about the concept of home because it entails both consistency and imagination. This debate stems from Homi Baba's theory in The Location of Culture (1994), in which he claims that the two countries that The country that immigrants live in and the migrants left behind form an "interstitial space" that is regularly the subject of stories that obliterate the nation's boundaries. Karmakar goes on to quote Roger Kennedy, who says that being at home entails having a material home as well as something that transcends physicality into a subjective realm that exists in the soul. As a result, even though we may be banished, we may be able to retain our sense of home, even though we frequently have a deep longing for our former residence.
Similarly, Benedict Anderson's concept of the "imagined community" might be applied here to comprehend how the "desh" was a real place in the past and continues to exist in nostalgia and recollections. With its subtlety and uniqueness, Anderson's theory of imagined communities reveals how nations are imagined into existence rather than being the fixed result of social circumstances like language, race, or religion. Partition literature authors highlight in their works the 'imaginary' character of the recently formed nation. As Anderson would contend, a nation that has become "desh" is still an "imagined community," something that was imagined into being. He says that a nation is an "imagined community" because its citizens feel a sense of community even though they will never know or encounter other members of that community in real life. The psychological link that unites the people in a community—which is not just based on race or tribe but rather on a historically formed group of people—is the essence of a nation.
According to Karmakar, we should not ignore the reality that an immigrant's sense of "home" is influenced by a number of other regulating elements. First-generation immigrants have a very different experience of the Partition diaspora than do second-generation immigrants. Selina Hossain's short tale "An Evening of Prayer" does a good job of illustrating this. Hossain illustrates how, for a character like Ahmed, East Pakistan will never truly be "home." However, it also gives Prateek, a member of a different generation whose birth in the recently formed nation of Bangladesh makes him twice removed from his "roots," an alternative interpretation of "home." As a result, the post-independence diaspora relates to "home" or "desh" in quite varied ways depending on the generation.
Given that the effects of the Bengali Partition on migrating women were both difficult and beneficial, the feminist history of the region may be broadened in this context. In his piece "Engendered Freedom: Partition and East Bengali Migrant Women," Archit Basu Guha-Choudhury quotes feminist geographer Rachel Weber as saying that "the houses in Calcutta became susceptible to the mobilization of women into the political, economic, social, and communal spheresÎ with the crumbling of the many walls that separated their existence from the outside world in East Bengal" (Basu Guha-Choudhury 67). Although the women's economic situation was severely impacted during this time, they demonstrated that they could transition into the public eye to alleviate their needs temporarily. Sutara, the sexually raped female protagonist of Jyotirmoyee Devi's The River Churning, is one example of a woman who transcended being a passive object of patriarchal conquest in a "man-made" Partition. Unfortunately, despite having the ability to forge their path to freedom, women continue to be a disenfranchised segment of society.
In this particular setting, the lives of women refugees underwent several alterations as a result of the Partition of Bengal. As they travelled from camp to camp or established themselves in the refugee colonies in the West Bengali capital of Calcutta, there were an increasing number of employment prospects outside the house. However, when poverty and hardship forced them to work outside their homes and become a significant portion of West Bengal's workforce, it meant that the state's jobless rate had increased due to the unemployed taking on odd jobs, which in turn increased the number of homeless people in the city (Sengupta 188).
In a highly insightful piece titled "Freedom in an Idiom of Loss," Jasodhara Bagchi notes that the opposition generated during the Swadeshi or anti-colonial movement during Lord Curzon's initial attempt at partitioning Bengal in 1905 depicted Bengal or India as a feminine form. The nation was viewed as a feminine form that was both the kind, comforting mother and the one who exacted revenge. Furthermore, by defining nationhood via marriage and motherhood, this connection of chastity with honour went on to render women "potential victims" of communal conflicts.
References
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Duke Univ. Press, 2003.
Basu Guha- Chaudhury, Archit. “Engendered Freedom: Partition and East Bengali Migrant Women.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 49, 2009, pp. 66–69. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25663863.
Sengupta, Anwesha, and Ishan Mukherjee. “Legacy of Partition: Foundations of the Indian Nation.” Economic &Political weekly, vol. 53, no. 4, 2018, pp. 40-42.
Sengupta, Debjani. Mapmaking: Partition Stories from Two Bengals. Amaryllis, 2011.
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