Going back to the un-partitioned times
“When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he arrived at a colony of Punjabis.” (Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story, a recent book on the Partition by Malavika Rajkotia)
Every East Bengali was a zamindar back home; every refugee was a zamindar in East Pakistan. Their combined land was more than the region itself.
The refugee has always been the subject of jokes. This joke did the rounds during partition and even to this day in Bengal. Every year, when August 15 comes along, we are fed on partition jokes and accusations of whipping up revisionist history. The fact remains it was not just a physical displacement of people but came with scars of humiliation, torture and of course, bloodshed. It reiterates the tragedy that was said to be a parting gift by the British who ruled for over 200 years. So what new do I add as a part of the sandwich generation (between those victims of partition and the next who couldn’t care less) for the future generations to know?
It is the same way that we would try to explain the phenomenon that Woodstock was in the context of the Vietnam War; the formation of Bangladesh; the fall of the Berlin Wall bringing about the unity of the two Germanys; Tiananmen Square etc and definitely, the holocaust. In short, we need to have more fiction that gives these stories a life because scholarly work takes strong political overtones. Art and more tangible remnants too are needed in addition to words.
It is not that we have not had partition literature in Bengali (which needs to get translated more), but more fiction in English from the eastern side of the tragedy is necessary for the Bengali diaspora and today, highly educated Bengalis from West Bengal and Bangladesh are increasingly becoming displaced.
First of all, we must remember that it was not the partition of India we need to talk about though two countries – India and Pakistan – came into being upon independence. It was only Punjab (and parts of Sindh) in the west and Bengal in the east, which were partitioned. So the rest of India has not really internalized the issue of partition like the people of these two regions have.
We need more stories and material documentation, not of the event itself but to explore the un-partitioned times and then the post partition stories that veered around the physical and of the mind.
And that is the shift that is happening now.
Anchal Malhotra, author of Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory and In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition, focused on the contemporary relevance of Partition in the everyday lives of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis.
Her debut novel, The Book of Everlasting Things was published in 2022 looks at partition from a post partition view of the un-partitioned times. Malavika Rajkotia is another such writer. The children and grandchildren of the displaced generation are now picking up the pen and trying to piece together stories through memories of what was orally transmuted in bits and pieces by people who were simply too traumatized to write and busy with survival.
To flog the partition as an event is futile, with a caveat that history in this case should never again be repeated. The trend in writing now is to go back on the un-partitioned times as all three countries and unearthing newer stories of our shared heritage.
Rajkotia writes, “The history of all four of my grandparents can be traced back to what is now Pakistan. But stories of their migrations to India due to the Partition of British India in August 1947, or their rehabilitation in refugee camps thereafter, were never told. Like many of their generation, they practiced resolute silence, either by choice or lack thereof, where I barely remember even hearing the word growing up. For the most part, the politics of partitioning a subcontinent and the colossal data of migration, displacement and death have largely overshadowed the individuality of the witness, their particular stories, their extraordinary losses.”
I can almost copy paste this to my own father’s experience and that of many others of my kind or we simply did not have time to seriously listen to our parents’ and grandparents’ experiences in the eastern part of the country. So do we really need to revisit this event every year during August celebrated as the freedom month?
Mampy Das, in her mid-thirties, working as a masseuse does not even know the exact place her father came over from after 1971, the year Bangladesh which was erstwhile East Pakistan, was born. But there is no bitterness. The family is just happy to have escaped “due to some riots that year”. Which year and which riots, she is unable to say.
In 1971, most of the domestic workers in Salt Lake, a burgeoning township almost, had come from opaar. Not just Hindus but poor Muslims as well. This is a fact most political parties, with the privileged gentry at its core, choose to gloss over due to obvious reasons. As a young reporter of a national daily in the mid-eighties, I met not-Bengalis Muslims who hid their identity here and crammed into tiny spaces in central Calcutta during the 70’s. Why? Because life had not really improved for them in former East Pakistan and they feared for their lives in new Bangladesh.
The rich came over to seek medical tourism and shop in New Market and but it is always the poor that is always badly hit among all communities and Bengal has always been a corridor for illegal traffic between the borders states and countries.
Not for them the remembrances of trees and rivers.
The overall identity of our people is so similar despite the difference in religion, similar to what is among the Arab population of the Middle-East consisting of the three major Abraham religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
In another scenario, at a seminar, sitting among the elite to discuss the hyper nationalism of the present times and the stories of partition, it was pointed out that we must think of inclusivity and that too many personal histories whip up hate. I agree with the first but disagree with the second. Personal histories cannot be made up when it entailed fleeing under dire circumstances. Bitterness, fear and hate are bitter pills to sugar coat though oral/personal histories can be exaggerated or have certain loose ends, like for example, Mampy Das’s.
To flog the partition as an event is futile, with a caveat that history in this case should never again be repeated. The trend in writing now is to go back on the un-partitioned times as all three countries and unearthing newer stories of our shared heritage.
Similarly Bengal too needs literature that documents lesser known stories through personal histories. We have had a recent novel by US-based Chitra B.Divakaruni about a family of three daughters caught up in the events following Independence in her 2022-23 novel Independence.
Though it would be wrong to say that Bengal has had no literature on partition, Urdu and Punjabi literature have done better.
There is not enough of vernacular literature to document the pain and partition of Bengal in 1947 or we do not cite these enough like we do Manto or even Garam Hawa, the film, which has a pan-Indian appeal, more than say Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha. If Meghe Dhaka Tara received more attention it was not because it was about a displaced family which came over, but because it was a heroic tale of love and sacrifice of the eldest sibling, in this case, a woman of an impoverished family.
Atin Bandyopadhya’s Neelkantha Pankhir Khonje is a masterpiece which needs to get translated for wider readership. Another famous Bengali writer, Syed Mustafa Siraj likened it to Greek tragedies. We have had an excellent anthology of translated stories edited by Debjani Sengupta Map Making in which there is a very touching story by Pratibha Basu. It is about two pimps disguised as sadhu preying on a hapless young widow, with two young daughters, and an elderly mother-in-law.
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Therefore, the latest novel by Swapnomoy Chakraborty’s recent book Jwaler Upar Paani (Sahitya Akademy Award for 2023) is another interesting addition as it is the saga of almost epic proportion of a displaced family in Kolkata, taking us through the post partition days and captures the history of the last seventy years or so of our country’s independence. It includes the Naxal Movement in all its gory, not glory!
Writes, Rajkotia, “So flowed the road (Sher Shah Suri Road now the National Highway 1 till the careless, callous Radcliffe Line severed the muscle of a 2,500-year-old continuum, flinging the western portion across a river of blood to be called Pakistan, which my parents still talked of as home”.
Only replace Rajkot and Lahore with Dacca or Faridpur district and the story is the same one. As my mother, a resident of Basirhat, this side of the border laments that “One fine morning, the Radcliffe Line divided the village of Satkheera across the River Ichamoti from Taki and made it part of it into another country! I lost my childhood friend Shakina forever.”
Whether it is the road or river, so many stories are still left unsaid.
It is estimated that more than 15 million people were displaced due to the 1947 partition. The Muslims in India crossed over to both the then East and West Pakistan, while the Hindus and Sikhs moved to India.
The joy of Independence turned out to be a traumatic experience for the people on both sides of the border. And the trauma of being uprooted from their homes remained with the ‘refugees’ till their last days. Migration continued even during the 1960s on religious, economic and political grounds. (source: Spaceink: https://thespace.ink/book-review-no-return-address-stories-of-displacement-and-alienation/)
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