Debjani Sengupta
(Debjani teaches English at Indraprastha College, Delhi, and can be reached at debjani62@gmail.com)
(Debjani teaches English at Indraprastha College, Delhi, and can be reached at debjani62@gmail.com)
The 1947
partition in Bengal is significantly different in its aftermath than the sudden
cataclysmic division in Punjab because of a number of historical, social and
political reasons. The Bengali literature that is based on the partition’s
experiences is therefore also varied and multifarious in its responses to 1947
not simply as an event, but as a metaphor, or a trauma or a site of enunciation
for thousands of people living through and resisting communal
polarization,migration, rehabilitation and resettlement.Taking a cue from the Annales historians, one can surmise that
the partition in the East is the longue
durée rather than the short time of political event/s, where the structures
and pluralities of social life under its shadow can be ascertained only through
a study of the particular and the local. Even after all these years after
Independence (1947), the partition in the eastern part of the subcontinent has
been a neglected area, although some recent historiography has drawn our
attention to the economic, political and historical issues of decolonization in
the region. Unlike the sudden and catastrophic violence that took place in
Punjab, enunciated through the metaphors of madness, rape and murder, the
Bengal region has seen a slower, although no less violent, effect of the
vivisection with the trauma taking a more metaphysical and psychological
turn.This is evident when we study the enormously rich and varied literature
that partition has produced amongst the Bangla speaking peoples of West Bengal,
the Northeast and Bangladesh that has not been studied together in an organic
manner; it deserves critical attention because it destabilizes certain assumptions
about 1947 just as it demarcates the way geographical areas, not always
contiguous, become the theatres of recuperation, mythmaking and sustainability
that in turn give rise to different kinds of literary representations. After
1947, the issues of gender, livelihood and labour have had different momentum
in the Bangla novels although the issues of status and independence amongst the
refugees may be common to narratives both in the East and in the Punjab.
Literary imagination plays a vital role in a process of recovery where authors,
Hindus and Muslims, undertake to map the contours of the mutilated land in a
bid to create a site of belonging, habitation and memory while changing the
dynamics of fiction, particularly the form and content of the novel in Bangla
that has responded to 1947 in heterogeneous ways. When colonialism and the
partition destroyed a sense of belonging to the land, these texts offer a
renewed sense of place that contribute to the processes of decolonization and
reinstate the ‘human subject’ at a time when it is most dehumanized. As Lacan
(and Freud before him) has reminded people, the event of trauma, by its very
ambiguous nature, recedes to the background while fantasies based on it
overpower individual and collective psyches. The initial
trauma of the partition is now distant but its ‘fantasy aspect’ has taken over
the subcontinent through the legacy of violence and bigotry. The spectacular
dance of death that has begun in the post-partition years has given way to
those in recent times like the violence that erupted between the Bodos and
Muslims (2012) in Assam or the Muzaffarnagar riots (2014) in UP. There are
numerous studies that have looked at the history of conflicts in India so going
back to 1947 may seem pointless to some people but not enough has been written
about the ways whole communities of people felt, remembered and tried to resist
in nonviolent elliptical ways the cataclysmic divisions and growth of sectarian
hatred over a long period of time. Even a cursory glance at Bengal’s partition
literature lays bare how the vivisection has shaped and moulded the land and
people, spanning generations and several geographical sites, through the
processes of resettlement, migration, border-crossings and rehabilitation that
must be understood as sites of meaning making for the region and in the long
run, the postcolonial nation. Literature that deals with these wide ranging
issues, written over a long period of time, try to reconstruct the lives of
individuals and communities, marginal or elite, whose memories of trauma and
displacement had dissociated them from their own life stories. Bangla partition
fiction captures the diffusion, through a great degree of self-consciousness,
of the longue durée of continuous
migrations and counter-migrations that give refugee-hood a different complexity
in Bengal. Reading these imaginative renderings of the diverse facets of the
partition becomes therefore an act of creating a literary historiography that
are alert to the silences of history, and aware of the ways in which individual
and collective memories can be brought into play with each other by studying
the micro-history of localities and particular communities. This literary
history may not have all the facticity of history but the questions of voice,
temporality, lack of closure may say something about the ways in which the
partition is remembered by diverse kinds of people. Rather than making a point
about the un-representation of partition violence (and there was a great deal
of violence in Bengal) Bangla partition texts seem to look at the little
histories of people in the margins and use strategies of refraction rather than
a simple reflection of conventional realism. Many of them foreground minority
(in terms of class and religion) subjectivity, and use fragmentation to index
the fracturing of narrative representation that the partition brought in its
wake. The less visible and delayed effects of displacement and violence are
seen in the family and community spaces that these texts foreground. They give
an added dimension to an event, often unspeakable, within the partition and lay
bare the notion of how ‘literature’ transforms the actual into the apocryphal
and the mythical.
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