My stray thoughts on 1947

Debjani Sengupta
(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.

The Fort of Freedom: A study of ‘Refugeehood’ through the formation of ‘Azadgarh Colony’

Sucharita Sengupta

(Sucharita is a researcher at Calcutta Research Group. She is working with Paula Banerjee on refugee politics in West Bengal as a part of CRG-RLS project on Popular Movements in West Bengal and Bihar. This article is a part of this research. Sucharita can be reached at sucharitaseng@gmail.com)

  In this essay I reflect upon the history charted by persons who were turned into ‘refugees’ or Bastuhara (the homeless) overnight after the independence of India. These colonies were illegal in nature. By not reducing the refugees from East Bengal into victims, this paper will examine the role of refugees in settling themselves in a new society through forming localities of their own by force (Jabardakhal Colony), emerging in the process as an economically productive subject. Azadgarh Colony in this paper is studied closely. It provides a glimpse of the individual negotiations that refugee leaders made in building colonies, their politics in asserting their sphere of influence over a certain area and the political tussle between the left and right wing political parties. We shall rely mostly on the memoir of Indu Baran Ganguly, a firebrand refugee leader who played a decisive role in establishing the Azadgarh Colony. Ganguly was an active member of the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI). He left the party in 1942. But he rejoined the party in 1948, the year when he came to Calcutta with his family as a refugee^[1]. The CPI then was trying to build up a strong opposition against the government and the refugee issue provided them with much needed instrument to articulate and mobilize their protests through forming groups and organizations, for instance, the ‘United Central Refugee Council’ in 1950. Ganguly mentions in his memoir that their rebellion against the Congress government in West Bengal embodied a glory that was larger than the pain they bore for the partition. Expressing apprehension on how historians will read partition history and interpret their memories, Ganguly in his memoir states that for him the history of refugee movement in the 50s was not solely of losses. It was instead a history of emancipation and stupendous success of winning over all odds to emerge powerful citizens of a new state.

      Ganguly’s memoir is interesting because it brings out the nuances of clashes among refugees over their political affiliations, the structure of power blocks they formed and using emotions to legitimize forceful occupations of lands. On one hand it reflects negotiations with the locals (in this case Muslims), on the other hand it also tells us about the tensions between neighbouring colonies, different political parties and ideologies. Each colony had an individual committee associated with a political party. For instance, Ganguly mentions that after being part of forming the second squatter colony in Calcutta, the Deshabandhu Nagar Colony in 1949, he was residing in the deserted house of the then prominent Muslim leader and zamindar Ghulam Ali Minar near Tollygaunge in exchange of a rent of Rs.50. The entire neighbourhood belonged to Ghulam Ali and poor Muslims, most of whom shared cordial relations with Ganguly. By this time Ganguly had re joined the CPI and he was being aided by the party to pay the rent. Incidentally CPI was declared illegal in March 1948. The party could not continue to pay the rent for long resulting into a scuffle between Ghulam Ali and Ganguly. Taking advantage of this situation, one group approached him to make false papers to confiscate the entire plot. They tried to evoke anger in him by saying refugees were forced to leave their land in East Bengal for the Muslims and hence ‘snatching’ their land was their right. Ganguly, in his own words, was a man of high morals and could not accept this proposal. It is clear from this narrative that for refugees like him, forming colonies through force in deserted lands was certainly not illegal but making false papers to confiscate the same was. Here Ganguly portrayed his conflict with Ali as an absolutely non-communal one, related solely to the payment of rent. Another day, Santosh Dutta, a fervent supporter of the refugee cause and main architect of the first squatter colony in Calcutta – Bijaygarh- along with Dhirendranath Roy Chaudhury, famously known as Kalabhai came to visit the area Ganguly was residing in. Both were famous freedom fighters and were supporters of the Congress. Apparently, they told Ganguly that they wanted to make the area an extension of the Bijaygarh Colony. On the same evening, he was approached by a rival group of Santosh Dutta, belonging to the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), to build an independent colony there, which will have a new committee with Ganguly as the new President. Ganguly apprehended that giving the plot to Bijaygarh Colony would make Santosh Dutta more powerful and resourceful. Hence Ganguly took up the proposal of forming an independent colony and this is how the ‘Azadgarh Colony’ was formed^[2]. These plots of lands were then divided among refugee families on a first come-first served basis in exchange of a rent of Rs. 10. This is the history of the formation of the ‘Azadgarh Colony’^[3]. Members of the Azadgarh colony did not compel the Muslims living in the neighbourhood to evacuate the land but members of Bijaygarh colony, as says Ganguly, attacked them and they were forced to flee the entire area. Later, few residents of the Bijaygarh Colony came and helped Ganguly in building the colony and complained about concentration of power and corruption among few leaders within the colony^[4]. There were repeated clashes between the Azadgarh and Bijaygarh Colonies and Ganguly himself was attacked by some residents of Bijaygarh mainly because he was a communist and since he formed an independent colony there instead of giving the plot to Bijaygarh^[5].
      Although Bijaygarh Colony is in paper the first squatter colony established by refugees, Ganguly rejects this claim owing to the nature of its establishment. He echoes what Prafulla Chakraborty writes in The Marginal men, about the formation of Bijaygarh Colony. Chakraborty says that the Colony was made possible due to the help it received from the government and that Santosh Dutta had taken verbal permission from both Jawaharlal Nehru and Bidhan Chandra Roy before establishing it with the help of Jadavpur Engineering students and Jadavpur Refugee Association. So it cannot be called a ‘jabardakhal colony’ or illegal squatter of the refugees. It was neither illegal nor legal as the tacit support of both Nehru and Roy cannot be denied in establishing Bijaygarh, writes Chakraborty[6]. Uditi Sen writes “the dispute over Bijaygarh’s status” provides insights on the nature of refugee negotiations. It was the passive mode of protests that distinguished the Bijaygarh Colony from the rest. Santosh Dutta was very close to the Bengal Congress and also to a section of the elite Calcutta Society. The fact that Ganguly talked of a ‘secret pact’ between Santosh Dutta and Bidhan Chandra Roy reflected their differences in political outlooks and modes of protests. While colonies like Azadgarh adopted radical modes of protest, Bijaygarh refrained from violent opposition due to its allegiance to the congress and hence the clash between Indu Baran Ganguly, as mentioned in his memoir with leaders of the Bijaygarh Colony was only inevitable[7].

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[1] Indu Baran Ganguly, Colonysmriti : Udbastu Colony Pratisthar Gorar Kotha (1948-1954), Kolkata, 1997, pp. 4, 42-43.

[2] Ibid, pp 54-56.

[3] Joya Chatterji, “ ‘Dispersal’ and the Failure of Rehabilitation: Refugee Camp-Dwellers and Squatters in West Bengal”, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 41, No.5, 2007, pp.995-1032, p.996.

[4] Ganguly, Colonismriti, p.57.

[5] Ibid, p.112.

[6] Prafulla Chakraborty, Prantik Manab: Pashimbange Udbastu Jiboner Kotha (Bengali translation of his Marginal Men), Kolkata, 2013, p.39.

[7]Uditi Sen, ‘Building Bijaygarh: A Microhistory of Refugee Squatting in Calcutta’, in Tanika Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.) Calcutta :The Stormy Decades, New Delhi, 2015, 416-418, pp.410, 411.