The Partition and Bengal,seventy-five years on

Abstract

This article looks at the Partition of 1947 as it affected Bengal, from the perspective of the present. A historical survey of the distinctiveness of the Partition experience in Bengal is considered vis-à-vis the rest of the subcontinent, by studying Partition writing from the two countries, setting them up in a dialogic perspective. The differences in the experience of post-Partition migration in Indian Bengal and present-day Bangladesh are noted, particularly the asymmetry in the number of migrants crossing over, and the greater sense of dislocation and concomitant nostalgia among those who went to India. For the first time in discussions related to Partition, the experience of Urdu and Bhojpuri-speaking refugees in Bangladesh is noted. West Bengali Partition literature from the 1940s till today is broadly covered and major themes are identified. Bangladeshi Partition literature, though less voluminous, is shown to have its own distinctive traits. The conclusion touches upon the future prospects of Partition writings.

Historical notations

The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 seared the collective consciousness of its 400 million inhabitants, leaving about 2 million dead in inter-communal attacks, traumatizing thousands of survivors, and forcing another 15 million to cross the newly created borders. The literary response, impressive both in terms of quantity and quality, reflects the effort of various disciplines — history, political science, sociology, social psychology, social anthropology, and trauma studies — to explain, analyse, and come to terms with the event and its aftermath.

It will be pertinent to start with a sketch of the broad spectrum of this literature. The northern border regions dominate the images associated with the event and writings about it — wanton attacks on the “other” community, rape and abduction, trains crossing the border laden with bodies of the slain, sudden manifestations of humane behaviour, heart-breaking lamentation. Within days of Partition in August 1947, amidst widespread riots, a large-scale population transfer took place in the Punjab region. The great names associated with Partition literature, from Manto to Khushwant Singh and Bapsi Sidhwa, focused on northern India.

Partition, naturally, did not impact the entire subcontinent with the same degree of immediacy. South India, far from the carnage, was spared the trauma but not the distress it caused. Nalini Iyer informs that Hyderabad experienced the potentially explosive “police action” by the Indian government, and discusses the treatment of Partition in Balachandra Rajan’s The Dark Dancer and R.K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma, but concedes “that Partition discourse while not absent in the South is secondary to other considerations of caste and language” (Singh et al., 2016: 340). Bengal and Bihar were racked by communal riots before Partition, most horrendously in the Direct Action Day of 16 August 1946 and the Noakhali riots and Bihar riots October–November, 1946.

Much of the historical drama around 1947 revolved around partitioning the Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal. The campaign for Pakistan argued in favour of keeping them whole, hence making them a part of the new country (Jalal, 1994/1985: 241). The minority communities, Sikh and Hindu in Punjab, and Hindu in Bengal, favoured slicing them up, keeping Muslim majority areas on one side and non-Muslim majority areas on the other, which Joya Chatterji (1995) famously attributes to the key role of Hindu communalism. Influential sections of the Hindu elite found unpalatable the idea of living in a country where they would be a minority. But it is worth mentioning that there was a last-ditch attempt by a number of prominent Muslim and Hindu politicians to keep Bengal intact as an independent nation-state; they included Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Sarat Chandra Bose, Kiran Shankar Roy, Satya Ranjan Bakshi, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, and Abul Hashim. As Willem Van Schendel sums up, “[t]his initiative received the blessings of some influential national politicians (notably M. K. Gandhi and M. A. Jinnah) but it was shot down by the national Congress Party” (2009: 94).

Bengal was spared large-scale Partition riots and massacres — perhaps because of the benign influence of a shared syncretistic cultural heritage, and also because the Scheduled Castes or Dalits led by Jogendra Mondal had formed an alliance with the Muslim League and supported the demand for Pakistan — though not the movement of refugees: Hindus migrated in large numbers from East Bengal to West Bengal, Tripura and Assam (including present-day Meghalaya), but there was nothing like the exodus of the Punjab and western India. As Yasmin Khan notes:

The prolonged tortuous Partition of Bengal […] was a political and social drama which stretched into the twentieth century. The war of 1971, and the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, exacerbated the human crisis in the region, and by 1973, West Bengal was coping with refugee population of around six million. (2017/2007: 189).

As for migration in the opposite direction, Chatterji estimates, “[i]n the two decades after partition […] perhaps 1.5 million Muslims migrated from West Bengal to eastern Pakistan” (2008: 166). In their study, Claire Alexander and colleagues project the number of refugees entering West Bengal and those entering East Pakistan in the two decades following Partition as “between 12 and 13 million” comprising both Hindus and Muslims, of whom “3 to 4 million [were] Muslims” (2016: 52).

The difference in the nature of migration between the Punjab region and Bengal has been widely commented on. Ananya Jahanara Kabir states that Bengal “did not experience the surgical cut of a clean transfer of population” (2013: 174, emphasis added). Nitish Sengupta describes it more accurately: “There was no exchange of populations as between the two Punjabs. West Bengal always had to face migration, sometimes in trickles, and sometimes like tidal waves” (2007: 232). While clean is discomfiting in regard to the brutal massacres, it is also more accurate not to describe Bengal’s migration in the past tense. It is important to grasp the correlation between outbursts of communal violence and migration. For example, the riots of 1950, 1964, and 1992, and the genocidal targeting of Hindus in the Bangladesh independence war of 1971 led to a spike in migration to India. The riots of 1950 and 1964 also induced large numbers of Muslims to migrate to East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) (Sengupta 2007: 174–175 and 225).

The asymmetry between the numbers of migrants into West Bengal and East Pakistan is reflected in their socio-political impact as well as in the literary and artistic response to Partition. Since several border areas of Calcutta (now Kolkata) were overwhelmed, class and caste proved to be key factors in determining the fate of refugees. Hindus from eastern Bengal who were already working in Calcutta and elsewhere in West Bengal, however, had the easiest transition to a new national identity. Educated caste Hindus were more readily accommodated into government rehabilitation programmes, but the so-called Scheduled Castes or Dalits suffered the most.

The Partition experience of Dalits in eastern Bengal makes for a sad tale. The dialectic of upper caste and Dalit comes into play here. Dalits were initially courted by the Muslim League and they supported the creation of Pakistan. Their leader, Jogendranath Mandal, chaired the first session of Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly and became the country’s first Law and Labour Minister. The honeymoon phase, however, ended with the 1950 riots, which did not spare Dalits, and led to their first exodus after Partition. Mandal himself left for India where he tried, with scant success, to make a political career for himself (Sengupta 2007: 174–175).

In her comprehensive study, Debjani Sengupta notes about Kolkata that “[t]he influx of refugees in huge numbers crowding the city pavements and parks created unprecedented social, economic and cultural problems [and that] the early migrants were urged to return to their [various] homes” (2016: 120). This, of course, was not possible. As the waves and trickles continued, the Indian government classified refugees into three groups: those who were fairly well-off but lacked accommodation, those dependent entirely on government help, and those whom the government could not rehabilitate. This last group, in great numbers, thus occupied whatever space was available, whether it was property abandoned by migrating Muslims, or vacant lots, or abandoned World War II barracks. Their settlements came to be known as refugee colonies, and phrases like “colonir meye” (colony girl) entered common Bengali parlance. The colony girl was seen as easy sexual prey by middle-class males, and was forced to appear in public spaces — hitherto exclusively male domains — in search of employment. But refugee women proved to be both feisty and politically aware. Sengupta further notes that “[t]he growth of Left political movements in the city [ …] is a direct result of the involvement, to a large extent, of refugee women in and out of their workplace” (2016: 129).

Plans for rehabilitation included sending refugees to other states. In Delhi, for instance, the East Pakistan Displaced Persons Colony, set up in Chittaranjan Park, is a well-known middle-class Bengali community. Those lower in the social scale — Dalits or Scheduled Castes — were sent to less hospitable places like the Andaman Islands and Dandakaranya in Madhya Pradesh, a region infamous since the mythic age of The Ramayana as a demon-infested wasteland. The tragic tale of the thousands of refugees making their way to Marichjhapi, an island in the Sunderbans, and setting up a vibrant community only to be massacred by Jyoti Basu’s newly formed Marxist government, was veiled in silence until Amitav Ghosh brought it into searing light in The Hungry Tide (2004).

The Minority Rights Group website mentions that one million Biharis came to East Pakistan after 1947. ¹ Bihari communities took root in Dhaka and in towns with industries or railway junctions. Most of them were skilled workers and artisans or had been in the service sector in their home states, which enabled quick employment in the railways or jute and textile mills; some even successfully set up their own businesses. The language barrier between them and the local Bengali-speaking Muslim population laid the foundation for future mistrust and enmity.

Pakistan began straining at the seams from its very inception, and the tensions arising out of Partition eventually led to its break-up, thus linking 1947 to 1971, when East Pakistan morphed into Bangladesh. Jinnah, assuming that Urdu was the lingua franca of all subcontinental Muslims, addressed a large crowd at the University of Dhaka on 24 March 1948 proposing to make Urdu Pakistan’s national language. Jinnah was heckled by Bengali students who demanded having Bengali recognized alongside Urdu as state language. In 1952, when student demonstrators were fired upon by the police resulting in several casualties, the language martyrs became national icons for Bengalis. (Sengupta, 2007: 171–180) In such a situation, Urdu speakers were looked upon with jaundiced eyes, though, as will be seen, Biharis were not all opposed to the Bengali language movement. The Bengali demand was eventually met, but by then it was clear that economic disparity between the two wings of Pakistan (despite East Pakistan earning more foreign exchange from jute and tea exports) could only be solved through ensuring provincial autonomy. The demand was resisted, again violently, despite the victory of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s pro-autonomy party in the legislature, and a genocidal war for independence ensued in 1971, where freedom fighters and ordinary Bangladeshi Hindus were targeted by the Pakistani Army. Ten million, most of them Hindus, sought refuge in India during the war; 600,000 to 1.2 million are believed to have died in India of disease or natural causes. (Ahmed, 2022: 4).

The freedom fighters, in alliance with the Indian Army, forced the Pakistani Army to surrender. Most, but not all, Biharis clung to their commitment to Pakistan, and many collaborated with the army as paramilitary personnel, committing atrocities against unarmed civilians. Willem Van Schendel notes that in the tense run-up to the war, Bengali “nationalist mobs had killed Biharis” and after the war “[s]evere retribution followed, leading to a counter-genocide of thousands of non-Bengalis and forcing more than a million to […] seek refuge in slum-like settlements all over the country” (2009: 173). Those who could fled to India, as captured in Kunal Basu’s Kalkatta (2015), and through India to Pakistan, as in the Bollywood film Refugee (2000).

For years the community believed Pakistan would accept them, but by now the 300,000 who remain in Bangladesh have given up on that dream and have been granted the right to claim Bangladeshi citizenship following a Supreme Court decree of 2008 (“Citizenship Debate Comes to an End”, The Daily Star, May 26, 2008). Until then, the Biharis of Bangladesh lived in a limbo. The other two million Muslim refugees who arrived in present-day Bangladesh in the two decades after Partition are Bengali-speaking and are an elusive population because they have merged with the local Bengali Muslim communities. The members of the educated professional classes readily found employment and benefited from the exodus of educated Hindus. Alexander and colleagues (2016) study the migrant settlements along the Bangladesh–India border from the other side. Before the drawing of the Radcliffe Line, as the new national borders created under the supervision of the British bureaucrat Sir Cyril Radcliffe came to be called, the people of these areas had formed close-knit communities of the two faiths, Muslims and various Hindu castes, and coexisted for generations. Realigning themselves according to this new border was a relatively simple matter. Those who chose to stay on the side of the border they were born in, even if their coreligionists crossed over, were often internally displaced, and relocated to areas close to the border where they felt safe. This kind of Partition experience was very different from the hazardous epic journey from the interior of one country to the safety of a place on the other side.

A peculiar experience resulting from Partition was that of enclaves. There were 102 Indian enclaves with a population of 37,334 people within Bangladesh. On the other side of the border, there were 71 Bangladeshi enclaves in India, with a total population of 14,215 (“Enclaves”, Banglapedia). The rajas of Cooch Behar and Rangpur owned enclaves in each other’s domains. When Cooch Behar went to India, and Rangpur to Pakistan, so did the enclaves respectively belonging to them. The issue was finally resolved in 2015 with the ratification of an Indo-Bangladesh agreement, assigning the enclaves to the side of the border they were on; only the 25 square kilometre Bangladeshi enclave of Dahagram-Angarpota remains testimony to the folly of bureaucratic cartographic exercises. It is now connected to mainland Bangladesh by a strip of land leased by India to access this enclave.

Such rationalization of the anomalies bequeathed by the Radcliffe Line is welcome development. In spite of that, the “shadow line” of the border remains fraught with dire possibilities perhaps unknown anywhere else in the world. In 2009 Bangladesh agreed to an Indian plan to enclose the whole of Bangladesh with a barbed wire fence; the New Age (Dhaka) of 23 September 2020 reports that three-quarters of the 4,000 plus kilometres have already been put up along the border in West Bengal, Meghalaya and Assam. In an attempt to put a stop to illegal trade, India’s Border Security Force follows a shoot-on-sight policy, resulting in the deaths of unarmed civilians, including children. The Dhaka Tribune of 22 December 2020 reported 45 deaths that year, the highest in 10 years, which in the previous decade averaged around 30. The situation, however, is unlikely to change, and the problems faced by those who live in the borderland will remain as a sad reminder of the Partition.

Partition in West Bengal’s literary culture

It is widely believed that art and literature, which impacts on both the affective and cerebral aspects of the audience, capture the total impact of a traumatic historical event more powerfully than historical or socio-political analysis. This is certainly true of the Partition and West Bengal. From the 1940s till today, Partition-related literary and artistic productions have had a haunting presence in the culture of West Bengal. In his essay “Fragments of Familiarity: the Bengal Partition in Samaresh Basu’s short Stories”, Sudipta Sen (2015) highlights three of Samaresh Basu’s short stories related to the riots. In “Adab” (1946), set in Dhaka, two strangers, a worker and a boatman, hide for hours from marauding mobs behind a garbage bin. They take advantage of a lull to have a smoke, when a muttered Arabic invocation identifies the boatman as Muslim. As the mobs disperse, they emerge cautiously and bid each other goodbye with the Persian word adab. By now the army has enforced a curfew, and the boatman is shot. The worker scurries back into the shelter and is filled with empathetic thoughts about the boatman’s family learning of their bereavement at a time close to the Eid festival. Set in a village in East Bengal, in “Jainal” (1978) the eponymous Muslim character and his Hindu friend, the narrator, go fishing in a boat. They drift towards a village raging with a riot and are given chase by Muslim rioters, but Jainal successfully paddles their boat away into a forest of reeds. At this moment, the narrator, suddenly aware of the religious gulf between the friends, imagines the sinister smile of a potential killer on Jainal’s lips. ² Jainal gives shelter to his friend in his village home and goes in search of his brother who has gone missing, but soon afterwards the brother returns carrying Jainal’s bloody clothes. The narrator, already tormented by guilt for his moment of unwarranted suspicion, is devastated by the turn of events. Another story, “Binimay” (Exchange, 1978), set in a sordid refugee settlement in Calcutta, centres on the symbolic sacrifice of the forsaken motherland in order to gain a foothold in the new homeland. An aged schoolteacher agrees to give his daughter in marriage to a feckless stranger in the hope that she will have a future in the city’s hostile environment. To him the daughter symbolizes the lost motherland. Basu was a member of the Communist Party of India and was arrested when the party was briefly under a ban in independent India. The Party’s view that the departure of the British and the Partition did not equate to true independence is reflected in his work. Thus, in “Adab”, the anonymous characters of different faiths identify the politicians behind the Partition as their true enemies. Basu’s confident handling of his native East Bengali dialect in the dialogues lends tonal authenticity, particularly in presenting subaltern characters, while the standard literary Bengali of his narrative prose has a simple but evocative poetic quality. He uses the short story form to great effect in capturing traumatic moments.

The gendered suffering caused by the Partition had a more violent and cruel aspect, excluded till the pioneering work by Urvashi Butalia (1998), and Ritu Menon, and Kamla Bhasin (1998), and specifically in relation to Bengal, the anthology The Trauma and the Triumph, co-edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (2003), brought it into the limelight. Their work of recovering lost female voices has also led to the recognition of a writer like Jyotirmayee Devi, whose novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The Two Sides of the Ganges, 1968), written against the backdrop of the Noakhali riots, is now studied as one of the “representative texts of women’s experience of social hostility following the violation, as well as of the suffering resulting from their rejection at home and in their communities” (Mehta and Mookerjea-Leonard, 2015: 14).

Perhaps the best-known Partition account in West Bengal is the novel by Shaktipada Rajguru, Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1958), ³ made into a film by Ritwik Ghatak in 1960. Rajguru (1922–2014) hailed from West Bengal, but since he lived amidst East Bengal refugees for some time he empathized with their dire straits, and the Dhaka-born Ghatak knew both East Bengal and refugee life intimately. Meghe Dhaka Tara is an unabashedly melodramatic story of an East Pakistani refugee family living in the suburbs of Calcutta comprising an invalid father, a helpless mother, an impecunious elder son devoted to classical music, a younger son who is injured while working at a factory, and two daughters, of whom the elder, Nita, is the selfless breadwinner. When her lover switches attention to the younger sister, Nita falls mortally ill with tuberculosis. The musician brother, though of no practical help, is the only one in the family who cares for the ailing Nita in the end. In the climactic scene she throws herself into his arms and cries in agony, “Brother, I want to live!” Ghatak wrote the original screenplays and directed two more films to complete a Partition trilogy. Komol Gandhar (A Soft Note on a Sharp Scale, 1961) strikes a relatively optimistic note, while Subarnarekha (1965) unflinchingly portrays the misery and tragedy that often overwhelmed Partition refugees. Although the general public is more familiar with Meghe Dhaka Tara as a film, the original novel repays close analysis. The image of an overcast sky that hides stars from view provides a symbolic cover to the narrative, which depicts a dark time when the radiant glory of Nita’s selfless service to family and friend remains largely unacknowledged till the tragic end. A series of contrasts creates the structural framework for the fairly fast-paced unfolding of the tale. The setting, a dismal refugee colony a short railway commute from Kolkata is contrasted with the ancestral village of Pirganj in East Bengal. Pirganj is idealized but not mythologized. Madhab Babu completes his schooling (the F.A. or “First Arts” certificate he possesses is the equivalent of the British A-levels or American high school graduation) but is too poor to study for a degree. He becomes a successful schoolteacher and acquires some landed property as well. He marries and starts raising a family when the Partition turns them into refugees. He is an impoverished schoolmaster in his new homeland, barely able to make ends meet, when he is superannuated and suffers a stroke. His idealistic devotion to education contrasts with his wife’s understandable anxiety over their financial precariousness. Nita, serious-minded and devoted to her family, is also dark-complexioned and plain, a terrible disadvantage when it comes to finding a mate. Her younger sister Gita, on the other hand, is fair-complexioned, and flighty, with no interest in her studies. Shankar, the eldest son, is totally devoted to the study of classical music, while the younger son, Montu, is passionate about football. Shankar and Nitu are kindred spirits, though unlike his sister Shankar is unwilling to sacrifice anything for the family until he has attained recognition as a classical singer. His musical taste contrasts with that of Gita and her friends, who are into popular music. As the painful intertwined lives of the deracinated characters move towards some kind of resolution, and relative prosperity, Nita, who is about to be released from the sanatorium, suffers a relapse and dies. She is the family’s sacrificial lamb, as her father aptly puts it at one point.

The most successful post-Partition writer in West Bengal was Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934–2012). Though he moved with his family to Calcutta long before the Partition, he never lost the emotional connection with his ancestral home in Faridpur, East Bengal, and it was only natural that he would take up the theme of the Partition for extended treatment. His first noteworthy attempt, Arjun (1971), is dedicated to the Bangladeshi freedom fighters. It looks back on the rupture of the Partition through the eponymous protagonist, who, like the author, hails from Faridpur. Arjun migrates to the outskirts of Calcutta with his mother and only brother, Somnath, after the Partition, a decision precipitated by his discovery of a raped and murdered body of a widow in a jute field and the general fear and uncertainty that gripped the Hindu community. A traumatized Somnath becomes mentally deranged as the family takes shelter at Sealdah railway station, the first stop for most refugees before moving to a camp or colony. Arjun plays an important role in setting up a colony at an abandoned piece of land. Here, Arjun and his friend, Labonya, do well in their studies, but the latter falls victim to the ill elements in the colony; Labonya is raped and the act of violence leaves her mute, another example of the violated and abandoned woman. The novel, however, is driven by a proactive energy, and Arjun, bitter about the indifference and hostility of the locals and the administration towards refugees, emerges as a successful citizen of his adopted country. Another “colony” novel in which the plight of struggling women is foregrounded is Sabitri Roy’s Bwadip (The Delta, 1972), in which women refugees in a colony not only learn how to survive, but in the process also become involved in Left politics.

Gangopadhyay’s definitive treatment of the Partition and its aftermath can be seen in his two-volume saga, Purba Paschim (1998). The first volume reveals the Partition through the story of two East Bengali friends, the Muslim Mamun and the Hindu Pratap Majumdar, fellow students in Calcutta who are so close that they are called Tal-Betal. ⁴ As the Hindu–Muslim divide begins to infect nationalist politics, Mamun becomes painfully aware of his Muslim identity in a Hindu-dominated Calcutta. He returns to his ancestral village before the Calcutta Killings, whose horrors the author desists from describing. It is a humane decision, for detailing atrocities might imply apportioning blame, further alienating the two communities. Similar to Mamun’s growing sense of alienation from the majority community in Calcutta, the Hindu community in his village is systematically “othered”.

On the other side of the newly drawn border, Pratap is nostalgic about his ancestral home, now rendered inaccessible, and faced with the challenges of refashioning his life to cope with post-Partition pressures: he gets a government job, yet feels alienated from native West Bengalis. The plight of the refugees on the Sealdah station platform is shown through his sympathetic eyes. Pratap’s bereavement is “indirectly related to their displacement” (Zaman, 1999: 323). In one chapter, his wife takes their two sons for a bath. The older son had learnt to swim in their village, and so would have the younger one had the Partition not intervened. When the younger one starts floundering, his elder brother dives in, but hits his head on a buoy and dies. The younger boy is rescued and lives to join the ultra-Leftist Naxalite movement which set West Bengal ablaze in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to be saved by his father and sent abroad, else he would have become a victim of state terror. This, however, occurs in the second volume, which also covers the Bangladesh independence war. On the other side of the border, Mamun, who as a student has been to jail for his involvement in the language movement, becomes a journalist and is arrested a second time during the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war as a suspected anti-state element. Like some of Gangopadhyay’s other novels, Purba Paschim presents historical insights in an engaging way:

Mamun recalled an incident much prior to the 1948 speech of Jinnah where he had talked of imposing Urdu [as Pakistan’s sole state language]; probably most of the present generation are not aware of it. Jinnah came to Baharampur to preside over the provincial conference of the Muslim Council. People in thousands had flocked to have a look at the Quaid-i-Azam, a man completely European in dress and manners with a passive face and penetrating eyes. He picked up the agenda which had as its first item – an opening song by Abbasuddin.

No, music, ordered Jinnah.

The people were stunned into silence. But after [the] first few minutes they rose up in protest. If Abbasuddin was not allowed to sing, there won’t be any meeting. Jinnah had no idea of the popularity of a man called Abbasuddin. The situation was going beyond control, so he was forced to concede. Abbasuddin sang not one but three songs. (2000: 155)

This vignette reveals certain problems in the Pakistan movement: Jinnah’s autocratic nature; his ignorance of cultural elements specific to Bengal; and, by implication, his lack of appreciation of the rich cultural variety of Muslim society as a whole. His politics, in other words, were based on his personal authority and a generic understanding of Islam.

In the second volume of Purba Paschim, Pratap, now on his deathbed, slips into reveries of his ancestral village. Such nostalgic flights are a common feature of Partition literature, and of village–city migration in general, as Ashis Nandy’s An Ambiguous Journey to the City (2001) magisterially demonstrates. One aspect of such dislocation is the attempt to recreate a semblance of the lost home in the city, if only by seeking to live in the same neighbourhood as people from one’s ancestral region. Among Partition refugees the will to nostalgia was particularly strong and was harnessed by publishing anonymous essays in a Calcutta daily from 1950 onwards and anthologizing them in 1975 as Chhere Asha Gram (The Abandoned Village), edited by the journalist, Dakshinaranjan Basu. In his review essay, Dipesh Chakrabarty begins by making a pertinent distinction between history, which narrates events and tries to explain their causal connections, and memory, which is unconsciously selective, and in the case of the Partition, marked by trauma and nostalgia. The nostalgia creates a sacred, idyllic site — to which one has patrilineal ties — associated with a proud history which culminated in the nationalist struggle against the British. Muslims are present in the memories, but as ancillary, if not subservient characters: they have no share in the sacredness or the beauty of the land. The “non–Muslim League Muslim was a valued guest. [ … ] What had never been thought about was how the Hindu might live in a home that embodied the Islamic sacred”; in viewing the Bengali Muslim’s “ethnic hatred” as “something inherently inexplicable”, the nostalgic Hindu fails to comprehend “their own variety of prejudice” (Chakrabarty, 2000: 336). Nostalgia is conspicuously more pronounced in West Bengali Partition literature than in Bangladeshi writings, perhaps due to the significantly larger number of Hindus uprooted from east Bengal compared to Bengali Muslims who left West Bengal.

In light of Chakrabarty’s astringent critique of the distortions of memory, a reading of novels like Atin Bandopadhyay’s Neelkantho Pakhir Khoje (In Search of the Blue Jay, 1971) or Prafulla Roy’s Keya Patar Nouko (Boat Made of Keya Leaves, 2003) may become imbued with an uneasy sense that ideology as false consciousness is dispensed under the guise of fine writing. But a healthy critical reading should also allow an appreciation of the poetic evocation of a long-lost East Bengal countryside (swallowed up, in this instance, by Dhaka’s fast-expanding conurbation) with its mixed Hindu–Muslim population precariously poised before an irrevocable rupture perpetrated by riots, abduction and rape, and the painful depiction of the plight of the female victims.

Of great existential significance is the extraordinary autobiography by Mihir Sengupta, Bishadbriksha (The Tree of Sorrow, 2013) a coming-of-age narrative of a Bengali from the predominantly agrarian district of Barisal amidst the painful changes that culminate in his family’s migration. The author is an innocent in the true sense, the scion of minor gentry, living in an organic community of Hindus and Muslims, which slowly shatters with encroaching political passions. His lack of resentment or prejudice, and overall even-handedness, is exemplary. Villainy and corruption are frankly noted, but the author’s friendship with a number of Bangladeshi Muslims remains intact. Interestingly, he notes that in his home district he had only heard stories of riots, in which Bihari migrants rather than his fellow Bengalis were active participants. It is only after migrating to India before 1964 that he had first-hand experience of communal violence, in Calcutta. From a theoretical point of view, Sengupta makes a significant distinction between desh (ancestral village home) and state, the latter being primarily responsible for the sufferings common folk.

Also hailing from Barisal, the eminent historian Tapan Raychudhuri (1926–2014), published two memorable memoirs in Bengali, Romonthon, Othoba Bhimratipraptor Parocharitcharcha (Ruminations, or Senile Scandalmongering, 1993) and Bangalnama (The Tale of an East Bengali Yokel, 2007), following them up with an English version, The World in our Time (2011). Raychaudhuri’s Bengali prose exhibits a wry sense of humour that darkens when dealing with the 1946 Kolkata riots that he witnessed, with heart-wrenching effect. These memoirs, like Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1954), exemplify life writing as socio-political history.

The Partition in Bangladeshi literary culture

The Partition of 1947 is largely omitted from the pages of Bangladesh’s history, and attention is focused on the language movement of 1952 and the independence war from Pakistan in 1971. Unlike the Indian independence celebrated on 15 August, this day is mourned in Bangladesh to mark the anniversary of the assassination of their founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in 1975. Yet, historically, Bangladesh is the product of a series of partitions. As Kabir summarizes:

Thrice-partitioned Bengal, together with the partition of the adjoining province of Assam, has given rise to a most peculiar kind of cartographic irresolution, caused by the repeated creation, dissolution, and transformation of the boundary demarcating its eastern and western regions. (2013: 173)

The Bengal partition of 1905 was a territorial reorganization of the Bengal Presidency into the provinces of Bengal and of Eastern Bengal and Assam, with Dacca (now Dhaka) as the capital. Since this separated the largely Hindu western areas from Muslim eastern areas, it was interpreted by the Hindus as an example of the divide and rule policy, and set off the Swadeshi movement. The British were forced to reunite Bengal in 1911, against the wishes of the Muslim majority. This was the basis of the separate national consciousness of the Bengali Muslims, without which today’s Bangladesh would not have materialized. Bengali Muslims supported the 1905 partition in the hope it would open up economic and educational opportunities for them. Bangladesh, more than the rest of the subcontinent, is the product of cartographic contingency. In 1947, the Radcliffe Line came as a shock to many. The Muslim-majority districts of Maldah and Murshidabad hoisted the Pakistan flag, but lowered it when they realized that they had fallen to India. In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where there were no Muslims, and in Khulna, which had a small Hindu majority, the reverse took place. The Muslim-majority eastern parts of the districts of Dinajpur and Nadia, and the Garo and Hajong tribes in northern Mymensingh district, were given to East Pakistan, but not the eastern part of the 24 Parganas. The Muslim-majority district of Sylhet decided in a referendum to join Pakistan.

Compared to India and Pakistan, Bangladesh has not produced much by way of Partition writings. This may be due to the asymmetry mentioned above between the numbers of migrants into West Bengal and East Pakistan. Besides, Bengalis became resentful of West Pakistani domination, as a result of which the primary thrust of literary creativity was towards an affirmation of their distinct cultural identity. The available Partition literature is less imbued with nostalgia or depictions of violence; nor is the Partition a key event in the national imaginary. The literary cultural response to the Partition in Bangladesh is in direct correlation to the nature of migration and the number of migrants. The largest and most cohesive refugee community was that of the Biharis — one million until after the independence war. While the Partition experience of the Biharis migrating to East Pakistan was similar to that of the Bengali Hindus moving to West Bengal, colonies of the former hardly feature in literary history, unlike the wide documentation of the Bengali Hindu experience in Calcutta’s colonies in writings and films.

Though marginalized, Bangladeshi Urdu writers hold regular mushairas and have their own publishing outlets, like the Bangla-Urdu Sahitya Forum, Dhaka, and the Shamsul Haque Foundation, Saidpur. A number of Urdu writers have played a politically progressive role. Yusuf Khan was active in the Bengali language movement. Poet Naushad Noori wrote “Mohenjo Daro” (1952) in support of this movement and “26 March” (1971) in protest against the military crackdown of 1971, for which he faced imprisonment. Poet Ilias Ahmed’s Biharis (2003), covers the history of the community, and also puts forward a case for their acceptance as Urdu-speaking Bangladeshis (Alexander et al., 2016: 220–241). Rizwan Ahmed (2013) points out a change of attitude among mainstream Bengali writers, and cites two novels, Selina Hussain’s Juddho (War, 1998) and Al Mahmud’s Kabiler Bone (Kabil’s Sister, 1993), which depict Biharis sympathetic towards the Bangladeshi cause who even at times aided freedom fighters (2013: 16–26). Tareq Masud’s short film Narushundar (The Barber, 2016) and Tanvir Mokammel’s documentary Swapnobhumi (The Promised Land, 2007) also offer a sympathetic portrayal of the Bihari community. Asad Chowdhury, a major Bengali poet, published an anthology of Bangladeshi Urdu poetry, Barir Kachhey Arshinagar (Mirror City Near Home, 2000).

It is worth looking into Niaz Zaman’s fine selection of twelve Partition stories (2000), all but one translated from Bengali. The first significant Bangladeshi story about the Partition, “The Escape” (1950), written in English by Syed Waliullah, has a raw, expressionistic power, while the next story, also by Waliullah, “The Tale of a Tulsi Plant” (1964) is subtle and tinged with melancholy. ⁵ The contributions to the anthology are of uneven quality, but Nazmul Alam’s “An Amulet” (“Tabiz” in the original, 1963) is an exception for creating comedy out of a fraught situation. An official travelling by train in northern India in July 1947 has trouble managing his heavy suitcase, which leads to crushing some guavas belonging to a huge-bellied Marwari passenger. A burqa-clad woman, but with her beautiful face uncovered, boards the same train. At another station a gang of thugs board and close in on her. Putting her hand inside the burqa, she throws them a challenge. They turn tail, telling each other that she is armed with a knife or a hand gun; it turns out to be an amulet. “The Exile” (“Parobasi” in the original, 1987) by Hasan Azizul Haque, one of the most highly regarded Bangladeshi contemporary writers, is also part of this anthology. ⁶

Hasan Azizul Huq’s Partition-related magnum opus, Agumpakhi (The Phoenix, 2006), presents the traumatic turn of events from the point of view of a middle class Muslim woman in West Bengal’s Burdwan, Huq’s home district. It is a technical tour de force that makes sustained use of the local dialect as the narrator recounts how the harmony between Hindus and Muslims in her village is rapidly eroded by religion-based politics. With the Partition, her family joins the Muslim migration to Pakistan, but she decides to stay back. The book won the prestigious Ananda Prize, as earlier had Akhteruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama (The Book of Dreams, 1996), which weaves the history of anti-colonial militancy into a masterly modernist narrative set amidst the uncertainties of an impending Partition.

One of the most subtly crafted and moving Partition narratives is Mahmudul Haque’s Kalo Baraf (Black Ice, 1992). This novella was written “in a ten-day burst in August 1977”, as its English translator, Mahmudur Rahman, mentions in his 2017 article. Rahman accurately characterizes its “two alternating voices. One voice is intimate, the first person memories of childhood in Barasat. The other voice is in third person, slightly distanced” (2017). Against the minimalistic delineation of the terrible historical events of the time, riots, a cholera epidemic, World War II, the Partition, the protagonist’s sense of dislocation is palpable. The newly carved out country he migrates to is far from the promised land it purports to be.

Though autobiographical in its genesis, Kalo Baraf is fiction, unlike Syed Manowar Ali’s Partition-centred family history (2013). Ali’s family lived in the 24 Parganas district of West Bengal for generations but finds itself “othered” at the Partition. The government withholds the pension of a senior member; communalist Hindus go on a rampage in the 1950 riots; and those who try to emigrate are harassed by Customs officials. This book is a rare example in Bangladeshi literature of a vivid, factual account of the travails of a Muslim family as it relocates willy-nilly in Pakistan.

Selina Hussain’s Bhumi o Kusum (The Land and Its Blossoms, 2010) adds a new angle to Partition fiction by situating the narrative in the Bangladeshi enclave of Dahagram-Angarpota. Set in the years preceding the 2015 resolution of the enclave issue, the novel depicts the struggle of the mixed Hindu and Muslim population of the enclave to attain a modicum of dignity in the geopolitical limbo of their situation. Like them, those living on the border occupy an ambiguous, liminal space, as evident in Delwar Hussain’s ethnographic study of a village on the Sylhet-Meghalaya border in Boundaries Undermined (2013). The border runs through Boropani, where Hussain, a British researcher of Sylheti origin, conducts fieldwork. Hussain notes, “[t]he Bangladesh–India border is one of the most violent in the world” and his aim is “to study the fence India is building around Bangladesh” (2013: 4), or rather the impact it is likely to have on the border people. There is brisk legal trade through the Boropani border checkpost, with Indian coal brought over in trucks. There is also much informal (read illegal) cross-border movement of people and goods as the border guards on both sides are lenient. He gives a fascinating account of various aspects of life here, its economic activities, festivals, and sexual life, but by the time he finishes his study in 2009 the fence is yet to be completed. Though he concludes that it may have a significant impact on the lives of the border people, most of them agree that it cannot last long. One informant declares: “The Indian state is sixty-two years old. The Bangladeshi state is a mere thirty-eight. The hills themselves are millions of years old. They may stop us from crossing for a few years, but it will never be forever” (2013: 152).

Conclusion: The future of the Partition in South Asian Culture

While there is a considerable body of literary and cultural production about the Partition in India, and to a lesser extent in Pakistan, it is likely to become a marginal aspect of Bangladeshi literary culture as it ceases to be part of the living memory. Prafulla Roy’s Keya Patar Nouko (Translation) has spawned a popular and long-running TV serial on a Kolkata channel that reaches the entire Bengali-speaking audience in and outside India, but anything comparable on a Partition-related theme cannot be contemplated in the Bangladeshi context. Tanveer Mukammel’s Partition-based feature film, Chitra Nadir Parey (On the Banks of the River Chitra), and his epic documentary, Shimantorekha (The Borderline), have not had the wide audience they deserve. Still, as the heart-rending tales of borderland dwellers in Suchitra Vijayan’s Midnight’s Borders (2021) show, the Partition will continue to haunt millions unless a geopolitical rearrangement removes the causes of tension. There is a marked difference, though, about the way the Partition is remembered in the two parts of Bengal. While West Bengal continues to produce literary works and films, as well as critical and historical studies, on the subject of the Partition, the situation in Bangladesh is quite different. The end of the British Empire is not observed nationally, and the focus has shifted to the aftermath of the Partition, which led to the birth of Bangladesh; one could call it a form of selective amnesia.