Echoes of the uprooted: Separation and nostalgia in the Bengali folk songs of wanderers and exiles

Abstract

This study examines how Bengali folk songs serve as emotional and historical archives for communities affected by displacement, indentured labour migration, and partition. It investigates how oral compositions rooted in rural and subaltern traditions articulate loss, longing, and separation through metaphor, melody, and repetition. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist historiography, and memory studies, the research argues that these songs preserve a counter-memory that resists state-sanctioned narratives and historical erasure. By foregrounding gendered mourning, ruptured intimacy, and dislocated geographies, the songs offer a critique of nationalist triumphalism and the emotional costs of mobility and state-making. They construct a cyclical temporality where mourning does not resolve but returns, functioning as a form of affective resistance. The singers—often women and labouring classes—become custodians of memory, embedding political critique within lyrical grief. Far from being static cultural remnants, these folk songs represent a dynamic form of oral history, voicing the lived experience of historical trauma and demanding an ethics of listening and remembrance in the present.