London and New York: Routledge India, 2024. US$180.00, cloth; US$50.00, ebook. ISBN 9781032309132.
This edited volume traverses the partition discourses of the eastern province of Muslim-dominated Pakistan derived from India’s partition in 1947. This volume consists of 14 chapters divided into three parts, excluding the introduction, along with 18 figures, including a map, documents, and images of refugees. The title refers to various social, economic, political, and cultural after-effects of partition as a long episode in the history of Bengal, carrying historiographical, memorial, and cultural implications. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay introduces this book by examining partition from various ends, covering the evolution of politics on caste and religion questions through violence, separation, and refugeehood, leading to the commemoration of partition through the lives of the affected.
The first section—“Partition and Refugees”—opens with Anwesha Sengupta, who earmarks in her chapter the huge task of post-partition bureaucracy to arrange a new and identical state, albeit without any experience of division or regularizing governmental affairs, including the innate crisis of refugees and their rehabilitation. Next, Gyanesh Kudaisya temporizes this challenge in the years between 1947 to 1979, when hundreds of thousands of the 11.4 million (or 42 percent) of Bengal’s total Hindu population remaining in East Bengal crossed over to West Bengal, compelling the state government to appeal to the central government to share the responsibility of accommodating the huge refugee population. As depicted by Anindita Ghoshal in her chapter, understanding the pangs of refugeehood through refugees’ own eyes is very important. She alleges that partition has not only failed to solve issues but has yielded many more. She chronicled the border-crossing, in terms of class and caste, of the people from East Pakistan even after independence from Pakistan in 1971.
The second part of this volume—“Memory, Rememory, and Postmemory”—focuses on individual memoirs. Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury explores the daily experiences of the refugees in authentication with memoirs that have compared the pre-partition secure life and post-partition life, with its many uncertainties and struggles. Sumallya Mukhopadhyay cultivates through the works of Urvashi Butalia, Kavita Puri, and Anjali Gera Roy, the praxis of (un)-remembering the pre-partition life of refugees whose oral narratives are often inaccurate and incomprehensive for myriad reasons. Krishna Sen also combines several types of literary works on partition with partition history, engaging the state to related discourses, and positing all of them to the phenomenological life-stories of herself, her predecessors, and some of her acquaintances. Jayanta Sengupta—an editor of this volume—has also situated his experiences in terms of his nostalgic memories for his original home-town Barisal, now in Bangladesh. Sengupta explores the memoir written by his grandfather as if to compare his grandfather’s pre-partition experiences with his own post-partition experiences—not as a refugee but on behalf of so many refugees. Debdatta Chowdhury, too, recollects the evolution of the partition experiences of her predecessors to herself, as if conjoined in a chain of belongingness to places like Barisal, Dhaka, and Mymensingh—none of which she has been able to witness. Her chapter focuses mainly on the experiences of her near and dear women predecessors who, as members of a communist family, were actively engaged in the political history behind and before refugeehood across eastern Bengal and the post-partition socio-economic history of Calcutta. Aparajita Sengupta presents women’s experiences by depicting different rhetorics of partition experiences of four women from elite-educated, upper class Bengali families of eastern Bengal. By exploring these women’s traumas and triumphs, this chapter showcases them as instances of the “new” and “modern” women of Bengal.
Memory and rememory in the forms of discussion also makes the diaspora a perfect imagined community. This is how the episode of partition has been dealt with by Jasmine Hornabrook, Clelia Clini, and Emily Keightley in their chapter “Moving Memory.” They interviewed partition-inflicted people based in the UK as well as their relatives living in Bangladesh. These authors emphasize how memories of 1971 became automatically entangled with, even superseding, those of the 1947 partition, through the recollection of the interviewees’ family-experiences—both Hindu and Muslim—to the global scale of separation of families and friends.
In the last part of the volume, “Cultural Representation and Memorialization,” Sarbani Banerjee explores the intersections between the official history of partition and Sunanda Sikdar’s literary memoir Doyamoyeer Katha (Tales of Doyamoyaa) in which she also elaborates on her life up to her ten years in a village called Dighpait in East Bengal, where the Hindus were displaced by a section of the solvent Urdu-speaking Muslims. This chapter also highlights the discourses between caste and class, and bhadralok and non-bhadralok. Interestingly and unusually, Banerjee identifies some positive feedback from the Dighpait people regarding the amenities provided by the government of India at Dandakaranya. She points to the reliability of documentations for proper understanding of the partition and refugee discourses. Justifying Gyanendra Pandey’s support for pamphlets, letters, and newsprint, and reiterating what Suranjan Das deemed newspapers owned by either Hindus or Muslims as propaganda literature of the respective religion, Banerjee emphasizes the neutrality of newspapers as they were vowed to the news of reality of the situation. On the other hand, Sreemati Mukherjee explores the art of Ritwik Ghatak through his books and films such as Komal Gandhar, Subarnarekha, and Meghe Dhaka Tara, as well as his artistic use of film-music, to rediscover the cultural memories of partition.
Uniquely, Rituparna Roy—another editor of this volume—attempts comparative assessments between the preservation of the Holocaust memories at the Jewish Museum Berlin and that of India’s partition archived at the Amritsar Partition Museum and the Kolkata Partition Museum. Finally, Aurgho Jyoti compares the way the Kolkata Partition Museum is engaged in the preservation and reproduction of Bengal’s partition memories to those of Punjab, including the Oral History Project, Visual Art, and Event Gallery, which all briefly converge upon discourses of continuity and specificity.
Given the present political quagmire in Bangladesh, this volume is significant in that it revisits the plight of partition and refugeehood, a plight that has the potential to recur in the near future.
Pratick Mallick
Acharya Prafulla Chandra College, Kolkata