Memories of the 1947 Bengal Partition and Its Aftermath: Tanvir Mokammel’s Seemantorekha (original) (raw)

‘I Belong There’: Affective Geography of Space in Refugee Reminiscences from Bangladesh and West Bengal

American Comparative Literature Association, 2022

When Priya Satia avers that ‘historians are storytellers’, she upholds the historical sensibility where narratives hold the edifices of modern statecraft together (2020, 1). It follows that privileging certain narratives is often done at the expense of other voices that remain underrepresented, marginalized, and silenced (Gera Roy 2020). But by stretching a historical event in time, it is possible to expand its spaces of representation and experience. The paper attempts to do just that by examining the oral narratives of refugees who migrated through the Bengal borderlands after the 1947 Partition. It focuses on the art of storytelling in the dialogic setting of the oral interview process. Since the narrative is rehearsed and recollected almost after seven decades, it facilitates the creation of an affective geography of space that transcends the ideological normative of cartographic borders. It is an imaginative, emotive, and reflexive space that helps the interviewees/narrators to reinvent and re-phrase the idea of belonging. Rather than the persistence of place, belongingness, as the paper argues, is constituted in a space that enunciates itself in the moment of narration.

Who is a Refugee? Understanding the Figure of the Refugee against the Backdrop of the Bengal Partition (1947-1970)

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021

The paper intends to study the figure of the refugee in post-Partition West Bengal by critically examining the oral history narratives of individuals who migrated from East Pakistan in the wake of the 1947 Partition. It underscores the value and relevance of narrativity in the representation of factual history, the motivation and manifestation of which make history subjective, interpretive and contingent on the refugee's narrative. The narrative act presents the refugees' transition from, what may be called, figurative to socio-material subjects who interrupt and derange the nationalising exercise of the nation-state. The multivalent understanding of refugees makes the nation-state suffer from an anxiety of incompleteness (Appadurai 2006). The paper extends the idea of incompleteness by showing that however much the nation-state attempts to frame a particular brand of nationalism, variants of ethnocultural nationalism do exist, demonstrating the diverse subjectivities embodied by the refugees/narrators. Such ethnocultural nationalism can be read as alternative forms of self-assertion deeply etched in the social memory of the refugees.

More or Less" Refugee?: Bengal Partition in Literature and Cinema

2015

In this thesis, I problematize the dominance of East Bengali bhadralok immigrant’s memory in the context of literary-cultural discourses on the Partition of Bengal (1947). By studying post-Partition Bengali literature and cinema produced by upper-caste upper/middleclass East Bengali immigrant artists, such as Jyotirmoyee Devi’s novel The River Churning (Epar Ganga Opar Ganga 1967, Bengali) and Ritwik Ghatak’s film The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara 1960, Bengali), I show how canonical artworks have propounded elitist truisms to the detriment of the non-bhadra refugees’ representations. To challenge these works, I compare them with perspectives available in Other refugee writers’ texts. These include Dalit first-generation literates’ experiences, as described in Adhir Biswas’ memoirs Deshbhager Smriti (Memory of Partition 2010, Bengali), Allar Jomite Paa (Stepping on the Land of Allah 2012, Bengali), and Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiography Itibritte Chandal Jibon (Memoir of Chand...

Life Stories and Material Objects: Revisiting the Memory of 1947 Bengal Partition

The Long History of Partition in Bengal: Event, Memory, Representations, 2024

Over the last few decades, there has been a perceptible shift in thematic focus in the field of 1947 Partition studies. The emergent discourses adumbrate the contours of refugee migration by highlighting the oral history narratives of those who witnessed the Partition. Though the proliferation of oral narratives has led to a ‘memory boom’, there has been little discussion on temporality and memory and their relation to the act of narration. Against this backdrop, the chapter examines the oral narratives of two individuals and places them alongside the material objects that they have preserved. Since human memory etiolates with time, Aanchal Malhotra believes that ‘transference of memory’ occurs into these inanimate objects (2017, 24). Contrary to Malhotra’s observation, the chapter foregrounds that as external objects, these items in themselves do not embody meanings. However, when placed in the context of remembering the past, they reinforce the structure of the narratives and enrich the life stories. In other words, these objects add value to the stories of displacement, migration, and resettlement. Most importantly, these objects help in negotiating time past in time present to make the life stories timeless as the material items are handed from one generation to the other. Keywords: Partition, memory, objects/items, oral narratives, remember

Reconstructing the Bengal partition: The psyche under a different violence’, Kolkata: Samya. 2013

The partition left a huge impact in a generation of people; their disturbed psyche would haunt many generations down the family line. It was a chasm that was buried deep, something that would perhaps open years later to show the gnawing wounds within. book analyzes the complex feelings of hatred and longing for the homeland that have contributed to shaping the personalities of a generation of people who were forced to migrate from East Bengal post partition.

Crossing Borders in Partition Studies and the Question of the Bangladesh Liberation War

With the seventieth anniversary of the 1947 Partition of India in sight, this paper examines the uneasy position that the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 has long held at the edge of Indian Partition Studies. The Liberation War is implicated in decisions to exclude Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh from much of the scholarship on Partition over the years, as evidenced by the state of the canon generally and the work of some feminist scholars more specifically. In order to rebalance Partition Studies and to resituate 1971, this paper engages with some fictional representations of Partition and the Liberation War to demonstrate the merits of border-crossing. It brings to light a contemporary shift in the direction of Partition Studies and argues for inclusive methodologies that avoid the privileging of one time or place over another at the expense of human experience, both in the individual case of India and across global partitions more broadly.