A Reading of Violence in Partition Stories from Bengal [1 ed.] 1527550273, 9781527550278

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A Reading of Violence in Partition Stories from Bengal

A Reading of Violence in Partition Stories from Bengal By

Suranjana Choudhury

A Reading of Violence in Partition Stories from Bengal By Suranjana Choudhury This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by Suranjana Choudhury All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-5027-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-5027-8

CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ................................................................................. viii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Narratives on Violence: Partition and After Chapter I ................................................................................................... 29 The Politics and Poetics of Victimization Chapter II .................................................................................................. 56 Women and Violence: Issues and Representations Chapter III ................................................................................................ 85 Relocation and Violence: Mapping the Trajectories Chapter IV .............................................................................................. 112 Reading Beyond Violence: Multiple Narrations Notes....................................................................................................... 128

PREFACE

Like Shanta Sen in her Partition novella Pitamohi, my grandmother continues to cast a sublime influence on our displaced family resettled in Barak Valley of Assam following Partition. Like many women of her generation she had sold off her expensive jewellery to rebuild a home for our homeless family. I lost her long ago, but she continues to define my roots for me. My maternal grandfather, the late Ananta Deb who was an activist in erstwhile East Pakistan had a huge stock of Partition tales for us and the memories of his days in Sylhet and Rajshahi. As part of the third generation to be privy to Partition narratives, my everyday life too has been moulded by its cascading remnants. This deep-rooted personal engagement with Partition has naturally encouraged me to take up Partition as a research topic. Nevertheless, I was acutely aware of the moral and ethical issues and their volatile relationship with this political phenomenon. However, the keen interest and scholarship of my teacher, Professor Jharna Sanyal, inspired me further to explore this somewhat contested but nonetheless intriguing subject of research. This book is a section from my PhD thesis on the topic “Issues and Representations of Violence in Selected Partition Narratives from Bengal.” At the outset, when I started my research, I discovered that expansive research had already been carried out on the Punjab Partition, covering both historical and literary spheres. A closer look at Bengal narratives on Partition revealed that a lot remained unexplored. It was with interest that I realised that contrary to the perceived opinion that Bengal had barely recorded Partition trauma, sporadic writings exist on this issue. Admittedly, if measured on a comparative scale, Punjab has been far more vocal on Partition imbroglio. Violence which marks the discourse of Partition has scarcely been investigated in the case of Bengal. The focus here has been directed more towards resettlement issues. As discussed in the introductory chapter, historical and sociological writings on Partition began to emerge in stages. As for literary narratives, quite a number of novels and a host of short stories were written in response to this seminal event. From the late 1990s onwards, a revived interest in Partition narratives has been documented palpably in the public discourse on Bengal. Manabendra Bandopadhyay’s Bhed Bibhed (Vols. I & II), Debesh Roy’s Roktomonir Hare (Vols. I & II), Prafulla Roy’s Onuprobesh and Abhijit Sengupta’s Uchheder Golpo are amongst the edited collections of short

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Bangla stories on Partition which bear testimony to this renewed interest in it. As for translated works, there were hardly any translations of Bangla Partition narratives until Alok Bhalla’s edited collection on Partition stories was published. Later on, Debjani Sengupta’s Mapmaking and Other Stories in 2003 and Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter, in 2008, became landmark publications of translated stories on Partition. Simultaneously, a flurry of creative texts on Partition cast in the mould of memoirs has emerged in the last few years. Shanta Sen’s Pitamohi, Jonmer Mati, Mihir Sengupta’s Bishadbriksha, Sunanda Sikdar’s Doyamoyir Kotha, Gopal Chandra Moulick’s Deshbhag o Nonipishimar Kotha are amongst the recently published creative writings on Partition. All these individual texts and edited compilations on Partition demonstrate the continuity of Partition in our lived world. Hardly any Partition novels from Bengal have been translated. Research based works on violence—especially on literary narratives—have scarcely been touched upon in the case of Bengal. All these decisive factors confirm the need to look at the issues and representations of violence with an exclusive focus on Bengal narratives. Exhaustive research would involve encompassing untranslated texts as well, because an omission of such a substantial body of writings would invariably manifest an organic lapse in the nature of research. Encompassing texts which have not yet been translated has facilitated my presenting a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of Partition violence as reflected in literary narratives from Bengal. The textual excerpts of all the novels which I have used in the chapters are my translations except Doyamoyir Kotha. Here it is important to note that in the case of translated short stories featured in edited collections of Fraser, Sengupta, Bagchi and Dasgupta or Bhalla I have mentioned the editor’s name when I have used textual quotes for the first time. Thereafter I have only included the respective page numbers. For the short stories which are yet to be translated and which are included in edited collections of Debesh Roy, Manabendra Bandopadhyay or Abhijit Sengupta, I have referenced the editor’s name when I have used textual passages for the first time. The translations of these textual passages including the titles are mine, unless otherwise mentioned. In the case of the critical works on Partition in Bengali I have translated the relevant portions which I have used in the book. Research on Partition historiography has already been extensively conducted and relevant materials are easily accessible, so as to avoid repetition. Elaborate historical details have been exempt from my introduction. Through this research on Partition I have sought to pay homage to the collective spirit of resilience and enterprise of our grandparents’ displaced generation which has gone on to make up the tapestry of the modern Indian nation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many to whom I owe gratitude for their unflagging support and inspiration that have made this book possible. This book is a section from my PhD thesis on the topic “Issues and Representations of Violence in Selected Partition Narratives from Bengal.” I am deeply thankful to Professor Jharna Sanyal for supervising my PhD work that has been shaped into this book. My gratefulness is unbounded for Madam Sanyal whose meticulous review and extraordinary support drove me to perform this journey from its very beginning. She showed me with her characteristic brilliance the potentialities of this research and guided me throughout, while putting her faith in me to choose my own path forward. I am extremely grateful to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for having agreed to publish this work of mine. I sincerely thank all my colleagues in the Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University for permitting me to take a study leave for over a year to complete my work. Special mention goes out to Professor Moon Moon Mazumdar, Professor Esther Syiem, Professor Mala Renganathan and Professor Sukalpa Bhattacharjee for their support and advice on the technicalities of attaining study leave. I also thank Dr Suparna Bhattacharjee, my friend and colleague in the department of Political Science, NEHU, for sharing her insights on Partition studies and encouraging me always. I also thank my friends, Dr Binayak Dutta at the Department of History, NEHU, who is also a noted scholar on Partition Studies, and Professor D.V Kumar, Department of Sociology, NEHU for academic inspiration and stimulating discussions. I thank all the teachers at the Department of English, Calcutta University, for giving very encouraging comments and suggestions to enrich my work. I express my thanks to Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata for selecting me as a participant in the NRTT Workshop on “Violence and Violation.” This ten day long workshop enabled me to get to grips with strong theoretical perspectives on the concept of violence and also aided me in developing a cross disciplinary approach towards my research. I thank especially Professor Manas Ray who was the discussant of my paper and who had offered very insightful observations on my research area. The arguments in my book have been rehearsed at some of the conferences and seminars which I have attended in the recently. I express

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my gratitude to all those whose comments helped me in sharpening my focus. I express my sincere thanks to all the staff members at the National Library, Kolkata; the British Council Library, Kolkata; Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata; Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Kolkata. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the staff members of Calcutta University Library, NEHU Library, Shillong, and Netaji Library, Shillong. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff members of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Library, Kolkata, for assisting me in gaining access to important research materials. Friends have played a very positive part in the course of my research. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank especially Samrat Sengupta, a very close friend and committed researcher who has helped me immensely over these last few years. He willingly allowed me to access books from his enviable collection and often sent research materials to Shillong whenever I needed them. I also thank especially my other close friends Ananya, Deepti, Rudra, Suchismita, Nabanita and Suparna for helping me on various occasions during my research. I am grateful to Debasri Basu, a fellow researcher who has helped me with invaluable tips and suggestions. The most sustaining force in this entire journey has been that of relatives. From the very outset of my research I have found endless motivation and inspiration in my parents. They were instrumental to my stepping out of my home town Silchar and pursue a higher education in Kolkata. On many occasions when I would lose all patience and fret anxiously, they would encourage me to move onward and upward. I thank my mother Aruna Choudhury and father Dr Chinmoy Choudhury for having done everything without being asked. I am grateful to my grandfather the late Ananta Deb, who was very enthusiastic at witnessing my research take form. He had helped me out with many Partition related writings which he had collected over a long span of time. I would also like to thank profusely Amitabha Dev Choudhury, the creative writer from Barak Valley and who is my maternal uncle as well. He had sent me his own books and materials when I most needed them. I am grateful to my Aunts and Uncles in Kolkata and Shillong who have offered much needed help and support. My thanks go to my extended family members, my father in law, and all my in-laws for supporting me immensely in my journey. My husband, Ratnadip Choudhury, has shown a keen interest in my research and has shared a rare sense of understanding throughout. Suffice to say that his academic spirit and positive disposition have enriched this course of my journey.

INTRODUCTION NARRATIVES ON VIOLENCE: PARTITION AND AFTER1

Teler Shishi Bhanglo Bole/Khukur Pore Raag Koro/ Tomra Je Shob Buro Khoka/ Bharat Bhenge Bhag Koro/ Tar Bela?2 Annadashankar Ray (For breaking a bottle of oil/ you snub the little girl/ All you old boys/ you have partitioned Bharat/ What about that?) ye daagdaagujaalaa, ye shab_gaziidaasahar /wo intazaarthaajiskaa, ye wo sahar to nahiin/ye wo sahar to nahiinjiskii aarzuulekar /chale the yaarki mil jaayegiikahiinnakahiin3 Faiz Ahmed Faiz (These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light -This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom, we had set out in sheer longing)

Partition continues to peer through ongoing spirals of fear; it lives on through communal riots and violence in each of the three nation states, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Recent (as well as past) eruptions of mob violence in Bodo land in Assam, Mumbai, or the panicked flight of North East migrants from Bangalore reiterate these strands of continued conflict.4 As a pivotal event in the history of the Indian subcontinent, Partition and its outcomes continue to mould socio-cultural contours and engagements within the context of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Partition echoes through the socio-political and cultural discourses due to its experiential distillations. This holds true not only for discourses which a focus on religion’s position in India but also “for [the] historical interpretation of justice and minority belonging and for the tension-ridden struggle over the production of secular national culture in the subcontinent.” (Daiya, 2). Even now, seminars, panel discussions, workshops, conferences and chat shows are being held in myriad colleges, universities, research institutes and television channels to reflect on the lasting consequences of Partition in the public sphere in the subcontinent. Martha C. Nussbaum, in discussing the pervasive effects of religious violence in modern India, comments pertinently:

2

Introduction If we really want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive the assault of religious extremism, from which all modern democracies can learn.5 (Nussbaum, Religious Violence 1)

It is not unexpected that the crisis and disruption which emerged during Partition would lead to such explosive outcomes and increasingly saturate current discourses about political violence across the country. Partition has become—in more ways than one—an evocative receptacle of meanings, ideas and metaphors of contemporary ethnic belongings of South Asia. The very nature of socio-historical arrangements and the ideological rhetoric afforded by the experiences of Partition has been such that it opens up a perpetual potentiality for creatively playing upon the conceivability inherent in the phenomenon. In the case of India, the heady years of diversified and extended struggle for freedom, the consequent dismembering of two mutually antagonistic nations, the statistical dimension of the displacement of millions—all these remain the principle concerns of official historiography and investigations in Social Science. The singularly violent nature of the event stands out. Details of varied forms of violence have emerged through such research; images of trains6 loaded with corpses as they arrived on either side of the border, mutilated bodies, cases of forced religious conversions, the tattooing of women’s bodies with symbols of the religion which was not their own, forcing apart homes and families. In certain regions, killings scaled up to the definition of genocide, and ethnic cleansing was carried out to raze many districts of minority populations. There were also abominable effects on pluralist practices and syncretic forms of culture and associated resources that sought to preserve such practices and forms.7 Partition historiography has shifted markedly from the study of archival matters relating to the transfer of power and high politics, to the other shades of the event. This shift has been enabling for scholars across disciplinary boundaries. New perspectives have included accounts and experiences based on oral witness accounts, memoirs, popular source materials, and a broadening of the framework of analysis. While colonialist historiography sought to reify the age-old divide between the communities as the key factor inciting a heightened separatism and the subsequent Partition, nationalist historiography marked a departure from this historical position emphasising colonial rulers’ device of divide-andrule. The onus of this scholarship was also on the role of high politics and

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the heroic contributions of national leaders, and thus an analysis of the effects of violence on the lives of the common people was neglected. It is noteworthy that in the historical framework of India and Pakistan, heroes in one national discourse are rendered villains in the other. In India, most nationalist studies often view Jinnah as the decisive figure masterminding the division; again in Pakistan many Hindu leaders like Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel have been held responsible for their incapacity to protect minority rights. These competing versions of history have been critical in facilitating other analytical approaches to reveal hitherto unknown facets of Partition and violence associated with it.8 There has sprung up over the last few decades an academic interest in exploring issues related to the social and cultural dimensions of this event. Bouts of violence in several regions (anti-Muslim violence and anti-Sikh riots) of India especially, have led historians to consider these periodical ruptures in terms of Partition massacres. In Remembering Partition, Gyanendra Pandey rightly remarks that, countering the nationalist version of history, the survivors’ testimonies maintain that Partition was violence, a cataclysm, a world (or worlds) torn apart. So, in parallel to institutional streams of history writing, there have come about newer modes of examining multiple truths of Partition violence. With regard to the broad range of perspectives on Partition studies, Joe Cleary makes a pertinent remark: While Irish and Middle Eastern historiography continues to be dominated by the ‘high’ politics of partition, South Asian historians have begun to investigate the issue from the perspective of those ‘below’ as well. In so doing, critical new insights on the communal violence that accompanied partition, on the specific experiences of women, and on the role of literature in constructing collective understandings and representations of the traumas involved have been opened up. (Cleary, 10)

Those archives generated by the state agencies are not the only primary sources. Scholars including Mushirul Hasan, Gyanendra Pandey, Ashis Nandy, Urvashi Butalia, Kamla Bhasin, Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta have offered diverse angles on the Partition story while highlighting the mystery shrouding its details. Their studies give expression to marginal elements and focus on the popular culture of the period. Effectively these have reconstructed the fall-out of Partition through a magnifying glass. Essentially, the spotlight is now on oral history, gender issues and the minority predicament. As for instance, Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence and Menon and Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries have given rise to, as Debra Castillo and Kavita Panjabi note in their introduction to

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Introduction

Cartographies of Affect, “a critical shift in the entire field of Partition by questioning the silence on women and also by subverting the monoliths of top down nationalist and state oriented histories.” (Castillo & Panjabi, 25). Ashis Nandy’s study of Partition history offers critical insight into the multiplicity of voices and silences which coexist within the paradigm of assessing Partition violence in the context of the South Asian history. As he notes in his foreword to Mapmaking: The great Partition riots were one instance when our society, culture and the very basis of civilised life tottered. Though they also included elements of organisation and planning, the riots did reach the interstices of our society. That is why to look at them is to explore the derecognised, contraband selves we live with and to re-examine one’s cherished ideological and ethical moorings. (Sengupta, Mapmaking ix)

Gyanendra Pandey’s rich works on Partition are primarily concerned with the interrelated issues of community, nationhood and violence. He basically argues that the separation between Partition and violence was over-simplified by nationalist historiography, and opines that history is in need of radical reconsideration. Veena Das’s study of the prolongation of Partition consequences in contemporary society is instructive of the ways in which events of collective violence continue to form the intermingling of experiences of community and state. Her formulations based on an empirical framework are important for facilitating a better understanding of violence. Das views violence not as a disturbance of ordinary life but as something that is implicated in the ordinary. Multiple perspectives on assessing Partition historiography and on the accounts of violence connected to this decisive moment give rise to a range of challenging issues waiting to be explored.

Violence: Multiplicity of Reading It seems that the difficulty violence poses to the subject undergoing it is mirrored in the difficulty of the representation of violence.9 —Willem Schinkel

Violence is tantamount to one of the clearest projections of Partition. Its dynamics—the nature of violence, its repercussions on society and the individual, and the forms of its socio-cultural and political insertion—are invariably imbued with the aesthetic sensibility of its writers. The event’s singularly violent character makes it a highly controversial and inflamed domain of research. Beyond the murder and pillage of others, it also involved enormous violence directed towards the

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self. It is challenging to conceptualise violence in a transparent and singular manner. Paul R. Brass, in a significant work on violence argues that the struggle over the meaning of violence in each society may or may not afford a consensus or a hegemonic interpretation. It will certainly not lead to the truth, but at most to a regime of truth, as Brass puts it, which would provide a context for reinterpreting previous acts of violence in a country’s history.10 Multiple narratives compete for control over the explanation of violence. There were several sites of violence during the period 1946-47 after which there were communal riots of a magnitude not seen before which had occurred earlier during British rule. These bouts of violence have been viewed as a phased sequence of revenge and retaliation. Furthermore, there is also a tendency to view them as subsets of wider communal conflicts between the Hindus and the Muslims over the future of the subcontinent. On the pervasiveness of violence during Partition, Paul R Brass comments, “In the last days of the British Raj, it was not only the case that violence occurred as a consequence of partition, but violence was a principal mechanism for creating the conditions for partition.” (Brass, 19) This raises a flummoxing question regarding the curious proximity between religion and the very violence it so often claims to lament. Deliberating on the link between religion and the current of constant conflict between religious communities, Martin Jay in Refractions of Violence claims that these antagonisms raise “profound questions about the deep and abiding link between religious belief, practice and institutionalization on the one hand and violating the putative sanctity of human life and inviolability, of the human body on the other” (Jay, 178). Was the violence unleashed during Partition a case of danger engendered in the act of obsessively preserving religious sanctity? Or was it an example of a deep seated propensity for bestiality ingrained within the human psyche? The answer is not easily found. Fascinating complexities and disciplinarian pluralities mark the defining parameters of violence and its relationship to the question of ethics and righteousness. Philosophical, anthropological, sociological and political approaches towards explaining and understanding violence express a range of positions on negotiating with the subject. The deduction of the belief that violence is a natural and normal phenomenon is usually the end point of any discussion on violence. Looking closely at contemporary ethnic violence and worldwide unrest, it can very comfortably be ascertained that violence actualises the inner world of lived values, and acts of violence are key to the moulding of moral order, and these give shape to the norms and codes of ethics. In the Indian context, multiple connotations of violence are emanated in drawing

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Introduction

out its conceptual framework. From the Mahabharata to the Gandhian doctrine, the opposition between ‘Ahimsa’ and ‘Himsa’, as conjectural categories, is frequently adhered to. The significance attached to the ethics of Ahimsa (nonviolence) is repeatedly reflected in most of the Indian philosophical canon. There is a kind of critical consensus that in the Mahabharata, the colossal work that within the Indian taxonomy of genres bears the title ‘itihasa’11 attaches great importance to nonviolence. Though it persistently stages episodes of gory bloodshed and apocalyptic violence—especially in the Kurukshetra war—there is also an intellectual and spiritual struggle to tame violence. It is ultimately ‘anrsamsya’12 which is extolled as the supreme virtue in the odyssey for self-realisation. In the Western philosophical tradition, formulations on violence have been posited by thinkers, amongst whom are Arendt, Benjamin, Zizek, Habermas and Agamben. These diverse theorisations of ‘violence’ as an analytical subject need to be dealt with in addressing the basic premise of Partition violence. It should be taken into account that in most of these discourses on violence primacy is attached to the link between ethics, governance, violence and issues of justice and morality. In this context it is worth mentioning Walter Benjamin, the noted critical thinker who makes a radical intellectual move by formulating a ‘poetics of violence’ in his “Critique of Violence.”13 Benjamin rejects any critique of violence which is based on a theory of justification with an allusion to ends or means. The relation between law and justice are the basic problem he addresses, as it hinges on violence. As he succinctly puts it, the task of a critique of violence may be summed up as the explicating its relation to law and justice. Particularly, his essay addresses the question of whether violence in the social and political realms could be justified as pure means in themselves, independent of whether it was applied to just or unjust ends. It is also a programmatic concern he shares with Georges Sorel in his Reflections on Violence.14 Within the paradigm of the state, Benjamin distinguishes between two forms of violence that mutually presuppose and deconstruct each other: “All violence as a means is either law-making or law-preserving.” (Bullock & Jennings, 243) Against mythic violence and its inborn cycle of law-making and law-preserving violence, Benjamin establishes a category of nonviolent, pure or unalloyed violence that could suspend the application of law to bare life. He coins this violence as “divine violence” – a paradoxically pure or non-violent violence that coincides with its tautological opposite: a strikingly violent violence. The recognition that the creating and conserving of the law has but scant relations with justice, has been widely recognised in the history of European discourses on legality and power. This reference significantly

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evokes Hannah Arendt’s treatment of violence as a discursive category of analysis which effectively brings out the instrumentality of the state and its relation with the moments of “radical evil.” Arendt primarily deliberates on the legitimacy of violence in the theatre of ideas. She attempts to improve our understanding of violence responding to Vietnam War and the threat of nuclear war during the burgeoning Cold War. Her ideas are substantial and shed light on how mankind can view power and violence. In On Violence, Arendt argues that justifications and rationalisations which are normatively used to legitimise some forms of violence are flawed. The question she is posing is, how is it possible to rationalise the irrational? Arendt argues that there is a dearth of real critical analysis on the role and function of violence in human society. As Arendt comments, “no one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has played in human affairs, and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for special consideration.” (Arendt, On Violence 8) The latter reflects the belief that in human affairs, the means-ends dichotomy is always open to unpredictability. The ends are at risk of being superseded by the means. However, Arendt believes that once violence is introduced into the debate then it becomes completely unpredictable and the very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-ends category, whose chief trait, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it is said to justify and which are needed to reach it. This endless debate emerging from the tussle between means and ends is crucial to the study of violence and its implications. The fundamental argument centres on the question of whether it is possible to track and identify the evolution of violence from its natural and primitive functions to the cultural manifestations of violence that had become so widespread in the 20th century. In any discussion on the specificity of Partition violence, analysing the broader paradigm of diverse theorisations on violence becomes an important academic area of exploration. These divergent modes of conceptualising violence and affirming the nature of its impact cannot be placed under an umbrella framework of theoretical stance. This plurality of stances amplifies the complex territory of defining violence and distinguishing its diverse forms and structures. A fascinating correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein questions whether there can be any politically viable system of ethics structured around the notion of absolute nonviolence. Commenting on the embedded thread of violence within the human psyche, Freud comments, “A lust for aggression and destruction is certainly among them; the countless cruelties in our history and in our everyday lives vouch for

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Introduction

its existence and its strength.”15 (Strachey, 210) In studying the concept of violence, covering all the consequent dimensions of violence becomes a pressing need—trauma, pain, suffering and so on. The experiences of suffering, pain, trauma, affliction, torture, fear and betrayal are also constituted within the structural analysis of violence. Violence does not simplistically suggest acts of physical aggression and infliction; instead its subtle and implicit representations require intensive analysis. Rather than merely emphasising only the raw, bloody effect of violence, it worthwhile looking at the more subtle, implicit forms of violence encased within trauma16, pain, fear or betrayal.

Partition Violence and its Pluralities From Ras Kumari to Amritsar, from Sialkot to Dhaka or from Calcutta to Delhi and Lahore to Khyber, the entire subcontinent was drenched in blood. In a word it had become one big slaughter house.17 —Shorish Kashmiri

In his study on the relation between violence and the states of South Asia—with a view to defining the territorial sources of contemporary violence,—Willem van Schendel pertinently points out that the disintegration of British India has often been depicted as necessary violence, as if it were a surgical procedure.18 This equation between the Partition and the accompanying violence has been viewed diversely and numerously by scholars and South Asian experts. As a result of Partition, several ironies weighed down the birth of secular democratic nations. A subcontinent which had hitherto offered the entire world examples of satyagraha, ahimsa took recourse to grotesque forms of violence during this crucial stage in history. In his leadership of the freedom struggle, Gandhi established the methodology of nonviolence, which is a prerequisite for a culture of peace. He perennially sought to transform the ethics of nonviolence into an instrument of social and political action. His distrust of violence as a tool to achieve liberty and as a tool of revolution was torn asunder by an incredible release of violence at that time. Forms of collective violence placed along a continuum of overlapping categories ranging from riots, pogroms to genocide were confronted.19 An overarching historical issue has developed from this: why did the mass migrations and the horrendous violence that accompanied them occur, and who was responsible for it? The Indian subcontinent has been subject to Partition thrice—in 1905, in 1947, and in 1971. In 1905, the partition of Bengal received widespread resistance and was subsequently withdrawn. Urvashi Butalia has noted the silence which swathes Partition in The Other Side of

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Silence, “In India, there is no institutional memory of Partition. The State has not seen fit to construct any memorials, to mark any particular places—as has been done, say, in the case of Holocaust memorials or memorials for the Vietnam War.” (Butalia, 361) The 1947 Partition, however, released an orgy of mutual violence leading to far-reaching devastation. As Kavita Panjabi points out in her research on Partition violence, “The collapse of the grand ideas of secularism and democracy began in the very moment that the nationalist struggle came to fruition.” (Castillo & Panjabi, 219) As mentioned previously, initially only an insular, blinkered perspective on Partition historiography was accessible; gradually the received histories have been interrogated which consequently set into motion a plurality of understandings of the event. In a similar vein, the violence set loose during Partition has also been examined from several vantage points. Questions and counter-questions have been raised as to how to explain the outbreak of such abominable violence. Debates on community, gender, economic determinations, and caste identity regarding violence have expanded various accounts on the subject. Complex experiences, interpretations and insights collected by scholars and writers on Partition violence emphasise the importance of recognising this diversity. Partition, as part of a renowned nationalist historiography, and especially its violence, began to vanish from the Indian public sphere after it occurred. The notion of maintaining harmonious ethnic relations within the state is best forgotten; generally perceived as incongruous with peaceful, non-violent, anti-colonial struggle under Gandhi’s leadership, this violence suggested its failure. On this issue, Kavita Daiya comments: Because responsibility for the violence lay with all the constituencies involved—British, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs—Partition has ultimately been disavowed historically as an aberration, a moment of “insanity” in an otherwise remarkable story of non-violently achieved freedom from British oppression. (Daiya, 7)

The spotlight in any research on Partition violence frequently falls on a strategy of elision and disavowal. In their article “Listening for Echoes: Partition in Three Contexts,” Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben Ari talk about this streak of evasion where they contend: The post-independence vision of sociology as a science of society in the service of the Indian nation was informed by a consent on nation-building which could only be achieved by securing a respectable distance from the trauma, the pain and guilt --- the "underside" of independence. Moreover, in the interests of ensuring "objectivity" and "neutrality", the underpinnings of

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Introduction a "value-free" sociology, the emotive violence of partition, appears to have been sacrificed as a subject worthy of sociological study. (Jassal & Ben Ari, “Echoes” 2216)

Partition violence has been presented in the guise of a calamity, a pralaya or tandava20 which would trail off after its brief tempestuous passing. The severity, uncertainty and jagged edges of violence are now seen as intrusions, impositions or exceptions. However, muting the violence is a very different task from the perspective of a survivor and the accounts disseminated by official historiography. Gyanendra Pandey’s description in this regard is pertinent: Whereas historians’ history seems to suggest that what Partition amounted to was, in the main, a new constitutional/political arrangement, which did not deeply affect the central structures of Indian society or the broad contours of its history, the survivors’ account would appear to say that it amounted to a sundering, a whole new beginning and, thus, a radical reconstitution of community and history. (Pandey, Remembering 7)

This difference of perspective raises the level of complexity in studying the violence of Partition. The issue of Partition violence is concomitant to the issue of community configurations in more ways than one. The conceptual framework of community identity, religious ties and negotiating factors like historical contingency, remains central to the issue of the violence incited on the basis of conflicting consciousness. Gyanendra Pandey, Veena Das, Ashis Nandy, Sudipta Kaviraj et al. have developed interesting insights on the overlapping parameters of community, its solidarity and violence. This dynamic weave between community and violence is alternately configured through strategies of acceptance and disavowal respectively. Violence and community qualify each other, and violence can occur only at or beyond that limit. The perpetration of violence is rationalised by the respective narratives of each rival community. The reasoning goes that whatever has happened within the community limits is not violence at all. Within highly specialised and exclusivist community limits, violence is seen as an aberration, an exception which would not come within the folds of group- (here, religious community) solidarity. It never occurs within the permissible boundaries of community. The community remains protective of all its members, untainted by violence, which resides ‘somewhere else’. Given the changing, malleable parameters of community identity at various historical junctures, this argument is particularly interesting. That which happens within the margins of community, be it atrocities committed against women or the forceful

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11

conversion of religious faith, cannot be labelled as violence. This strain of disregard or allusion becomes a strategic reasoning which actually endorses acts of violence. This relates to the general question of the ethics of survival.21 The task of offloading responsibility to the rival camp (here, community) is marked by a sense of preserving the self at the cost of the other. Stanley J. Tambiah expands on the role-indeterminacy of ethnic conflicts.22 Assailants and victims frequently get their roles reversed which takes on the shape of a diabolical riddle. Tambiah, in “Obliterating the Other in former Yugoslavia” notes that this riddle is marked by a continual process of “constructing the other as the enemy and violence is unleashed under the thrall of a felt collective demonizing and everyday taboo lifting.” (Tambiah, 77) The venomous intensity of the forcedly allocated boundaries is directly proportionate to the build-up of ambiguities between the socially constructed categories. Most survivors’ accounts express this fearpsychosis of being annihilated and posit it as a justification for committing violence. It would seem that the perceived threat to survival instigates violence. To what extent does it stand in an explanation of the violence of Partition? Parallel to this discussion, is the question of whether our understanding of community needs to be deepened. The differences in place within the same, so called homogeneous community come to be muted in order to whittle together a unified community identity. On the one hand, communal ideology may reflect a disdain for other groups, but it might also represent the group’s attempt to define a legitimate space for itself in the public sphere. The language which was evolved by the state (intending here the colonial administration) fundamentally saw communal violence as proof of an age-old conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims, rather than as the degradation of the moral order of the cities brought under colonial rule. Very often contemporary accounts of violence get appropriated by this description though it is a flawed, short-sighted deduction. Instead of investigating the specific conditions which lie behind the emergence of communal conflict, the language of the state lays emphasis upon the tension that has persisted for several centuries. What is the motif of signifiers that structures the ideologies of communalism and ethnicity? Is Partition violence merely a continuation of prevalent communal conflicts, or is it possible to point to a different trajectory of features characterising the violence of Partition? Contemporary HinduMuslim communal violence in the Indian nation cannot be isolated from Partition because continuing troubles clearly indicate that Partition still haunts the human psyche beyond the public rhetoric of unity and the everyday life of one nation. In his study on violence and civilization

12

Introduction

especially in the context of communal conflicts, Gyanendra Pandey links the two astutely, “Civilization is the absence, then, or at least the strict control of violence.” (Pandey, Question 7) He further qualifies his statement by adding that the discourse of civilization may be described as a discourse on violence in the negative. “Violence is Civilization’s other, as it were. It is what Civilization and History are not.” (9). Represented as pathological; a symptom of disease, violence is barely related to normal conditions of life situations. Whether happening within the folds of community or viewed as an occurrence on the other side of the boundaries, Partition violence exposes a minefield of inquiry. In order to study this complex field it is equally necessary to resist absolutely any single causal explanation behind its occurrence. Was the nature of mob fury during Partition sporadic, scattered here and there? Or was it organised and strategic? There is no simple, linear way of answering this. It is not easy to grasp the entire pattern of mob behaviour during that period.23 In fact as discussed earlier, it is considered as momentary madness and at the same time, as a manifestation of accumulated mutual hostility. In his analysis of different facets of crowd behaviour in the context of violent outbreaks, Sudhir Kakar gives interesting insight on the subject. Mobs, he comments, “illustrate more clearly than in any other comparable social situation, the evanescence of rational thought, the fragility of internalised behaviour controls, values, and moral and ethical standards.” (Das, Mirrors 142) The collapse of neighbourhoods, the psychopathic and sadomasochistic aspects of the violence during Partition represent such fragilities as mentioned by Kakar. In fact they have resulted in complete disorientation in the process of identifying the victim and the aggressor. In Partition therefore, many aggressors are sufferers and many sufferers are perpetrators, and logically there is no distinct boundary demarcating the two. This mercurial nature is peculiar because it was unleashed to bring about fixity, a certain sense of self-containment within the participating groups. Gyanendra Pandey hits upon this feature in his focus on Partition violence: What appears to count more and more in the context of Partition are believers and non-believers, Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and even the usually remote India and Pakistan. Violence --- indeed, excessive, unforgiving violence is sometimes thought to have been needed in the effort to establish these new communities on secure foundations and it is no shame to declare it. (Pandey, Question 45)

The role engineered by rumours throughout Partition to mobilise one community against the other warrants investigation. Murmured insinuations

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13

and over-zealous declarations create a state of anxiety which in turn paves the way for promoting violence on the basis of misinformation. Ordinary people caught up in the mob behaviour during Partition grew to be easily swayed by the circulating stream of stories murmuring of impending dangers on the one side, and another set of glorified tales of bravery and new accounts of tradition on the other. The dynamics of rumour exhibit the vulnerability of the masses in relying on all types of narrations. The broadcast of false reports and exaggerated figures serves to intensify the justification behind annihilating the enemy. Gyanendra Pandey, in his study on the enormous role of rumour in unleashing violence during Partition remarks: Rumour is marked characteristically not only by indeterminacy, anonymity and contagion, but also by a tendency to excess and ‘certainty’ – a ‘certainty’ confirmed when the report moves from a verbal to a graphic or filmic mode. (Pandey, Remembering 70)

Most often, rumours are intentionally designed to incite different emotions in different stages.24 The noted historian, Bipan Chandra, in his article “Truth of Incidents, Truth of History” looks at the implication of rumour in the overall scenario of turbulence and concludes that, during Partition in particular, rumours majorly manipulated the course of human behaviour.25 It is interesting to reflect on how these rumours during Partition escalated the general sense of panic and also the specific ways in which images of hatred, imperatives to revenge and such were translated into actual acts of violence. Through the creation and circulation of hatred, the images of assailant and victim were frequently reversed depending on the perspective from which the memories of traumatic events and of everyday violence were viewed and relived. The anti-Sikh riots in Delhi can also be seen this way, as in Veena Das’ analysis of a similar mode of intriguing phenomenology of panic rumour, “In stunning reversals of what was the experience of violence here and now, panic rumours created a kind of screen in which aggressors came to identify themselves and even experience themselves as victims.” (Das, Life and Words 111) The issue was not merely one of truth or falsehood but also of the power and the structure of this discourse that completes the question of violence. These cases are repeatedly heard of and at a certain point these versions almost assume the status of gospel and are being ultimately confirmed through writing. It is pertinent to cite Pandey once more regarding the instrumental role of rumour vis–à-vis Partition violence, “Is it far-fetched to suggest that the general discourse on Partition still functions as something like a

14

Introduction

gigantic rumour, albeit a rumour commonly presented as ‘testimony’ (or ‘history’)?” (Pandey, Remembering 91) An interesting take on violence is seen in the celebratory rhetoric of upholding nationhood in the postcolonial context, paving the way for an overwhelming accolade to violence. The rhetoric of revenge sets into motion most of the accounts detailing acts of violence in the wake of Partition. A different kind of vocabulary is adopted to incorporate such acts of violence within the permissibility of ethics, so acts of brutality and murders are transformed into ‘veerta’ and ‘sahosikta’26 and at times participants are hailed as ‘deshkerakhwale’. These accounts make a tangible distinction between martyrdom and violence. The tendency to view violence as “not really violence” affords a sense of propriety to these otherwise brutal acts. Martyrdom and revenge do constitute instances of violence but at the same time they are presented as if they were carried out in order to stop further and more damaging violence, and there is a degree of ethical allowance which goes along with these acts. To quote Gyanendra Pandey: Indeed, in the case of martyrdom, the victim’s narrative tends to transform it into something altogether different, not only just, but beautiful and even otherworldly- God’s deeds as it were, performed in defence of God’s word and work: ‘dharma’, religion, the religious community. (Pandey, “Community” 2037)

In this course of perpetration there is barely any tolerance of committing violence or inflicting pain. Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman et al. make an interesting observation in this context; “Collective violence particularly presents the temptation to homogenize a collectivity through languages of patriotism and betrayal in populations, which is then mimicked in anthropological accounts of this violence.” (Das et al., Violence 11) Most of the survivors’ accounts are saturated with suggestions of violence being committed as a means of revenge or sacrifice. Kavita Panjabi too notes that, as violence was perceived in terms of performing a duty, securing the life of the community or nation- so neither self-immolation nor revenge, amounted to acts of violence in the victims’ accounts. Equally true is that there prevails a conviction that sacrificial bloodletting is necessary for building strong nation states. Suvir Kaul contends that the vocabulary of martyrdom is a key characteristic of such a belief, and this further makes death extremely meaningful and renders guilt involved in such acts less oppressive, so validating war and violence.27 As Suvir Kaul positions it, “In this vision, the nation, or the quam (community) demands its shaheeds, and is strengthened by them.”(Kaul, 7) The trope of revenge too

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15

operates similarly. It is presented as a matter in which the actors have no choice; it is only treated as recompense, i.e. paying someone back. As Gyanendra Pandey puts it, “The survivors’ accounts are often interspersed with terms of abuse, calling forth damnation upon these mother fuckers, sister fuckers and so on.” (Pandey, “Community” 2044) Embroiled in this matter is the question of survival, which in turn legitimises violence. In his essay “Survival of Violence: Violence of Survival” Anup Dhar touches upon this issue interestingly: Or perhaps, are we not all surviving at the cost of others? Is not Israel surviving at the cost of Palestine? But then, what is so natural about the survival of self, survival at any cost, at the cost of the other? Is survival then always already violent, something that intrinsically impinges on the survival of the other? Is there anything natural about the violence of survival, is there anything natural about the annihilation of the ‘other’ for the survival of ‘self’? (Dhar, 65)

In this context, it is illuminating to see Ashis Nandy’s point that “all the victims knew that in other parts of the region, often only a few miles away, people from their own community were doing exactly what was being done to them.” (Nandy, “Invisible Holocaust” 313) The breakdown of all inherited senses of community as well as the changing pattern of moral codes are reiterated in this way. Ironically, all the communities involved felt that their community had triumphed because they had succeeded in inflicting greater suffering upon the rival community/communities. Did Partition violence differ distinctly from other communal conflicts? An important feature of Partition violence was the type of massive violence directed reflexively towards the self. It represented numerous instances of killing own family members along with destruction of the selves.28 Urvashi Butalia’s documentation of the Thoa Khalsa incident is a significant example in this regard. Partition historiography narrates several other similar incidents; Thoa Khalsa is not an isolated episode. As Butalia points out, stories of this kind of mass suicide, or of women being slain by their own families are legion. In the context of Partition it is easy to encounter episodes of fathers killing daughters in order to avoid abduction and potential victims committing suicide to honour the community. The fear of losing one’s religion and culture motivated the enactment of such drastic measures. Another important dimension of Partition violence can be discerned in its pervasiveness, the remote villages of Punjab and Bengal bleeding profusely during the period. Ashis Nandy comments that the riots were not merely a speciality of the cities or a matter of urban slums exploding in violence. It was not merely an urban phenomenon concentrated exclusively in Calcutta, Delhi,

16

Introduction

Lahore or Rawalpindi.29 It precipitated to the villages of Punjab as well as many pockets of Bihar and Bengal. South Asian society, including rural South Asia, was implicated in the Partition riots. As the division of the country progressed, interreligious ways through which ordinary people in villages and urban areas conducted their lives were violated. This becomes an interesting discovery bearing in mind the continuous evocation of pristine, idyllic village settings through Partition memories. The villages, slums and cities were gradually contaminated as they got caught up in the whirlwind of the heightened communal rift. This overtly romanticised image of the homeland and its sudden transition becomes an important marker of the implications of violence during Partition. However this strategic mode of remembering is not without its complications. Most critical scholarship on Partition indicates that many such remembrances are misleading, and tinted with romanticised reminiscing.30

Depicting Bengal Violence and its Features “Both in terms of social geography and political developments Bengal occupied a crucial place in the evolution of communal politics in the subcontinent.”31 —Suranjan Das “Partition transformed Bengal and India yet, for the most part, the changes which flowed from Partition were as unexpected as they were farreaching.”32 —Joya Chatterji

Bengal represents a significant chapter for research and investigation, from both an historical and a political perspective. The partition experience in Bengal has been greatly distinct from that of the western part of the nation. The landscape of the nationalist movement, the increasing rift in terms of ideological affiliations and the gradual mobilisation for separation provide important points of reference for examining the special case of Bengal. It is of use to explicate how the Bengal story affected the Indian socio-political scenario throughout its course right up to the journey towards Partition. As Bashabi Fraser opines on this connection, “These events force one to reconsider questions of religious allegiance, personal beliefs, community consciousness and the divisive politics round the term communal in Bengal and in the greater context India.” (Fraser, 4) There is a need for a separate analytical framework for the specifics of violent events in Bengal during Partition. The differences between these two divisions are many. The ‘serious gap’ in the nature and occurrence of

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17

violence between Punjab and Bengal require an altogether separate space in which to be to be examined. As Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta in their path-breaking analysis of Bengal division note, “While history and politics have been constant and definitive in the context of Punjab, the Partition of Bengal has been refracted through conflicting prisms during the last six decades.” (Bagchi and Dasgupta Vol. 1, 2) The intermittency of the outbursts of violence, the protracted and agonising terrors, the porosity of borders, and an unfinished enterprise of recovery make Bengal an unprecedented case. Its violence is of a different nature, manifested in a protracted struggle for survival, the relentless exodus of a section of the populous seeking a new home in an alien landscape. Numerous historical and socio-political pieces of research have made evident the particularities of Bengal division as well. In the context of Bengal, Partha Chatterjee, Suranjan Das, Joya Chatterji, Sugata Bose, Sekhar Bandopadhyay33 and many others have done extensive research on the gradual polarisation of religious identities and the explosion of communal violence. The second partition of Bengal as it is called, being connected with the Partition of 1905 opens up a realm of concomitant issues of conflicting alliances and debatable identities. This wound had probably not healed and continued to play on a subterranean level. In his essay “Lokohito” Tagore states, “[the] Partition of Bengal did not affect our livelihood but it struck deep into our hearts.” (Tagore, 549) ‘Deshbhag’, ‘Utpaton’, ‘Uchhed’, ‘Griha-hara’34 are some of the many terms which have become loaded with layered socio-cultural connotations in this regard. The partition of 1905 warrants a mention because this division is attributed primarily to a colonial strategy of divide and rule, and was undone in six years. Partha Chatterjee in “The Second Partition of Bengal” discusses the conjecturing of a unified identity of Bengal at the time, “The idea that Bengal was one and indivisible, regardless of religious plurality, was a crucial element that shaped the notion that territory and culture were inseparably tied in a sort of natural history of the nation.” (Roy, Why 1947? 148) He further posits that the Swadeshi movement propagated an Indian nationalism pronouncing the Aryan-Hindu tradition, a linguistic nationalism valorising Bengal cultural unity and a rhetoric of HinduMuslim unity. However, over time, a host of political negotiations and developments threw this entire contrivance into disarray. The older dynamic of Hindu-Muslim unity was not sufficient for addressing the question of agrarian class relations. Sugata Bose, in a piece of intensive research on Bengal communalism: “The Roots of Communal Violence in Rural Bengal: A Study of the Kishoreganj Riots 1930” stresses the fact that without the agrarian dimension of the Hindu-Muslim problem in

18

Introduction

Bengal, the politics of separatism would have been diluted by the strong influx of composite nationalism. Bose also highlights a critical juncture in Bengal’s history; that religion provided the basis of a national bond and became the rallying cry of a political organisation demanding the sprouting of a separate Muslim homeland. Thus religion was used to disguise what was essentially an economic conflict which was burdened heavily by an economic and political order, while Muslim peasantry responded readily to appeals of religion and legitimised the breakdown of social relations. In this context it is interesting to flag up Zillur R Khan’s comment in his essay “Islam and Bengali Nationalism” on the rise of Bengali Muslim nationalism: What began as non-secular nationalism for Bengalis who had embraced Islam in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gradually became more religio-ethno-linguistic nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under economic pressure from non-Muslims and later from nonBengalis.35 (Khan, 834)

Another significant contribution on the morphed character of HinduMuslim relations36 comes from Suranjan Das, a noted historian from Bengal—particularly concerning the period following the 1930s—and its repercussions on the political turmoil which broke out during that time. A sharp transition ensued from unorganised, unstructured politics to a more organised and institutionalised communal politics. Elite and popular communalism tended to converge, and, concurrently, communal and class identities also converged majorly at the time. In this context, Das notes in his essay “Towards an Understanding of Communal Violence in Twentieth Century Bengal”: The outbreaks in this phase lost their initial class basis; became more organised; and were directly connected with developments in institutional politics and consequently exclusively related to communal politics rather than class interests. Crowd violence no longer focused primarily on richer and more influential sections of the two communities -but was instead directed at any manifestation of the rival community, such as religious centres, clubs and schools. (Das, “Understanding” 1805)

He also emphasises that polarised stereotypes were evoked, and apprehensions and fears were manipulated against specific symbols, individuals and objects. The conflict and strand of separatism percolating through society was intensified by the polarisation of the entire population into two communal blocs.

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Joya Chatterji’s work Bengal Divided represents Bengal’s sociopolitical instigation of Partition and its close link with the development of Hindu communalism, along with the existing politics of Muslim separatism. In response to the Communal Award of 1932 and the threat of loss of influence and authority that followed, Zamindars, congressmen, urban professionals, businessmen and members of the Hindu Mahasabha worked towards putting together a monolithic representation of the Hindu community. Through the rhetoric of communalism, they mobilised the “sanskritising aspirations of low caste groups” to reject the possibility of rule of the Muslim majority. As she comments: A large number of Hindus of Bengal backed up by the provincial branches of the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, campaigned intensively in 1947 for the partition of Bengal and for the creation of a separate Hindu province that would remain inside an Indian union. (Chatterji, Bengal Divided 227)

Disasters such as the 1930s depression, food shortages, fuel shortages created by the war, and the fall of Burma, the refugees fleeing Burma, the 1942 cyclone, the famine of 1943 and the economic strain of the war effort had already shattered the place’s morale. Bouts of violence taking place in Dhaka, Kishoreganj, Jessore and some other zones of Bengal reached their climax in the 1946 Great Calcutta Killing.38 Direct Action Day was observed in Kolkata with the unleashing of undeterred mob fury without the constraints of government machinery to pull the reins in on the violence. Bashabi Fraser refers to Maulana Azad’s recollections of the infamous day in his memoir, “Throughout Calcutta, the military and the police were standing by but remained inactive while innocent men and women were being killed.” (Fraser, 17) Suranjan Das too notes in his study “Communal Violence in Twentieth Century Colonial Bengal: An Analytical Framework” how August 1946 saw the first large scale involvement of the Bengali Hindus and Muslims in communal violence. This orgy of violence displayed communal hostility at its strongest, thereby completing the process of dehumanisation. Violence perpetrated by the opposing communities was alarming, insidious and sadistic. The bloodbath of 1946 in Calcutta instantly put into motion a series of violent episodes in Noakhali and Tippera. Due to strengthened communal identities, the riot gained considerable local support once it had begun. The riots in Noakhali and Tippera were in some respects extensions of the Calcutta carnage. Alarming acts of looting, arson and forced conversions accompanied these riots. The police and ineffective governance aggravated the situation. It was not merely a spontaneous mass uprising;

20

Introduction

rather it was the result of planned, calculated preparation. In the Hindu psyche, Noakhali came to personify Muslim tyranny. The article “Forbearance or the Violence of Memory: Noakhali, Bengal, 1946” by Anjan Ghosh provides comment on the aftermath of the riot: “in an effort to heal the wounds of the two communities, Gandhi set out for Noakhali to spread his message of nonviolence and brotherhood during the second week of November in 1946.” (Ghosh & Ray, 44) However, the news of this massacre reached the rest of India a few days later which resulted in a vehement outpouring of communal violence, especially in Bihar. A wave of murders and looting swept through Bihar and Gurmukteswar in Uttar Pradesh. This ricochet of violence and counter-violence reached its peak in the eruption of riots in the Punjab. On the last phase of violence in the drive to Partition, David Gilmartin39 in “Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative” observes: From late 1946 there is evidence that violence was often aimed not at renegotiating status and power within the symbolic framework of a local order but rather at ‘cleansing’ the local community to reground it symbolically in the territorial frameworks promised by partition. (Gilmartin, 1086)

While it is true that violence was less dramatic in Bengal than Punjab in 1947, both in Punjab and Bengal the psychological impact of the violence associated with Partition was profound. The gore and horror of the violence of 1946-‘47 ultimately marked the significance of the connection between religious communities and fixed territorial boundaries. The significance of boundaries mapped geographically seeped into popular consciousness through the severity of the violence. Bengal, as a distinct episode in the history of a partitioned nation, lays itself open to critical engagement of a different dimension. The subsequent chapters of this book, therefore, seek to dissect the dynamics of Bengal violence during Partition and its modes of representations in literary narratives.

Convictions of Narration: Partition Violence on a Fictional Canvas “To talk of despair is to conquer it.”40 —Albert Camus

How does one go about formulating the contentious relationship between history and literature? Does one qualify the other? Is it conceivable to locate the ways in which the functionality of one is

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constituted by that of the other? The phenomenon of the close intertwining of one with the other has been addressed by numerous thinkers; Walter Benjamin, Hayden White, W. B. Gallie, Lewis Coser, Michel Foucault and many other theorists have explicated theses on the connection between history and literature. Walter Benjamin in On the Program of the Coming Philosophy puts forth that in a deeper philosophical understanding, all knowledge claims are necessarily embedded in a particular subjective perception of how the world functions. Hayden White, in a discussion of the demarcation between investigative procedures conducted by the historian and the task of narrative operation contends: It is one thing to represent ‘what happened’ and ‘why it happened as it did’ and quite another to provide a verbal model, in the form of a narrative by which to explain the process of development leading from one situation to some other situation by appeal to general laws of causation. (White, 12)

How does literature in the broadest sense become a means of coming to terms with life? The prime concern is not with the ‘what’ but with the ‘how’ of representation, not with the facts as such but with the modes and forms through which specific experiences are narrativised. It might be fitting to recall here Paul de Man’s argument that literature is fiction not because it somehow resists the acknowledgement of history, but because it is not a certitude that language functions according to principles which accord to, or which resemble, those of the phenomenal world.41 David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock in their illuminating essay, “Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge” draw upon Michel Foucault’s position that texts recognised today as literary fiction-stories, poems or plays were in fact once accepted as the primary media for the expression of essential truths about human dilemmas and understandings of the world. More often than not, writers on Partition (as can certainly be said of Holocaust writers) seem to share the fear that the essential rhetoric of their literary medium pastes a certain fictionality onto events themselves.42 In the attempt to analyse the ways in which the terrifying and the unutterable are narrated, several questions arise; what special constraints are laid on those who confront writing about Partition? Can horror and art coexist? Does the gravity and scale of Partition violence preclude adequate modes of representation by creative writers, autobiographies, and memoir writers? Can literary reflections add to the stark archives of Partition itself? These are the principle questions which need be addressed and examined thoroughly. Andrea Reiter, in reflecting on the issue of holocaust experiences and the rhetoric, in attempting to ascribe meaning to such

22

Introduction

experiences, suggests that the “the quite exceptional nature of the camp experiences places heavy demands on the expressive powers of language, constantly threatening the survivors’ testimony with failure.” (Reiter, 13) It is also of use to draw upon Jharna Sanyal’s point with regard to the link between literature and articulation of social realities in her piece “The Silent Side of History: Silences in Ashapurna Devi’s Stories on Widows” where she comments, “If literature explicates social realities in a popularly accessible format, concepts formulated by the positivist sciences may be employed to read the structures of everyday interaction as represented in fiction.” (Dasgupta & Guha, 258) In the case of Partition experiences too, creative writings (not survivors’ accounts) are marked by a certain ambivalence and ellipses owing to the dauntingly enormous aspect of its destruction. Nevertheless creative narratives are a key way of understanding Partition violence in a more nuanced manner, owing to the fact that these writings essentially document aspects which are overlooked in sociopolitical texts—the actual impact of such a bloody episode on the quotidian existence of ordinary laymen. As Mushirul Hasan comments so poignantly in his foreword to Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories, “Literary works, particularly those of a realist dispensation, mirror and mould the perception of an age: its contradictions, travails, anxieties and cares” (Fraser, iii) The sheer difficulty of expressing questions of ethics and moral tribulations entailed in these narratives underscores the complex nature of representing sensitive truths through literature. Often, it is claimed that literary texts offer a description of Partition massacre to a degree which it is not in the interests of history or politics to explore. In more ways than one, literature and film remain the stage in which the most sustained engagement with the human dimension of Partition gets portrayed. Partition texts are often read as counternationalist documents of suffering and regularly described as a means of filling in the gaps of official records.43 Literary narratives can be equated with subaltern testimony, as Gyanendra Pandey significantly shows, serving as one of the small voices of history.44 Jill Didur as well, through an analysis of the functional aspect of Partition narratives (that is, creative texts) suggests in Unsettling Partition that these should not be read either as records or tittle-tattle, but that they should rather be viewed as discursive interventions into existing representations of the history of Partition. Partition narratives in fact facilitate a plurality of views to be brought in, and help during unsettling monolithic accounts of the period. As these are not merely journalistic records or official documents, our perceptions of history and politics are affected by these creative interventions. However, the interpretation of literature should not be

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determined solely by its sign of challenging history and politics; it does much more. In Unsettling Partition, Didur refers to Spivak’s argument that what happens in literature as literature is the peculiarity of its language, and contends that a rhetorically sensitive outlook on Partition literature would provide better insights. So the aesthetic space in these narratives is tantamount to a relational framework between literature as representation, and society as its generative context.45 Deliberating the aesthetic function of the narrative art, Debra Castillo and Kavita Panjabi rightly comment: Narrative art then is distinct from history or anthropology, political science or philosophy and of course from the pure sciences too, constitutes an alternative form of knowledge production in which the aesthetic impact of history--- be it experienced or received structures the work, as such it serves as a significant key to its specific forms of knowledge and the meaning the individual makes of history. (Castillo & Panjabi, 14)

The task of negotiating with ethical implications is also instrumental to analysing the part literary narratives have to play in Partition. The thin line between serious and perceptive pieces of writing and the sensationalised modes of narrative is not easy to pinpoint. As stated previously, Partition represented a phase of unnatural human conduct and horrifying acts. Imagination in this context becomes very sensitive territory, encompassing the problem of evil. Creative engagement in such a disorientating moment in history carries with it the potential of transgressing the limits of ethical discretion. At times, impartial and unprejudiced reflection is rendered impossible by the resonances of destruction voiced in some narratives. The question is how to function in the realm of ethics to thwart transgression into theatrics of ignorance or of untamed passion? The moral responsibility of depicting the other face of the human condition no doubt lays open a terrain of contesting narrative strategies. Aharon Appelfeld46 responding to a comment on the obliqueness of his writings’ representations of the horrors of the Holocaust, responded that one does not look directly at the sun. Given this, could creative artists afford to perceive the world as a kind of violent caprice in direct, straightforward ways? The inconceivability of this abruptness, the incomprehensibility of this historical trauma often qualifies the artistic sensibility of creative artists. Dori Laub,47 while examining the implications of witnessing catastrophe (in Laub’s case, the Holocaust) argues that the failure to tell the story serves as the reinstatement of its tyranny, since the longer it remains unspoken the more distorted it becomes. In this context as a mode of substitute testimony, literary witnessing acquires a unique significance. Tarun Saint brings to our attention in Witnessing Partition,

24

Introduction

that even if not directly associated with legal processes of justice, the possibility of acknowledgement comes to the fore in sensitive fictional renditions. Such writing serves as a reminder of the urgent need for transitional justice in lieu of structures which permit closure at the societal level through the actual punishment of participating offenders. Jennifer Yusin and Deepika Bahri, while discussing the paradoxes of Partition fiction contend that fiction performs its own failure inherently in striving to create the illusion of an ‘I’ who fully bears witness to the unimaginable and unnameable.48 The suggestion that literature has moral presuppositions and consequences is not disquieting, but the writer has scarcely been held to account for the very act of writing—a condition that goes with the territory of writing on Partition. Further, these demands on writing expose broader literary issues and aspects of the relation between aesthetic and moral judgement. But that does not diminish the gravity of the subject itself. Rather, the significance of writing about Partition would be further evidence of the extraordinary dimensions of the subject.

Representing Violence: Partition Narratives from Bengal Here we are balancing on the edge of a precipice As the days pass by upon the razor’s edge. Blood congealed mark out the borders Like Kalnemi dividing the kingdom of Lanka.49 —Dinesh Das

Even a fleeting glimpse at the rich and vibrant tradition of Bangla literature affords a deep and grounded engagement with intercommunity experiences qualify the essence of Bengali literary sensibility. Debesh Roy, while analysing the entire gamut of Bangla literature from Bankim’s Durgeshnandini to Tarashankar’s Hashuli Banker Upokatha (The Saga of the bend of Hashuli) puts forth that complexities embedded within this tradition unfold subtler truths of representation and aesthetic understanding. The response from Tagore to the first partition of Bengal was prompt and bitter. There was no shortage of poems, songs or slogans condemning such a damaging administrative ploy. Tagore’s ode to the glory of the undivided soil of Bengal, ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’51 testifies to his overwhelming attachment to a spirit of natural and cultural integration. What happened, then, after 1947? While it is true that Tagore was not alive then, Bibhutibhusan, Manik, Tarashankar, Satinath were reigning over the literary circuit of Bengal. If they could choose to write on Rashid Ali day52, about the famine, or even on the 1946 riot then why did such silence descend upon them after the actual Partition took place? This uncanny

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25

silence which was upheld at the time is baffling. Debesh Roy asks very pertinently, “Why did then Bengali literature become silent during the time of Partition? Or did it not remain silent?” (Roy, Roktomoni 25) He then goes on to ask, “How could Partition pose a life and death question for a social consciousness rooted in permanent government jobs and secured by doctors and lawyers?” (25) Arriving at the answers is not straightforward. In the case of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) as well, there was no substantial attempt at vocalising the pangs of Partition. Hasan Azizul Haque, Syed Waliullah and Hasan Hafizur Rehman are some of the few writers who adopted partially Partition tropes in their works. It is not very surprising that on the other side of the border most writers chose not to write significantly on Partition. For the people who lived in or migrated to East Pakistan, Partition communicated a totally different array of circumstances. Asru Kumar Sikdar makes a very important comment in this regard: For them this freedom denoted a twofold freedom, freedom from the colonial oppression of the British rule and also a release from the long drawn out Hindu hegemony. Because of this Partition middle class Bengali Muslims prospered considerably as they were the primary beneficiaries. Most of the writers belonged to this thriving class and for them this immediate gain held more importance than the loss of Partition.54 (Ghosh, 192)

However, Elias’s Khowabnama (Dream Elegy)55 and Hasan Azizul’s Agun Pakhi (The Phoenix)57 give a sense of the other perspectives which arose through this formative moment. These narratives have a poignant take on the ramifications of this disruptive moment. However, most other narratives are saturated with a note of hope, faith and expectation. So it is only natural that Partition has not elicited the kind of engagement in the East Pakistani psyche which it did in India or more specifically, West Bengal here. Ought this silence or restraint be viewed more as an alternative to giving room to bitterness, a strategy for healing communal distrust and rebuilding community life and interpersonal trust? It is noteworthy that to date, the majority of whatever Bangla literature has been produced on Partition addresses primarily the issues of migration and strategies of rehabilitation instead of addressing direct violence and the wounds of Partition. In an article published in the “Anandabazaar Patrika”59 entitled “Desh bhag ki Amader Sahityake Sporsho Kore Ni?” (Hasn’t Partition touched our Literature?”), Dipankar Chakraborty poses this vital question. In a series of interviews conducted, leading Bengali writers aired their own

26

Introduction

perspectives on the silence assumed by the writers of the time. Sunil Gangopadhyay and Samaresh Basu argued that literature unleashing the violence of the time could have instigated communal bitterness and so it was prudent to focus on social integration and harmonious existence. Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay pointed out that there has been no proper record of Partition historiography, and therefore writers could not find raw material for fictionalising. Nevertheless it would be unjustified to negate the corpus of narratives written on Partition though some of them have created literatures in an idiom of loss, nostalgia and longing. Quite some novels and a host of short stories have been written periodically on Partition. Interestingly though, even to this day, pieces of writing are breaking through the surface on various tropes of Partition. The early creative responses to Partition include Narayan Sanyal’s Bakultala P. L.Camp (1955), Balmik (1958, Anthill), Pratibha Basu’s Samudra Hridoy (1959, The Oceanic Heart) Manoj Basu’s Setubandha (1967) (The Ridge), Jyotirmoyi Devi’s Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (1968, The River Churning) as well as short stories written by Satinath Bhaduri, Manik Bandopadhyay, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Ramesh Chandra Sen, Jyotirindra Nandi and so on. From the 1970s onwards, there has emerged a substantial volume of narratives on Partition. The liberation war of East Pakistan and the subsequent formation of Bangladesh encouraged authors to reinvent narration on Partition and its influence on the lives of ordinary people. It was a transformative phase, a stage which marked the failure of a division along solely religious lines. This made authors and thinkers evolve a changed set of perspectives on displacement, territoriality and community formation. So Prafulla Roy narrated Keya Patar Nouko (1969, Boat of Screw-Pine Leaves) Atin Bandopadhyay created his masterpiece on Partition Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje (1971, In Search of the Bird Neelkontho), and Sunil Gangopadhyay offered his readers Purbo Paschim (1989, East-West). In recent years, another influx of writings, a curious blend of autobiography and fiction has added variety to the volume on Partition. Shanta Sen’s Pitamohi (1994, Grandmother), Mihir Sengupta’s Bishadbriksha (2005, The Morose Tree), Shanta Sen’s Jonmer Mati (2007, Ancestral Land) Sunanda Sikdar’s DoyamoyirKotha (2008, A Life Long Ago) and Gopal Chandra Moulick’s Deshbhag O Nonipishimar Kotha (2011, Partition and Nonipishima’s Tale) are poignant and sensitive echoes of the traumatic times. A constellation of short stories featuring in Manabendra Bandopadhyay’s (Ed.) Bhed-Bibhedh (2 Vols., 1992, Differences and Disharmony), Alok Bhalla’s Stories about the Partition of India (3 Vols., 1994), Saros Cowasjee and K. S. Duggal’s Orphans of the

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27

Storm (1995) Debesh Roy’s (Ed.) Roktomonir Hare (2 Vols., 1998, The Chain of Bleeding Gems), Debjani Sengupta’s (Ed.) Mapmaking and Other Stories (2003), Bashabi Fraser’s (Ed.) Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (2008) and some included in Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Das Gupta’s (eds.) The Trauma and the Triumph (2003) point to the sort of intense engagement which Partition continues to evoke even now. Also where interviews, memoirs, autobiographical pieces, publications and critical engagements are concerned in both Bengali and English, there have been significant contributions. Dakshinaranjan Basu (Ed.) Chhere Asha Gram (1975, The Abandoned Village), Sandip Bandopadhyay’s Deshbhag: Smriti ar Swatta (1999, Partition: Memories and Selves), Gargi Chakravartty’s Coming Out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (2005), Semonti Ghosh (Ed.) Deshbhag: Smriti O Stobdota (2008, Partition: Memories and Silences), Madhumoy Paul (Ed.) Deshbhag: Binash O Binirman (2008, Partition: Destruction and Reconstruction) are significant compilations of reminiscences, interviews, and diary entries relating to the legacy of Partition. It is not possible to arrive at a singularly representative image or general understanding of Partition violence through an exploration of these texts. These narratives document multiple voices, and quite naturally so. In these texts, several ways of dealing with the communal predicament in imaginative terms become apparent. This book, from here on, seeks to examine the reflections of violence associated with Partition in a stock of selected Partition novels and short stories from Bengal.60 Through an idiosyncratic explication of selected Partition narratives like Narayan Sanyal’s Bakultala P L Camp (1955), Pratibha Basu’s Somudro Hridoy (1959, The Oceanic Heart), Saktipada Rajguru’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star) Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (1968, The River Churning), Prafulla Roy’s Keya Patar Nouko (1969, Boat of Screw-Pine Leaves), Atin Bandhopadhyay’s Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje (1971, In Search of the Bird Neelkontho), Sunil Gangopadhyay’sPurbo-Paschim (1989, East-West) Shanta Sen’s Pitamohi (1994, Grandmother) Mihir Sengupta’s Bishad Briksha (2005, The Morose Tree), and Shanta Sen’s Jonmer Mati (2007, Ancestral Land), Sunanda Sikdar’s DoyamoyirKotha (2008, A Life Long Ago), Gopal Chandra Moulick’s Deshbhag O Nonipishimar Kotha (2011, Partition and Nonipishima’s Tale), selected short stories as part of Manabendra Bandopadhyay (Ed.) Bhed-Bibhedh (2 Vols., 1992, Differences and Disharmony), Alok Bhalla’s Stories about the Partition of India (3 Vols., 1994), Saros Cowasjee and K. S. Duggal (Eds.) Orphans of the Storm (1995) Debesh Roy (Ed.) Roktomonir Hare (2

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Introduction

Vols., 1998, The Chain of Bleeding Gems), Debjani Sengupta (Ed.) Mapmaking and Other Stories (2003), Bashabi Fraser (Ed.) Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (2008). This book from here on, attempts to conduct an exploration of the multiplicities contained within the discourse of representing violence in literatures. The subsequent chapters entitled, “The Politics and Poetics of Victimization,” “Woman and Violence: Issues and Representations” and “Relocation and Violence: Mapping the Trajectories” address the issues of victimisation, gender, relocation and politics of memory as a continuum of matters in close association to Partition violence. At the beginning of each chapter, I have presented an extensive investigation of the related issue and introduced each subject elaborately before conducting an intensive explication of the respective texts. Chapter I, “The Politics and Poetics of Victimization” delves into the multiple trajectories of victimization and shows how the perpetrator-victim dyad is an amorphous proposition in the context of continually shifting configurative factors and considerations. Chapter II, “Woman and Violence: Issues and Representations” focuses in particular on the kinds of violence inflicted on women, showing how they embody community honour and become depositories for extremes of communal atrocity and vindication. This chapter also explicates the instances of women’s agency, which functions as a challenge to the patriarchal norms of communal violence. Chapter III, “Relocation and Violence: Mapping the Trajectories” discusses violence enfolded within the relocation process. The issues of the refugee experience and the overall crippling effects of Partition itself are looked at with a focus on the quotients of violence informing this controversial enterprise. The concluding chapter explores the presence of an alternative space which represents the working of a more compassionate rhetoric, and which stages the emergence of an empathetic world to inhabit. Through such a detailed examination of Partition narratives from Bengal, this book is aimed at driving home the urgency of understanding the imaginative responses to such colossal violence and its connectedness to the realm of public imagination and consciousness in a volatile, conflict-ridden world. ™ The translations of titles of all Bangla texts and edited collections mentioned here are by the author, with the exception of Doyamoyir Kotha (A Life Long Ago) and Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning).

CHAPTER I THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF VICTIMIZATION

Being Marginal, Being Victim Hierarchy and inequality, which are so fundamental to social structures, normalize violence. Violence is what lends to culture its authoritativeness. Arthur Kleinman61

Kleinman’s comment points to the politics of the gap between circumstantial realities of the people at the top, and those at the bottom. Being susceptible or being vulnerable has to be understood with an awareness of a comparative scale of relationship configured between various positions of a hierarchy. In the context of the 1947 Partition, the scope of oppression and perpetration of violence stamped by communal ideology becomes a pivotal issue of study. A deeper appreciation of the nature of violence proliferated during that volatile stage would indicate an interesting graph of the perpetration-victimisation dyad, whose decisive factors are class and caste. Talking about the heightened differences operating on the canvas of the Bengal social matrix in the colonial period, Dipesh Chakrabarty in his essay “Communal Riots and Labour: Bengal’s Jute Mill in the 1890’s” observes: The picture was complicated by the cultural difference between the Bengali Bhadralok, the main political group in the city, and the workers. The only elite group interested in taking their politics to the poorer, working class and up-country Muslims was a group of wealthy Muslim traders.62 (Das, Mirrors 182)

In any work on Partition violence, the general tendency to take religious differences under the broad sweep of its argument needs to be thoroughly re-examined. It is a risky proposition to undermine the multiple strands of victimisation and the various modes of its representation in fictional accounts. Engaging mainly with the trends of the perpetrator-victim dyad on the basis of the ruler and ruled opens up a plethora of unresolved

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Chapter I

issues; it becomes symptomatic of a reductionist attitude to interpreting fictional narratives. Does Partition form the basis for the creation of a hierarchy of suffering or victimhood? Who has suffered the most?63 The collective imagination continues to nurture ideas about Partition, to shape the discourses of caste and religious identities, and ideas about majorityminority relations and issues related to refugees and cross-border migrations. At the societal level, the continual processes of othering, resulting in such dichotomies as the Hindus vs. the Muslims, the affluent vs. the economically disadvantaged and the forward castes vs. the backward castes, have attained normative status and have become a greater consideration in any research on Partition violence. In getting to grips with communal violence (here, Partition), absorbing or ignoring the hierarchical differences associated with such violence would render a blinkered view of the entire picture. A truly nuanced explication will be bolstered by an awareness of differences of cultural, social and economic components. A more detailed look at fictional texts reveals that creative writers have also refrained from grouping violence according to the denominations of the oppressor and the oppressed. There is no distinctive boundary which would separate the contours of the perpetrator and the victimised; the dividing lines are ever altering and fluid. This identification of pluralities may be accepted as a crucial factor in researching Partition violence since it contributes to a new appropriation of people’s own stories and histories. These multiplicities also point to the implausibility of arriving at an objective understanding of Partition violence. Practices and discourses of violence are integral to the creation of subjectivity and community. Memories, attitudes, social practices, and rituals are all, beyond a doubt, the products of little histories, long neglected by the discipline of history. Failure to recognise the little histories of Partition cheats us of understanding how local communities are reconstructed through the language of violence, and limits our capacity to imagine different levels of victimisation which seep through layers of violent outbursts. As David Gilmartin notes, “Indeed the disconnection between the rarefied decisions leading to Partition and the searing consequences on individual lives, remains one of the most powerful tropes that has been carried from partition fictions to the work of the historians.” (Gilmartin 1069) Numerous examples of inscriptions, literature, histories and other materials demonstrate the formal and informal social classifications and structures which serve as important factors in the outbreak of violence. Accounts of riots have invariably portrayed communal riots as inevitable eruptions of anger and violence between communities divided by deep, incommensurable and often historical differences. However, it has been

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argued by Wilkinson64 that ethnic riots are far from being spontaneous outpourings of anger. Instead, they are often premeditated by politicians with a clear electoral purpose. Those parties that represent elites within ethnic groups will invariably use polarising anti-minority events in order to encourage the members of their ethnic denomination to identify with their party and the ‘majority’ identity. Was this reasoning in place during Partition violence? There is no linear, uncomplicated manner to explain issues and aspects which directly or indirectly impinged on the sudden and total breakdown of long-standing inter-community networks and alliances.65 The complexities are varied and to probe into these dynamics would elicit interesting explanations; if we look at the contemporary conflict situations in India, involving the caste Hindus and untouchables, the Hindus and Muslims, the Hindus and Sikhs, the Marxists and Maoists, the army and the police, the farmers and the police, it becomes rather evident that in the case of Partition violence too, culpability should be allocated only whilst keeping in mind the diverse interests and plural politics of victimisation.66 Whenever there have been violent conflicts between rival groups, the tendency for victimisation has always been grounded on unequal denominations. In his study on collective violence, Ervin Staub argues that in an encounter between the powerful and the dominated “it is the dominant group that responds with violence to attempts by subordinate groups, both nonviolent and violent, to improve their position in society”67 (Staub, 372) Ironically, during Partition, when communal violence reached its climax, in the moments of victimising, the defining parameters for the dominator and the dominated were not exclusively based on religious faiths. At times it was a precarious combat between the powerful and the dispossessed. As the potential subjects of violence exist on unequal levels of power, who are at risk of being marked by violence? Veena Das investigates whether individual members of a group carry the marks of pain as the price of belonging to that group. Raka Ray cites how Das in her discussion on the industrial disaster of Bhopal in 1984 raises the experiential aspect of pain and suffering, and contends that, “located in individual bodies they yet bear the stamp of authority of society upon the docile bodies of its members” (quoted in Basu & Roy, 90). This sign of docility and powerlessness was something which qualified violence during Partition as well. In the affliction of pain and suffering linked with Partition, both the visible and invisible signifiers spoke of millions of sufferers who were ruthlessly slaughtered, forcibly displaced, grievously wounded, and eternally scarred by the loss, pain and trauma of Partition. Frequently, their only fault lay in belonging to the wrong community on

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Chapter I

the wrong side of the dividing line between India and Pakistan. Zoya Hasan, in her article “Mass Violence and the Wheels of Indian (In) Justice” directs the focus to the aftermath of violence, specifically the Gujarat violence. Hasan critiques the operations of the judicial system in India by reflecting on the issue of securing justice, relief and rehabilitation of communal violence victims. It is in the context of communal outrage in contemporary politics of victimisation which she argues that instead of wading deep into matters of the principles of perpetration, most accounts of Hindu-Muslim violence tend to focus on less important subjects. Personal experiences of pain, trauma, and exile uncover the specificities of the moments of violence, and in the process, lay bare the complexities that constituted those moments. An all important factor to be recalled in this regard is that hierarchical power relations operated not only in the matter of perpetratorvictim ideology; it is also recognisable in the case of discourse generated around this topic. It is because of this that some voices are deemed sacrosanct. It is why up to a certain point in time, the official history of Partition was invested with an aura of authority. Naturally, the other stories and experiences which were equally true never attracted public attention. The discursive depictions of this episode were only partial and fragmented, privileging one voice over all the other voices. However, for the last 25 years or so, attempts have been made to recover the other narratives of the victimised, the marginalised.68 In this regard, Sukeshi Kamra notes, “The only place where the issue of ‘recovering’ voices has been extensively theorized is in the case of politically and socially disenfranchised (peasants in particular), and by Subaltern group of historians.”69 (Kamra, Bearing 20) She goes on to contend that, since they were silenced, they were agents and their agency is very often rendered invisible by elitist history, and there is this risk of eliding the true issue of power imbalances that were clearly in place at the time. In the case of creative writings there is no real theorising of marginalised voices, but significantly, these literary narratives provide a channel for illuminating the note of differences existent within society, for retrieving voices of the victimised and unveiling the ‘inside stories’ of Partition violence. As Gyanendra Pandey argues, in the process of the struggle for nationalisation “violence too becomes a language that constitutes and reconstitutes the subject.” (Pandey, Remembering 1). Usha Zacharias and J Devika in “Powers of the Weak: Fear and Violation in the Discourse of Communalism”70 opine that the violence of the dominated is more complex than the violence of the dominant. This becomes especially true when the literary renderings of vicissitudes of susceptibility functional within the discourse of communalism

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33

are kept in mind. As a crucial field of representation and refraction around the issues of victimisation, marginalisation, silenced identities and literary narratives provide fascinating loci of analysis. In these webs of mobilisation and power relations, the position of women is also crucially important. But as there is a separate chapter on Partition violence and women, the present focus is on politics of victimisation from other aspects. Partition narratives from Bengal reveal that writers have tried to bring to light the inherent structures of oppression and discrimination, and their repercussions throughout Partition movements. The majority of these narratives, based around the rural landscape of undivided Bengal, give accounts of streaks of discriminations and the mechanisms and politics of mobilisation which finally unleashed communal violence. In his article “Bhanga Banglar Sahitya” (“Literature of Divided Bengal”), Asrukumar Sikdar remarks: There was a huge gulf of difference between Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims. Though they worked together, in some cultural spheres there prevailed harmony, but by and large they lived parallel and segregated lives. Very often whenever some tension descended, this parallel existence generated bitterness and violence.71 (Ghosh, 201)

Time and again Bengal narratives confront this chord of differences. Short stories and novels on Partition alike, have expressed how these notes of discrimination between communities got heightened and how they brought about violence and disorder. These narratives have also flagged up how, within the same religious community, differences in terms of economic position or caste denominations have shaped the directions of carnage and grief. Not infrequently, stratified social statuses and economic gaps have been instrumental in promoting sacrifices of the less privileged. Another context of narratives—that of Jharkand Muslims, inspired highly relevant observations by Sinha-Kerkhoff and Ellan Bal. They remark, “Common regional and class identities (‘we are all poor Jharkhandis’) seemed more important than those based on religion.”72 (Jassal & Ben Ari, 81) Such narratives do not appropriate blame on any community in particular; the authors have rather given a sensitive picture of the times. It may be posited that writers have not directly identified ‘villains’ or ‘saints’ in this entire series of events. Most have reflectively made attempts to locate the moments of crisis, ordinary people’s sense of entrapment and their sense of impotence in the face of such havoc. In “Ulukhor” (“Insignificance”) by Nabendu Ghosh, the idea of agony and suffering to which insignificant people like Aziz and his class are exposed in times of crisis is brought forth. The impoverished and

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Chapter I

dispossessed are not the prime players in propelling the rift between different communities along religious lines. In general, mighty politiciancriminal nexuses give rise to pernicious bitterness, initiate violence, and engender ethnic cleavage as they tend to take advantage of ethnic polarisations. Aziz is a tram conductor by profession, whose life is fraught with perpetual struggle against the odds of poverty and the wretched realities of life. The conductor has no direct ties with the tactical party politics of Congress or the Muslim League, but his life gets twisted by the communal politics of the period. Aziz’s dilemma regarding being reluctantly encaged in this eruptive circumstance is brilliantly captured by Ghosh in the story. Once the traumatised section of society is depicted through Aziz, the author goes on to contend that the turbulence concocted by communal hostility ultimately affects this dispossessed lot. He is not able to keep his promise and so is thrown into desperation which gives us an insight into the ramifications of divisive politics in laypeople’s lives. An explicit political sense of self and the contradictions that arose from the strident identity-oriented self-definitions are projected in Aziz’s response to his immediate circumstances: The blazing wind seemed to reflect the wild ferocity of men and the strange emptiness around seemed to reflect the blood from an unsheathed knife. Through it all an ugly current of chilling fear flowed incessantly like an unseen glacier. Its presence made one’s consciousness wail like a siren and one’s feet grow heavy. (Fraser, 126)

Official accounts of Indian and Pakistani history tend to provide only facile versions of the Partition, primarily aimed at reshaping public perceptions of the establishment of each nation state. The communitarian mode of life which is supposedly pivoted on a sense of mutual trust and faith is drastically affected by the spread of communal ideologies and divisive identity politics of that period. Here ‘supposedly’ is used deliberately to throw up another vitally relevant question in the context. Hence it becomes clear why it is very important to shift some deeply problematic issues from the commonly transmitted perception. More recently, historical enquiry into Partition has stuck to the gradual but steady communal mobilisation and the upsurge of competing political strategies which would re-open the issue of Hindu-Muslim relations. This should not be taken as an indication that no unifying bond between the two existed. In the story, Aziz makes huge efforts to negotiate between people in his group and create harmony amidst communal hostility. That being said, Ghosh is keener on portraying the rift between the oppressor and the oppressed and the battle waged against each other; “The world seemed to

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be such a beautiful place. Aziz thought. And he was not alone any more. They would win.” (117) Aziz’s daily struggle to earn a living and his effort to combat communal tensions build up pressure in his mind. Oppression of a different kind overlaps with the raucous situation of that phase, and this in turn produces a very complicated equation. The stifling situation emanating from the union unrest is intensified by the on-going inflamed communal strife. His ailing daughter Rabeya makes fervent pleas for him to buy her a doll, which propels Aziz to confront the situation on his own, but his vulnerability in this violent state has serious implications. Numerous Partition narratives relate similar tales of vulnerability and victimisation. Manik Bandyopadhyay’s “Khatian” (“The Ledger”) and Achintya Kumar Sengupta’s “Shwakhor” (“Treaty”) give us depictions of communal frenzy and its effects on the weaker sections of society. The final parts of the story enact a creeping anxiety about the danger which festers in an unseen zone. The concluding act of Aziz’s murder reflects on the most prevalent episodes of victimisation of the subjugated class during Partition. It also signals the failure of state governance to provide protection for the weak, vulnerable and poorer sections of society. In a movie like Parzania73 based on the Gujarat Hindu Muslim riot, there can be found equivalent instances of communal tension and the politics of instigation grounded in rhetoric of oppression. It becomes a dove-tailed process of exploitation and the fulfilment of petty, self-serving agendas. Ghosh’s other, related, story “Trankarta” (“The Saviour”) offers insight into the negotiations rooted in exploitative politics which take place between the high caste and the untouchables, and the rich and the poor, during Partition. “Trankarta” narrates the elite class’s utilisation of the marginalised to protect themselves during times of emergency. The social urges of the exploited were put under the command of the upper class interests by communal politics. Bipan Chandra, the noted historian in this field, comments, “If in many areas the Hindu propertied classes exploited the Muslim masses, this was not because of their being Hindus or design or desire to exploit Muslims. Their being dominant did not represent Hindu domination.”74 (Chandra, 71) In this vein, Joya Chatterji points out, “The old class distinction between the bhadralok and the chhotolok now re-emerged in the guise of a communal difference, between bhadra Hindus and abhadra or itar Muslims.” (Chatterji, Bengal Divided 177) The Bengali bhadralok community with its finery and opulence remained distant from the people inhabiting such fringes of society, the Dom community. In the previous phase the so-called respectable clan of Bengal with its education and refined culture felt far apart from the grassroot section. In normal times they were not equipped sufficiently in a

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Chapter I

cultural sense to have exchanges with these people. The affluent group of people in the story, with a view to saving their lives, make use of the otherwise oppressed, marginalised Jhogru Sardar, the leader of the Dom community. As the author remarks: A group of people lived in between this respectable, aristocrat enclave and that other neighbourhood and thought themselves as part of this one. They were doms…..Though they thought themselves as part of this neighbourhood, their aristocratic and respectable neighbours would rather disown them. (Fraser, 133)

Educated, lofty-headed characters like Mr Bose or Mr Tiwari seek assistance from Jhogru Sardar in salvaging them from an anticipated onslaught by the enemy camp. Thus the sense of belonging which is under scrutiny gets reviewed for a different purpose. The social and cultural hiatus between the men of letters and the uneducated get erased through divisive politics being enacted on a different plane. Sardar is being enticed to go through with the task of protection with drink and arms; the exchange between strata is corrupted by various considerations when they coax people like him to come forward and act in unity. Critical discourse engaged in the politics of community alignment and realignment need to be problematised. This abrupt nudge at ‘inclusion’ has an important influence on any discussion of community formation. In the Indian subcontinent, religion has remained the dominant social bond which has an overwhelming presence. Peter Geschiere and Gyanendra Pandey have commented on the theme of inclusion-exclusion, “The story of the struggle to realize nationhood and sovereign status has also been a story of how to deprive certain groups and peoples of citizen.”75 (Pandey and Geschiere, 11) That in “Trankarta” the powerful people used Hinduism as the method of grouping themselves is clearly indicated in Mr Bose’s utterance, “What if you are a dom? You are a human being just like us and a Hindu- sit down my brother.” (Fraser, 140) The impassioned utterance is teeming with symbolic resonances and idealises Hindu tolerance, while making scapegoats of the ‘bad and dirty’ Muslims. The purported unified Hindu identity is marked by hierarchical configuration and consequently not without contestations. The sudden change in the composition of community—here, I mean the Hindu bhadralok community—underpins the self-serving tone of the otherwise closed, self-contained nature of the section. Those whom mainstream Hindu society had excluded were utilised to serve other people’s needs, and stood for little else. There is reflected in these narratives a need to expel their overpowering sense of

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angst and timorousness. We see something similar happening in Bhisam Sahni’s Tamas. Nathu the chamar unwittingly becomes an instigator of communal tension. Indeed, quite a few Partition stories stage such incidents of selective victimisation though the circumstances might be different. It has often been observed that the real sufferers are the common people quite divorced from manipulative political strategies. Most politicians want to make use of this division to win people over; wealthy businessmen want to capitalise on this aversion. In Tamas, two college peons speak of the predicament of the poor, “We poor people are real ignorant fools, we go breaking one another’s head. These well-to-do people are so wise and sensible.” (Sahni, 343) In fact, in “Trankarta” this is exactly what happens. The so-called educated sages of society manage to emerge safe by making the other group active participants in the riot. In one aspect then, the story also exhibits the complete process of appropriation of Jhogru and his league to champion their cause in the name of religion. From an historical perspective, in the colonial period, especially during the 1940s, the phenomenon of absorbing the marginalised section under its broader structure also helped in fortifying the enumerative aspect of its platform and granting a sense of confidence and tenacity. This phenomenon also displays the ways in which contiguity, rather than given as a “primordial” category, is painstakingly constructed and reconstructed even if not infinitely malleable. The conclusion of the story of Jhogru also supplies a telling commentary on the trope of ‘martyrdom’ and the politics inherent in this concept, “Yes, Jhogru was dead because people like Jhogru were always born to save the likes of Mr.Bose. The Pandavas would have never lived if the five Nishads had not died in their place.” (Fraser, 143) In the Mahabharata Pandavas having prior knowledge of a conspiracy designed by the Kauravas, let five men of a hunting tribe (the Nishads) and their mother die in the fire, so that no one would suspect that they had fled. This episode is faithfully re-enacted in “Trankarta” whereby Jhogru’s clan posture themselves in the image of the martyr whose slaying would provide a boon of life to this other group of citizens. The scene of mourning towards the end is emblematic of the rituals associated with lamentation over death. Veena Das remarks on the act of women’s mourning and its implications: In the genre of lamentation, women have control both through their bodies and through their language. Grief is articulated through the body, for instance, by infliction of grievous hurt on oneself, "objectifying" and making present the inner state, and is finally given a home in language.76 (Das, “Transactions” 68)

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“Palanka” (The Four Poster Bed) by Narendranath Mitra depicts the psychological tension which came to the fore between Rajmohan, the master and Maqbul, his worker over a ‘palanka.’ The intricately designed and embellished furniture comes to represent the main sinew of tension between the master, a wealthy Hindu landowner, Rajmohan, and the poor miser Maqbul, struggling to make ends meet. The conflict over the ownership of the palanka invests the narrative with a sense of anxiety and threat; the narrative does not record any occurrence of physical violence or a murderous act. The story is set in the period right after Partition, a crucial moment of transition. In the story itself, the changes are hardly visible. As in many other Bangla short stories and novels, the power and authority, in terms of financial status and social position, rests with the wealthy landowner Rajmohan. He generates work for daily wage labourers like Maqbul, which in turn places him in a subordinate position. In most historiographical accounts it is claimed that after Partition, the power configuration underwent a serious shift, the Muslims became the dominant group replacing the old hierarchical order. In “Palanka” however, no such transition is noted. Maqbul, owing to his marginalised existence as a poor worker remains at the mercy of Rajmohan’s whims. In a surge of tempestuous wrath at his daughter-in-laws’s specific appeal for sending money by selling off her wedding cot, Rajmohan sells it off to Maqbul at a nominal price, for no other reason than to vent his rage and feeling of agitation. Maqbul’s decision to purchase this expensive cot is induced by his wish to own an object of cultural distinction. Rajmohan’s momentary bout of irrational annoyance grants Maqbul the chance to possess such a prestigious object at an approachable price. As the phase gives way to a better reasoned assessment, Rajmohan claims he will get back his prized cot. The main strand of conflict in the story is initiated by this crucial point, which becomes an interesting intersection of class antagonism and religious bitterness. The worker’s unfailing desire to possess this disputed cot can be seen as an attempt to reverse the established hierarchical order. But rather than a collective hostility towards the possessed class, it is an individual special case, a one on one duel. In this equation of a widening gap, Maqbul’s predicament of rejecting any negotiation poses a threat to the narrative pattern. Maqbul’s stance as the stubborn individual eventually becomes suggestive of a strong, deep-rooted resentment towards the privileged rival community, in a severely unequal battle. As he shares with his wife, “Inequality and injustice of the world make them red with anger; beautiful objects of the world make them burn with desire.” (Bhalla, Partition Stories 342) On the other hand, Rajmohan’s unbending position on this issue insinuates the working of a deeply

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instilled, rigid parochial mindset which is against the slightest of changes. Throughout, he has exercised complete authority over a person like Maqbul, and wields power over him, while Maqbul’s resistance to complying with the established codes causes him a grave mental wound, “he had helped so many people recover their property, would he not be able to recover his own? He had to get it back somehow.” (346) Maqbul’s seething anger when all his survival methods are ruthlessly hi-jacked by Rajmohan climaxes in his decision to extinguish his enemy. No crime is enacted, no murder is committed, but the narrative forebodes a sense of threat and contains the spores of dangerous brutality. In effect, the plot documents a chapter of potential violence; one which awaits enactment. It also becomes emblematic of the violence of class domination and retaliatory outcomes against the backdrop of a newly divided nation. Who will be the agent of the potential violence on the verge of disrupting the everyday functioning of lives? Is it the conservative, high-headed Rajmohan or is it the indefatiguable, dogged Maqbul? No straightforward answer is given to this complex question in the narrative, it remains unobtrusive. Maqbul’s inflammable sentiments towards Rajmohan threaten to cause harm to Rajmohan’s existence as a representative of the remainders of the Hindu populace in the newly formed East Pakistan. However, the short story has in store a climactic narrative breach which brings forth an unexpected turn. The transcendental moment of Rajmohan’s empathetic estimation of Maqbul’s wretched social position guides the story towards a more charitable conclusion. The possibilities of violence get submerged by a broader egalitarian acceptance of life. When he witnesses Maqbul’s perishing children lying, half-starved, on the bed, Rajmohan rises above his obsession, “Today my pedestal is no longer empty. Today I see them, I see my beloved Radha Govinda on the pedestal.” (357) Narayan Gangopadhyay’s “Ijjat” (Honour) provides pertinent insights into how a local conflict translates and plays out between multiple sites of hierarchy and affiliations. The narrative constitutes an interesting treatment of the exploitative mechanisms devised by society’s influential stratum to thrive at the cost of initiating unrest and hostility among the subjects. An isolated, nameless, insignificant village is induced by the communal mayhem affecting the larger world outside. The Calcutta and Noakhali riots are persistently referred to, implying the measure of communal venom which could rip apart even the tiniest of habitations in the restless subcontinent. Jagannath Sarkar, a staunch upholder of the Brahminic tradition within the clan of Namasudras, embodies one extreme position of belligerent communalism. The other extreme position is held

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by Dhola Montai, the militant leader of the Muslim community. The plot opens up the space of direct confrontation between these apparently77 opposing camps. Habib Miyan, the wealthy Muslim leader of that region strategises the primary act of casting one enemy against the other. The village society, though heterogeneous in its composition, had existed in a manner of mutual tolerance for so long. Two very strong religious symbols; the leviathan banyan tree representing the Hindu faith, and the Fakir’s tomb suggesting the Islamic faith, have inhabited the same periphery in a harmonious mode for ages. No acrimony has so far contaminated this shared feeling. The story foregrounds the issue of shifting affiliations, and projects how barbaric wrath destroys every other human value in a communally loaded environment. The intimation of burning landscapes like Calcutta and Noakhali suffering the worst of communal bitterness intensifies the hostility within the immediate sphere. The recurrent references to the outside world are an intentional narrative strategy to amplify the looming sense of danger. Anxieties fed by the rough edges of this sensitive and volatile passage magnify the urgency to assert their respective ideological positions. As noted in many historiographical works, religious icons assume extraordinary significance at these moments; they cease to be mere symbols of faith, but rather they become receptacles for communal sentiments and feelings.78 It comes as no surprise that in “Ijjat” a similar trope arises. An incandescent response is brought about during preparations for a local religious celebration. The opposing camp under Montai’s leadership openly threatens to thwart all the paraphernalia of festivities. Habib Miyan orchestrates this flaring up with his own vested profits in mind. In general, explaining the fallibility of human nature during a riotous act tends to naturally give way to a demonising principle; in this case Habib Miyan is posited as the demonic manifestation. However, Gangopadhyay does not make any serious attempt to redeem either Jagannath Sarkar or Dhola Montai in this vicious theatre of attack and enmity, thereby implying that the responsibility is shared by the communities collectively in its occurrence.79 As the author observes, “These kinds of disputes for the sake of women, land happen regularly. But for religion they are ready to sacrifice more.” (Bandyopadhyay, Bhed-Bibhed 219) Gangopadhyay’s technique of using polyphonic potentiality of the text to articulate voices facilitates looking at another pressing issue in parallel. In the versions Sarkar and Montai provide, the anxieties are most astutely articulated, and a link is posited between the communal furore and the financial struggles in their lives. Marginalisation is revealed as a double bind here—a state not just characterising the dispossessed within society but also afflicting the

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powerless situation within their respective families and wounding them. The narrative thus suggests an alternative world grounded in the practical stumbling blocks of life. The story’s final moments reiterate the solidarity of a communal dispossession which would override the boundaries demanded by communal jingoism. The collective act by Jagannath and Montai of unearthing the grave of Habib’s dead wife to take possession of her saree for their respective wives reveals another side of their life’s struggle. Ultimately in the story, primacy is shifted to another terrain of dispossession, powerlessness and marginalisation. The principle motivation behind enacting and promoting violence is diffused to introduce the other perspective, as the author finally notes, “Everybody was astonished at this sudden turn of event[s], how can Fakir and Kali reconcile with each other so easily?” (220) In Remembering Partition Gyanendra Pandey makes the claim that there are various ways through which the “life and conditions of India and Pakistan and perhaps Bangladesh too have been obviously remade by that violence and the curious memory-history we have of it.” (Pandey, Remembering 16) Shantiranjan Bandyopadhyay’s “Atimanush” (Super Human) points to the type of inhuman suffering generated by communal hatred. Ramjan’s predicament as the quintessential victim produces many bitter truths about the entire social system’s functioning. Glaring inequality and the resultant crises and difficulties intruding upon a marginalised individual’s life underscore the fragility of Ramjan’s angstridden existence.80 Suffering becomes the prime theme in the story. The narrative views critically the level of disillusionment and misfortune generated during mass displacement and migration caused by the Partition, “Pakistan has been formed but still why the poor villagers still have to starve? Why do they have to migrate to their enemy nation out of unbearable hunger?” (Bandyopadhyay, Bhed-Bibhed 311) Focusing on the particular conditions of India’s Muslim populace, Rowena Robinson categorically states that they are generally extremely backward and live under constant threat of vulnerability and poverty.81 (Robinson, 842) Although this is a universalist claim, and needs to be qualified properly, Ramjan’s condition strengthens this opinion. Hannah Arendt’s contention in The Origins of Totalitarianism that a dislocated state constitutes a loss of all rights, cheated of life and one’s humanity and personhood, is reflected in the narrative structure. Ramjan’s nonsensical ramblings serve to critique pungently the shortfalls of surviving in a dehumanised society. The very concept of sanity is critiqued in light of Ramjan’s losing his rational self after his son’s death.82 His sense of grief and mourning finds bizarre expression in his persistent desire to taste the blood of the wealthy.

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This putrid desire is a nod at his intense hatred towards society’s upper crust. His son Chhoku is bashed to death collectively by the members of a rich Hindu household because Ramjan and his rickety son Chhoku are taken for Muslim enemies conspiring to attack them. This grotesque act further spotlights the negative control which communalism generates and its ability to renew itself through the reiteration of stereotypes. This is a highly ironical twist and unravels the overwhelming communal rhetoric, obscuring any of humanity’s innate goodness. After witnessing his innocent son’s brutal murder he degrades into a state of mental disarray. The author grasps at the source of this pathological form of dysfunction. The cannibalistic kind of desire he professes to experience points implicitly to a transfer of an equal measure of perversion and distortion which he had to confront at the moment of his son’s death, “He wants to taste the blood of healthy, rich people. How would that taste?” (308) The depraved manner of his son’s victimisation under the guise of communal strife testifies to the archetypal assertion that human nature is crawling with evil. The plot poses the ethical question of maintaining sanity in such a malign world. The narrative technique marked by ellipses and the rejection of chronological patterning of episodes heightens the note of deformity pervading the world of the living.

Discontents of Hierarchy [T]his bubbling blood/this breathless sky/this demented air only a poor man’s household is being shattered/ what’s so poor about it.83 —Nabaneeta Dev Sen

The carrying out of group power and cultural hegemony of any religious community over the other in the pre-partition phase radicalised the social scenario and initiated mobilisation of one community against the other. Quite a few fictional narratives on Partition introduce the schema of the politics of inequality and social inequity to present community functioning as a more complex network. A number of literary narratives on Partition specifically envelop the quotient of discontent put into motion by the disparities perpetuated in the prevalent social arrangements and thereby generate a distinct logic behind communal rift and unrest which submerged the Partition situation. Novels such as Keya Patar Nouko (Boat of Screw-Pine Leaves) and Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje (In Search of the Bird Neelkontho), identify the discursive forces such as the socioeconomic hierarchy and the uneven developmental politics that re-order group affiliations and ethnic solidarity. These narratives invoke the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy as indeed do most literary discourses

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dealing with the rhetoric of communal differences, and Partition violence in particular. These works may be contextualised in the contested understandings of violence and the constitutive frames of references for analysing violence. The more urgent sense of political sense identity and the ambiguity that stemmed from strident identarian self-definitions are projected in these works. These narratives also portray how important debates84 shaping the sphere of public discourse in the pre-partition stages percolate into the lives of common people and bring about abrupt changes. A more fine-grain explication of the pertinent issues raised in these narratives helps in pinpointing how the entire framework of rural Bengal society bound by syncretistic popular culture and a shared language is tragically demolished on religious lines. Mob fury and the series of violent outbreaks were not sudden phenomena, they were part of a protracted and gradual process fuelled by differences and imbalances rooted within the social structure. The inner dynamics of struggle thus become integral to our assessment of violent conflict and tension affecting the society. A frequently overlooked aspect is that most of the Bangla narratives on Partition have essentially underscored the transitional inevitability towards Partition and the mounting resentment in communal relations in rural settings. A parallel study of historical records can explain this peculiarity of feature. Most recent historical debates regarding Partition tear apart the contested territory of mobilisation of the popular mandate supporting Partition. The historical findings posited by scholars including Joya Chattterji, Partha Chatterjee, Suranjan Das, Gyanendra Pandey, and Dipesh Chakrabarty examine the aggregative forces consisting of communal ideology, exclusive nationalist discourse and government machinations giving momentum to Partition. Instead of resting the onus on the imperial strategy of ‘divide and rule’ as was popularised, contemporary researchers have uncovered the responsibility of other elements involved in this entire drama of events. Partha Chatterjee in “The Second Partition of Bengal” contends that a single narrative can be constructed for each of the roots of Partition ranging from the mobilisation for a Partition of the province which properly speaking lasted only a few months, to the cultural construction of nationality, a story running for over 100 years.85 How does this high drama of communal mobilisation or the discourse of separatism get expressed through the literary narratives? What is the mode of representing in literary texts the explosive forces of violence associated with these steps? The history of Indian nationalism provides a highly visible example of the necessary elision and forcible yoking of community feeling in keeping with the national project, notwithstanding the existence of a number of deep-seated factors, such as ethnic, religious, and cultural

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formations within the traditional society which obstruct the process of a successful union. Literary creations thus become striking sets for playing out these differences and representing how differences immersed in hierarchical social structure give way to violent outcomes. Atin Bandyopadhyay in Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje86 (In Search of the Bird Neelkontho) addresses the slow shift in communitarian bond, the complex synthesis of identity formation and the undercurrent of religion as a cultural demographic factor in the formation of hegemonic national ideologies. In In Search of the Bird Neelkontho, the use of the devices and codes of a social realist way of writing that offers an intense description and keen social observation in a phase of transition can be attributed, as Joe Cleary explicates, to the perceived need to provide a documentary with as much credibility as possible.88 Bandyopadhyay, in the novel, lays emphasis on the breakdown of the various levels of integration that constituted the cohabitation of a village community, and the chasms being cracked open in the ties experienced by the villagers. In the narrative domain, challenges such as the percolation of religion as ideology in rural Bengal are dealt with, as well as the complicity of the common people in violence which was not always the result of the instigation by outsiders. The community as presented in the novel, is representative of almost any village in erstwhile undivided Bengal. The backdrop against which the various strands of the plot are woven into a mosaic narrative is a deeply stratified village setting. It is important to keep in mind that there is no linear style storyline in the novel, but rather a network of competing interests are expressed by a polyphony of voices. The village’s inhabitants are not a homogeneous mass; the Hindus are the main landowners, the Thakur family is the head of the village, while the Muslims are the economically disadvantaged lot. They are seen to be working as labourers on Hindu owned land, or as boatmen or domestic help in Hindu households, but they do not enjoy access to the interior. This deeply hierarchical village community in the novel becomes a viable site for staging oppositional moves against each other. There is a question mark hung over the utopian notion of a harmonious pre-Partition past through various voices in the novel, especially through the characters of Samsuddin, Felu, and Jabbar. The differences, and the gaps felt in the quotidian dimensions of life expose the fissures and the measure of dispossession of one community set against another. Resentment is initiated between them due to these differences realised by certain sections of society. In an extremely status-conscious social milieu, Muslims are shown to have to live in poverty, perpetually struggling against the hardships imposed upon them. It is against this kind

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of backdrop that the narrative rolls on. In his role as narrator, Bandopadhyay focuses on two distinct threads of response generated by a hierarchical structure of society as described. The first response is the unquestioning acceptance of a given life condition which does not press any change upon them, the other a response which threatens to bring on a manic situation. For characters like Isham Sheikh and Abedali, unified identities based on common ideas about personhood, social collectivism and social struggle hold supreme. They belong to the same ‘desh’89 and hold a collective solidarity. The village community of Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje is not characterised by race or tribal membership, but is historically constituted. The people’s worldview is overwhelmingly governed by the local, largely inherited and socially enforced customs. Whatever the intensity of inequality may be, Isham Sheikh or Abedali uphold an unfailing loyalty towards their Hindu superiors. Atin Bandyopadhyay had grown up in the small village of Rainadi, in Dhaka, so he is certainly aware of the kind of disparity which prevailed upon most village communities during that time; so pitted against people like Isham and Abedali are Jabbar, FeluShekh and their likes. Their sense of discontent and resentment towards the privileged Hindu section is registered from the very outset. The differences in religious affiliation and the economic imbalance between the Hindus and the Muslims have also drawn an invisible borderline between the two classes. Bandyopadhyay draws attention to the fact that the seeds of Partition can be said to have lain within the economic and social differences that existed between the Hindus and the Muslims. In an interview to Urvashi Butalia, Bir Bahadur Singh talks about similar circumstantial realities about the Hindu-Muslim relationship: If a Mussalman was coming along the road and we shook hands with him and we had say a box of food or something in our hand, that would then become soiled and we would not eat it, if we are holding a dog in one hand and food in the other, there’s nothing wrong with that food. (Butalia, 40)

Atin Bandyopadhyay also shows that the state of harmony in the prepartition period was built on concrete, material differences. In his research on Bengal communal riots, Suranjan Das categorically points out that the concept of communalism took new overtones during that period and comments that the idiom, insignia and ritual of communal confrontation changed in accordance with historical specificities. In Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje too, a separatist identity politics is created through an emphasis of the differences in everyday life. So in response to his father’s wholehearted loyalty towards the Thakur family, Jabbar resentfully blurts out, “When Hindus come across as they spit at us, we too would do the same.” (19)

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A key site for playing out the debates surrounding communalism, nationhood and cultural separatism thus becomes created by identity politics in this context. The politicisation of identity is apparent in the creation of the nation state; the concept of identity envisages and sets into motion various aspects and variants founded on the inclusion-exclusion rhetoric. Ernest Renan’s celebratory definition of a nation as a ‘spiritual principle’ persists as a central concept in nationhood and the formation of national identity. However, during a volatile phase (such as the period preceding partition) the esoteric conception of nationhood and nationalist identity is eclipsed by a strong nationalist and tangibly separatist issuebased discourse. The act of ‘othering’ is carried out so as to construct a counter-identity because this entire enterprise is necessary to replenish the definitive idea of the self. This notion of self, based on an overwhelming dependence on the religious parameter is present in most Partition narratives. During that period various cohesive and composite units of a population sharing a sense of solidarity on the basis of common land and a collective past became subject to the divisive forces of religion. So Abedali cannot come to terms with his son’s antagonism with his village’s Hindus, and cries in deep anguish at the sudden turn of events. Even in Abedali’s response, the author is problematising the Hindu-Muslim relationship by segregating the nuances of both the case in question and the general scenario. The author notes: Abedali appeared much tensed in the dimly-lit periphery. He is repeatedly distressed by the fact that there is an outbreak of riot in Dhaka. Hindus and Muslims are brutally murdering each other, none is spared. He feels extremely agitated whenever he comes to know that Muslims are being slaughtered by the Hindus, but the next moment benevolence and the goodness of Borokorta, Dhankorta and the neighbouring villagers, the long legacy of this bountiful bond wipe away all grief and anxiety. (20)

In the Indian subcontinent, religion has remained the dominant social tie distinguishing the characteristics of the nation; indeed this is the reason that the Hindi term “Hindutva” signifies the equation between the Hindu cultural identity and the Indian nation, and the Urdu term “Quom” designates the ideals of the religious and political community of Muslims. In his eye-opening discourse on identity formation in a religious frame, Amartya Sen argues that, The intricacies of plural groups and multiple loyalties are obliterated by seeing each person as firmly embedded in exactly one affiliation replacing the richness of leading an abundant human life with the formulaic

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narrowness of insisting that any person is situated in just one organic pack. (Sen, 20)

In the phase of transformation preceding Partition, the very rhetoric, articulation and imagination of that segregated identity become extremely important and submerged other factors altogether. The itching desire to change, to be involved in constructing a brighter future, prompts Samsuddin, Jabbar and Felu Shekh to create rivalry against the Hindu villagers. A lot of Muslim villagers are enthused by Samsuddin’s initiative to set up a branch of the Muslim League in the village and seek League membership. His image as the spokesperson of the Muslim community lends a fresh lease of life to the economically bereft, deprived villagers and he succeeds in garnering solid support from his them. Sugata Bose, in his study on communal riots in the Kishoreganj zone of East Bengal touches on the topic of agrarian mobilisation towards distilling a communal identity. The tenure structure of the rural economy and acrossthe-board impoverishment of the Muslim agrarian sector created discontent amongst the provinces, and this deprival eventually acquired a strong communal dimension. Bose goes on to note that at a critical impasse in Bengal’s history, religion provided the foundations of a national bond, however stretched, and became the rallying cry of many demanding the creation of a separate Muslim homeland. The MalatiSamsuddin conversational quarrel brings up an interesting aspect of village politics during that time. Malati, the Hindu widow on the sidelines, is controversially vested with preserving the honour of religious sanctity. She had once held a strong friendship with Samsuddin, which has now but disintegrated due to their respective social positions. When she finds League flyers being put up by Samsuddin, she is deeply infatuated with the idea of destroying those flyers. She considers herself a victim of Muslim antagonism; her husband had been killed in a communal riot. Though the author does introduce acts of communal violence in the village at this point in the narrative, the inclusion of this version of her husband’s death portrays a sign of premonition and anxiety on communal grounds. As she witnesses the flyers being pinned up everywhere, she experiences an urge to rip them up, and as a result strikes up an imaginary conversation; a heated exchange between her and Samsuddin: S: ‘Why did you do that?’ M: ‘Why would not I do this? Does the country belong to your community only?’ S: ‘Why would it belong to my community only? The country belongs to all of us.’

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Chapter I M: ‘Then why do you only harp on Islam?’ S: ‘I do so because our people have been reduced to mere animals. Just open your eyes and you would see, job is yours, land is yours, and lordship is yours. Even education is also with the Hindus.’ (31)

This excerpt of the exchange is an allusion to the rampant chasm which had already infiltrated every tiniest spectre of community consciousness. Malati’s recurring reference to ‘only’ connotes the exclusion syndrome promoted by most fundamentalist principles. The use of ‘only’ prevents any sense of togetherness and mutual mode of existence. Malati casts doubt on Samsuddin’s prerogative of supporting the Muslims merely because this is alien to her. It carries within it an air of unexpectedness, a feeling close to shock. Her resort to ‘only’ is her way of simultaneously giving room to a sense of bewilderment, and incrimination against Samu. This questioning is also found in the register of a confrontation, a verbal encounter. When Malati actually tears away the flyers, Samu protests in a docile tone: “Don’t you know that I have to take a lot of trouble to bring those pamphlets all the away from Dhaka? Don’t ever do that again.” (32) In the village, the process of dissolution is slow as it is set apart from political mainstays like Dhaka and Calcutta. Even after learning that “Islam is in danger” (Islam Biponno), Samsuddin deliberates before opposing his own neighbours. It is of interest to recognise the manner through which communal elements percolate or appropriate the general mindset of the mass. A useful example in this regard is the launch of Krishak Praja Samiti. Under discussion in the article “Islam and Bengali Nationalism” by Zillur R. Khan are the strategic measures adopted by the political stalwarts to evoke responses from a variety of sections. He makes the point that interestingly enough, the rise of the Muslim elite attempted to counteract the Hindu elite’s claim to a general secularist mass appeal by heeding the needs of the Bengal Muslim peasantry. He goes on to observe that Bengali Muslim politicians like A.H. Suhrawardy and Fazlul Haq gave prominence to the regional interests of the Bengali Muslims over any Islamist revivalism which is tantamount to ignoring narrow regional boundaries. Appropriation of Samsuddin into that fold of exclusive communal idiom does not get realised initially. However, his later decision to question the village election results against Chhoto Thakur is pivotal in the novel, “I have decided that in the forthcoming election I shall fight for League. I shall contest against Chhoto Thakur.” (72) In speaking about the strong feeling of resentment amongst the Muslims during this phase, Badruddin Umar posits that what was remarkable during the struggle for independence in the 1940s, was that the Muslims of the principally Hindu areas in India like the United Provinces, Bihar, Assam and the Southern

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Provinces, joined the supporters of the Muslim League in large numbers in demanding Pakistan, which, according to the Lahore Resolution did not include these areas. This tragically exemplified how emotionally charged and powerful political propaganda can evaporate even the minimum of common sense, judgement and even consideration of reflective selfinterests, and create political blindness in the masses, as well as in the literate and well educated sections of society.90 Although on the one hand Bandyopadhyay has brought to life the growing communal dimension making up the rural Muslim community consciousness, the other aspect involving the presence of the Hindu nationalist struggle also features strongly in the text. The provincial landscape, with its hierarchical structure and the accompanying practices of differentiation on the basis of religious faith, facilitated the emergence of organised political representation in pre-partition Bengal. It would be only a partial analysis to view the Muslim separatist ideology as the result of the burgeoning communalisation of politics. In her seminal work on Bengal politics Bengal Divided, Joya Chatterji evaluates the political and social processes that catalysed the need for a separate homeland eventually. In Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje there is a parallel strain of the stratified dynamics of revolutionary terrorist activities which were later deployed as the panoply of Hindu communal propaganda (in the text there is no explicit reference to that subject). A very striking issue in the village with regard to Muslim majoritarian politics is its non-hegemonic ambition with regard to the Hindu community. The author describes an episode in the novel where Sachindranath, the incoming Union President from Congress party, is party to preparations for receiving an influential League leader from Dhaka, but experiences total alienation from this ongoing euphoria. The entrance of the firebrand Swadeshi activist, Ranjit, is a very significant moment in the novel.91 He is portrayed as the champion of the extreme side of the freedom struggle, and is posed as a counter against Samsuddin’s attachment to League politics. The likelihood of tension caused by the friction between the two camps escalates as the story unfolds. Ranjit’s determination to train the villagers in stick fighting, dagger manoeuvring, and pistol-firing stresses the aggressive ideals of the Swadeshi struggle. Joya Chatterji notes that, during that period of transition: Going back to the villages was high on the nationalist agenda, not merely because the mobilisation of peasantry was seen as being important in itself, but also to instil in the bhadralok the virtues of earthiness, hardiness

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Chapter I and manliness that they lacked and which were believed to spring from an association with the soil. (Chatterji, Bengal Divided 163)

Ranjit’s extended discourse directed towards Malati on the need to inform oneself on martial arts and fighting skills for the purpose of self-defence is a precursor of the flow of events soon after in the narrative. Samsuddin’s newly acquired political status riles Malati, which is indicative of the perceptible divide based on religion between the villagers. Malalti’s outrageous interrogation, “You have made so many lathis but how many can be used to bang heads?” (93) is in stark contrast to Ranjit’s calm assertion, “Lathis are not meant for hitting heads, Malati, they are used for protecting heads.” (93) There need be attention given to a crucial nuance at this point. Samu is extremely self-conscious before Ranjit about his role as a league activist; his reluctance to leak any information about his involvement with the League invokes another sensitive matter. Samu’s subject position as the village’s League leader stands in a hierarchical structure in opposition to Ranjit’s role as a Swadeshi activist. Ranjit’s provocative question to Samu is set in the rhetoric of a superiority complex; it seeks to implicitly undermine the significance of Samu’s hold: “I have heard that you have become League’s boss?” (98) Samu’s response is measured and defensive, “It is a matter of my religion.” (98) This verbal exchange between Ranjit and Samu is a testament to the shift in each of their predilections and gives the potential for a larger ideological conflict. Samu’s wish to revamp the sociological system is in sharp contrast to Ranjit’s conception of a revived, independent India. Samu’s later appeal to Ranjit, “Don’t distrust me Thakur, don’t neglect me” (99) contains within it the socially constituted hierarchical burden. Further on in the novel, the village fête is rendered an ugly combat zone for the release of communal antagonism. A Muslim man is accused of molesting a Hindu widow, at which communal rage breaks out, marking the disintegration of the village communities. The disputes which were earlier settled under the counsel of the group of the elderly are invested with a communal dimension in the changing world. This chilling and unnerving narrative moment sheds light on how alliances got reconfigured to produce violence and utter chaos. Here, Ranjit’s declaring earlier in the novel that one should be furnished with combat skills for self-defence is resonated with dense implications. Ranjit and Isham Sheikh both thrust upon themselves the onerous weight of defending the Thakur family from the unceasing onslaught. Such critical instances of mob fury highlight the vulnerability of the folk, which is pathetically articulated by Isham Shekh. His ongoing concern for the Thakur family challenges the functioning of the fanatically politicised mindset bent on drawing only

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differences, “He stood amidst the inflamed place and cried frantically, ‘Where are you Shona babu, Laltubabu? How would I go back without you? How can I show my face?” (142) The echoing “Allah O Akbar” makes for a frightening atmosphere, becoming a very powerful sign of communal assertion. Nowhere in the narrative is any equivalent act of ritualistic communication from the Hindu community lodged. Here, it is necessary to understand the predominance of religious symbols and ritualistic acts over the basic tenets of religion during moments of communal tension. They serve primarily as definite markers of difference, chalking out in the public arena the boundary between one community and its perceived rival. In Bhisam Sahni’s Tamas, the city is in outcry over the act of laying a pig carcass around the entrance to a Mosque. It induces the deepening of mutual suspicion and cynicism, leading to an outburst on a massive scale. In Religious Nationalism, Peter van der Veer speaks of the impact of ritual communication: “It works largely by defining not only the self but also the other whether outside or within the self and by subjugating the other through symbolic violence.” (der Veer, 84) Hefty mobilisation in terms of the community immediately after the fête ruckus marks a continuing tide of communal hostility within the village set up. This raucous outbreak points out how the restraint which was strongly prevailing upon primitive forces of hatred was shed. In the novel there is also some fearsome foregrounding of a stereotypical representation of an aggressive, murderous, virile Muslim, a Muslim inhabiting the rustic space of elemental attributes. Felu Sheikh is framed as the embodiment of most of the negative characteristics typically associated (from the Hinduised version, to an Orientalist view) with what constitutes a Muslim. The Colours of Violence by Sudhir Kakar addresses the formation of a Muslim identity steeped in negative connotations from a Hindu gaze: [T]he destroyer of temples, devourer of cow flesh, defiler of Hindu womanhood, rapers and killers all! Mussalmans were little better than animals, dirty and without self-control, who indulged all the demands of the senses, especially the violence of the body and the pleasures of the flesh. (Kakar, 32)

In Felu Sheikh’s case it appears that he would be capable of performing all these. He is brimming with vengeance against the affluent Hindu inhabitants; his zealous attachment to the League is a by-product of his abhorrence of the Hindu villagers. In Communalism in Modern India, Bipan Chandra too delivers a similar account of image construction in the context of communal differences, an image watchful of physical,

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psychological and emotional considerations. In the plot, he comes across as the potent emblem of moral disorder and psychic disquiet. The author’s portrayal of Felu has an electrifying effect- he is strong, intimidating, the unchallenged muscle man in the locale, “Everybody is scared of him. Any time he might chop off somebody’s head, he is matchless in effortlessly beheading people. Nobody meddles with him.” (58) He is also wife abductor, frighteningly libidinous in his disposition. Importantly, it is the wife of a wealthy Muslim jute dealer, Altaf Miyan, who he has abducted, and therefore the destroyer of a Muslim household. With this, the character negates the supposed assumption of being an invader of the sanctified Hindu domestic space.92 His virility, spectacular masculinity and strength would spill over through his acts of envy in local ha-du-du matches. Further down the line of the narrative, heavy doubt is cast over Felu’s machismo by the sudden attack of a rabid elephant which Pagla Thakur had mounted. Pagla Thakur, an intriguing, mentally imbalanced figure in the novel does not strategize the attack; Felu becomes an arbitrary victim. His future thereafter is a counter tale of his past force and present grievances against Hindu folks, especially Pagla Thakur, the man behind his demise. His own perception of the way in which he is debunked creates in him an uncontrollable fury mostly directed towards his wife Annu Biwi, and in part towards the gluttonous breed of crows (‘halarkawa’). His gangrenous arms and his crippled state serve as a constant reminder of his decimated existence. The downfall of his manhood is in stark contrast to his previous glory. Felu Sheikh’s dismembered condition becomes a curious parallel to the overall anxious and precarious social condition. The segments of narrative describing Felu’s position in the novel hint at a vicious, violent, murderous order of things. His acute physical pain, his loss, might impel him to seek revenge against the world which he inhabits. It becomes relevant to add to the earlier proposition (Felu as the representative of ‘fearsome, virile Muslim’) another assessment. In this case the two operations- Felu’s thorn in his side represented by the wealthy Hindu society in his village and his irrepressible wrath at his wife’s supposed infidelity do not cancel each other out. The effect of these energies in tandem is an aura of fright and imminent violence. Set in a remote village of East Bengal, Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje deals with Hindu-Muslim relations, explicating some fundamental issues which are vitally connected with this subject. It is useful to keep in mind that the novel is not intended to set off the nightmarish violence, disaster or atrocious communal conflicts associated with Partition; the effect is unrushed and gradual. The narrative, in its framework, constitutes the

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toilsome yet sluggish routine of provincial life, the deeply entrenched hierarchical system, ritual bound customs, and, within this pattern, the seeds of discontent are cultivated. The novel questions the ideological tenets behind 1947 Partition as the second part enacts the resistance against nationhood primarily built on religious predicates. However, the narrative leans towards an implicit critique of the sharp hierarchical status and the inherent differences and logic of parochial social practices, which in turn catalysed the force driving Partition. A landscape imbued with a good measure of insecurity and anxiety would necessarily give rise to feelings of mistrust, fear and suppressed violence. The novel lays focus on this undercurrent of violence without wholly resorting to the gruesome presentations of bloody killings and merciless mass-slaying. Prafulla Roy’s Keya Patar Nouko (Boat of Screw-Pine Leaves)93 depicts the slow breakdown of the village community and the ruthless incitation of those in it, one facing up to the other to desecrate their constructed enemies. An idyllic picture of the rural life of Bengal is portrayed through his sprawling narrative with its focus on Rajdia, the village where the main action takes place. For a lengthy period of time Prafulla Roy goes about describing the slow-paced, balanced and pristine life of the village. There is not much suggestion of the differences being played out within the community network. Although the structure of the village is clearly hierarchical, it comes across as a given condition in the context of that village. It shares a perspective with Shanta Sen’s Pitamohi (Grandmother) where certain cultural practices are related by Tultuli, the child narrator. To a certain point this narrative seems to be in concurrence with the discourse of the romantic village life of undivided Bengal. Replete with happy gatherings, cultural symbiosis and shared existence are the pre-Partitioned days, here, finding their most powerful expression in the Irish Doctor Lalmor. The doctor began as a Christian preacher who had gone there intending to preach his faith; in stages, he becomes the preacher of human bonds and collective unity. Focus is laid on Hemnath’s family and the newly arrived Abanimohan, Surama and his children from Calcutta at Hemnath’s place. The novel, as most other narratives in the genre do, shows that the wealth rests with the Hindu community, as the land and property lies with them. Contrastingly, most of the Muslim characters are shown to be the poor, dispossessed section working on land belonging to the Hindus. It is implied that most of them live on the plentiful alms from the rich. This comes through when a poor Muslim farmer, Taleb Miyan, is urged to take the left-over crops from Abanimohan’s newly purchased land. At the point the donation is agreed upon, he is brimming with joy. As noted in “Memories of Displacement”

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by Dipesh Chakraborty, the language of kinship is determined here in this village too through the process of absorption of the other. In this narrative, the ‘other’ is the Muslim community and so too, to a certain degree, the socially inferior low caste Hindus. The perfectly harmonious ethnic identity abruptly transforms into a land of communal unquiet and gives the narrative a jolt. At one juncture, the author describes the fear spread by a man-eating tiger in the area. To combat the common enemy the villagers take it upon themselves to slay the tiger; gathering with great aplomb, they loudly raise their respective religious chants like “Kali Mai ki jay” and “Allah-O-Akbar”. But within a short time span, the atmosphere transforms tremendously; a sinister, terror-laden dimension is projected from the same chanting. A riot ensues and to reinforce their religious affiliations, the villagers try chant in order to proclaim war against their rival community. These constitute deliberate strategies to provoke, and incite rage and tension. The narrative pins down that feeling of shock and bewilderment at the change of direction. The eruption of Muslim hostility towards Hindu neighbours is depicted as being outside the normal realm of events. As the author relates, “The country wide frenzy took under its bloody sweep this prosperous, sublime village of Bengal.” (397) Majid Miyan, when pleading with Hemnath to put a stop to the violent scene, speaks not as a Muslim but as a spokesperson for a unified community: I beg at your feet Thakur Bhai, please stop this carnage. How can this happen before your eyes? Riot has erupted elsewhere, why should we be affected by this? We want to stay together as before. Please stop them. What I have not witnessed all these years should not happen at this ripe age. I want to rather die before that. (399)

The ruthless murder of doctor Lalmor provides the supreme example of delirious obsession pushing the crowd on. Ashis Bannerji discusses the reasons behind the outbreak of riots, “It is fairly obvious though that the foremost prerequisite for a riot is the persistence of communal perceptions.” (Das, Mirrors 41) Prafulla Roy does not really provide any explanation for this type of ferocious eruption; he merely lays out the abrupt transformation of the village. It is implied that this kind of violence demolishes society’s existing structures, and reconstructs them. In Rajdia, the rampage and destruction affect community life in a dramatic way. In the majority of his works, Gyanendra Pandey contends that Partition violence in particular has been described as the ‘other history’ and has been treated as extraordinary in nature and further, likened to a natural disaster in its presentation. Motaher Ali’s claim that they did not wish for this, reiterates this point in the book. Pandey too, argues, “There are two

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faces of Partition history, one belongs to the ‘ruling class’ and the other to the ‘refugee class’ (Pandey, Remembering 125) Roy’s representation of Partition in the novel—by covering diverse perspectives—brings forth the dynamics of perpetration. Acting against a rendering of Partition violence as absent and aberrational in official historiography, the writers discussed here have reconstructed Partition history by speaking for people’s reception and survival of violence; they have taken it upon themselves to create a reflexive interpretation and comprehension of the situation and era. These narratives put into focus the contradictions and ironies which accompany the trope of enactment and retaliation of violence during Partition. As Suvir Kaul reflects, “Just as the causes of Partition were many, its effects are myriad and lingering, indeed they are constitutive (in acknowledged or repressed ways) of family, community and public life on the subcontinent.” (Kaul, 26)

CHAPTER II WOMEN AND VIOLENCE: ISSUES AND REPRESENTATIONS

Re-envisaging Violence on Women “I am damned too. You want me to live still, and sow the seed of damnation?”94 —Lalithambika Antherajan “Slay that ‘Bhuri’, none will come to claim her now that girl who grew one finger every twelve months, Now shortens one phalanx each year.”95 —Gulzar

A focus on women’s lives within the discourse of history and politics of Partition produces a very different kind of narrative—different in terms of the understanding of Partition that it provides, and of what it means to write the history and read the literature about the period. It therefore becomes important to consider such issues with regard to the mode of representing women’s experiences during Partition. Not only would this help in bringing a plurality of views, but it would also question and unsettle the monolithic accounts of the time. Violence is embedded in social structures, including those of religion. Patriarchy, as an ideology and structure of domination, is a clear example of this dangerous synergy. Traditional historiography has obviously failed to describe the collective trauma of the scale and magnitude of Partition, since such painful experiences can only be grasped by taking into account the mutilating effects of violence—dimensions of pain, shame, guilt, betrayal, revenge, and nostalgia that history has strategically chosen to expel from its telling and retelling. For last few decades, sociologists, historians and feminist critics have played active roles in reviving interest in Partition fictions.96It is now an established fact that Partition was not only about drawing new national borders but also about the reconfiguration of the structures and meanings of family, belonging, nationality and citizenship, racial and ethnic

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identities, community, sexuality, and international politics. As Satish Saberwal notes in his assessment of Partition history in his essay “The Long Road to Partition: Social and Historical Perspective”, “a more creative approach to troubled past, personal or collective is to meditate on them, reflect on them by asking as honestly as we can manage, what exactly happened and why.” (Saberwal, 237) These literary narratives, besides providing an addendum to the historical archive, open up, articulate, discuss and examine ethical questions. Although there is a growing body of feminist research that includes women’s narratives of these events, the considerable scope of scholarship on state and nation formation that examines its sexual politics, and the forced micro-dynamics of boundary formations, remains underappreciated. It is difficult to homogenise women’s experiences and perceptions of Partition. There is a specific underpinning of the divides of caste, class, the rural and the urban, with regard to the experiences of Partition and life after it. Drawing a parallel between Partition violence and the unrest in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the impacts of both conflicts on women’s lives, in “Women and Ethnic Cleansing”, Beatriz Gonzalez Manchon comments that the violation of women’s human rights, in the form of murder, rape, sexual slavery and forced pregnancies, have unfortunately been present throughout these and other ethnic cleansing campaigns. The absence of women’s specific experiences from historical accounts—as a result of gender roles—has been greatly criticized by feminist researchers in the past few decades. The cultural, social and psychological impact of Partition stories on modern-day India with regard to the intersecting spheres of gender, community and nation need to be addressed critically. Feminists researching Partition history have already begun to deconstruct the apparently gender-neutral meta-narratives of history through the use of personal testimonies, autobiographies and interviews. In her essay “Partition Violence: Self Reckoning and the Structuring of a Modern Subjectivity”, Kavita Panjabi cites Veena Das’s critical observation that women became objects of national honour and the whole matter became an “important factor for the self-definition of the newly created nation states.” (Castillo and Panjabi, 278) Tropes such as forgetting, discontinuity, silencing and exclusion have been used in the historical as well as the many fictional narratives that record the phenomenon of Partition. Regarding this connection, Sukrita Paul Kumar notes: One of the most disturbing consequences of this has been the invisibilization of woman. The society had to recover them and value the massive chunk of vital human experience lying repressed in hundreds of

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Chapter II women, disoriented and alienated due to wrenching separation from their roots.97

The act of ‘making public’ that is performed by fictional narratives is crucial in acknowledging and recognising survivors’ experiences of brutality and violence. There seems to exist a deep patriarchal complicity between religion, community and, which made acts of brutality against women possible. In the essay “Religion and Violence: Suffering of Women” Susan Rakoczy observes: “Violence and patriarchy are social surds, raging infections in the human community. When religious language is used to justify these patriarchal structures of oppression which are inherently violent because they violate women’s human dignity, the circle is complete.” (Rakoczy, 31) It is important to map out these representations of the nexus of the patterns of the perpetration of violence, which are very much gendered. It becomes necessary to ask not only how women were made victims of communal or ethnic violence through rape or physical torture, but also how they had taken those signs of violation and reconfigured them in their lives. Jill Didur points out that while some historical research has sought to write the stories of victimized women, this attempt has at times “failed to address the problem of how any venture to write a meta-narrative is necessarily homogenizing in its articulation.” (Didur, Unsettling 12) So it is important to read fragmented and decentred representations of the everyday events of Partition and their bearings on the lives of the women. In this regard, literary narratives make powerful interventions which can question the totalising discourses that claim to have spoken the experiences of Partition. Fictional characters like Sutara, Kusum, Malati or Jhinuk are no less powerful figures than real women who experienced the anguish of Partition. In an interview given to Alok Bhalla, Bapsi Sidhwa observes that it is the women who bear the brunt of the violence that accompanies any civil or political turmoil, especially when the earth is partitioned anywhere in the world, be it Bosnia, Palestine, Israel or India.98 Women as rape victims, women as abduction victims, women committing suicide, women as being traded for their families’ sake, women as the breadwinners of the families and women as unassailable individuals countering violence— these multiple images of women emerge from a wide array of Partition stories, both real and imagined. Murders, abductions, and sexual assault became frighteningly common occurrences during the mass migration through the borders. Thousands of women became separated from their families and communities. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin argue that the location of women at the intersection of all these factors, rather than at their periphery, casts an entirely new light on the evident fixity of the

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defining features of identity, such as community, religion and nationality. As Amrita Pritam cries out in agony, “I am the cursed daughter of Punjab/ Just look at my fate”, this pathetic outburst in fact encloses the lived realities of suffering women, not just in the Punjab, but also in Bengal, across the border. In this connection, Martha C. Nussbaum—in her essay “Rape and Murder in Gujarat” in Violence and Democracy in India— comments that the widespread image of the female body as the nation helps to explain why during the waves of communal violence at the time of independence, “possession of women was such an important issue to the contending sides, as Muslims established Pakistan and as Hindus and Muslims killed one another in large numbers during the mass migrations surrounding the separation of two nations.” (Basu & Roy, 104) An important insight relating to the impact of violence in terms of its significance for women’s lives also becomes relevant to the life of the nation. While examining the collective, historical account of nationalist discourse in South Asia, it is important to identify the way that certain kinds of opposition, such as men-women, Hindus-Muslims, and communalsecular, become norms in most historical descriptions. Commenting on the necessity to attend to the idea of violence against women during Partition, Taisha Abraham observes that it becomes important to “redefine violence to include not just overt forms of violence but patriarchal violence that functions through consent and agency, violence that erases, marginalises, disembodies and silences women.” (Abraham, 16) As stated earlier, literary narratives on Partition have tracked the complexities inscribed within the discourse of violence targeted against women. These texts have re-enacted the cultural negotiation of this violence and have also uncovered its impact on the narratives of national belonging invented by and for women as citizens and refugees in postcolonial South Asia. It has been argued that women from the Punjab had to experience the worst forms of violence; the magnitude of this violation was unthinkable. The reflections of this long-drawn massacre had been strongly represented in literature which emerged from the western frontier. These narratives have disentangled women’s experiences from those of others and have helped in critiquing the general experience of dislocation, violence and rehabilitation from a gendered perspective. These fictions have provided scathing and sharp commentary on the politics of Partition. Literary texts on the subject of Partition, therefore, have been written and are read emphatically within artistic conventions of realism and tend to be treated as surrogate documentation. Writers such as Manto, Sobti, Qurratulain Hyder, Hashmi, and Rajinder Singh Bedi have conducted explorations of the complex dynamic of this event and have

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intensively provided glimpses into the subjectivity of victims and aggressors alike. Commenting on the kinds of representations of female victims within the paradigm of Hindi, Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi fictions in his essay, “The Woman Protagonist in Partition Literature” in Translating Partition, Bodh Prakash asserts, “The victimized women characters in such narratives evoke the strongest revulsion for the perpetrators of such inhuman acts.” (Ravikant & Saint, 197) Most of these creative texts offer accounts of women who negotiate multiple identities and also point to the paradoxes embedded within state, community and nationalist imaginings. Amongst these writers from the western part, Manto is the one whose work epitomizes dehumanizing sexual violence against women within the communities that enacted the 1947 rhetoric of ethnic conflict and honour. His stories reveal how identities for both men and women came to be produced through violence. Most of these narratives open up the possibility of rethinking the meaning of communal violence and the equation between the national and communal from gendered perspectives. What was the response in Bengal? Has violence against women during Partition been adequately addressed in Bengal’s cultural discourse? Has there been adequate archiving and analysis of this composite moment of history in Bengal? Urvashi Butalia has pointed to the serious gap which exists in the case of experiences associated with Bengal Partition. Though it is often argued that violence in the Punjab was intensely pervasive and widespread it cannot be denied that Bengal too suffered in its own distinct way. In the case of those victims who were women, the situation was no less grim. Didur discusses Shelley Feldman’s assessment of Partition violence and concomitant violence in East Bengal, and in Unsettling Partition cites Feldman’s argument that while analysing the case of Bengal’s division, it is important to include the double colonialism of East Bengal, its particular location in the ethnic and religious hierarchies of the region, and the simultaneity of separation and violence as well as the challenges to freedom and social mobility.99 This would help in providing a meta-narrative of the violence based on the differences and pluralities embedded within the discourse. Violence here had a more ‘everyday’ nature. In partitioned Bengal, minority women faced verbal assault, molestation and abduction at the hands of the men from the majority community. Anwesha Sengupta, in researching this aspect of Partition, notes that families that were on the ‘wrong’ side of the border (i.e., where they were minorities), often sent the young unmarried girls to the other side for their safety and security. It is important to ask whether the investigative works on Partition which emerged in Bengal had taken up women’s issues sensitively.100 In a comprehensive study on the fallout of

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Partition in Bengal, Ella Moore observes that the strong traditions of Indian society and the patriarchal nature of the family unit have limited discussions of the female experiences of Partition.101 She further notes that silence has also been the choice of those who do not wish to recount the atrocities through which they lived and simply wish to negate the trauma of separation. In her review “Partition and its Meanings” of The Trauma and the Triumph Vol 1, Himani Bannerji notes that in most analysis, even in literature and sociological studies, a univocal tragic vision of the male experience of trauma is projected through a patriarchal moral regulation of women and the family. This statement by Bannerji is, however, subject to contention. It is worth mentioning here that Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta’s edited compilation The Trauma and the Triumph is a groundbreaking work in the field of Partition studies highlighting women’s issues in Bengal. This study in fact counters the critique that the eastern Partition has not been sufficiently reflected in creativity, in contrast to what one witnesses in the case of the western Partition of the Punjab. As more and more research is being conducted in this field it has become easier to trace the exposition of women-related subjects within the spectrum of Bangla literature. Quite a few writers have attended to the pain, loss, and bewilderment of women trapped in the vicious grip of ethnic nationalism, and they have repeatedly pointed out that sexual violence against women constitutes an integral part of this division. By touching upon the untold facets of Partition, these narratives uncover the socio-sexual violence perpetrated against women and the epistemological violence encoded within the lens of violated womanhood. As this book is based on the literary narratives from Bengal, the findings which come across through an intensive analysis of select texts are decidedly interesting. The diverse issues covered in these narratives pronounce the constitutive centrality of women’s experiences in the context of Partition. The intriguing equation of a woman’s honour with the sacredness of the nation within the scope of nationalist discourse contributed towards making women an object of protection and target of violence, both physical and discursive during Partition. It is useful to identify the complexities entailed in accommodating the violated female figure within the sanctified space of the family. The figure of a violated woman, as it were, posed the problems of acceptance and assimilation within the familial structure. This paradoxical configuration of the family’s supposed role—to uphold and nurture a woman’s honour on the one hand, and its failure to contain the victimized women within its protective shield on the other—can be seen as pivotal in opposing conventional ways of narrativizing the Partition experience. The suicides,

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martyrdoms, sexual assaults, abductions and unplanned pregnancies suffered by women during Partition reveal how the metaphorical representation of women’s chastity as emblematic of community honour was read as literal in reinforcing patriarchal competitions for nationalist power. The abducted women presented a new social question and their reintegration into their original families and communities also required a complete reconstruction of gendered rituals of purity. Sutara in Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning), Malati in Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje (In Search of the Bird Neelkontho), Kusum in Bakultala P.L. Camp, Arundhuti in “Karunkanya” (“The Stricken Daughter”), and Sudatta in “Jaibo” (“Biological”) present varied cases of victimized women and suggest how the specific perspectives and experiences treated in these literary narratives cause the diffraction of historical truth into multifarious versions of individual cases. The representations of victims and vanquishers in these narratives thus build up a space to engage in meaningful debate surrounding this crucial aspect. In a very major way, the violent aftermath of Partition brought forth a steady reconfiguration of gender roles and a total change in women’s relationships to public and private spaces. Women’s visibility in the public sphere grew more and more pervasive. The sense of security and permanence conventionally associated with home faded away. In order to accommodate these responsibilities, women’s roles outside the home were drastically revised. The complex dynamics of displacement and spatial loss, and the psychological and sociological dimensions of the experiences of the people venturing into a world of both problems and possibilities required all kinds of adjustments that changed their gendered existence within the family. This gradual phenomenon of women becoming bread winners in order to sustain their families becomes an interesting theme in the field of sociological research. Fictional texts such as Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star), “Posharini” (“The Woman Who Sold Wares”), and “Machh” (“Fish”) bring forth the concept of women struggling against various odds to be the providers, and navigating the multiple debilitating pressures which engulf their existence. These struggling women figures not only represent the nation in its transition but also mark its violent effects. These characters, labouring amidst all kinds of constraints, serve to index the violence of Partition.

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Women’s Honour: Politics of Exclusion 102 “Why did not they die? Why did not they take prison to preserve their chastity? Why didn’t they jump to well? Cowards, clinging to life!”103 —Rajinder Singh Bedi

It is necessary to highlight the problematic issues associated with the question of accommodating a violated woman in the context of Partition within the sphere of “home.” In this connection it is useful to bring forth the complex configuration centering women and their location within the domestic arena during Partition, by referring back to the formation of “womanhood” in the historical trajectory of the construction of the Indian nation. By touching upon the diverse nuances associated with the question of women, and how they assumed new roles with the changes in the political scenario during the colonial phase, it is possible to open up new insights and arguments regarding the subject of women’s honour. In her discussion on Partition Violence in her essay “Violence, Knowledge and Subjectivity”, Veena Das discusses the necessity of addressing “gendered acts of violation” and how these women have developed noxious signs of violation. Since the focus is on post-rape/abduction narratives, it becomes possible to discern the ways in which gender is implicated in the formation of the Indian nation and what relation it bears to its historical past. As these stories are located in the historical context of Partition and its bearing upon the lives of women, it is necessary to trace the socio-political equations which played a vital role in rendering such positionality of women within the larger network of the intersection of power and ideology during that time. To speak of one of the most disturbing aspects of Partition is to speak of the violence that was associated with it in unimaginable proportions, and particularly of the violence meted out against women. Through these stories it is possible to address the question of the reception of these women within the space called home. In any scholarship on gender relations within the broader sociocultural matrix during the colonial phase, the arguments are primarily formulated while keeping in mind the nationalist enterprise countering the colonial hegemony. The location of women in Indian society is being scrutinised in terms of its opposition to the image of an emancipated woman within a liberalised western ambit. The anxiety to maintain the specificity and specialty of our women as opposed to their women permeates all reformist strategies. While speaking about the contradictory pulls of nationalist ideology against the dominance of colonialism and the resolution it offered to these contradictions, Partha Chatterjee speaks of

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the division of culture into two distinct spheres—the material and the spiritual. The nationalists argued that in the spiritual realm the East was far superior to the West. While discussing this dichotomy between the spiritual and the material categorization in “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question”, Chatterjee gives us an insight into the specialized distinction of the social space into ghar and bahir, the home and the world. As he notes: The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world, and woman is its representation. And so we get an identification of social roles by gender to correspond with the separation of the social space into ghar and bahir. (Sangari and Vaid, 239)

The responsibility of upholding spiritual purity was assigned to the woman. She was expected to remain within the restricted freedom granted to her and any act of refuting it would be seen as a serious blow to this ideological construction and would be highly condemned. This public/private, outside/inside dyadic structure is the subject of many feminist tracts. The public/private dualism ensured that the mobility of women remained restricted within the home and the idea of a pure woman was extolled as the ultimate paradigm of good womanhood. In an urgency to develop an assertion of Indian national identity, there arose the necessity to glorify an ancient past when women held high positions in society, with an added enhancement to their traditional qualities. The woman was accorded the task of preserving the sanctity and purity of “home” which was emblematic of the spiritual domain in the nationalist debate. Her role as a woman was sought to be actualised in the sphere of home only. V. Geetha, in her essay “Culture, Religion and Patriarchy”, records this specific aspect of Indian social structure when she says: Words in Indian languages designate the woman as the queen of the household, as its guardian angel, its custodian and so on, where as a man is described as the one that brings in an income, as a protector and the guardian of the hearth in his capacity as a public figure and as one who fashions the world, makes history. (Geetha, 145)

As such, the figure of a woman as embodying political and cultural identity assumed new dimensions as the political problems changed in the subsequent phase. Identity in India began to be crystallized around the poles of two essential modules—namely religion and caste. In this new framework, the Hindu-Muslim question and womanhood became merged. Within this discursive space, the woman’s body was seen as the repository of community honour; here I mean the religious community. In this

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reformulated discourse of nationalism, new political forces of communalism became narrowly and exclusively associated with the concept of nationhood. During this historical interface, home was endowed with a religious and moral sanctity within the contours of a national ideology. It would be interesting to trace how, during that phase, the construction and experience of womanhood had informed the course and meaning of the role of women. In her book Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, Tanika Sarkar puts forward an argument concerning the mobilization of women within a restricted notion of community in an idiom of militant Hindu nationalism. The domestic sphere was conceptualized as the site of a possible emergent nation, and the Hindu wife came to be a figure of unusual political weight. Since India began to be conceived in terms of its constituent communities—Hindu, Muslim, Christian and so on—it became essential to invent and realize the image of a shared communal enemy and to secure it successfully. The Hindu community, in particular, dissolved into the figure of a threatened woman’s body, and violence became a necessary condition of the Hindu male honour. It is useful to note that these Partition narratives also find the trials and dilemmas of their displaced protagonists in Sita’s story in The Ramayana. Sita’s story serves as a subtext that is perpetually invoked in these stories. As mythical Sita has to go through trial by fire to prove her legendary chastity, so also these abandoned women have to go through agonising trials. Within the space of nationalist discourse, Sita had an exclusive position. Gandhi, too, promoted the image of self-sacrificing, monogamous Sita as the ideal Indian woman, while he invited women to enter the public realm during satyagraha. Sita’s predicament, her abduction by Ravana, her exile in a strange land, her unfailing deference to her husband, her trial by fire and the condition of the abducted women gave fresh immediacy and poignancy to this familiar mythical narrative. Priya Kumar argues in this context that the story of Sita understandably provided an older narrative line, “a pre-existing cultural paradigm to hold together and represent the chaos and confusion at the time of Partition.” (Kumar, 156) In the post-Partition era, Sita’s story was used to endorse the Indian state’s rescue and recovery project, but within that discourse Sita was repeatedly projected as a woman deprived of all voices; she was a silent sufferer waiting to be rescued by the state. As a helpless female victim, she required the legitimate intervention of the state to restore her. It is worth mentioning that most of the Partition narratives render an oppositional telling of Sita’s position in the nationalist discourse by highlighting her tale to constitute the abducted woman’s subjectivity. By drawing upon the episode of Sita’s abduction, many Partition narratives

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have been able to question the popular reception of Sita’s suffering as a mark of deference.104 Rather, these narratives have given powerful feminist revisions of the story. For example, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga Opar Ganga draws upon the trope of Sita’s exile very powerfully. I have elaborated on this aspect in my detailed discussion of the text. As Paula Richman notes in the introduction to her edited collection Questioning Ramayans, “Oppositional telling often provides alternative perspectives on characters, incidents or ethical issues, thereby enriching the diversity of the Ramayana tradition.” (Richman, 11) Bakultala P.L. Camp105 by Narayan Sanyal is a particularly interesting Partition narrative in the sense that it is one of the earliest Partition literary accounts to focus on the social stigma facing an abducted woman during the time. Sanyal’s critique of this situation opens up a space in which to question social norms related to sexuality. With the repeated investment of certain ideal attributes in the domestic sphere, Woman/Mother and India became synonymous terms. As Tanika Sarkar explains, from the mid-nineteenth century, Hindu revivalists came to see the household as “doubly precious and important as the only zone where autonomy and self-rule could be preserved.”106(qtd in Didur, Unsettling 28) The character of Kusum is shown to be the stigmatized woman who is constantly subject to public voyeurism in the camp. As a camp inmate she is described as a guardianless widow, an attractive woman inviting one trouble after another. Her relationship with her supposed cousin, Tarapad, who visits her, generates a lot of gossip in the vicinity, and her clandestine meetings with him intensify the situation. In the course of the narrative, the narrator, through letters addressed to his friend, reveals the tainted past of Kusum, a past which acts as a spectre in her life, haunting her throughout. The readers come to know that Kusum was abducted when she was in her teens as a consequence of the heightened rivalry between Hindu and Muslim camps in the village. Bishwanath, the Hindu nationalist activist, had a weakness for Kusum, and, in retaliation to actions by the Hindu group, some extremist members of the Muslim camp kidnapped her. This move was crucial to rendering the rival community wounded. It is worth mentioning here that the reconstruction of the ancient past went hand in hand with an intensification of the patriarchal surveillance of elite and middle-class women’s sexuality and conduct as wives and mothers.107 Naturally Kusum’s position within her family and village community was rendered highly controversial. Her reception within the family was fraught with a lot of tension and anxiety: “[H]er mother hit her forehead witnessing her daughter, her father sat numbly beside the powerless family deity. Her little sister stood there with a shocked expression. The

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neighbours gathered around to see her.” (44) The entire description is symptomatic of an extraordinary situation where Kusum became the source of disturbance, a raw bleeding wound reminding the community of its frailty. The narrative records how Kusum led a confined life at her home to avoid any kind of embarrassment which would be directed towards her family. The author notes, “Kusum remained confined within the house. She came out only to take bath in the small pond near the house.” (54) As Jill Didur observes that the suicide, martyrdom, sexual assault, abduction and social death suffered by women at the time of Partition underscores “how the metaphorical representation of women’s chastity as emblematic of community honour was read as literal in patriarchal competitions for nationalist power” (Didur, Unsettling, 36). This incident in Kusum’s life released a series of unexpected tragedies in the years that followed. Her father expired, her mother was left alone with two young, unmarried daughters, and the position of the family was very vulnerable. As the narrator describes, “Kusum never came out of her home even after seven eight years, lest the past scandal resurfaced in the community!” (54) Kusum’s anxious position heightens the debate surrounding the so-called fallen women. The interlocking conjunction of patriarchal and nationalist interests led to a categorization of women as good or bad according to their ability to live up to the notions of idealized womanhood. According to these constructed parameters, Kusum inhabited a very dangerous position in the society. She had been abducted by members of the rival community, so her “contaminated” presence threatened the paradigm of good womanhood. As researchers such as Butalia, Menon, and Bhasin have shown, the abducted women, in destabilising the notion of masculine honour invested in women’s chastity, presented a new social question. Biswanath’s return from jail induced a major change in Kusum’s life, because he proposed marriage to Kusum. It is deeply ironic that in most of the Partition narratives these women are driven towards some possibility of accommodation within the social sphere through male patronage. The motif of a man acting as the saviour of a weak, destitute woman is a recurrent theme in Partition stories (the Sutara-Pramode alliance towards the end of Epar Ganga Opar Ganga is a relevant example). The narrative appears to reiterate that patriarchal intervention, in whatever measure it may be, is instrumental in transforming a woman’s life. This narrative further illustrates how gendered national imaginaries are overlapped within the discursive structure of the narrative. Later on, Bakultala P.L. camp, where Kusum is ultimately destined to seek refuge, also proves to be hostile for her. It is interesting to note that a camp is no home, but it assumes the structure of an extended hostile home, denying

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her any sense of respect and dignity. Kusum disguises herself as a widow because her husband is a criminal in the eyes of law, for murdering her rapist. The society in her village had previously ostracised her for being a raped woman; after Partition the circumstances have not really changed. She is looked upon as a fallen woman who has transgressed all boundaries of propriety. It is later on revealed that Tarapad is actually her husband in disguise. Kusum’s final departure from the camp lodges a crucial critique of a society which fails to deliver any justice to such women. Her ultimate decision to go away to avoid further humiliations (for her, Biswanath and Writobroto, the narrator) shows how “subjects contest power in its discursive form and their desires and discontents transform or explode discursive systems” (Didur, Unsettling 57). Through this narrative’s engagement with Kusum’s predicament, the author strives to present a view of the events that inscribes the conflation of ‘Woman’ and ‘Nation’ through the reinforcement of patriarchal ideology. Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga Opar Ganga108 presents another very potent image of a victimised woman and the tribulations inflicted upon her by the society for being a victim of community rivalry. This fictional account attempts to constitute the fragmented subjectivities of the female subject of mass violence, and consequently paves the way for imagining the traumatic inner world of the female survivor. It highlights the violence towards and probable rape of a Hindu girl in East Bengal in the pre-Partition phase and her subsequent state of marginalisation by her own community. In her illuminating examination of the novel, Jasodhara Bagchi states that Sutara’s sexuality is the great violation unspoken in the novel, yet “it remains the stake in a sinister game in which the community teams up with nationhood to keep alive the caste-class entente of the ruling classes in India.” (Bagchi and Dasgupta Vol 1, 20) Bagchi looks at the trend of moral regulations and hypocritical obsession with women’s sexual purity embedded within the patriarchal foundation of the hegemonic class in India through her analysis of the novel. Feminist historiography has argued that during Partition, abducting women from the other community became a common way to dishonour the Muslim/Hindu other; the appropriation of women from the other community was a way to affect the collective honour, religious sentiment, and the physical reproduction of that community. The lingering debate surrounding the recovery of abducted women and their restoration to their respective families during that time have churned out a huge discourse on gender codes, the alliance between the state and patriarchal ideology, and questions about women and their asymmetrical relationship to the structures of nationality and citizenship. On 17 November, 1947, a resolution was passed by the All

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India Congress Committee which stated that, “every effort must be made to restore women to their original homes with the co-operation of the governments concerned.” (Didur, Unsettling 37) However, in reality, women also went on to be exploited by an ill-guided state-sponsored recovery programme that sought to restore them to the territorial politic of the nation, ignoring the individual wishes of the women. On 19 December 1949, the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration Bill) was passed in the Indian Parliament. Kamala Patel and Mridula Sarabhai, who were actively engaged in the recovery operation, recorded later on that this project was loaded with discrepancies and incorrect politicised strategies.109 Menon and Bhasin make a significant observation: The recovery programme through its overt and covert rhetoric and operations, was as much an index of India and Pakistan constituted themselves vis-à-vis each other as it was a contest of competing claims by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs over each other’s (and their ‘own’) women and children. To this extent both countries were engaged in a redefinition of each other’s (and their own) national character as demonstrated by a commitment to upholding honour and restoring moral order. (Menon & Bhasin, 107)

The abducted women’s survival challenged the forging of a dichotomous relationship between the civic and domestic spheres in the wake of the post-independence transitional phase. In the case of Epar Ganga Opar Ganga, Sutara is not recovered by any state machinery. In fact, she is saved very soon by her Muslim neighbour Tamij Kaka’s family on that fateful night. She is the only surviving member after a sudden blaze of communal fury devastated her entire family during the Noakhali riot. At the very beginning of the novel, Sutara ruminates self-reflectively on the politics of historiographical representations and recounts her personal experience of violence and trauma. Through a minimalist account she narrates how within a short span of time she lost her family: her father was killed, her mother committed suicide, her sister disappeared and she lost consciousness. As the author notes, “Is it possible? Can it happen? She has lost her mother, father, sister in no time.” (109) The narrative highlights the confusions and ellipses encoded within memory of trauma.110 The narrative refuses to give any conclusive view of the episode of violation in Sutara’s life. The story also traces the contradictions that arise from the competing ideologies of home, nation and gender upon the return of the abducted women to their families and nations. Ironically, Sutara’s wish to go back to her brother’s family in Calcutta invites a lot of complications into her life. Her brother Sanat barely shows any interest taking her back. When Tamij Kaka

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corresponds with Sanat, in response to Sutara’s plea, and informs him that she could be sent with some Relief Mission, Sanat categorically insists that she should not be sent with any team. As he writes, “Uncle, please don’t send her with any Relief Mission or Recovery Team. This would unnecessarily invite a lot of scandal amongst relatives.” (113) This clearly indicates that her position within the extended family would never be an easy one. Ultimately, when Tamij Kaka escorts her to Calcutta, Sutara finds herself an unwanted visitor in the family. Her status as an abducted woman has robbed her of all rights to inhabit a dignified familial space. She comes to understand the random fragments of her life; she realises painfully that the violence of the state and home echo each other.111 From the very beginning she is treated like an outcast; most of her family members bear the attitude that her presence and touch itself would pollute those who come into her proximity. Her despoiled state, the death of her parents, and the absence of her sister have already shattered her world irrevocably. Her polluted status is reiterated in the narrative especially through the prejudiced conduct of the old members of the family. She overhears a conversation in the kitchen when she tries to help with the cooking; her Boudi’s mother gets vexed at this and snubs the other family members for allowing her to do things: “I am amazed at your wisdom. She was in a Muslim household for so many months. It was not a matter of one or two days, it was more than six months. Can a woman retain her caste in such a situation?” (120) When Sutara’s nieces offer to take her to her room again, the lady of the house instructs, “She must be purified with Ganga water first. God knows what forbidden food she has consumed in that house.” (118) The novel’s marking of Sutara’s troubled position through these episodes underscores the obsessive apprehension of preserving the sanctity of the home by excluding her from all activities. This is the consequence of upholding an ideology rested on the notion of the purity of women. In a different context, Lata Mani discusses the production of contentious social strictures, with its focus on the woman-tradition-lawscripture nexus, and explains, “still current though challenged by feminists and other progressives, is the notion of women and scriptures as repositories of tradition.”112 (Sangari & Vaid, 119) Jyotirmoyee Devi’s deep-rooted engagement with the violated, humiliated women is reflected in her dedication of the novel, “to all the dishonoured, humiliated women of all ages, all nations.” The cruel, isolating practices carried out to ritualise the forms of purity accorded to women render Sutara at the receiving end. The symbolic burden placed on a woman’s body by cultural nationalism produces a devastating effect on her life. The narrative conducts an examination of violence which is

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inflicted twice—sexually and socially. Being a violated woman, Sutara is destined to live a life of denial—a life which has to be lived outside the security of home. She is sent to a boarding school so that the family is saved from any kind of public scrutiny and criticism on account of her staying in the house. This decision enables the family to conform to the social code of conduct and helps it in promoting the purity of the domestic sphere. As Priya Kumar comments, the novel “offers an unsparing indictment of the terrifying hold of rituals of purity that mark out the exclusionary boundaries between communities, most frequently through the regulation and control of women’s sexuality.”(Kumar, 166) In one of the most painful episodes of the novel, the author demonstrates how Sutara is being treated by her family. The degree of mental torture she has to withstand suggests the level of societal intolerance towards her. In her Boudi’s sister’s marriage ceremony, a cruel spectacle is staged where she is compelled to eat alone before the scrutinising gaze of a gathering public: “17/18 year old Sutara sat dazedly before a huge gathering of spectators.” (138) The author categorically uses the term ekghore113(italics mine) to establish Sutara’s isolated, ostracised position. In the latter part of the novel, too, the author draws upon Tagore to categorise them as pilsuj114 (italics mine). The repeated disgrace which she has to experience heightens the sense of isolation and heartless supervision exercised by the patriarchal family and community. It is also indicated in the novel that in boarding school, Sutara and her ilk remain confined within the institution even during vacations: “[T]he boarding school had to be kept open for some orphan girls who were exiles, fugitives, with no place to go to.”(133) These girls are orphans only metaphorically, and not literally. These episodes of the novel also powerfully suggest the complicity of women in promoting and perpetuating repressive the patriarchal practices of the time. It is mostly women who dishonour Sutara and repeatedly mark her as the ‘other’. The narrative resonates with a larger cultural narrative, qualified by its propensity to ostracise, humiliate and torture the so-called ‘polluted’ women. Sutara is also shown to be occupying a position outside the prospect of marriage. Bibha’s mother’s euphemistic reference to her condition as “other problems” reinforces the kind of subterfuge society indulges in for expelling Sutara from the ambit of any plausible intervention. Does Jyotirmoyee Devi enact any possibility of the absorption of Sutara into the familial space, against the surveillance imposed by social codes? Towards the end of the novel, Pramode, Bibha’s brother, proposes marriage to Sutara. There are multiple ways of looking at Pramode’s marriage proposal. Is it merely driven by a patriarchal patronising stance? Or is it a kind of wish-fulfilment which is performed in

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the narrative? A marriage is a mechanism through which Sutara can be reinserted within middle class respectability. Does the author only strive to replicate this strand? Given the mode of Pramode’s development as an individual in the narrative, his proposal does not appear very unexpected. From the very beginning there is evidence that Pramode has a sensitive and receptive mindset; he is critical of the way in which society operates to marginalise women like Sutara. His proposal can be seen as an extension of his liberal self. Debali Mookerjea Leonard looks at the possibility of marriage in a different vein; she points out: Sutara’s entry into middle-class respectability marks a definitive break from the fixation with purity and routine rejections but at once weakens the radical possibilities of a life as a single, independent woman. Recontextualizing Sutara within bourgeois domesticity, Jyotirmoyee Devi immediately undermines the happy-ending by returning to themes of the solitude of socially excluded women (hinting also at their nonreproductivity).115 (Mookerjea, “Disenfranchised Bodies”)

The anger of the author, which permeates the narrative as a response to the construction of a highly biased, insensitive gender dynamic, is to a certain extent reduced through this somewhat positive turn of events. However, the author refrains from offering complete closure and so leaves a space for several interpretations and explanations. The discourse of rape surrounding the figures of abducted women during Partition chaos has become loaded with varied explanatory perspectives and rhetoric. The crisis of a raped woman—a survivor—is central to the understanding of the complicated nexus between state, community and patriarchy. How does one suffer in the course of living a life after being violated physically, psychologically, and socially? Veena Das provides an explanation: The formation of the subject as a gendered subject is then moulded through complex transactions between violence as the originary moment and the violence as it seeps into the ongoing relationships and becomes a kind of atmosphere that cannot be expelled to an ‘outside’. (Das et al., 208)

Through the case of Jhinuk, a rape survivor in Prafulla Roy’s Keya Patar Nouko (Boat of Screw Pine Leaves, it would be interesting to highlight the layered shades of complexity which qualify the course of accommodating a violated woman within the community and more specifically within the home. Broken in body and spirit, do these women succeed in scripting their agony within the domestic turf? The historic moment of Partition shaped the lives of these women in ways that were forever marked by the

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event. In the novel, Prafulla Roy constructs the subjective status of Jhinuk almost as a ghost returning from the dead. Jhinuk is the leading female character in the novel. Since her childhood in Rajdia, a village in East Bengal, she has been looked after by Hemnath’s family, who live in close proximity to Jhinuk’s father. Jhinuk looked upon Hemnath and Snehalata as her grandparents and she was looked after by them. Jhinuk had gone along with her father, Bhobotosh, to visit her ailing mother in Dhaka but in the middle of the journey they became trapped in a riot in which Bhobotosh lost his life and Jhinuk was abducted. The author describes Jhinuk’s condition when Hemnath manages to bring her back: “bleeding wounds were visible on her lips, cheeks, hands and different parts of the body. The sari which she wore looked tattered and torn. It appeared as if she had been devoured by some devil.” (412) This detailed description signifies the material, bodily rupture of her being. Jhinuk’s rape and abduction are historical acts of violence which were repeatedly enacted on thousands of women’s bodies after they were symbolically constructed as Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs. The actual trial of Jhinuk begins when Binu, Hemnath’s grandson and Jhinuk’s childhood friend find themselves in Calcutta. Both Hemnath and Snehalata are deeply moved by her wretched condition; there is no tension so far as her acceptance in Hemnath’s family is concerned. It is important to mention that it was not that all families who rejected their abducted/violated female members. So long as it remained private, various strategies were worked out to reabsorb these members within the networks of family and community networks. In her analysis of the problems pertaining to the reintegration of abducted women within the folds of the family, Priya Kumar holds that “in a culture that attaches so much value to the purity and chastity of the female body, the option to return to their natal families was fraught with dangers of rejection”. (Kumar, 148) When Binu takes Jhinuk to his sister’s house, she is not received well by her sister’s mother-in-law. Her instruction that Jhinuk should be lodged in an isolated room gestures towards the level of inhuman practices adopted by the supposed custodians of purity codes. It elicits an illuminating concern on the matter of hospitality: a hospitality which is gendered and informed by patriarchal surveillance. The subject of inhuman violence is seen to be infiltrated into the realms of the everyday here; violence is not just confined to the act of sexual violation, and the consequences are no less dangerous. The recipient of this violence is doomed to remain possessed and haunted by an unbearable trauma. Binu’s mental state after Jhinuk’s humiliation by his own sister’s mother-in-law evokes a sense of stinging pain in the narrative:

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While discussing the abduction of Ayah in Deepa Mehta’s film Earth, 1947, Kavita Daiya cites Terry Eagleton’s contention that rape is ‘unrepresentable’ because the reality of the woman’s body is the outer limit of all languages.116 Indeed, Jhinuk’s rape is ‘unrepresentable’; the readers perceive the grave effects of the act upon Jhinuk’s life through its later repercussions. Binu’s shuttling from one place to another to protect Jhinuk from mortification attests to his sense of love and compassion for her, and the perpetuation of hostility from other quarters as well. As he agonisingly notes, “Jhinuk’s only crime is that she has been raped. So she is an untouchable. She is dirty like a filthy worm. Her breath would defile the entire universe.” (519) This angry reflection stages the impasse between the male character’s disavowal of violence and his inability to change societal attitudes. Roy’s intention is not to create a master narrative by which the experiences of Partition can be understood. Instead he frames the moral and emotional responses to unspeakable tragedy in a manner that moves past numerical summaries of violence and raises questions of ethical human behaviour on the level of the individual. In a discussion on Pakistani writer Khadija Mastur, vis-àvis the theme of the female victim and male protector in her narratives, Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar contends that the proximity of the female body in relation to the male protector uncovers the complex situational cues which framed individual choices during this period.117

Reconstituted Lives and Perpetuity of Violence “The qualities associated with domesticity were evoked, like those of care, self-suffering and family obligations even as women’s ‘coming out’ was justified as the demands of the displaced nation, communities in need of survival and families bereft of a bread earner.”118 —Anjali Bhardwaj Datta.

It was in fact as a direct consequence of the experiences of Partition that a radical transformation took place in the lives of many women119 afterwards. Women’s visibility in the public sphere grew more and more pervasive. The sense of security and permanence conventionally associated with home faded away. In order to accommodate these responsibilities, women’s roles outside the home were drastically revised. They had to take many factors into consideration, such as adjusting to a

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dislocated nation, and then, also, there was the necessity of looking for some degree of financial stability in this transitory phase. It becomes imperative to consider the life choices and locational realities of various categories of displaced women, and find out the range of gender-specific types of work that existed, and contemplate the impact of these on their lives. The process of migration/displacement is the actual procedure of movement but it is not the concluding aspect, because this movement is necessarily followed by some form of settlement/rehabilitation which leads to social change more often than not. Migration study posits this as the most difficult moment, because when movement initiates social change, the process of struggle and the fierce competition for survival begin. A few studies on women refugees in the post-Partition phase throw some interesting light on this question and indicate that the experience of women migrants is variable and fluid.120 This gradual phenomenon of women turning into breadwinners in order to sustain their families becomes an interesting trope in the field of sociological research. A host of creative writers from the subcontinent have been equally engaged with the task of reflecting on these socio-political concepts, and their bearings on our lives, through their fictional ventures. The key questions pertaining to such representations of the self-determination of female characters in a few fictional texts generate interesting arguments in this regard. It is useful to trace this remarkable locus of emergence of working women as a category and further situate the complexities associated with this category in the context of post-Partition rehabilitation. Until recently, most people assumed that the economic significance of women was heralded by the new perspectives of the 1970s and 80s. Recent scholarships on Partition historiography have brought forth a new trajectory of research on women’s employment issues, their links with the inner domain of the household, and the responses of their concerned families to such sudden shifts. Novels such as Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star), or short stories such as “Posharini” (“The Woman Who Sold Wares”), and “Machh” (“Fish”) signal the changing pattern of Bengali society with respect to the earning composition within the ambit of the family, and implicate the reshuffling of existing gender roles immediately after Partition. In his study on migrant women, Archit Basu Guha Choudhury observes: There is no clear consensus on the transformation of the bhadramahila because it followed no definite route that could be charted. The reality was far more complex than a mere expansion of domesticity or a dramatic foray into the outside world. The ability to find the economic means to support one’s family and oneself is circumstantial but requires confidence. (Basu Guha Choudhury, 67)

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Saktipada Rajguru’s novel Meghe Dhaka Tara121 indexes the failure of postcolonial nationalism “through the representation of the gendered violence that saturates the female refugee’s life in urban India.” (Daiya, 145) The novel conducts a critique of the familial abjection of urban, working class female refugees in Calcutta in the phase following Partition. Rachel Weber, a feminist ethnographer who has conducted studies on refugee women in West Bengal, contends that with the dissolution of the segregated boundaries between the home and the outside world, most of the houses in Calcutta became vulnerable to the mobilisation of women into the political, economic and social spheres.122 Nita’s entry into the outside world is pushed by the increasing economic difficulties experienced by her family. The exploitative structure which traps Nita, and which ultimately devours her completely, is the originator of an implicit violence in the narrative; this violence does not cause bloodshed but annihilates Nita ruthlessly. Very often the male refugee is presented as the suffering individual battling against everyday problems. Paulomi Chakraborty argues that the prototype of the East-Bengali refugee victim belongs to a high class/caste Hindu propertied family and is no subaltern.123 In the case of Nita’s family, the position is not that of displaced elitism. The novel shows Nita’s father as a retired teacher, an idealist whose main goal is to impart education, rather than to earn money from it. However, the novel illustrates that women experience the anguish of displacement in a unique way. Due to the intrinsic social and economic instability that Partition brought, the physical and emotional safety of the entire family stood compromised. In her study of Bengal refugee women, Uditi Sen contends: It can be reasonably surmised that when it came to rebuilding lives, the figure of the refugee woman, the terms in which she was imagined and the values and capabilities that were embodied in her were vital to the process of formation and articulation of a community identity amongst refugees.124 (Sen, 7)

Nita’s predicament within the family is poignantly explicated in the narrative. It explores the drastic transformation which takes place in Nita’s life in order for her to sustain her family as the sole breadwinner. Initially there is a discussion in the family about the possibility of Nita’s marriage. The mother expresses clearly that Nita’s dark, ordinary appearance would not fetch her a qualified groom: “Who is going to marry her? And that too without a dowry?” (13) This conversation centring around Nita’s marriage prospects brutally lays bare the commodified identity of a woman, which prioritises the physical glamour of a potential bride in the marriage market.

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It is important to note here that the mother depicted in the novel is not the conventional sustaining, giving, sacrificing mother. In fact, she negates the attributes associated with normative motherhood; rather, she is at times delineated as an extremely aggressive, cruel mother who does not have qualms about sacrificing one of her daughters for the well-being of the other. The novel projects how a sacrificial motherhood is thrust upon Nita by every member in the family. Eventually everything converges towards Nita’s emergence as the only vital earning member in the family. Her father becomes an invalid; her elder brother Sankar, in his pursuit of a career as a singer, hardly supports the family; and her younger brother works only temporarily in a factory, prior to being rendered disabled in an accident. As the author notes, “An infinite darkness dances before Nita. It sails aimlessly like a radarless boat with no shore nearby to reach. Everywhere she can hear menacing roars of waves.” (39) There is a sensitive evocation of the everyday world of a woman in the patriarchal organisation of ordinary quotidian life. In the novel Partition is presented as an icon of destruction, and a signal of decadence and estrangement. The family victimises Nita ruthlessly through their exploitative, petty bourgeois aspirations. Her role as the surrogate mother constitutes her gendered subjectivity, susceptible to the mean, abusive codes of society, which are condensed into a family here. The rhetoric of sacrifice embedded within the transformation of Nita into a sacrificial being is indicative of the larger construction of exploited, working women refugees in the post-Partition phase. She perpetually resorts to the unjust demands made by her family at different stages and reduces herself to almost inert production machinery. Her self-sacrificing labours fulfil the consumption practices of her other family members. When Madhab Babu objects to Kadambini’s plan of marrying Gita off to Sanat as Nita is still single, Kadambini gives a ruthless reply, “You have spent so much money in educating Nita. Now she has started earning, why should we marry her off?” (53) Though her father and to some extent her brother Sankar are projected as somehow sensitive to her experiences of suffering, the other family members are represented as hopelessly unfeeling towards Nita’s plight. Gita, her pretty younger sister ‘acquires’ Sanat, Nita’s lover, as her husband eventually; Nita remains mute in response to this malicious spectacle. She is shown to have internalised the troubles of denial and dispossession without lodging any signs of protest: “she is a discarded individual deprived of all the pleasures of life, her relentless toil is meant for fulfilling her family’s needs.”(37) We witness a curious juxtaposition of both the archetypal mother and daughter in the character of Nita. The fantasy of the home depends on Nita’s productive

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labour and in the course of realising the dreams of the family she vanquishes herself. She is compelled to remain single so that her family has access to her income.125 Contrary to the idealisation of the home in most nationalist, patriarchal discursive representations, the home in the novel is an exploitative, emotionally oppressive space, setting an end to all possibilities of Nita’s happiness. She becomes an image of the iconic, suffering refugee woman; she does not signify a singular case—she constitutes the refugee women of Bengal. Madhab Babu’s perception of Nita as one amongst many such exploited Nitas bears testimony to that. “Nita is only a scapegoat of this age. Nita is not alone, she has witnessed many such Nitas.” (72) In her research “The Refugee Woman: Partition of Bengal, Women, and the Everyday of the Nation”, which is a study of the gendered violence that occurred against the backdrop of the post-Partition phase, Paulomi Chakraborty examines Ritwik Ghatak’s cinematic adaptation of the novel. She reads the film as a critique of the coalescences of cultural motherhood as metaphoric regimes which exploit and victimise women. Nita’s gradual journey towards her ruin is marked by her increasingly marginalised status within the family. When Sanat, her former lover and now brother-in-law, requests that she stop her pretence of being self-sacrificing, she gives a sad smile and replies that she has been paying the penance for a sin she had committed: the sin of self-denial; the sin of quietly withstanding all injustices. The last part of the novel stages the tragic movement towards Nita’s death. The kind of sacrificial violence that she has allowed herself to be subjected to reaches its climax when Nita is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Her necessity in the family increasingly reduces as the family acquires stability slowly. The emaciated, sickly image of Nita, who isolates herself to protect her family from any infection, heightens the significations associated with the violence unleashed by injustice, exploitation, oppression embedded within the family. The family’s need for diminishes, and she experiences this transition: “No body recognizes her contribution, she receives no love and respect. She has been reduced to a recipient of pity.” (110) In her examination of Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara, Kavita Daiya argues that by turning away from an idealisation of the family, the narrative lays bare how heteronormative, patriarchal familial belongings engender psychic and material dispossession for the female refugee-citizen.126 Nita dies in the sacrificial exploitation of her body as labour power deprived of love, health, and marital happiness. This is, in a way, a representation of selfinflicted violence. She actively allows herself to be destroyed by the ruthlessly exploitative family structure; she journeys towards emerging as the symbolic depository of sacrificial attributes. Her physical death only

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fulfils the ultimate requirement of self-immolation. The narrative’s attempt to historicise the gendered, material displacement and dispossession serves as a means to represent the multiple forms of violence which saturates the everyday lives of women. A detailed study of Palit’s “Machch” (“Fish”) reveals an essential aspect of a displaced, victimised family. The narrative shows how a household with a survival crisis—and stricken by extreme financial instability—functions during such moments of vulnerability. The entire pattern of family life becomes different under such a circumstance. Gargy Chakravartty has given an elaborate picture of the gradual transformation of Bengali society after Partition on account of women’s participation as the breadwinners within the family. Her findings are based on extensive interviews conducted across class and culture to give a comprehensive picture. In her research, Chakravartty observes, “The sense of sharing responsibility, and at times taking on the entire economic burden of the family was a new phenomenon in the trajectory of women’s search for identity in Bengal.” (Chakravartty, 87) The focus is on Nirupama’s life as a provider in the family. She is not the sole earner; she assists her father in sustaining the family, who are ruthlessly affected by the displacement. It makes for an interesting study of women’s participation in the public sphere of living. How can we look at this contribution? Is it a moment of empowerment and emancipation for Nirupama? Palit’s narrative obsessively revolves around the existential crisis which Nirupama has to experience as a result of this sudden change in her life. The agonising experience of working for long hours to keep alive her ailing mother and younger siblings is brilliantly captured by Palit. Rather than attempting to focus directly on the violence of the era, Palit’s story tracks the ramifications of displacement in Nirupama’s family. Nirupama’s consciousness as revealed in the narrative suggests that the representation of working women is not always grounded in emancipation politics. She is perpetually under pressure, both on the domestic front and in the professional sphere. It appears as though she has been stripped of all human attributes. Her mental agony is reiterated in the narrative when the author notes, “Perhaps she is no longer a human being. She carries perpetually within herself the ‘being’ of a dumb, burdened animal.” (Roy, Roktomoni 215) Nirupama’s reflection on the household condition conveys the tension that infected people’s behaviour at that time: Even after this hard, tiring day of work, she can only view herself as a self-centred being when she looks at the plight of her family. She feels guilty when she realises that her ailing father is compelled to work every day or when her sister Manu has to leave school in the middle of the day to

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Further research on the post-Partition situation is crucial to the framing of a comprehensive picture of gender configuration vis-à-vis rehabilitation strategies. It is in actuality an important aspect of the rehabilitation and reconstitution of womanhood after Partition. Nirupama, who had never worked outside the home before and had never really intended to, is now trapped. This sense of entrapment can be perceived as a mode of psychological infliction: “From morning till evening she has to literally squeeze herself like a lifeless machine to survive. It is a mechanised routine for her.” (220) Her inability to handle the academic requirements inside the classroom, her failure to meet the pressurising demands of professional life, and her unease at the sight of her undernourished sister heighten the feeling of claustrophobia which ceaselessly chokes her. In some ways Palit’s critique of the treatment of women like Nirupama recalls the projection of Nita in Meghe Dhaka Tara. Similarly, Nirupama’s final decision to abandon the prospect of marrying Bijon, her brother’s friend, is more than just an act of sacrifice. The emphasis is on the compelling responsibility which she cannot evade for the sake of the functioning of her family. The title of the story is very suggestive because an episode involving a slice of fish deals a staggering blow to her desire to marry. One evening she witnesses a shocking scene on a dingy roadside where a helpless poor mother forcefully pulls out a fish from her son’s mouth to distribute it to her other hungry children. As the author depicts her response to this painfully bizarre incident, “She could not withstand it any longer. She wanted to shut her eyes and escape. Just for a slice of fish! She almost screamed having witnessed this dreadful incident.” (224) This pathetic episode tremendously affects her and influences her to change her decision about getting married. This is evident at the point in the narrative when Niru expresses her own decision of denying herself marriage and setting up a family of her own: “She pleaded before her mother in an odd and listless voice, ‘I beg at your feet, Ma. Please don’t marry me off. I simply can’t marry.’” (225) The title of the other story “Posharini” (“The Woman Who Sold Wares”) is itself loaded with varied implications. Generally speaking, dislocated women suffer loss, deprivation and violence. In the iconography of displacement, women are the helpless victims in need of protection and care. However, the survival needs of their families have pushed women into taking up new roles. While analysing the situation surrounding IDPS in Sri Lanka, Darini Rajasingham Senanayake has observed that the women

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dislocated by the conflict in South Asia—internally or across borders—have demonstrated ‘ambivalent empowerment’.127 Why ambivalent? Following encounters with violence, pain and loss, these survivors have to reconfigure their lives and selves in drastic ways. Do they exhibit a significant potential in creating conditions under which they continue to survive and cope? The case in “Posharini” can be looked at as a point of entry into such a discourse on the social and economic changes immediately after Partition. The gender-based boundaries limit Pushpa’s position to a great extent. The everyday struggle of trying to survive with some measure of dignity in the present leaves very little room for hopes of a happy future. However, does Posharini’s case plead for effecting a change in the discursive representations of passive, mute female subjectivity? Pushpa, the central character in the story, takes up the unconventional job of selling goods on trains and at railway stations. She does it out of sheer necessity. The realities of life have not yielded her wings to move away from the responsibilities she has to execute. The initial description of a confused, lost, poverty-stricken Pushpa leaves a deep impact on the reader’s mind: Her name was Pushpa-Pushpabala. Pushpa’s eyes were large but sad. Just by looking at her it could be sensed that she had already passed through many stormy and difficult nights and, having recovered a little, had arrived at a happy morning. She stood there with both hope and suspense. (Bagchi & Dasgupta Vol 2, 190)

Her entry into the public domain is fraught with a lot of struggle and opposition. The choice of her livelihood renders her situation even more complicated. Her access to the outside world raises questions which would unsettle many accepted social norms. The degree of hostility with which she has to contend informs us of a very harsh and competitive world which functions on the border of cruelty. Rani Dasgupta, an active participant in the Tebhaga movement in Dinajpur, writes about the refugee women who took up jobs as salesgirls, including those who conducted door-to-door selling, which was unthinkable for women in those days.128 Uneducated women also took work as maidservants, washing utensils, cooking, supplying office tiffin, and selling fruits, flowers and vegetables. Those were the days when survival really meant fighting tooth and claw against various odds. In her research on the burden of work for women in India in the present scenario, Padmini Swaminathan contends that the context in which they work and live and the manner in which they cope with and negotiate these varied spaces bring out starkly the dynamics of contemporary capitalism in developing countries. Swaminathan’s introduction

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to her edited collection Women and Work narrates how oppression faced by wage-earning women is the result of patriarchal norms and capitalist relations of production. The story insistently grounds the figure of Pushpa in a web of constant limitations. Samaresh Basu scores a point by projecting Pushpa as a posharini, a woman vendor. The concepts dealt with in the story go beyond the challenges imposed merely by patriarchal ideology and delve into a somewhat different analysis. Besides Pushpa, the story is crowded with different male characters who are similarly caught up in a situational crisis. The interactions between Pushpa and Haren, Morton, and Majon (they are named in accordance with the products they sell: Morton is a brand of chocolate; Majon refers to toothpaste in colloquial language) are initially based on a sense of suspicion and distrust. The struggle for existence, which occurs on an everyday basis, propels this negative feeling: Pushpa did not need to hear these words. She already knew. The cries raised by the hawkers struck her like a wound, piercing her ears and heart. Darkness filled her eyes. These people wanted to drive her away. The train began moving. She got down at various stations and entered other compartments. Everywhere it was the same story. Loud cries and angry sarcastic glances pierced her, driving her to despair. (40)

The kind of conflicts and contradictions which Pushpa encounters emerge from other avenues as well. “They were determined not to allow her to sell. She didn’t know if she would ever meet those who had the power to give her legal rights. Those who already had a claim on the territory were hostile.” (43) In this entire spectrum of rehabilitation and reorganisation work after Partition, state policies had a crucial role to play. Numerous accounts based on empirical work and field interviews reveal graphic descriptions of opposition and prohibition imposed by various state apparatuses during that phase. Pushpa and the remaining league of hawkers face one such terrible situation. The author articulates their dispossessed state, as brought on by the repressive state policies: “The special court for abolishing illegal hawking deployed a circle of policemen, wielding batons and guns, surrounding the premises. Those who journeyed to provincial towns in the afternoon and returned in the evening were being rounded up.” (45) The very meanings of equality and justice were reconfigured in that context. It would be wrong to claim that Samaresh Basu is solely making a gendered narrative of rehabilitation enterprise in his story. Towards the beginning, we witness Pushpa’s exclusion from the camp of other hawkers and their acts of resistance against her entry. The complex

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status of her predicament does not strike a familiar chord with the rest of them. A form of subtle violence, which is not physical, is inflicted upon her to frighten her from pursuing her job. The narrator plays out the tension between Pushpa and the opposing group to underline the struggles and dilemmas that govern her everyday life. There is a foregrounding of Pushpa’s urgency to continue with her profession. However, eventually a sharp paradigmatic shift occurs in the tale to address other compelling issues. The collective torture which these vendors experience brings forth another facet of repression embedded in the chapter of the rehabilitation programme. The precarious lives of these vulnerable refugees puts across this aspect of experiential living out of an uprooted identity. An essential component of Partition scholarship focussing on the perpetration of violence, as it were, is this constant endeavour of eking out existence amidst massive opposition. The grinding poverty of Pushpa and others like her magnifies the complications contained in this regime of relocation. The basic emphasis on the overarching problems related to Pushpa’s position as a railway vendor implicates the necessity to note the doubly marginalised site of working women in that context. Enrolling the coercive arm of the state as its ally provided the government with the means of ensuring the triumph of its interests. Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted that “Repression and violence are as instrumental in the victory of the modern as is the persuasive power of its rhetorical strategies.” (Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality” 21) Some interviews and reminiscences of the refugee women who had to grapple with the turmoil of rehabilitation often indicate the strategic intimidation of the governmental measures taken to handle the issue of refugees, and its derivative problems. The post-Partition scenario thus becomes a terrain of discursive struggle and contention marked by ‘critical moments in the policing, production and contestation of community identity.’ The attitude of the police in arresting Pushpa and her companions in the story offers another insight into the historiographical representations of the resettlement trauma. Joya Chatterji’s work puts forth the government’s myopic, self-serving responses to refugee problems. She points out in her essay “Right or Charity?”: According to the official line, a true refugee or victim had no choice and was not a free agent. He could therefore not be expected to exercise volition, or have any choice over how and where he was to live in this country in which he sought refuge. These were the only terms on which government was prepared to offer the refugees its helping hand. (Kaul, 83)

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In one way “Posharini” unwittingly exposes the ambiguity embedded in the promises made by the government to ensure protection and security for the displaced population. It deflates the patronising claims of many official historical accounts recording the various developmental measures designed to promote the well-being of migrants. As Pushpa emerges from the lock-up, ready to counter the expected flurry of insults directed against her, the unexpected happens. The narrative records the climactic point of including Pushpa amongst the other equally tortured ‘male’ hawkers. “They all laughed. Pushpa’s eyes were blinded by the light and shade of tears and laughter. She now belonged to the ragged crowd of jailbirds around her.” (47) This concluding part of the story also throws up very important questions relating to the interface of gender and class as categories and how different nuances of these categories are actuated through the politics of hierarchy and oppression. This trajectory of analysis would be beyond the scope of this specific examination and could be further scrutinised in a separate capacity. This reading, to a certain degree, discloses the slippage within the representational status of the sanctified ambit of the official documentations of Partition voices. The exercise of exploring, via literature, the varied experiences of the dislocated women in building up their lives and surroundings also explicates the mode of structuring these occurrences by the discourses of gender and nationalism.

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Displacements and Relocations: Multiple Dimensions of Partition Violence “Shobare chokher shamne pore thake bhanga bastu-bhita Kono Pichhutan noy, Onishchoy theke fer shuru”130 —Sankha Ghose (The relics of the broken home lie before everyone’s gaze Severing all ties with the past Another beginning from unsettled moments) ‘Panchhi, Nadi, Pawan ke Jhonke/Koi Sarhad na inhe roke’131..... (The bird, the river, and rustles of the winds/ No border dare stop them’) ....

The traumatic process of displacement contains within it the destruction of lived space, cultural practice and social ties. The question of survival struggles and the concomitant violence with respect to refugee conditions raise some important issues pertaining to politicised state policies and strategic rehabilitation programmes. Ranabir Samaddar’s view—that in the context of the post-Partition phase, the narrative of refugee care and protection merged with the narrative of nation-building on both sides of the border—brings forth the complicated dynamics of refugee issues on the subcontinent. Pia Oberoi’s observations with regard to refugees and state policies in Exile and Belonging render an amplified understanding of migration flows and their related problems. She argues, “Displaced persons during Partition had lost the effective protection of the state and would have certainly been able to prove a well-founded fear of persecution as it was not a sanitised exchange of population.” (Oberoi, 4546) She further comments: Those persons forced to leave their homes at Partition were refugees in a meaningful sense. They were fleeing persecution, individual and generalized, they had crossed international borders in their flight, were

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The construction of the sharp borders that was/is inviolable for the partitioned communities in both emotional and material dimensions heightens the gravity of displacement and resettlement. Clearly these spatial divisions carried with them the violence of human separation and the shocking emergence of a life of extreme struggle for the displaced.132 Concurrently, Partition also initiated the drawing of cognitive maps that informed who was included and excluded. Thus the state-mandated borders promoted the rhetoric of cognitive maps, which in turn intensified the creation of partitioned societies. The notes of dissent in historical and anthropological accounts of Partition’s communal violence are also visible in the analysis of the relocation and rehabilitation procedures after Partition. It becomes all the more important to identify the pluralities embedded within this vital feature of Partition—the forced dislocation, mass migration and exchange of a population of millions.133 In “Memories of a Lost Home”, Alok Bhalla comments on the nature of this forced exodus: The migrants did not choose to leave their homes or see themselves as makers of new nations. Indeed there is very little historical evidence to indicate that, apart from a few, the migrants had left their homes because they were tempted by a vision of a new selfhood and a new country and a promise and a hope. (Jassal & Ben-Ari, 167)

A lot of critical and investigative engagements have brought the matter of migrations, both legal and illegal, from South Asia to the so-called first world. A similar degree of commitment is also needed to study the effects of displacement scenarios and mass migrations with respect to the 1947 Partition. In her investigative work on Partition, Violent Belongings, Kavita Daiya talks about this long-term fallout of Partition. She comments on the significance of such a central aspect of postcolonial belonging and asks, “But what of the constitutive migrations of 1947 and their impact on the cultural imagining of belonging—national and otherwise?” (Daiya, 103) At that point in time, a border became a marker to denote the sense of loss, a marker which pronounced the beginnings of anarchy, insecurity and violence. Like Daiya, some other seminal works on border studies and refugee issues carried out by scholars such as Prafulla Chakrabarti, Ranabir Samaddar, Paula Bannerjee, Willem van Schendel, and Pia Oberoi have opened up interesting debates on the relevance of the Partition motif in the contemporary forms of strife.134 These studies become indispensable

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in understanding the contemporary dynamics of globalisation across these borders. Partition therefore prevails at various levels, and the partitioned borders continue to invade the present and imprison the future, shaping mentalities and lives, modes of representation, and issues of border extremism. In his thesis on the status of refugees and immigrants, Michael Dummett underlines the need for the protection of refugees and the responsibility of the state to look after them; he contends, “Those who are forced by fear for their lives, or of torture, rape or unjust imprisonment to flee their own countries have a valid claim on other human beings to afford them refuge.” (Dummett, 34) Hannah Arendt’s argument on refugee status is very important in this connection. Arendt dwells upon the Jewish history of forced migration to critique the classification of stateless persons as refugees.135 Arendt conducts a critique of this international legal discourse on refugee status by arguing: The term stateless at least acknowledged the fact that these persons had lost the protection of their government and required international agreements for safeguarding their status. The post-war term ‘displaced persons’ was invented during the war for the express purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence. (Arendt, Totalitarianism 279)

This further complicates the defining conundrum and evades stateless people’s loss of human rights, making the situation all the more vulnerable. With regard to the uprooted people, she also comments that “once they had left their homeland, they remained homeless, once they had left their state, they became stateless, once they had been deprived of their human rights, they were rightless, the scum of the earth.” (267) This specific perspective from Arendt can also be linked with the plight of the post-1947 Partition refugees. It is possible to identify them as inhabiting a “unique and liminal position” (Daiya 104). They were not stateless persons because ideologically they were citizens in the nation to which they migrated. They were promised national rights and were in the process of becoming citizens. However, in reality there was a wide disparity between the actual treatment rendered and the official promises, and this signified the marginal position of the refugees in the process of nationmaking. Partition narratives are replete with representations of the varied treatments given to refugees. Paradoxical modes of assimilation, resistance, oppression, exploitation, loss and alienation have been articulated in these narratives. Partition migrants were not integrated in their misfortunes, as

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they are assumed to be. In “The Last Journey: Exploring Social Class in the 1947 Partition Migration”, Ravinder Kaur points to this note of variance with regard to the different experiences of the displaced group. Her article focuses on the last journey that the migrants undertook to escape fatal violence. She examines the various modes of transport used by the Hindu and Sikh migrants from West Punjab to East Punjab during the Partition displacement. For all refugees, life was in complete disarray. On most occasions, refugees were welcome in the new country, provided they chose to remain as miserable victims and grateful recipients of philanthropy rendered by the state and its older residents. Most of the time they realised that in their spiritual and national home they were only small actors, ambushed in a frightening theatre staged to satisfy the ambitions of the powerful. As Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia note in their introduction to Partitioned Lives, the figure of the refugee also complicated the official notion of displacement: “a trope that recurs throughout Partition literature and compels an inquiry into the meaning of home, place and belonging.” (Roy and Bhatia, xviii) During that time, Partition survivors did not feel at home in their space of relocation, and those who chose to stay put experienced alienation in their defamiliarised homeland. For many, the privileging of the regional over religious affiliation demolished the close link between place and identity. A geographical space encapsulates within its fold linguistic, cultural, and ethnic commonalities which remain intrinsic to that place. The Partition displacement violently ruptured that socio-cultural fabric, which in turn created an unredeemable sense of loss and angst. Within the framework of the histories of migration and displacement, the Partition-induced displacement assumes a unique position owing to an intensity and magnitude that challenges comparisons. Partition-induced displacement and subsequent relocation in Bengal are marked by a distinct set of features and peculiarities. The course of transition from ‘dyash’ to ‘desh’136 has been fraught with a great degree of shock, disbelief and anxiety. The bloodshed that occurred as a result of Partition on the western border was treated with the emergency of a war, which in turn initiated a prompt exchange of population and property, followed by a relatively structured rehabilitation. It was primarily a two-way exodus and the tide of brutality and havoc was encountered with better efficiency and competence. In the case of Bengal, a similar scale of atrocity was not enacted and the displacement was by and large a one-way affair. Since it did not happen in the mode of a civil war, it scarcely received attention from the central government. It has turned out be a continuing process and it is very much an overarching

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problem to date. The terror and trauma associated with this migration is slow and painful, being informed by periodic outbursts of violence. After the Calcutta Killing and the Noakhali and Tippera riots, sporadic incidents of violence continued to occur in various corners of Bengal. Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta have pointed out pertinently: Compared to the nature of border and boundary in the West where political, strategic and military considerations have converted the entire region into two rigid divisions, the dividing line in the East is porous and flexible. So much so, constant border movement and migration impelled by human and economic considerations have given to this region, where the two countries meet, a composite character which questions the strictly demarcated preconditions of nationalism and nation-state. (Bagchi and Dasgupta Vol 1, 3)

Meghna Guha Thakurta also points towards the pluralities linked with the migration pattern in Bengal.137 She warns against any kind of homogenising representation of the displacement scenario in Bengal. These specific features make Bengal a distinct case and initiates analyses from separate perspectives. Social scientists such as Prafulla Chakrabarty, Ranabir Samaddar, Joya Chatterji and many more have shown in their investigative works138 on refugee problems in the partitioned Bengal how all India’s political leaders tilted the balance at the centre against Bengal, and how it impacted the entire scheme of relocation and rehabilitation in Bengal.139 While analysing the scheme of things in Bengal, Renuka Roy points that in the truncated province of West Bengal there was at first a deceptive calm, but from December 1949 onwards it became obvious that an influx of refugees had started, and they came through great misfortunes. Since the exodus was a one-way affair, the migrants from East Pakistan continued to seek refuge in West Bengal and Assam in ever-increasing numbers. It is an empirically-based fact that the compensation given to West Pakistan considerably solved the emergent crisis, but in the case of East Pakistan’s refugees the government assumed an ‘unshakable stand that they were not entitled to any compensation.’140 This administrative, political and financial crisis of relocation engendered its own forms of structural state violence for those displaced by Partition. Historical accounts declare that only 25 percent of the total refugee influx sought shelter in government camps; the remaining 75 percent struggled on their own to sustain themselves. This statistic is instructive of the magnitude of collapse which struck deep into the social fabric of Bengal. As Joya Chatterji notes in her thesis on after-effects of Partition, the displaced group comprising primarily the Hindus was not a homogeneous

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group, but being grouped as the Hindus covered a multitude of social classifications. Some of them were high-caste—elite, western-educated people—and many of them belonged to the depressed section of the society. For this large and diversified Hindu community, the decision to go or stay behind encompassed many factors. The most pressing issue was the threat of immediate physical violence to be directed against them. Though violence on the eastern side was more contained as compared to in the western part, the Hindus experienced extreme vulnerability in the newly formed Pakistan. It is important to note that violence also signifies a state where a sense of fear is generated in such a way as to make it systemic, pervasive and inevitable.141 The decision was thus based on a complex calculus of factors ranging from subtler forms of discrimination, changed social configuration, and a general dissatisfaction at the altered status. The recurring incidents of communal unrest in 1950 and 1964 also prompted the minority community to leave for West Bengal. Whenever the relations between India and Pakistan worsened, be it over Kashmir or some other stray incident, the tension percolated into the lives of the Hindus in East Pakistan and it ultimately drove them away from Pakistan to India. Sandip Bandyopadhyay talks about the impact of the sudden change in the lives of the Hindus which persuaded them to leave. He talks about an incident in which a propertied Hindu resident of East Pakistan migrated because he feared that he would be deterred from singing ‘Bande Mataram’ with his head held high. He further records that the very fact that they would have to survive at the mercy of the majority Muslims acted as a catalyst to leave their own homeland. Some of them had relatives or friends on the other side of the border who would offer them temporary shelter when they arrived as refugees. Even for them, leaving behind their ancestral places, large estates, and abundance of social honour and respectability was no easy task. But for many, especially people who occupied the lower rungs of the social scale, migration was even more of a traumatic option. When they left, they tended to do so under circumstances different from those which persuaded the relatively better off to leave. By and large they left the little they possessed in the east only when they were driven out by extreme violence or intolerable hardship. In the sphere of socio-cultural discourse in the context of Bengal, this long-drawn-out migration over a porous border and the connected struggles of resettlement have disseminated multiple narratives of victimhood and displaced subjectivity. The stories of Partition refugees’ experiences and their assimilation within the restructured survival space generate crucial commentary on the debates surrounding nationality, ethnicity, class and belonging. These also become useful tools for analysing

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the questions of citizenship and identity politics with regard to the positions of Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan Tamil and Tibetan refugees in India today. Georgio Agamben’s argument on refugee issues in Symposium is instrumental in understanding the threat which this huge influx following Partition imposed on the project of constructing Indian nationhood. As Agamben argues: If in the system of the nation-state the refugee represents such a disquieting element, it is above all because by breaking up the identity between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality, the refugee throws into crisis the original notion of sovereignty. (Agamben, 117)

Drawing upon Agamben’s views on refugees, it becomes relatively clear that the horrid spectacle of refugees crossing borders and striving to fit themselves within them produces a potent discourse of violence. As stated already, the continuity of this process and the problematic terrain of refugee/economic migrant/infiltrator142 issues across borders make Partition relevant to understanding the socio-political specificities of Bengal today. This in turn paves the way for representing and remembering Partition violence in the public sphere. In her introduction to Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter, Bashabi Fraser comments that in the case of Bengal, continuous struggle is perhaps the reason that stories about the Bengal Partition did not emerge on the same scale that stories about the western border did. She says, “For the East Bengali/East Pakistani refugee, a long life of uncertainty and need, gave rise to a different kind of story—that of the endless effort to combat hunger, homelessness and unemployment with a resilient desire to survive and live...” (Fraser, 32) Literary narratives, memoirs, films, paintings143 and songs have eventually taken up the colossal problems of dislocation and violence embodied in such a process. The questions of being ‘un-homed’, of being recipient of state-orchestrated violence and mass hostility, and of being at times organisers of mob fury, complicate the course of articulating displacement and relocation issues in straightforward, linear modes. Very often these narratives address the range of complications entailed in articulating the ‘voices’ of the dislocated. Many creative writers engaged with Partition themes have also explored the many-layered transformations which were actualised in the realms of human lives during that time, their creative productions acting as imaginative transcriptions of history (however contested this history might be). The paradoxical representations of East Bengalis as victims of communal violence in their ancestral homes and also targets of denial in India on the one hand, and of them being organisers of unrest and carriers

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of communal hatred on the other, are articulated in these writings. However, the immediacy of Partition and the crises which disintegrated the entire social make-up of Bengal have only partly been touched upon in literature. In his book, Deshbhag: Smriti o Swatta (Partition: Memories and Selves), Sandip Bandyopadhyay remarks on this lapse: Historical vacuity which is strongly palpable in Bangla literature is the absence of narratives on disaster succeeding Partition. The extreme fallouts of Partition—the occurrences of mass uprooting, pain of being homeless, mental trauma of witnessing the death of near ones—these colossal human tragedies of Partition have not been adequately addressed in Bengal literature.144 (Bandyopadhyay, Smriti 3)

Bandyopadhyay adds that in 1949, Nimai Ghosh’s seminal movie on dislocation, Chhinnamool145 (Uprooted), was released to capture the sufferings of the displaced. But strangely enough, it could not represent some crucial aspects of dislocation. This is true with respect to the writers writing from East Pakistan and then Bangladesh. A sense of reserve is also observed in the writings from the other side as well. (Agunpakhi, Nongor and Japito Jibon are exceptions) Writers have primarily written about their own community experiences; they have refrained from documenting anything which could potentially be viewed as communally motivated. This extra cautiousness has also acted as a barricade to uncovering a broader span of happenings. It is useful to remember that Bengal had witnessed a huge influx of refugees from Burma as well. This massive exodus had also heightened the dislocation-related problems in Bengal. The problems of the displaced population from Burma, and their colossal struggles against various hurdles, have been addressed by some writers such as Niharranjan Gupta, Sashadhar Dutta, Harinarayan Chattoapdhyay, and in recent times by Amitav Ghosh.146 However, this specific dislocation and displacement issue needs a separate analytical framework for investigation and research. In this chapter the primary concern is to unveil the ways through which tales of displacement and relocation have been constituted in literary narratives. It is useful to examine the representations in literature of ‘refugees as iconic citizens as well as victims of the state, as national subjects and anti-national subjects.’ (Daiya, 105) Novels such as Bakultala P.L. Camp, Arjun, Purbo Paschim, Deshbhag o Nonipishimar Kotha, Pitamohi and numerous short stories on Partition are examined in this chapter to lay bare the issues of victimhood, the violence of resettlement, the and reconstitution of lives in an alien environment.

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Violence during Exodus “You are driving away and away With your families, And your bag and baggage, Because our common motherland Has been dissected.”147 —Amrita Pritam

While analysing the Partition massacres and subsequent uprootings, Ashis Nandy puts forth the view that the scale of events has an epic quality. This epic is defined not merely by its valour and sacrifice; it is marked by psychopathic violence, betrayal and pettiness. He remarks, “At the heart of that unwritten epic, there is a great journey to exile too. That exile lasts not for a decade or two; it ensures a lifetime of homelessness.” (Nandy, “Invisible Holocaust” 306) This metaphorical exile was nevertheless qualified by a massive physical journey. This difficult journey also coincides with the beginning of a celebratory journey of India as a nation state. The journey closely connected with the birth of India and Pakistan also frames important aspects of the political cultures and international relations of these countries. The displacement in the Western part took spectacular shapes—caravans of refugees stretched for miles to escape the infamous carnage and atrocities. In Bengal, Assam, Bihar, and Tripura the movement lacked that terrifying grandeur, but it was not insignificant by any means. People on both sides of the border used every means of transport—planes, trains148, bullock carts, boats, and camels (in the west) to arrive at a safer place. Besides, these people also traversed miles after miles on foot, withstanding all possible dangers, which troubled them incessantly. In Deshbhag: Smriti O Swatta (Partition: Memories and Selves) Sandip Bandyopadhyay notes how the celebrated French director Jean Renoir was greatly shaken by the narrative of a family which covered the entire route to west Bengal by boat. He decided to make a movie about this, although in the end it did not materialise. These movements evoke tragedy, trauma and pain not only in the psyche of the people who were uprooted but also in the onlookers, listeners, chroniclers and so on. Some Partition narratives have treated these routes of dislocation as bringing forth the calamity of such an event. The most evocative image which comes to mind is that of a long, haphazard march of men, women and children walking with leviathan efforts on their way to India or Pakistan. Another powerful image which has been transmitted through official photo archives and also newspaper clippings is that of choked railway compartments, and densely crowded train tops causing

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danger and fear. In the case of Bengal, another image which is frequently associated with the Partition dislocation is that of a boat brimming over with hapless migrants navigating through river routes to the other side of the border. The cover page149 of Bashabi Fraser’s book Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter bears such an image of refugees fleeing in a boat at night, from their burning riot-torn villages in Noakhali, East Bengal. These images ultimately unmask the chaotic birth of the Indian nation and the excruciating pain attached to it. In her essay, “The Last Journey: Exploring Social Class in the 1947 Migration”, an interesting study on Partition migration, Ravinder Kaur highlights how differing modes of transport are pointers to the divergent class experiences of Partition displacement and the ways collective memories of cataclysmic events are formed and popularly remembered. The narratives of people traumatised by the brutal rupture of their homeland do not begin with these journeys, but are majorly shaped through them. Shanta Sen’s novella Pitamohi150 (Grandmother) takes an engaging look at the hazardous span of the journey performed by Mago to cross the border. The parameters of loss and violence are assessed through the grandmother’s reluctant decision to leave her long-cherished ancestral land.151 The novella charts the gradual transition from a happy, peaceful community life to an uncertain and disturbing mode of existence. The grandmother, Mago, like many quintessential grandmothers of Bengali families, is the sustaining figure within the larger family. She holds diverse familial ties together and renders a sense of harmony in the family. Towards the beginning of the narrative, the focus is essentially on the annual family get-together on the occasion of the Durga puja festival. These kinds of family gatherings were common annual occurrences in the extended families residing in various provinces of East Bengal. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Remembered Villages” mentions such instances of annual visits to the ancestral homes on the occasions of pujas. These periodical expeditions performed by the families living in urban Calcutta for professional reasons were seen as welcome breaks from an otherwise runof-the-mill existence. In Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje, too, the author describes the village celebration of the Durga Puja festival in the Zamindar family, in which Mejo Babu comes from the city every year to supervise the big family event. In a similar vein, in the first part of Pitamohi, the family of Tultuli, the narrator girl, makes a visit to the ancestral house in East Bengal to celebrate Durga Puja. Mago, as all her grandchildren call her, has a transcendental presence in the family. The old sprawling ancestral house and Mago become synonymous with each other; it appears as though one exists for the other. As they approach the house, the gap

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between the house as a material structure and the eagerly waiting Mago as the centre of affection reduces and gets lost in space, “Whether it is returning home or coming back to Mago, home or Mago, Mago or home— this celebration is meant for whom?” (15) Shanta Sen’s next novel Jonmer Mati (Ancestral Land) also talks about this lively family ambience against the backdrop of the pristine village of Moukathi in East Bengal. Gayatri, the narrator of Jonmer Mati, remembers with fondness her cherished days of living in her ancestral house. In the introductory section of Roktomonir Hare, Debesh Roy specifically mentions Pitamohi while relating the treatment of the themes of separation and reintegration with the emergence of free Bangladesh, “Purbo-Paschim is an expansion of space, Pitamohi is an extension of time. Either of these extensions would not have happened without Bangladesh of ’70-’71.” (Roy, Roktomoni 35) The first part of the novel serves as a prelude to the major turn of events in the consecutive parts. The first section echoes the tone of many such narratives where a tone of nostalgia and pining for the past becomes an overarching concern. Anusua Basu Raychaudhury talks about an invocation of similar motifs in her article “Nostalgia of Desh, Memories of Partition” where she notes that ‘desh’ for these refugees “existed at a certain moment and in a distinct space associated with their childhood and younger days, their friends and playing fields, their village and para, their riverside walks and natmandirs.” (Basu Raychaudhury, “Nostalgia” 5654) The first section “Tultulir Poth” (Tultuli’s Path) explores a similar excursion into various corners of the village and builds up the sense of piety surrounding their ‘bastu-bhite’. The naming of the three sections, “Tultulir Poth” (The Route of Tultuli), “Saat Purusher Poth” (The Path of Seven Generations) and “Magor Poth” (The Road of Mago) is highly suggestive and these titles invoke the metaphor of a road, both symbolic and real. Mago’s final journey after the occurrence of the Barishal riots violently disintegrates that long path where the familial past, community culture and shared faith mingled so naturally. Ironically the novella begins with the happy and exciting journey of Tultuli—along with her family—to Mago, and culminates in the tragic dislocation of the lonely and withered Mago. The second section of the novel, “Saat Purusher Poth”, beautifully weaves together the diverse strands of village life with a special emphasis on the projection of an integrated social fabric, an existence which is built on simple practices of love and reciprocity. Mago’s relationship with Ahladi’s mother and Kartik Thakur, and their everyday exchanges, render a vibrant picture of community bonding.152 In this part of the novella, Mago’s antipathy towards the urban lifestyle is

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highlighted. She experiences a sense of alienation on her visit to Calcutta and she refuses to live with her son’s family there. She shares a strong cultural bond with her desh. Her birth, her childhood, her growing up—all these are culturally connected with the place where she belongs. Her response to the prospect of being with her son in Calcutta—“Bapu has confined me in a dorin153” (80)—carries within it an ironic twist: that she will be eventually uprooted to seek shelter in this dorin. This strong sense of belongingness intensifies the measure of violence constituted within her eviction and the subsequent stretch of her painful journey across the border. The very thought of crossing the border suggests a kind of violent transgression. In his article “The Year of Independence, the Year of Partition: Between History and Memory” Parthasarathi Bhaumick154 analyses Partition migration and its consequences to point out how crossing a border, in the context of Hindu mythology and cultural history, is seen as an act of violation. He cites the example of Sita in The Ramayana, who crossed the border marked by Laxman, and how it led to the series of problems thereafter. He further discusses how in nineteenthcentury Bengal, crossing the sea to sail to the western countries was seen as crossing Kalapani155 and anyone who did that was largely condemned by society. For Mago, the possibility of crossing the border implied such a violent act. It meant complete anarchy and disorder for her. In the third part, “Magor Poth”, Sen dwells upon the span of Mago’s passage towards India. The manner in which she experiences her uprooting is indicative of the implicit violence which shaped the process of dislocation. The woman who had nurtured and preserved her familial roots for so long succumbs before the hostile forces of displacement. There is no suggestion of physical attack or arson; nevertheless the act of uprooting this old, frail woman striving to reach her son is no less violent. Bigger political games operating at a higher level or the strategies of the constructed nationhood deprive people like Mago of their own desh. It is described as the most traumatic moment because she has to leave her homestead. At a ripe age, this unexpected turn of events drives her away from her land. The cover picture of Pitamohi portrays Pitamohi as an old, withered, stooping woman holding on to a stick for support. This picture speaks volumes on the level of woes Mago has to withstand. The massive influx of refugees as an immediate consequence of the Barishal riot is recorded in vivid terms by the narrator. Like Lenny156 in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man, Tultuli, too, is forced to witness the rapidly changing mood of her city. Physical and psychic violence inflicted on people in transition make obvious the critical state of things:

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News from all quarters arrives about how the victimised people have reached Sealdah station in large groups, being permanently displaced from their own land. Countless people are coming in trains from Barishal. They have sought refuge in Bonga. People are endlessly crossing the border. All of them are terrified and anxious. Everyday Mejda goes with his friend to Sealdah station to collect some news. Everyone is frightened by the thought that Mago is also one among the crowd. (93)

The family lives in perpetual tension, everyday being affected by a sort of psychic haemorrhage worrying about Mago’s plight. In different parts of Calcutta, Tultuli’s mejda and mejdi come across several Magos, “many old women might be mistakenly identified as Mago because amongst the large groups of fleeing people there are many such old Magos walking endlessly.” (95) And when Mago finally arrives it is no less shocking: It is difficult to look at Mago. Her clothes are dirty and tattered and resemble that of a pavement beggar. Her cloth is so worn out that it barely covers her body. Her hair is smeared with dust. She does not have anything with her, not even a spare saree. She has only brought her bony, emaciated body along with her. (100)

Her delirious outpouring throughout the night expresses her desire to convey her individual experiences of woe and suffering on her way to India. She survives until morning only to finish her own story of displacement. Monmayee Basu’s157 study is based on personal interviews with many women migrants who conveyed their own experiences of traumatic and painful events. She notes in “Unknown Victims”, “Another aspect of the problem was the intense psychological impact left on the minds of the victims. The Hindu women who migrated were shattered psychologically as a result of the uprooting.” (Settar and Gupta, 157) Fear is sometimes less derived from actual acts of violence than from perceptions of violence. Mago’s struggle to cope with the realities of her journey, covered partially by steamer and then by train, brings forth the misfortunes which victimised many people like her. The road is used as a metaphor to convey the note of destruction and devastation. The process of ruining the road—the intensely personal road of Mago—represents the violence embedded within this dislocation. The journey which she undertakes to reach Calcutta ironically obliterates the entire route of her life journey. The road, as a concrete, spatial entity, demolishes the temporal route of her lived past. As Tultuli experiences, “Through her constant babbles over night the road was certainly destroyed. For Tultuli this road belonged to Mago. Mago was gradually destroying that road through her physical agony in the course of her stay at her son’s place in

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Calcutta.” (101) This form of destruction is enacted through her suffering. In “Suffering and Transcendence”, Eugene Thomas Long discusses the experience of suffering with reference to human existence: By contrast with the process of becoming in which we act to realize some state of affairs that we desire and through which we find meaning in existence, the experience of suffering appears to be the opposite of activity. It is a boundary, a tragic element in human experience which sets limits to our process of becoming and raises the question of the meaning of human existence. (Long, 141)

Mago breathes her last only after she completes her story; it appears as though she survived through the night just to tell her story. In a way her painful death symbolically signals an uprooted, suffering individual’s rejection of taking on a life in an alien world. Gopal Chandra Moulick’s Deshbhag o Nonipishimar Kotha (Partition and Nonipishima’s Tale) also raises questions about citizenship, ethnicity and the rhetoric of belonging that nationalist histories cannot answer. It returns to the memories of Partition and its changeability in everyday life in order to represent its varied dimensions. The history of the state practices of rehabilitation in India is rife with contradictions. Priya Kumar notes in her essay, “It’s my Home, too: Minoritarian Claims on the Nation” in Limiting Secularism, “Nationalism needs and produces its own minorities—defined as such—in order to reinforce and validate its own center: the presence of oppressed minority groups is therefore crucial to the self-definition of the majority group.”158 (Kumar, 177) Deshbhag o Nonipishimar Kotha records how a family’s claims on its long inhabited village are severely challenged under the changed circumstances initiated by Partition. The narrative examines how, during the phase of division, the ties of religion transcend those of region and language. It underscores the trials and tribulations the narrator’s family has to face on both sides of the border. This novel emerges as a specific response to the predicaments and dilemmas of a family deeply rooted in East Bengal and attests to the ways in which historical moments of crisis afflict the entire arrangements of people’s lives. The author draws on his own childhood experiences to make an important intervention on the broader discourse of the displacement dynamics. The trauma of leaving behind ‘home’ in the midst of impending civil strife conveys the index of vulnerability and threat which swelled up during the period. In her article “Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals”, Cathy Caruth argues that trauma is constituted not only by the destructive force of a violent event but by the very act of its survival. She further adds, “If we are to register the impact of violence, we

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therefore cannot locate it in the destructive moment of the past, but in an ongoing survival that belongs to the future.” (Caruth, “Violence and Time” 25) Moulick’s narrative critically engages itself with the moment of dislocation and its bearing on the lives of the people who are uprooted. The pangs of dislocation and emotional bruises accompanying such displacement are recreated through memory and these issues have been discussed elaborately on the chapter on memory. The primary concern of this chapter is to dwell on the exact manner of dislocation—the way in which the family gets uprooted. In his article “Smriti Niye Dhaka” (“Covered with Memories”) in the anthology Deshbhag: Binash o Binirman (Partition: Destruction and Reconstruction), Bishnu Basu gives a similar description of the unexpectedness associated with the moment of leaving Dhaka, his homeland. “The nation got independence. Leaving Dhaka, leaving our land, leaving our boyhood, leaving one part of divided Bengal, our family was compelled to come here. Our independence began in a truncated Bengal.” (Paul, 21) Moulick, too, shows how the unexpected happens in the village of Jhakpal, and the family leaves on a note of utter bewilderment. Neelanjana Chatterjee conducted an examination of refugee experiences in “Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengal Refugee Narratives of Communal Violence”, and, on the basis of this study, she notes: From the available public ‘evidence’ it seems East Bengal Hindus left their ancestral homes for contingencies of varying compulsions and at different times because of riots, the fear of riots, economic privation, political targeting, insecurity about the maintenance of their cultural lives, an attrition in their numbers, the existence of pre-partition family and business connections in India—because they felt they had no choice. (Chatterjee, “Interrogating” 11)

In Remembering Partition, Gyanendra Pandey raises an important question with regard to the construction of exclusivist nationhood and the associated violence within such a construction. He remarks: Shall we continue to think of 1947 as a constitutional division, an agreedupon partition of territories and assets? Or shall we face up to the enormity of the violence and the incredible acts of rape, torture and humiliation? Shall we call it ‘civil war’, recognising the fact that there were wellorganised local forces on both sides and a concerted attempt to wipe out entire populations as enemies? (Pandey, Remembering 15)

In Deshbhag o Nonipishimar Kotha, the immediate cause behind dislocation is not the occurrence of any massive violence; rather, it is the intimidating

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knowledge of such a possibility which drives people away. For them, an escape to West Bengal seemed the only way to save face, and avoid assimilation and humiliation by people who had so long been their social inferiors. Local Muslim League leader Samser Ali’s proposal to marry Nonipishima shatters the family and propels the guardian to think about the prospect of leaving the village. For the family members it is an unthinkably obscene proposal and the family cannot even imagine entertaining such whims. This violent reconfiguration of social desire raises unsettling fears: “Samser Ali is the grandson of Mansur Ali and the son of Tayeb Ali. He is the local League leader. Forgetting his past he thinks that as a big shot now he can dare to marry the daughter of his superior.” (67) This is an act of transgression and it threatens to jeopardise the honour and dignity of the narrator’s family. It was seen as an attack on the very core of Hindu integrity and identity and there was a heightened sensitivity to the experience of religious marginality or second-class citizenship.159 So migration remains the only option that will allow them to move away from this changed world. In Deshbhag, Deshtyag (Partition, Displacement), Sandip Bandyopadhyay cites the report which was published in a newspaper named “Deshapriya” from Barishal which stated, “Villages after villages, Hindus are moving away not out of any fear but out of the hope of living elsewhere.” (Bandyopadhyay, Deshbhag 69) The decision to migrate, taken in haste, has a destabilising effect on the psyche of the family members. All of them decide to leave in the dark of the night to avoid any dangerous moves from Samser Ali. They would walk through the village to Arichaghat; from there they would board a steamer and finally, from Goalondo, they would take a train to reach the other side of the border. This part of the narrative is replete with the description of the left behind territory. Their ancestral home which has nurtured so long many familial treasures, priced heirlooms, even small belongings, would stand abandoned.160 They even leave behind cooked Hilsa, along with so many other things. The family’s clandestine journey resonates with a sense of loss and betrayal. It is not a journey of honour and respectability; rather, they walk through stealthily as thieves lest their departure creates any trouble. The route thereafter is fraught with troubles and difficulties on a massive scale. As he notes, “We are walking through muddy water. Kaka (Uncle) is extra cautious about being silent, this is adding to the woes. He is leading us by lighting the torch at times.” (136) Whatever belongings they carry along make the walk heavy and laborious. Seema Das, a cultural activist who had to leave her home in Potuakhali, Barishal during Partition records in her autobiography, “Nobody is able to believe that we are leaving Potuakhali forever. Did anyone imagine that

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we would be separated in this manner?” (Das, Dyashe125) As the narrator traverses through his village route, he experiences—as a child—an acute feeling, a forced extrication from his cherished roots. This is symptomatic of most Partition narratives. This sense of mourning is an instance of vulnerable rhetoric articulating the sense of an oppressed and victimised group identity. Anxiety, uncertainty and insecurity coalesce to heighten the calamity of a sudden, forced exodus. As they leave behind a trail of familial heritage and cultural past, this violent territorial separation underscores the peculiar experience that Partition engenders in their lives. Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari in The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts comment that the Partition syndrome is always defined by terms like ‘disaster’, ‘break’, ‘disruption’, ‘dislocation’, or ‘rupture’. As Ranajit Guha notes, this displacement is “stapled firmly to an accentuated and immediate present cut off from a shared past”161. (Chatterjee, Small Voice 645) The detailed description of the steamer and train which they board reiterates the prevalent Partition motif of crowded trains and boats carrying a mass of hapless, uprooted people. This journey is not a voluntary one performed out of any taste of adventure, nor even a pilgrimage to attain any religious salvation. It is worth mentioning that long after the borders have been drawn, and the state of Bangladesh has been formed, an interesting paradigm of border-crossing is carried out which is rampant even today. This constant mobility across the IndiaBangladesh border gives an interesting axis of trans-border migration. There are families and individuals who have continued to cross the border from both sides to visit their loved ones, and to attend to their families. In “Journeys across the borders of India and Bangladesh” in Cartographies of Affect, Epsita Halder has drawn upon Victor Turner’s concept of ‘communitas’ to discern the patterns of such migration. As she notes: Travel between the familiar spaces (home, village, country) and the estranged ones (the relatives’ house on the other side of the fence) and the mobilization across the borders through a modernistic dynamic of creation of new nation states, I shall show, generates religious emotions and sensations of piety around this secular intention of crossing.” (Castillo and Panjabi, 102)

However, the tragedy of a journey which is depicted in Moulick’s narrative underlines the devastation brought about by hard-hitting sectarian ideology. For all the dispossessed people on the move, the only option has been to embrace the practicality of siding with the mainstream. This journey is not marked by any happiness and excitement. Beyond the border, too, they can

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only envision insecurity and constraints. At the moment of leaving the village, although Nonipishima tries to comfort her boudi (sister-in-law) by saying that they would soon come back, it is quite obvious that this is a permanent departure, and that coming back is only a remote possibility.

New Home for the Displaced: Struggles and Conflicts The question of accommodating the huge mass of constantly arriving refugees became a critical issue for the partitioned Indian state. The enduring sense of pain, loss and betrayal experienced by the East Bengali refugees in the wake of the 1947 Partition and their reception within a nation that was nominally theirs have been investigated from various perspectives in the sphere of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies. The narratives representing the victimhood of the East Bengali migrants struggling to cope with an entirely new set of challenges and constraints are viewed as important archives in recording the far-reaching consequences of Partition. This titanic task of rebuilding lives and rearranging priorities was fraught with a multitude of problems and difficulties. Debates generated in the constituent assembly and other public arenas talk profusely about the inadequacies to be found in various rehabilitation policies. Renuka Ray, the Refugee Adviser for the eastern zone and then Rehabilitation Minister, gives an account of her own personal experience while dealing with these problems, and observes: Many descriptions have been given of the conditions of the poorer refugees, the unfortunate men, women and children fleeing from terror and arriving in India. But nothing can accurately describe the heartbreak and tears, the grim tragedy that was being enacted. (Bagchi and Dasgupta,Vol 1, 86)

It is interesting to note that a striking feature of the representation of refugees in both the political and cultural spheres was that a refugee was not merely seen as a hapless victim, but also as a potential agent capable of inducing violence. This ambivalent representation of refugees complicates the discourse of victimhood and denial which so often characterises refugee tales. However, keeping in mind the duality of discourse, it is possible to discern the modes of assimilation, resistance, denial and implicit violence which mark the process of relocation and reconstitution of uprooted lives. Creative texts such as Bakultala P.L. Camp, Arjun, Purbo-Paschim, and many short stories have taken up this critical issue of refugee rehabilitation and the associated socio-cultural transformations initiated by this violent belonging.

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The condition of being ‘bastuhara’ and then being rendered as ‘sharanarthi’/ ‘udvastu’162 generates a gigantic scale of insecurity and anxiety, both physical and psychological. ‘Vastu’, which is endowed with a sense of sacred gravity and permanence becomes a thing of the past for these people. Their quest for a ‘basha’ as opposed to ‘bari’ becomes a search for a new belonging and identity. Partition narratives are replete with tales of such tragic quests. Spurred by this shattered loss of roots, the refugees had to engage themselves in a fierce struggle for survival and possession. Naturally the course of competition is qualified by its own ethics of violence. Their recounting of the immediacy of displacement violence is seen as a potential threat for inciting ethnic violence again and again. In her study on refugee status, Kavita Daiya notes: Refugees and their oral testimony in this period come to be seen as powerful enough to generate mass political violence. Narratives that bear witness to refugees’ experiences—“their suffering”—are denigrated as “tales” that become “more lurid” in their re-telling. Thus, newspaper accounts represent refugees’ testimonies regarding their experiences as implicitly false, exaggerated fictions, and as technologies that produce ethnic violence: the recounting of ‘tales of suffering’ become vocal performances that produce ethnic violence. (Daiya, 110)

In the context of Bengal, too, the refugees have been seen as organisers of violence engaging themselves in volatile acts to secure a place for themselves. Naturally, the conceptualisation of victimhood gains a different dimension, keeping in view this other contention. In The Marginal Men, Prafulla Chakraborty mentions two important reasons behind the discriminatory attitude rendered by the government towards the refugees in the east. Firstly, the geographical proximity between the West and Delhi prompted the government to take immediate action. Secondly, a large number of Punjabis in defence sectors propelled them to initiate steps. Narayan Sanyal’s Bakultala P.L. Camp gives a graphic account of living in government-provided relief camps and the various planes of violence constituted within this system of rehabilitation. Numerous accounts of camp life a—reminiscences, interviews and oral testimonies— have been generated in the recent past in various anthologies.163 Most of these documentations point to the politics of discrimination and practices of corruption rampantly prevalent in such camp lives. The lives depicted in rehabilitation centres like Coopers Camp, Chandmari Camp, and Jirat Camp are often full of details connected with exploitative schemes and unfulfilled demands. In the novel, camp life emerges as a space where specific identities and subjectivities are contested and forged in the

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skirmishes of everyday life. Describing the genesis of the vast number of camps in West Bengal in “Living Another Life: Un-Homed in the Camp”, Anusua Basu Ray Choudhury states: In fact, different types of camps in West Bengal were set up to deal with an unprecedented refugee influx in the state. The government mainly set up three types of camps, namely, women’s camps, worksite camps and Permanent Liability (PL) camps. (Basu Ray Choudhury, Citizens, 13)

As the name suggests, Permanent Liability Camps (emphasis mine) are meant for those refugees who are considered unfit for any kind of beneficial employment through which they could be rehabilitated. The refugees residing there are the old and infirm, invalids, and orphans. Bakultala P.L. Camp is such a permanent liability camp. This camp, which is situated somewhere in Bihar Bengal border, was initially constructed as a military camp during the war period. After Partition, this abandoned military camp has been recast as a refugee camp. This P.L. Camp is transformed into a thriving space for playing out the exploitative strategies conducted by the government contractors, various forms of deceit orchestrated by the powerful, and also internal conflicts amongst the camp refugees. The narrative records how Writobrata Bose, the officer in charge of the camp, becomes witness to a series of untoward incidents in the camp and how he is gradually pulled into the whirlwind of nasty politics and power tussles enacted during his tenure. A government grant of a generous sum of money for the renovation of the camp area is viewed as the decisive moment for generating group politics and unpleasant factions. Neelanjana Chatterjee makes a very important study on East Bengal refugees within the discursive framework of interrogating victimhood. In her illuminating essay on this issue (as stated earlier) Chatterjee shows how East Bengali refugees’ construction of the image of Partition victimhood—the selfconscious insistence on the historicity of their predicament as patriots and subjects of communal persecution—challenged their marginalisation after Partition and legitimised their demand for restitution. In the novel, too, Sanyal takes on a wide spectrum of refugee issues and he categorically shows how, at times, refugees are equally culpable in inflaming a situation unnecessarily. On the one hand, he depicts some of these refugees as weak, hapless victims languishing in the camp without any hope for a better future, and on the other, he shows some of them as trouble-makers working in league with other corrupt, wicked people in the vicinity. Sanyal’s projection of a divided world in the camp is considerably in conformity with the representations of camp life as

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documented in various interviews and memoirs. In his article “Coopers Camp e Chhelebela” (My Childhood in Coopers Camp), Jogendranath Roy talks about growing up amidst one such hostile environment during his childhood. He says that though there were kind, cooperative families around who would help them on various occasions, there were also some families who would behave in a wild manner, just to assert their presence. It remains true that since the families who took refuge in such camps were not homogeneous caste groups, there prevailed a considerable measure of divisive caste politics, even though they lived under such degrading circumstances. Many camp narratives reveal an interesting axis of identity politics and resettlement agendas. Joya Chatterji makes a similar observation in her analysis of camp life; she notes that the refugees understandably sought to establish relationships of friendship and mutual support with others of their own kind from their own parts of East Bengal and, quite reasonably, they wanted to foster these connections in their new homes. In the case of Bakultala P.L. Camp a different kind of identity rhetoric is cast to suggest how most of these camp dwellers remain as prisoners of the past. The deranged old man who bursts into a frenzied Greek expression in response to the haughty officer’s comment is actually a highly educated retired school headmaster. This tragic plight of a veteran school teacher represents how Partition can be viewed as an ‘epistemic rupture’164—as a total destruction of language. His apparent nonsensical eruption heightens the systemic disorder of the times. A number of empirically-based studies reveal that camp dwellers resorted to various forms of resistance to register their protest against the shoddy and offhand implementation of various grant schemes. In her book, Refugees and Borders in South Asia: The Great Exodus of 1971, Antara Dutta cites the case of the noted writer Maitreyi Devi who went to the village of Bogra, 22 miles away from Bongaon, and a few minutes from the border found that medical supplies were almost non-existent and needed to be replaced every few days as many refugees were injured. Dutta notes, “Her account of the refugee camp provides us with an insight into the early days of the relief operation—well-meaning, chaotic and susceptible to a complete breakdown if the numbers continued to rise.” (Dutta, 133) Numerous protest committees were launched to raise voices against injustice and depravity. In Bakultala P.L. Camp, Sanyal challenges the basic premise of agitation and protest. Interestingly, within the evil nexus of contractors, some government employees working in the camp, and also some camp dwellers, are seen to be actively involved in various dubious activities, including the trafficking of women, and the shady handling of government grants. The depiction of a character like

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‘borokhoka’ creates an atmosphere of intimidation in the camp at times. However, overall, camp activism and resistance against the failed dispersal of government policies is sparsely staged in the novel; the focus is rather on the wicked people’s hegemony over most of these silent, voiceless camp dwellers. The narrative privileges such a perspective perhaps because of the fact that the chief actor in the novel is an honest government official who takes up the task of protesting against the corrupt system. The canvas of discontent and denial is mainly highlighted by Writobrata’s attempt to bring about a change in camp life. As he receives applications of complaint with regard to the negligence of the camp’s repairing tasks, he becomes increasingly aware of the gap between the apparent success of schemes and reality. There is one instance in the novel when news is circulated about a proposal for the total resettlement of some camp families, and these families lodge a protest against this move. Taking advantage of this situation, some youths involved with camp welfare organisations intrude upon the matter and try to mobilise them. It becomes clear from the narrative that Sanyal critiques the unnecessary politicisation of camp issues and he attaches primacy to bringing out the discrepancy between the government’s policies and their actual implementation on the ground. As a creative writer, Sanyal is not keen on showing charts or statistics of discontent and betrayal; rather, his focus is on the emotional dimension of such experiences. In the case of characters like Kusum and Kamala, a different form of violence traumatises them— violence which is directed against women; violence which is gendered and which reinforces subversive patriarchal norms. This aspect has been discussed in detail in the chapter on ‘Women and Violence’. The threats posed by the wicked Ramsharan, and the dirty, manipulative ploys implemented by Dr Sadhucharan represent the insidious levels of exploitation and unspoken violence affecting the lives of the camp refugees. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novella Arjun165 highlights an altogether different dimension of rehabilitation experience. In the novel, Gangopadhyay emblematises the discontent surrounding relocation and gives an engaging account of the violence entrenched in the reconstitution of scattered, broken lives. The elements of politics and concomitant violence which are inextricably linked with refugee rehabilitation and the formation of squatters’ colonies become the primary concern of the narration in Arjun. The novel expresses an ambivalent sympathy for the refugees as it constructs them as subjects of misery and suffering, and then projects some of them as the agents and organisers of violence. In many ways the tale of the settlement diverges from that of Bakultala P.L. Camp. After Partition there was an interesting public discourse regarding the status of

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refugees vis-à-vis their reception within the fold of the newly-formed nation. The politico-social category of the refugee and its Bengali synonym sharanarthi were initially the topics of intense debate. Cartoons and illustrations appeared in many daily newspapers such as Amrita Bazar Patrika, Ananda Bazar and their like, revealing serious public anxiety over the amount of expenditure and assistance borne by the government to shelter the huge mass of refugees. Countering that debate, there emerged another discourse proclaiming the permissible rights of the refugees. This argument collectively posited refugees as sacrificial victims of Indian independence and lawful citizens of India, and sought to invest a sense of dignity and respectability with regard to the usage of the term refugee. In “Interrogating Victimhood”, Neelanjana Chatterjee notes in this respect: Rehabilitation with dignity was not to be seen as an act of charity but as the repayment of a national debt to the East Bengali Hindus represented in this passage as historic agents—freedom-fighters and victims of Partition which consigned them to minorityhood and therefore subordination in a Muslim majority state. (Chatterjee, “Interrogating” 8)

This reflection on refugee status is partially worked out in the novella Arjun. Arjun reinvents the story of the dispossessed and underscores a refugee community’s multi-layered struggles to assert its existence while negotiating all its dispossessions and handicaps. The year of publication of the text is very crucial; it was published in 1971, the year of Bangladesh’s liberation. The author dedicates the novella to the muktasainiks166 of Bangladesh. The narrative frame captures the growing politicisation of the struggles of the Deshapran squatters’ colony in the face of the heavily changing socio-cultural set-up of the time. Like many squatters’ colonies established in and around Calcutta just after Partition, Deshapran Colony was developed and organised to shelter a group of homeless families. He recollects those days when Biraj Thakur, the leader of the refugee group, had spotted some abandoned houses and plots in and around Dum Dum and led the group in building some haphazard colonies. Biraj Thakur had mobilised them to grab land for themselves, instead of living on government doles and charity. Later on, when Arjun reads Che Guevera’s life journey, he is instantly reminded of Biraj Thakur: “Afterwards when I read Che Guevera’s biography, I don’t know why I was repeatedly reminded of Biraj Thakur.” (48) In an article entitled “Udvastu Colony”, Nilima Dutta gives a similar account of colony formation in Jessore Road. She gives a description of how every detail was taken care of while building a full-fledged colony out of almost nothing. Conflict intensifies in

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the colony when Kewal Singh, a Punjabi plywood factory owner, strives to hire the local unemployed youths to work under him. Most of the migrant families have remained as squatters; they have failed to bring any degree of security into their lives. For the refugees, everyday life is a hand-tomouth struggle. Kewal Singh needs a portion of the colony’s land to extend his factory building and he can fulfil his business agenda by evacuating five or six families from the colony. Time and again, the families gather to offer resistance against Kewal Singh’s manoeuvres, but eventually the atmosphere changes for the worse. Young people like Dibya and Sukhen, who had initially protested against Singh’s moves, turn into his hired assistants in an ironic twist. This transformation proves to be a critical moment in the narrative. The possibility of raising an effective opposition against the coercive measures adopted by Kewal Singh becomes more challenging. Singh’s collaboration with the original owners of the land, the Dattas, turns the picture all the more menacing. These dubious measures adopted by Singh reinforce the formidable manifestations of systemic violence operating within the very basic structures of society. The rising power of the capitalist community threatens to subdue any attempts of retaliation put up by these ordinary people. It is quite obvious from the narrative tone that they do not have any government support to fall back on. In “Dispersal and the failure of Rehabilitation: Refugee Camp-Dwellers and Squatters in West Bengal”, Joya Chattterji contends that it is a historical finding that in the early 1950’s Dr Roy’s government had drafted legislation in secret which would have given immense power to the government, enabling them to evict squatters and protect the right to private property. However, when the news became in public it triggered a sustained campaign against the intended bill. The government was compelled to backtrack. The Act, when passed, included a pledge that a ‘Displaced Person’ in unauthorised occupation of land would not be evicted ‘until the Government provides for him other land or house in an area which enables the person to carry on such occupation as he may be engaged in for earning his livelihood at the time of the order.’ Therefore, the complicity of the police in Singh’s insidious attempt to forcibly vacate the plot does not come across as a surprise. Ironically posed against the capitalist community is the culturally elite community of Abaneesh Mukherjee and his like. Abaneesh exercises his own influence and mobilises the press to cover the ruckus between Arjun’s group and that of Kewal Singh. The government is forced to pay compensation because of Abaneesh’s intervention and the squatters are recognised as Indian citizens. Arjun’s education, social mobility, and intellectual predilection

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place him way above the other residents of the colony. Very often, through the first-person narration, it is suggested that he experiences a sense of alienation from the other people. The narrative also hints at the possibility of Arjun leaving the Deshapran colony. Arjun is no radical leader or activist, yet his involvement with his community (here I mean colonydwellers) happens due to a sense of responsibility for their collective plight. He is pulled into action, and his participation and the subsequent physical injuries caused to him bring about a solution to the ongoing problem. Here it is useful to remember that at the beginning of the novel, too, Arjun is physically attacked by some unidentified perpetrators and this sets the tone of violence and resentment, which is invasive and extremely provocative. His encounter with the rival group is suggestive of a delirious circumstance where he takes on some of his old mates who have joined Kewal Singh’s band. Like Arjuna of The Mahabharata, he fights this battle partially against his own kin. His own childhood memories as a boy in a tea shop and a past life shaped by incessant struggles both draw him to resist the wicked moves of the enemy camp. His own ambition to explore the better possibilities of life is overpowered by his immediate desire to save his community. Talking about the parallel correspondence between Arjuna in The Mahabharata and Arjun Roy Choudhury, Debali MookerjeaLeonard notes: In the epic the hero Arjuna is essentially what he was at its beginning— there is no shift in his consciousness. He is an embodiment of certain virtues of the community, and this is so even when he is on his solitary journeys gathering divine weapons and royal allies. This is because Arjun undergoes no ‘education’. In re-situating the epic in the present, Gangopadhyay tracks how modernity has altered man’s relationship with the community and thus reconstituted the structure of humanity. (Roy and Bhatia, 51)

Though Arjun experiences self-distancing from his colony neighbours, his involvement in that power tussle recontextualises the epic narrative against the present backdrop which is replete with acts of violence against community and brotherhood. An inconceivable change which took place in the lives of the refugees brought forth a change in the entire socio-cultural makeup of Bengal as a whole. The agonising process of living on stifled platforms, combating disease, starvation and police atrocities bred its own scale of violence. The territorial, emotional and psychic dislocation generated an ugly lineage of destruction and ferocity. The creative media of literature, songs, and cinema167 have also shown the menacing effects of such

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existence. Overcrowded cities, unemployment, and squalid living conditions generated monstrous effects in the guise of forced prostitution, underworld crime and political hooliganism. Many youths resorted to illegal activities and crime to create terror and forcibly attain their status as citizens. It was a common sight in the colonies to witness the rampage caused by local goondas. Calcutta in particular turned into a city spawning anti-social elements, unrest and lawlessness. That this growth is a long-term consequence of Partition dislocation remains uncontested. Amalendu Chakraborty’s short story “Dhoan, Dhulo Nokkhotro” (“Smoke, Dust and Stars”) lays bare that such a horrifying state of life is a long-term effect of Partition displacement and the topsy-turvy alterations of lives. The young, vulnerable, hungry generation being moulded into agents of violence to serve the petty ends of different political camps and a rising capitalist class is an overwhelming phenomenon associated with colony and camp lives. The story opens with the murder of a young man, Felu, who is a hooligan, and the subsequent trauma that his family has to encounter on hearing this news. The society has descended to such a level that the murderer openly proclaims that he has committed the murder. The narrative, from the perspective of Ratan, the younger brother of Felu, explicitly cites the openness and obscenity of violence perpetrated without any qualms. The story also claims that criminals are mostly created by the inefficient policies of a culpable state. The narrative offers a piecemeal and fragmented version of the displacement that had entirely reconfigured people’s lives in the past: “Bundles of human beings lying in Sealdah station. Everything around was clammy, bleaching powder odour choked existence. Pox germs hovered around to infect the refugees.” (Roy, Roktomonir 295) Ratan, a sober, educated school master, is deeply impacted by this heinous act. He believes in the ideals of Communism, and rushes to his mentor, but party ideology has also appropriated criminals like Benu as instruments to work for them. The narrative is also suggestive of the fact that a hopeless and grim situation, such as this, produces a counter-violence. The overwhelming sense of vulnerability and entrapment which Ratan experiences induces him to resort to violence in order to avenge his brother’s death. The story ends with a similar suggestion: “He holds the wooden baton firmly. Benu is still laughing. Ratan springs upon that laughter.” (296) The narrative signifies how such a decadent society generates its own elements of destruction. Debesh Roy’s short story “Udvastu” (“Refugee”) unveils how in a reordered state, an individual’s identity is ruthlessly questioned by the coercive state apparatus. In a post-Partitioned world, the state decides to disown its people in a violently arbitrary manner. The narrative reminds

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one of Orwell’s 1984168 where repressive agents of the state work in unison to completely vaporise an individual’s existence. Like Satyabrata in the story, many more Satyabratas face a similar plight because their identities are not in concurrence with the scheme of the state’s definition of identity. This narrative constitutes a space which mediates the violent intersection between conceptions of state-endorsed identity relating to a displaced individual’s claim to nationality. Debesh Roy conducts a critique of state-induced insensitive protocols and their bearing on individuals’ lives. It explores questions about national belonging by taking up Partition as the defining moment for violently induced exclusion-inclusion dynamics. The predicament of Satyabrata Lahiri reveals the continuing impact of Partition on the cultural politics of citizenship in independent India. The term ‘refugee’ does enormous violence to the individual bearing the identity; at times it becomes a term of abuse, robbing an individual of minimum dignity and honour. The kind of shock and disbelief which engulfs this family is brilliantly captured by the author in the description of the condition of the family: Darkness submerges everything, the windows, the backyard, stairs and the tulasi plant corner, and everywhere it is only darkness. Like a deluge, like a deadly epidemic, darkness chokes their existence. Identity-less refugees Satyabrata and Anima relate this darkness to a smouldering sea of warm liquid and want to annihilate themselves drowning in that sea. (Bandyopadhyay, Bhed Bibhed 435)

The narrative does not depict any physical violence but the entire canvas of mental torture and pain reflects the effects of the violent governmental style of the modern nation state system. Displacement, homelessness, life under corrupt and capricious camp administrators, and challenged identities mark the existence of a displaced individual—an ‘udvastu’. The narratives which have been explicated represent the kind of bitterness and intensity associated with the predicament of being a homeless person within the fold of the nationalist rhetoric. These texts have demonstrated the long-term effects of the destruction of dreams and individual aspirations owing to this disastrous transformation. Radically altered economies, and an existence under the constant threat of unpredictable forms and levels of violence have also been unravelled in these texts. In the sphere of public discourse, the particular manifestation of the East Bengali refugee status is trapped today in an ongoing struggle over a region to which the dislocated people have both cultural and historical claim. This contest over home, place, and memory is being played out in different contesting manners.

CHAPTER IV READING BEYOND VIOLENCE: MULTIPLE NARRATIONS

Love and Compassion Challenging Violence “Everyone wonders, ‘What’s Lalon’s faith?’ / The whole world talks about Faith, / everyone displaying their pride! / Lalon says, ‘My Faith has capsized / in this Market of Desire....’”169 Lalon Fokir

Parzania170(2007), a movie from 2002 based on Gujarat violence, reflects the dark, sinister side of a society operating madly under a spell of communal hatred and venom. Amidst the frenzy of mindless attacks and murderous activities the movie also curiously lodges an episode of tender compassion and humanity at its best. Mr and Mrs Iyer171, another movie engaged with communal unrest, stages a rare instance of fortitude and true grit countering religious vengeance. Jehangir Choudhury, a Muslim passenger, is rechristened as Mr Iyer by a Mrs Iyer travelling in the same bus and seated next to him. She lends him her surname to save him from a potential attack by a furious, hunting mob. These instances of empathy and kindness are not merely restricted to film narratives; they remain equally powerful themes in much of the literature addressing Partition violence. The chapters of this book have attempted to explore the diverse aspects of Partition violence and their varied forms of representation in literary narratives. It becomes apparent that Partition novels probe into the nature of violence, the dynamics of its socio-political embedding and its impact on the perpetrators and victims. Examined from this perspective, most of the novels emerge as strong denunciations of the dehumanising experiences of Partition violence. An incomprehensible human distortion and a civilisational deviation, this violence is depicted as a breakdown of human values. Naturally countering this demonic lapse, a space meant for staging generative and compassionate order comes to the fore. This very representative aspect of violence and suffering records the nullity of such acts, and redemptive possibilities are also encoded within these texts. This concluding chapter seeks to cover this slightly different trajectory of analysis. It would be an interesting task to uncover the spots of goodness

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in the rump of destruction and ravages. As discussed in the previous chapters, the complexities and difficulties of representing violence in literature serve to amplify our understanding of violence as a concept, and as a structure of practices. Alongside this, the need to find some possibilities for a better and more hopeful world also emerges; only urgency in the direction of redemption can strive to heal the raw wounds caused by Partition. Compassion, sensitivity towards suffering and a more humane conception of cosmic order would succeed in effecting changes and reconstituting a damaged universe. Martha C. Nussbaum analyses various facets of compassionate acts in her essay “Compassion and Terror”. She defines compassion as “an emotion directed at another person’s suffering or lack of well-being. It requires the thought that the other person is in a bad way, and a pretty seriously bad way.”172 (Nussbaum, “Compassion” 14) She further argues that whatever doubt may be cast on true acts of compassion, its importance cannot be negated. She asks, “What else can we plausibly rely on to transform horror into a shared sense of ethical responsibility?” (Nussbaum, 14) True Partition was a time of horror and ugliness; it was an instance of human fallibility. In a world where killing was as much a force as caring, people had carved out ethical space—room for caring. Have these moments of care, compassion and empathy been registered in the discourses of Partition historiography and creative responses? How many Partition experts have paid adequate attention to this side of the story? It is useful to note that if official accounts have documented the statistical dimension of this historical event, the newer findings of history, anthologies on personal interviews, reminiscences, and diary notes have generated multitudes of opinions, views and takes on the same event. Through these accounts people have come to know about the other stories: stories of dignity, sensitivity and trust. Tridivesh Singh Maini,173 who has worked on this aspect, makes a pertinent comment in his article “Traces of Humanity in Indo-Pak History”: While there is no doubt that the vivisection of the sub-continent was tragic and brought with it a baffling lunacy manifested in chaos, arson, turmoil, calamities of rape, eviction, dislocation and refuge, there is fascinating and instructive documentation of the traces of humanity, instances where Muslims saved the lives of non-Muslims and vice-versa as a tool of peace between India and Pakistan. (Singh Maini, 1)

Who is going to locate those ‘traces of humanity’—the historian, the researcher or the creative writer? It could be actually all of them, in varying measures and different directions. The shift in representation that

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has occurred is significant enough to have been considered by many as the breakdown of some accepted consensus—a consensus which remained valid until many years after Partition had actually taken place. In a lecture delivered at University of California summarising the pronouncement rendered by one of his many projects on Partition, Ashis Nandy claimed that it was not hatred, but a strong undercurrent of humanity, that was the surprising finding of research on the traumatic bloodbath of the Partition174. He comments in a similar vein in a newspaper article entitled “Birth Pangs”: There was grass-roots resistance to the violence. Genocide is not easy to organise in a society built on communities, not nations; 26 per cent of the respondents in our survey say that they survived because of help given by someone from the enemy community. No other genocide in the world yields comparable figures. And even that figure is an underestimation. Many victims are loath to admit that they have survived because someone from the enemy community helped. (Nandy, “Pangs”)

The ethics of survival (not just of the self), harmony and tolerance pull out a parallel narrative of mutual trust and dependence even during the height of turbulence and conflict. It is interesting to discover these moments of tranquillity and avoidance of violence. Khaled Ahmed significantly notes that if 75 percent of Partition was inhuman and depraved, 25 percent of it was human. He remarks that “even the neutral accounts compiled after the more intense periods of nationalism have been partitioned, the Indian side putting on records the good deeds done by non-Muslims and the Pakistani side recording the acts of grace of the Muslims.”175 These contending narratives at times obliterate any possibilities for reconciliation. As analysed in the previous chapters, violence has often been perceived as an aberration and an unusual phenomenon during the time, but there was no dearth of violence and it had become a norm; an inevitable occurrence. So, if violence had become inevitable, was to refrain from it a rare happening—“an aberration within an aberration”? Or did such “an aberration within an aberration” underline the pluralist view in which the affiliation to one religious community was just one rather than the sole source of identity? In the article “Tranquility and Brutality: The Paradox of Partition Violence in the Punjab”, Pippa Virdee cites the example of Malerkotla town in the Saungrur district of Punjab, which succeeded in completely averting violence during that phase. Mushirul Hasan discusses the radical views of Amrita Pritam, the celebrated Punjabi writer, who— subverting the so-called divisive, narrow claims of religion—had once commented:

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What I am against is religion—Partition saw to that. Everything I had been taught—about morals, values and the importance of religion—was shattered. I saw, heard and read about so many atrocities committed in the name of religion that it turned me against any kind of religion. (Hasan, Boundaries 27)

Like Amrita Pritam, many ordinary men and women grasped the essence of a true religion and practised it even when the rest of the world acted otherwise. Crucial to the dissemination of a generic nature of debate on Partition violence is the assumption of a universalised projection of harrowing details and morbid statistics. The acts of resistance daring to negate hate-politics should not be merely read as individual moral acts reminding us of the ways in which few Germans protected Jews during the Nazi regime. Ashutosh Varshney, the noted sociologist, has highlighted the importance of civic ties in promoting an integrated and harmonious society. He examines the pattern of communal riots and their impact in some select cities in India in “Ethnic Conflict and Civic Ties” and contends that “It can be shown structures of civic life constrain political strategies and their outcomes. Given a thick civic engagement between Hindus and Muslims, polarising political strategies fail.” (Varshney, 11) However, whether civic ties can alone prevent violence is controversial, but violence cannot be the final word for lives to move forward. The image of a sad, lonely but resilient Gandhi observing fast to appeal before the masses to restore peace and harmony in the aftermath of the Calcutta Killing and Noakhali-Tippera riots in Bengal before Partition has gained an iconic status over time. An anti-colonial struggle functioning under the cult of Satyagraha176 was suddenly rendered vulnerable. For Gandhi, the preacher of ahimsa, the solution lay in selfdenial for preserving some semblance of order. He wanted to instil within a possessed public consciousness the value of peaceful coexistence. Whether he succeeded remains a highly controversial issue in the context of Partition history. However, it should be conceded that Gandhi’s presence certainly had a transformative power, especially in Bengal. Debjani Ganguly and John Docker discuss the overwhelming influence of Gandhi in the contemporary world, and while introducing this aspect in their edited collection, Rethinking Gandhi and Non-violent Relationality: Global Perspectives, they declare pertinently: We need to remind the world that Gandhi’s idiosyncratic, almost Chaplinesque political style that evoked humour, encouraged dialogue, and remained fundamentally humane in face of the most formidable colonial/imperial machinery, provides an alternative language of political engagement.177 (Ganguly & Docker, 3)

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This chapter is not on Gandhian theories, but to grasp the signs of soulstirring goodness amidst ruthlessness and betrayal, Gandhian thinking still remains a milestone.

How Literature Celebrates Humanity How does one place literary narratives in this zone of representation? There often emerges an allegation that creative texts on Partition have either sensationalised violence or have produced an idyllic picture of intercommunity harmony. Has there been a balanced, sensitive depiction of constructive acts of thoughtfulness and compassion in literature on Partition? A closer look at the narratives from both Punjab and Bengal would reveal that writers have succeeded in enkindling moments of recovery and redemption amidst the frenzy of barbarism. Just as there is a Ralph or a Piggy or a Simon to stand up against cruelties of Jack and his like in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies,178 Partition narratives, too, are crowded with sane individuals who dare to restore peace and amity in a violent world. In his essay. “The In-Human and the Ethical in Communal Violence”, Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, “We cannot produce narratives that relive and celebrate moments of inhumanity even though we can all imagine the boastful stories of cruelty that would have circulated among men who killed in the days of the riots.” (Chakrabarty, Habitations 143) Here it is important to deliberate on a vital aspect of representing the specific acts of transcendence. In my introductory chapter, I have reflected on the questions pertaining to ethics and codes related to the conceptualisation of violence. It is seen that most of the critical thinkers such as Arendt, Agamben, Habermas, Zizek, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Tambiah have refrained from validating violence, but at the same time they have established the pervasiveness of violence in the sphere of the everyday—in the family, home, communities, state, judiciary, and army—in other words, violence which resides in the systemic order of things. In the present context of discussion on the crusade against different forms of communal violence during Partition, it is important to address the modes of this resistance: individual or collective. It is seen that most of the literary narratives which I would discuss in this chapter record moments in which an act of violence is perpetrated to negate the other extreme acts of violence. How does one explain these acts? If violence is to be condemned perpetually, seen from this perspective, do these acts evoke a sort of moral and ethical anarchy? Since one is distinctly different from the other, these extraordinary moments elicit a different theory of evaluation. It is important to note here

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that in the modern semantics of violence there exists an ethics of violence according to which state violence is deemed good and legitimate, whereas private violence is considered bad and evil. As Willem Schinkel notes in this regard: A more problematic paradox is that all violence cannot be legitimate. In other words, the state cannot succeed in gaining a true monopoly of violence, eradicating all private violence, since then it would become obsolete. Legitimate violence therefore exists by virtue of the existence of non-legitimate private violence. (Schinkel, 31)

These kinds of validation open up a contested logic of endorsing violence. Moreover, it should be noted that these literary narratives do not in any way represent state interventions to resist violence. So how does one appreciate such instances of resentment against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness? Freud’s response to Einstein’s correspondence with him on the issue of the prevention of war in a series called “Why War” is very illuminating in this regard. Freud says that all that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve as antidote to violence. He observes, “All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play this feeling of community, identification, whereon is founded, in large measure, the whole edifice of human society.” (Strachey, 212) Seen in this light, the entire discourse on identity politics becomes qualified by a different dimension. Here it is important to examine Amartya Sen’s contentions on the issue of identity and the restoration of amity between diverse communities. As he says, “Underlying the coarse brutality, there is also a big conceptual confusion about people’s identities which turns multidimensional human beings into one-dimensional creatures.” (Sen, Identity 174) This is an argument which has been developed keeping in mind the global scene of ethnic collision and unrest. In most of the Partition narratives discussed, we find that there is not really any eclipsing of defined boundaries and affiliations. Rather, it is possible to witness a sharp movement—a conscious journey towards assimilating higher human values. It is an established fact that Partition unleashed violence as an irremediable, unavoidable state; however, it also made audible the other voices. No religion endorses violence; each religion ratifies, in its own way, the practices of unconditional human love and empathy. In the Indian philosophical tradition, a lot of primacy is attached to sayings like ‘Kshma Paramo Dharma’, and ‘Daya Paramo Dharma’. These are looked upon as the highest ideals to be practised in the realm of the everyday. Dharma, as defined by Hindu scriptures, is moral law, combined with spiritual discipline, that guides one’s life. All that

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brings out the significant resemblances between men and calls into play this feeling of community and identification, whereon is founded, in large measures, the whole edifice of human society. This is not something which is only embedded in Hindu religious philosophy. All religions celebrate the assimilation of higher humane ideals. These creative texts have in fact created a space which subverts the petty denominations of communal principles—a space where transcendental shifts are enacted. Actually, there exists a fragile boundary line demarcating overtly romanticised and nostalgic depictions, and realistic and insightful representations. Creating the latter is not an easy task to accomplish; however, quite a few literary representations have embarked on a positive trajectory of depicting the unvanquished human spirit. In his analytical essay, “The Trauma of Independence: Some Aspects of Progressive Hindi Literature 1945-7” featured in Mushirul Hasan’s Inventing Boundaries, Alok Rai holds that most of the time, rational explanation collapses in the face of a monstrous upsurge of violence, resulting in a literary indulgence in horror which he calls “pornography of violence”. As he reflects: However, when the enlightened explanations break down in the face of a monstrous upsurge of mass violence, one is left only with the horror—and the incomprehensibility of this horror finally infects the rational understanding, the aesthetic imagination as well. Among the crudest consequences of this process is a kind of literary indulgence in horror which is quite similar to the indulgence we had noticed in the case of the poverty stories. At the lower end, it shades off into what can only be described as a pornography of violence. (Hasan, Boundaries 365)

He further contends that the representation of emotionally charged experiences requires composure, and through this experience transcends historicity and becomes a universal experience. Writers very often attempt to hold fierce identity politics and communal propensity responsible for such decadence. In most of these writings, communalism is established as a negative force, leading to the shrinkage of human sympathies and the breakdown of meaningful communication. In what ways do these writers exorcise the ghosts of communal violence? How do they envision a more inclusive and hospitable world? It is possible to discern at least two distinct strands of representation which celebrate the mood of survival, tolerance and forgiveness. Since the focus here is on Bangla narratives, bservations are primarily recorded keeping in mind the relevant texts. In the preface to the compilation of stories on Partition, Manabendra Bandyopadhyay refers to a Greek myth about creating similar, uniform human bodies, which would be done forcibly by amputating different body parts ruthlessly. He further

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asserts that most of the stories on Partition do not resort to any contrivance to establish peace and sanity; he asks whether we want a mechanised, lifeless unity or whether we shall discover a fundamentally unified sensibility which would unveil a new rhetoric of humanity.179 This new rhetoric of humanity is substantially addressed in Bangla novels and short stories on Partition. One way of depicting the essential goodness which prevails in society has been in the reflections of kind and helpful gestures rendered by friends, neighbours, and acquaintances belonging to the rival community during moments of acute crisis and desperation. There is another group of narratives which underscore sparks of kindness and sympathy towards strangers which would often involve a risk of endangering one’s own life. There is no question of privileging one group over the other because, during such moments of depravity, any kind deed serves to render a degree of preserving force in a topsy-turvy situation. Episodes of the first kind occur in the narratives of Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning), Somudro Hridoy (The Oceanic Heart), Nilkontho Pakhir Khonje (In Search of the Bird Neelkontho), and short stories such as “Kafer” (Infidel), “Khatian” (Cot) and “Epar Opar” (Here and There). Stories such as “Dui Dik” (Two Sides), “Majhi” (The Boatman), “Hindu” and “Ram Rahimer Kotha” (Of Ram and Rahim) discuss tolerance and syncretism of a different order. Pratibha Basu’s Somudro Hridoy180 (The Oceanic Heart) is a poignant record of a perplexing relationship between Sultan, a Muslim landlord, and Sulekha, a Hindu girl living in the same place. Basu reflects on cultural topography and regional identity and shows ultimately how constructed identities are transgressed by the overpowering force of love. The novel can simultaneously be categorised as a romantic fiction based on the ups and downs of the evolving relationship between Sulekha and Sultan, which culminates in a tragic reconciliation. Sulekha, who once used to harbour strong antipathy towards Sultan for his alleged involvement in a communal riot, is emotionally pulled towards him at the final moment. Though the theme of romance is the most palpable aspect of representation, its other facet—representing a thesis on communal relations—cannot be overlooked. As Tapati Chakraborty notes in her discussion of Partition narratives from Bengal, “The simplistic oppositions that inform the novel’s narrative structure make it the ideal ground for the operation of all the motifs of a ‘humanist’ understanding of the Partition.” (Settar and Gupta, 272) Sulekha’s initial repulsion towards Sultan is mainly driven by her perception of him as a hedonistic, corrupt crony of the British camp. Her intense hatred towards him makes her conceive a plan to murder him: “You would not be able to imagine what kind of a

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devil, a fiend he is. I shall kill him even if I have to endure exile or execution for that.” (55) Her distrust is strengthened when a riot erupts in her locality, which is actually an outcome of the overall heightened tension throughout the country. She conspires to assassinate him, but all her attempts are thwarted and she is held captive by the nawabzada. Sulekha, who was once a revolutionary and an activist, reacts vehemently against her own plight, but she is rendered helpless in her exile at the nawab’s place. Her perpetual antipathy towards him saddens him and he takes it upon himself to return her to the safety of Calcutta. His intense emotion for her can be traced back to their childhood years when he used to visit Sulekha’s house along with his grandfather. He nurtures that love, but Sulekha remains stone-hearted. Though it appears that the story is all about unrequited love and courtship, there is a deep political undercurrent which serves to comment on the community equations of the place. Contrary to most representations, here the Muslim family is shown to be affluent and influential. Through flashback mode, the novel also documents the evolution of the nationalist struggle and mass participation in it. Towards the climax, in a highly dramatic moment, Sultan Ahmed is killed by Hindu attackers in front of Sulekha. At this moment, Sulekha discovers her deeply buried love for him and she boldly identifies dead Sultan as her husband. The author notes, “Sulekha screamed, ‘He is my husband! My husband!’” (152) This final declaration by Sulekha invests the narrative with a sense of acceptance which defies all communal boundaries. Though this transformation appears to be a bit cinematic, its import cannot be undermined. Though the story has a tragic end, Sulekha’s response to Sultan’s death and her recognition of his love becomes a celebratory moment. Love, oblivious to religious extremism, serves as the binding factor. Manik Bandyopadhyay’s “Khatian” (The Ledger) stages another case of unalloyed friendship towering high in the midst of the riot-ridden slums of Calcutta. The characters are unnamed, perhaps deliberately to shield their respective religious identities and also to make them each one amongst many such victims of communalism. In a very volatile situation, one friend offers refuge to another under his cot, so that he can be hidden from the angry mob outside. In this story, too, the author shows that a common class denomination can be a cohesive factor against strident religious fanaticism. The author renders it very clear that communalism as an ideological construct will always be an abstracted alienation for the continually suffering poor people, whose perpetual struggles with everyday existence inject a sense of resignation into these issues. With an intricate

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awareness of the dynamics of the situation, the author posits the camaraderie shared between the two friends against the hate-politics practised by the rest of the world. The thesis of communalism is qualified as an absurd morbidity in the face of the crisis experienced by these two friends. The harsh realities of life have inculcated in them a better understanding of existence than the petty ideals of religious fundamentalism. Through the story, the author also shows how in urban areas most slums were bastions of communal frenzy, and how poor people were mobilised to serve heinous ends. The narrator calls into question the entire framework of socio-political assumptions on which sectarian rhetoric flourishes. These poor factory workers subvert the trend of ritualistic conformism to catastrophic violence. Contemporary discussions on Manik’s works focus primarily on his leftist stance and his radical reconstruction of the proletariat life.181 Here in this story he fuses the strand of class consolidation with that of communal mobilisation. When both of them lose their jobs in the factory, the emphasis is on unity in dispossession. The ultimate comment voiced by one of them—“You are poor and so am I. We belong to the poor community” (Fraser, 150)—demolishes all their differences to a poignant conception of an exploited community. Achintya Kumar Sengupta’s “Shwakkhor” (Treaty) is another sensitive take on communal relations. Two friends, Johurali and Dinonath, are shown to belong to a marginalised, “riff-raff” societal group. The narrative traces how these friends are caught up in a communal conflict. These poor vendors are ignorant about the higher politics of the time, but somehow they are mobilised against each other to subscribe to the ideology of hatred. Falsities of communalisation and the unnecessary construction of adversaries are exposed over the course of the narrative. The logic of coexistence was forfeited overnight in favour of a ‘we’, the innocent and ‘they’ the evil, deserving of being looted and killed. The narrative shows how, when intercommunity relations are at their nadir, some people sign treaties of peace and reconciliation. However, the treaty is signed in an unconventional manner: “Dinonath put three fingers together, turned the bidi around and gave it a final puff. The fire was their signature. It was a treaty—of peace and friendship.” (Fraser, 155) So the final mood which prevails in the story is that of reassurance and reconciliation. What is notable about this story is that both Dinonath and Johurali had participated in rioting, but, once destiny drives them to see each other, the older bond of friendship is reignited. They are not faceless enemies any more. As sanity descends upon them, they track a path of progress and regeneration. Manoj Basu’s “Epar Opar” (Here and There) is set long after the occurrence

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of the Noakhali-Bihar riots and the havoc created in the life of someone like Himangshu. In an explosive time in the history of the Indian subcontinent, the retaliatory violence rendered Himangshu homeless, while his wife was murdered. This was an evil time which transformed his friend Sirajul beyond recognition. Nobody came to his rescue during that critical time and he was seriously injured by some marauders from outside. He could not trust anyone in the vicinity, but now time has restored tranquillity in the village. All his lands were appropriated by his erstwhile neighbours.182 As Anup Beniwal stresses in his analysis of Partition violence and reconciliation, time acts as a great cohesive agent and the answer to the madness lies in the passage of time that, while affecting objective distancing, leads to a rational analysis of the experience.183 So, in Himangshu’s case, time has provided him with the distance to judge calmly. As such, when Golam Ali, an old man in the neighbourhood, visits him in his frail condition and expresses a sincere apology for the ugly turn of events, Himangshu is deeply touched at this unexpected gesture. He tells him that if he had not been bed-ridden with illness during that fateful time, he would have contained the violence. “I did not have the strength to get up, otherwise I would have given a big shout and told everyone...” (Fraser, 223) Golam Ali’s sense of “justice and innate humanity” (67) moves Himangshu so much that he donates to him the hundred rupees that he received in exchange for his land, for the building of a shrine in that place. Though he knew very well that dispensing with the money would only cause his ruin, he does not fail to reciprocate the touching act of Golam Ali. This also becomes another way of showing that people like Golam Ali must survive, to keep up the legacy of humanity. In his study on Partition narratives, Alok Bhalla insists on recognising different facets of truth and argues: An integrated society self-consciously asserts that different claims of truth demand our attentive consideration and not our scorn and rejection. Only if it does so can it prevent our particular beliefs from hardening into sectarian certainties. Those who cannot live with varied ways of thinking and imagining cease to live a life of culture.184 (Bhalla, Dialogues 44)

Very often writers have tried to incorporate negotiations of such recognitions and understanding into their created spaces. Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, the celebrated author and creator of the versatile detective Byomkesh Bakshi, has addressed the theme of human sympathy and claims of professional duties sustaining through the palls of communal menace. His story “Dui Dik” (Two Sides) captures the unique side of the human mind responding

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to professional ethics in a communally torn world. Bandyopadhyay articulates the concerns from both sides—the Hindus and the Muslims— and gives a voice to their views about the chain of events that shattered the lives of all the communities. In her essay assessing Saradindu’s take on communal violence, “Partition Relived in Literature”, Anindita Mukhopadhyay notes, “Bandyopadhyay’s own anxieties about the nature of the violence resonate through the convictions and doubts of his characters that he captures in cameos.”185 (Settar and Gupta, 212) Bandyopadhyay focuses on the instrumental role played by the ‘goondas’ in generating riots and how they keep these riots alive through a vicious spiral of violence and counter-violence. In “Dui Dik”, the aggressive agent of violence is Noor Mian, who rules the nexus of crime and violence. He is the maker of rules in his area and has no scruples about indulging in all kinds of nefarious activities; he is represented as the evil incarnate. The story is narrated by a doctor, Binode, to his friends, much later when all these events have subsided and everyone shares a temporal distance from that destructive phase. The doctor had accidentally witnessed the heinous acts of Noor Mian but was powerless to intervene in any measure. The doctor’s status was that of a marginalised person in that locality, so he had to bear his knowledge of these happenings silently. However, soon the tables were turned; Noor Mian was lethally injured by someone from the rival camp and Binode watched it happen in front of him. His personal battle began when he was left with the choice to treat Noor Mian or to abandon him to die. When the criminal came crawling to his chamber, he had to first exorcise the communal identity lurking within him, and then he responded to his duties as a doctor. When Binode examined his condition and decided to send this critically wounded man to the medical college, Noor Mian pleaded fervently for Binode to treat him personally as he knew the world outside would not spare him. The doctor in him won over his Hindu self, leading him to preserve the life of this infamous crook. He could not hold himself back from attending to Noor’s wounds. This discord between the ethics dictated by his profession and the agitated being within him was resolved only partially, because during the course of Noor’s treatment Binode was compulsively driven to reflect on his peculiar predicament. Though at times he wished to evict Noor, he could not commit the act. The author records Binode’s predicament, “There exists nothing stranger in the world than the human mind. I don’t know even today why I nursed for days and nights together the person whom I hated the most, the person who committed three or four murders before my eyes.” (312) His profession demanded that he should look after an ailing patient; it was a professional responsibility which he could not

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disown. The moment Noor Mian had arrived in his chamber as a patient, the only identity which mattered was his identity as a doctor. He could not disregard this role because it entailed a sense of accountability towards society at large. This intense conflict within him is indicative of the consciousness of human duty which was stirred up within him. His personal universe is endowed with affection and kindness for this suffering villain. This builds up a distinct narrative space premised on the ideals of empathy and non-violence. Dibyendu Palit’s “Hindu” is another representative narrative on the humane side of communal antagonism. It becomes obvious through the exploration of quite a few narratives that many writers have addressed this facet of the Partition story. Palit’s “Hindu” tracks the disintegration of a mixed community in a place called Rampur, in Bihar, just after communal violence had risen sharply there. Rampur, which was a habitat for both Hindus and Muslims, undergoes a sudden change after a riot takes place. As a result, the notions of “our people” and “their people” are reconstituted. Muslims are seen as outsiders in this changed context. Embedded within this sense of narrow identity politics, an episode occurs which challenges this petty, constricted vision of society. The story also conducts a sharp criticism of a social system which denies any care and protection to even an ill, destitute person, on the assumption that the needy person belongs to the rival community. But sometimes, even in such a dehumanised, degraded society, one can witness moments of compassion and redemption. Palit seems to place a very potent question as to whether the very survival of the ‘self’ is predicated on the destruction of the ‘other’. In the story, Mathuranath, a staunch Hindu and an authoritative figure, is presented as the ‘Hindu’. His naming is very ironic because this conservative, dogged Hindu provides refuge to an ailing, helpless man lying without any care and protection. The story also projects the wide discrepancy which exists between a very pious practising Hindu and the other fanatics, who have been uprooted in terms of religious faith. The wide array of connotations qualifying the identity of a ‘Hindu’ comes under intensive scrutiny in the story. Mathuranath believes in the real essence of religion which teaches man to be more tolerant and sensitive. His act of giving shelter to this dying man is prompted by his own vision of being a true Hindu. However, the societal codes embedded in religious constructs fail to recognise the real ideals of religious teachings. Therefore, when tension escalates as a response to Mathuranath’s gesture, even his own family members rebel against him. When his son insists on removing the man from the house because he is a Muslim and cannot be sheltered in a Hindu household,

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Mathuranath responds by saying, “Right, but he is also a patient who is unconscious, isn’t he? Let him rest now.” (Fraser, 237) The story ends on an uncertain note because there is a suggestion that the dying man might indeed be removed from Mathuranath’s place by his son. But even then, the story opens up a space for rethinking religious prescriptions and initiates a more charitable understanding of the world. In an essay on Tagore, entitled “Utsav-Celebration: Tagore’s Approach to Cultivating the Human Spirit and the Study of Religion”,186 Kathleen M. O’Connell discussed the relevance of developing a harmonious relationship between different communities. She notes that Tagore always upheld the creed of communal unity and a peaceful society. Tagore’s views in The Religion of Man were a summary of his pluralistic, humanistic thinking that was developed over many decades. She cites that in an address to the Parliament of Religions in 1937, Tagore had specifically pointed out that all through the course of human history it has become tragically evident that religions whose mission is the liberation of souls have, in some form or the other, been instrumental in shackling the freedom of mind, and even moral rights. The reality of such an integrated space as conceived by Tagore became almost unthinkable during the time of Partition. Even then, creative artists sought to discover cases of mutual trust and faith, pursuing the goodness of the world. Gour Kishore Ghosh’s “Jaha Jae” (Loss) focuses on the growth of such an assimilative space. It shows how riots bring people into a forced proximity which perhaps would not have been possible during normal times. Ranu, a middle-aged Hindu woman, finds herself involuntarily sharing the same space as an elderly Muslim shopkeeper because of the sudden outbreak of a riot. She takes refuge in a shop owned by a Muslim man. It is unimaginable that someone from Ranu’s background would be housed with a Muslim male in such a way. The initial response is apprehension, fear and a pervasive sense of insecurity: “Ranu didn’t feel comfortable with the man. And it was as if he had read her thoughts. She hadn’t spoken to him until then, but he seemed to feel the apprehension, suspicion, discomfort and fear that she harboured against him.”(Fraser, 161) Within the narrow confines of the closed shop she feels alarmed at the thought of being with a Muslim man; it is a matter of honour and dignity for her. But the possibility of not surviving the explosive situation outside reaffirmed her decision to stay back. Here Ghose subverts the stereotypical image of a virile Muslim male predating that of a vulnerable Hindu woman. The shopkeeper is shown to be a puny, thin, dry-looking man who feels equally uncomfortable with Ranu. As the situation outside worsens, the man offers her water and then helps her to

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combat the pungency of some gas generated by an explosion. The mood of unease and claustrophobia changes slowly to a better sense of dependence. Ranu chooses to stay back with this stranger in that sheltered space, because for her the place holds more safety and protection than the mad, violent world outside. This transformation of the predicament suggests that a monolithic assumption of a uniformly hostile world does not explain every happening, and Ranu’s case validates it.

Final Words (?)..... Surprisingly, a discourse which started with the possibility of locating the discursive framework of violence and its ramifications in the context of the Partition narrative strives to end on a note of hoping to look beyond violence. Partition is an open chapter in the journey of this independent but divided subcontinent. The multiple traces and resonances it carries within its frame of reference are phenomenal. Any form of insular, myopic reading of this seminal episode generates an incomplete understanding of its politics and poetics. No single deduction can claim to hold the key to grasping its dynamics. In fact, there should not be any final word on this subject. Archives of survivors’ memories, journalistic discourses, and radical findings of history and anthropology are being preserved, along with other available sources such as official documentations and institutionalised historiography. Each new analysis and fresh insight opens another engaging track of research. Along with these, there exist the literary representations—the main focus of enquiry of this book—which have brought to Partition an unusually powerful representation of human vision and understanding. In different ways, writers have endeavoured to reckon with the pain of Partition and its concomitant violence across generations. Through the analysis conducted in the previous chapters it has become clear that the novelistic modes of representing the differentiated impact of Partition violence provide a sense of the changing contours of perceiving its horror and interpreting it. In mapping the modes and strategies of representing violence, the literary text signals the need to reconsider the veracity of establishing ethno-religious nationalist paradigms. As Tarun Saint comments in this context: Such fictive testimonies continue to provide models for later reflections on Partition violence and the further reinscriptions of horror that have followed in the years after the event across South Asia, in the absence of any prospect of conclusive laying to rest of ghosts of the past. (Saint, Witnessing 308)

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These texts also point to the vast array of subjects and perspectives which were never written about: the unwritten texts, or ‘the genre of silence’187 on Partition. Without acknowledging the insights these texts could have provided, we can hardly recognise what or how much we know of Partition, or even what we are able to imagine of it. The new directions of critical work on Partition also indicate the voluminous degree of ongoing involvement with Partition discourse. As this study has demonstrated the spectrum of pluralities embedded within this scholarship, naturally the final word on this widely contested subject is far from being uttered. Finally, I would like to revisit the same trajectory on which I had premised my argument in the introduction. That Partition continues to define the socio-cultural and political lives of the subcontinent is an overwhelming truth. Sinister manifestations of Hindu right-wing ideology or Islamic extremism in the current sphere of public discourse only reinforces its legacy. The unease surrounding Sarabjit’s death in Pakistan, or the intermittent skirmishes acted out on the Indo-Pak and Indo-Bangladesh borders instantly bring the horrors of August, 1947 back into public memory. The resonances of the ‘Partitioned’ past will continue to be replicated in the entire subcontinent unless the true spirit of democracy and the preservation of minority rights are actually practised in these divided nations. Although we would like to stubbornly resist violence, we remain entrapped within a hegemonic structure of violence. It is worth mentioning the various documentation projects which archive the diverse stories of Partition and its cascading effects on our lives. A pertinent example is the Indian Subcontinent Partition Document (ISPaD) which preserves a record of the plight of minorities in Bangladesh and West Bengal. Here it is useful to cite an interview with Bangladeshi film director Tanvir Muquammel published in Anandabazar daily on May 8, 2013. His comment on the Shahbagh188 movement is very significant: “The kind of precedence this movement has set would have significant ramifications in entire South Asia.” All these examples take me back to my initial contention that Partition is not a dead subject. Partition, in more ways than one, continues to reappear and inform both the public and private spheres of contemporary discourse. The final word is yet to be spoken.

NOTES 1

This book is a section from my PhD thesis on representations of violence in select Partition writings from Bengal. Choudhury, Suranjana. Issues and Representations of Violence in Selected Partition Narratives from Bengal, 2014. 2 Annadashankar Ray, a noted Bengali poet, responded to Partition very poignantly. His poems, especially the short poems, point out the mindlessness of this division. The quoted text comprises the opening lines of the short poem “Khuku o Khoka”. I have taken these lines quoted in Sudipta Basu’s Deshbhag O Bangla Sahitya (p.67) The translation is mine. 3 See Faiz, Ahmed Faiz. Subh-e-Azadi.Translated by Agha Shahid Ali. Web 15th Feb, 2013 4 Episodes of communal fury and acts of vengeance rule socio-political life in India. The Bhagalpur riots of 1989, the Bombay riots of 1993, the Gujarat violence of 2002, and the upsurge in Kokrajhar and retaliatory action in Bangalore in 2012 are just a few instances in a drawn out and continuous series of communal conflicts occurring in India. 5 Martha C Nussbaum’s thesis here is on the domino effect of Gujarat violence in socio-political discourse of the subcontinent. It is helpful to recall here Raka Ray’s essay “Slap from Hindu Nation” which indicates the symbolic use of the word ‘slap’ in the recent discourse on Muslims in India. According to her, from the Hindu perspective, if the macho Muslim has in the past been thought to have slapped, raped and penetrated the body of Hindu India, the same must now be done to him. 6 National photographic archives document numerous images of train massacres during Partition. History texts and many sociological writings contain such photographs of trains crammed with migrants across borders. The cover page of Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan captures such an image of a train. 7 Tarun Saint, in Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction documents in the introductory chapter the mindless destruction of cultural shrines in his study of Partition violence, and its bearing on various literature. He makes specific reference to ‘Ganga-Jamni’, an Indo-Islamic cultural amalgam reproduced over centuries of a cultural melting pot. It was severely damaged by Partition violence. Similarly, the shrine of Khoja-Ismaili pirs was destroyed during the Gujarat violence of 2002. 8 Historians such as Ayesha Jalal and Aitzaz Hasan have put forth a different view on Partition politics. Histories emerging from Pakistan make claims that the right wing within INC and Hindu communal forces had cornered AIML. These narratives argue that Jinnah has frequently been erroneously viewed as the mastermind behind Partition. A divergent reading of Jinnah’s politics is also to be seen in Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence.

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From Willem Schinkel’s Aspects of Violence: A Critical Theory, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. p.4 10 Paul R. Brass in “The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946-47: Means, Methods and Purposes” reveals how violence in the Punjab was organised and planned in advance by various community members and also argues that the Punjab violence foreshadows the later Hutu-Tutsi killings and violence in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. He argues that these forms of violence are not spontaneous as is usually understood. Rather, they are intentional productions by organised groups. He labels this phenomenon as an ‘institutionalised riot system.’ 11 Sibaji Bandyopadhyay has offered an incisive explication of the ethics of nonviolence and non-cruelty, and its significance in the narrative field of the Mahabharata. He discusses how this epic incorporates the essence of Indian ethos and how it can be seen as the grand narrative of Indian past. He calls this work itihasa. See Sibaji Bandyopadhyay’s “A Critique of Nonviolence” Web. 14th Feb, 2013. 12 Anrsamsya in the Mahabharata has been closely examined as a conceptual thesis by Mukund Lath. He has delivered an intensive analysis of anrsamsya (noncruelty) as a category, and has reflected on its relation with himsa (violence) and ahimsa (nonviolence). See Mukund Lath’s “The Concept of Anrsamsya” in R.N Dandekar (Ed.) The Mahabharata Revisited, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1990. pp. 113119. 13 Walter Benjamin, in response to the aftermath of World War I, formulated a theory of violence drawing upon the relation between power, law and justice. He premises his argument on the question of the use of violence as a pure means in the social and political sphere. He paradoxically attempted to balance the ideology of proletarian violence with the theology of divine violence. See Marcus Bullock and Michael W Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. I 1913-1926. pp. 236-53. 14 Georges Sorel expresses his conviction regarding class warfare and contends that only this can effectively change social structures. He offers up useful insights into the functions of violence, sources of political power and the transformative properties of myths. Developing the ideas of violence, myth and the general strike, Sorel celebrates the heroic action of the proletariat as a means to save the modern world from decadence and the capitalist spirit of a retiring bourgeoisie. 15 Freud and Einstein’s exchanges of ideas through their correspondence took place after World War I seeking to devise a formulation for creating a peaceful and more habitable world. In response to Einstein’s problematisation about the psychological dimension of thirst for violence, Freud explained the concept of Thanatos or death instinct as a means of revealing the recurring pattern of self-defeating and selfdestructive behaviour. See “Why War?” in J. Strachey (Ed.) The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 22. pp. 197-215. 16 Concepts relating to trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological and neurological disorders have been discussed extensively in Chapter V on Memory.

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17 See Shorish Kashmiri’s “Humiliated and Harassed They Left” in Mushirul Hasan (Ed.) India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (Vol. II) p. 145. 18 Here, ‘surgery’ refers to a clinical condition where territorial borders undergo a kind of surgical operation. It is reminiscent of Prof Anup Dhar’s background narration to a film Ebong Bewarish on lesbian suicides in the “Lesbian-GayBisexual-Transgender” Film Festival, 2013 at Max Mueller Bhawan, Kolkata. Discussing the tragedy of the increasing rate of suicides amongst lesbians due to non-acceptance in society, Dhar shows how the discreet survival of violence in everyday life marks the basic premise of existence. He relates how political borders are smeared with blood, and how violence in different forms bleeds into all spheres of life. 19 The sharp distinction between pogrom, riot, and genocide appears to get contested in the case of Partition violence. The involvement of the state, large scale retributive violence, calculated and spontaneous outbursts taking place concurrently, render the defining parameters seriously lacking. 20 Pralaya, or tandava signifies a totally chaotic, upside-down situation. Pralaya refers to a stormy, destructive state unleashing chaos and disorder. Tandava has a specific mythological reference; it connotes the fierce, devastating dance form of Lord Shiva after Sati’s act of self-destruction. Both the conditions imply devastation and destruction. 21 Here it is important to question the obsessive rhetoric of survival of self when survival is threatened, which fuels acts of violence. 22 Stanley J. Tambiah’s studies on ethnic conflict are particularly useful in getting to grips with the South Asian political situation. His theorisations on the process of enemy construction are pertinent to investigating the kind of hostility in place between neighbouring nations in South Asia. 23 Gyanendra Pandey uses Natalie Zamon Davis’ “The Rites of Violence” to look at the function of crowd behaviour during riots. Davis analyses the practices of religious violence in France during the 16th century. See Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, California: Stanford University Press, 1975. 24 Literature on Partition is full of cases of rumour playing an instrumental role in bringing out violence. It is of use to bring to mind here Bhisam Sahni’s Tamas, especially where rumour creates trouble by instigating violence in the region concerned. 25 See Bipan Chandra’s article in Anandabazar Patrika, Sunday, March 13, 1988. p.13. 26 This sort of euphemistic terming paves the way for a new glorification of violence that supplants the resultant suffering caused both to the other and self. Within the Indian tradition, the idea of sacrificial violence constitutes one of the dominant discursive ways in which it seeks to comprehend and linearise violence. 27 Suvir Kaul has conducted an evocative exploration of the resonance of Partition in the formation of India’s history succeeding the Pokharan episode in 1998 in The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India. He emphasises the fact that it is time that archives of diaries, letters, memories and witness accounts, which rely on memory, were used to facilitate a holistic understanding of Partition.

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28 The breadth of violence erupting during Partition also led to multiple instances of honour killing. Women being reduced merely to upholders of community honour and reproducers often got murdered by their own people or sometimes committed suicide to preserve the so-called sanctity of the community. Even today, newspapers and television channels publicise such cases of honour killings in various regions of the country. 29 The narratives of Rahi Massom Raza’s Adha Gaon (A Village Divided), Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Atin Bandhopadhay’s NeelkonthoPakhirKhonje (In Search of the Bird Neelkontho) have as their setting obscure villages of India. The high drama of Partition and the ensuing effects of such an event tear apart the total order of life in these villages. 30 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Anusua Basu Ray Chaudhury, Ashis Nandy et al. have critically questioned the overwhelming recollections of an idyllic, romanticised past of the survivors. These thinkers have pointed out that survivors often create their own inflated versions of their past lives on the other side. Their recollections are regulated by an urgency to situate Partition as the disruptive moment destroying all. These accounts also represent the diverse ways in which discourses of violence are remembered, recorded and retold. These perspectives have been discussed in Chapter IV and V. 31 These lines are seen in Suranjan Das’ Communal Riots in Bengal: 1905-1947. p.1 32 From Joya Chatterji, Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India 1947-’67. p.1 33 These social thinkers have variously addressed the issue of Bengal Partition; from different positions and viewpoints they have provided extensive examinations of the socio-political dynamics of Bengal Partition. 34 These are very cutting and strong Bangla terms signifying the fierceness of Partition. Using them brings forth the scar caused by Partition and its unhealed continuity. 35 In Bangladesh, the resurgence of Islam is not synonymous with Islamic militancy. The latter swelled in frequency and intensity between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s as a transitional phenomenon on the periphery of Bangladeshi life and society. It is pertinent to consider here the tormenting effects of a deficient nationalist construction of a universal Muslim identity. 36 Suranjan Das has made a sizeable contribution towards understanding the changing colour of communal ties in Bengal. His pieces are significant in that he perceives communalism in its wider context, accepting it as a coherent societal perspective which could dictate the political and social action of a section of the population at a particular historical juncture. He sees communalism through the prism of communal riots. 38 The Great Calcutta Killing is an infamous, bloody episode in Calcutta’s history. The outpour of unprecedented violence, mindless killings and demonic outbursts in and around Calcutta on August 16, 1946, set off a series of abominable retaliations in Noakhali, Tippera Bihar and so on. 39 In another study on Empire and Crystallization of Islam in Empire and Islam: Punjab and the making of Pakistan, David Gilmartin notes that the alien colonial

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domination encouraged the growth of "communalism" and eventually of Muslim “nationalism,” particularly in Punjab's cities, thus posing new ideological challenges to the British Raj. Gilmartin argues that an understanding of Muslim politics in this period depends on an understanding of the close interplay between the ideology and structure of the British colonial empire on the one hand, and the form of Islamic organization and ideas on the other. 40 Irving Howe cites Camus to bolster his views on writing and the Holocaust. This quote is from Irving Howe’s article “Writing and the Holocaust” in Lang, Berel (ed.) Writing and the Holocaust. p.198. 41 Jill Didur elaborates on this aspect of de Man’s propositions in her essay “Fragments of Imagination: Re-thinking the Literary in Historiography through Narratives of India’s Partition.” 42 James E. Young in his article “Holocaust Documentary Fiction: The Novelist as Eyewitness” in Berel (Ed.), Writing and the Holocaust, speaks of the impulse in Holocaust writers to insist on a documentary linkage between their writings and the events inspiring them. 43 In the essay “Partition as a Literary Paradigm” Anna Bernard discusses this important function of literature as a counter-nationalist instrument for providing other perspectives required for getting to grips with the complex nuances of partition. She argues that it is possible to identify distinct plotlines, genres and aesthetic modes within the genre of partition literature, in particular the romance, the Bildungsroman, and the fragmented narrative. 44 Here, literature plays a role similar to that of subaltern historiography in revealing the voices of the marginalised and the invisible. Since the 1990s, special notice has been given to reviving those muted and dormant voices which would amplify our understanding of Partition violence. 45 It is useful to cite here Anup Beniwal’s claim in Representing Partition where he speaks of the aesthetic space inherent in creative texts and its close-knit relation with socio-political dimensions that ineluctably ground it in life and society. The thrust is on how the novels he examines, how history, the understanding of their responses to Partition violence and the construction of the narratives all gravitate towards the theme of order and disorder. He also compares and contrasts the pre and post-Rushdie writings on Partition. 46 Berel Lang refers to the oblique and indirect methods employed by the creative artists (here, Aharon Appelfeld) to negotiate the terror of the Holocaust. Hence diverse methods are adopted to voice these horrors. Lang discusses this in Writing and the Holocaust; the introduction to his edited compilation of Holocaust writings. 47 As a former camp inmate and child survivor he refers to the urgency to tell the story of the Holocaust which is being haunted by the impossibility of telling. See Felman and Laub (Eds.), Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. pp. 57-84. 48 Jennifer Yusin and Deepika Bahri talk about this facet of Partition fiction in the course of their analysis of BapsiSidhwa’s Ice-Candy –Man. See Deepika Bahri’s essay “Writing Partition: Trauma and Testimony in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-

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Man” in Roy and Bhatia (eds.) Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement. pp.82-98. 49 These lines from Dinesh Das’s poem “Ponaraoi August 1947” (Fifteenth August, 1947) are quoted in Tapati Chakraborty’s essay “The Paradox of a Fleeting Presence: Partition and Bengali Literature” in Settar and Gupta (eds.) Pangs of Partition. p. 276. 51 Tagore, as a Bengal’s cultural representative during that time, composed this song to reignite the unified spirit of Bengal and drive public opinion against this communal division. The first line ‘Amar Sonar Bangla, Ami Tomay Bhalobashi’ means “My Golden Bengal I Love You” 52 The Rashid Ali Day (Feb, 1946)—wrongly described as Rashid Day—was a historic youth uprising in Calcutta (Kolkata) in which the members of the Congress, Forward Bloc, RSP, CPI and the ML participated. 54 Asru Kumar Sikdar’s article “Bhanga Banglar Sahitya” (Literature of Broken Bengal”) discusses the responses of Bengali authors to the Partition. Sikdar posits that Partition had caused the writers to feel very uncomfortable; many of them chose to remain silent as there was insurmountable difficulty in grappling with such a situation. 55 Khowabnama (Dream-Elegy) written from an explicitly communist perspective, stresses the fact that Partition was a meditated class collusion and uncovers it as a betrayal of the exploited, irrespective of their religious identity, on both sides. 57Agunpakhi (The Phoenix) chronicles the course of events within a rural family residing in Rarh of West Bengal. It records the impact of Partition on this family which gets divided as the children leave for Pakistan while their mother chooses to stay put. 59 See Anandabazar Patrika, Sunday, March 13, 1988. p.13 60 Here, literature from West Bengal is intended. I consciously use ‘Bengal’ because generally there is no categorical term ‘West Bengal literature’; rather these writings are referred to as ‘Bangla Sahitya’, meaning Bengal literature. 61 As quoted in Arthur Kleinman’s “The Violences of Everyday Life” in Veena Das et al. (Eds.) Violence and Subjectivity. p. 238 62 Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses the outbreak of communal riots in jute mills in Bengal. He explains how strong communal divisions, particularly among the migrant workers, contributed to conflict. See Veena Das (ed.) Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia. pp. 146-185. 63 Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben Ari flag up this particular issue; they enquire about the possibility of establishing a hierarchy of victimisation with regard to Partition violence. See Jassal and Ben-Ari (eds.) The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts. pp. 19-51. 64 Wilkinson employs the term ‘ethnic’ to describe Hindu-Muslim strife in Gujarat in 2002 in a wider sense. The riots of Gujarat are described as ethnic cleansing. See Steven Wilkinson “Putting Gujarat in Perspective” Economic and Political Weekly 37, 17 (27 April-3 May, 2002) pp. 1579-1583. 65 Mushirul Hasan in “Memories of a Fragmented Nation: Rewriting the Histories of India’s Partition” suggests that for an explanation of the events, Partition debate

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should be located beyond the conference chambers, and that only such an approach could generate a comprehensive view of the complexities associated with Partition violence during that time. See Sattar and Gupta (eds.) Pangs of Partition: The Human Dimension Vol II. pp. 171-190. 66 George J. Bryjak in “Collective Violence in India” argues that keeping in mind the pluralities of ethnicity and existence of multiple interests, the cause of riots should not be unquestionably assigned to any particular group. See George J. Bryjak “Collective Violence in India” Asian Affairs 13, 2 (1986) pp. 35-55. 67 Ervin Staub in his essay “Genocide and Mass Killing” hones in on the evolution of increasing violence and its effects on perpetrators and bystanders as well as the role of leaders and external and internal bystanders. See Ervin Staub “Genocide and Mass Killing: Origins, Preventions, Healing and Reconciliations” Political Psychology 21, 2 (June, 2000) pp. 367-382. 68 This trend refers to the investigative works carried out on Partition Violence and its victims by scholars like Urvashi Butalia, KamlaBhasin, Ritu Menon, Mushirul Hasan, Gyanendra Pandey, JasodharaBagchi, Subhoranjan Dasgupta et al. to draw attention to the legacy of Partition violence in day-to-day life. 69 SukeshiKamra stresses the need to reassess the received history of Partition from an elitist standpoint. She encourages a nuanced understanding of Partition violence by giving detailed attention to the other, as yet unexplored sources. Kamra’s views are incorporated into Bearing Witness: Partition Independence, End of the Raj. 70 Their study looks at how narratives and the experiences of social failure or weak citizenship form discursive spaces that can bring about real acts of violence. They exemplify how a low caste coastal community, the Arayas of North Kerela react to the Muslim/Araya killings in their region. 71 Asrukumar Sikdar examines Bangla literature’s response to Indian Partition; he draws out the multiple concerns which go into creating the directions of literary representations. 72 Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal in “De-Partitioning: Contesting Borders of the Mind in Bangladesh and India” deliberate on the possibility of perceiving Partition as creating a different experiential reality according to where the creating is done. See Jassal and Ben-Ari (eds.) The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts. pp. 7597. 73 See Parzania Dir. Rahul Dholakia Perf. Naseeruddin Shah, Sarika, CorinNemec, Raj Zutshi. PVR. 2007. 74 Chandra’s thesis is on the construction of communal ideology and the cause of its spread in modern India. Chandra seeks to understand, interpret and expose communalism for what it is. See Chandra’s Communalism in Modern India. 75 Pandey and Geschiere discuss the notion of nationhood, and show how the rhetoric of the inclusive claims of liberty and equality are promoted by nationalism and related movements, and how this is accompanied by the practice of excluding many classes, communities and individuals from these claims. See Pandey and Geschiere (eds.) The Forging of Nationhood. 76 Veena Das poses the question of whether it is possible to construct languages of pain and find out how one should inhabit a world that has been rendered alienating

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through desolating experiences of violence and loss. See Veena Das “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction,” Daedalus 125, 1 (1996) pp 67-91. 77 Here I categorically qualify the camps as “apparently opposing” because in terms of religious practice, they are rival communities but when it comes to the struggles of existence and lives writhing under grinding poverty, they belong to the same group. 78 Suranjan Das, Partha Chatterjee and Joya Chatterji have shown in their explorative works how religious symbols and rituals were used as tools to crystallise identities in a particular fashion and incite opposition between susceptible folk. 79 Paul R. Brass in “The Partition of India and the retributive genocide in the Punjab, 1946-47” emphasises the point that—in the drama of the Punjab massacre during Partition—no one group can be singled out for blame for the destruction; each group took part in the violence. See Brass Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms and Genocide in Modern India. 80 Here, one is reminded of a character like Hori Mahato in Munshi Premchand’s extraordinary novel Godan (1936) which is themed around socio-economic deprivation and the exploited lives of the village dwelling poor. 81 Rowena Robinson investigates the varying levels of marginality experienced by Indian Muslims and asserts that the recurrence of communal riots is responsible for this state of depravity. See Rowena Robinson “Indian Muslims: The Varied Dimensions of Marginality” Economic and Political Weekly 42, 10 (March 10-16, 2007) pp. 839-843. 82 Analogies of madness appear with frightening frequency in Partition tales. On one level, the metaphor of insanity is used there to communicate a sense of incomprehension, on another level it is employed to denote a refusal to comprehend. Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” is a classic example in this regard. 83 These lines are from the poem by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, “Dharavi (December 1992)” See Tarun Saint (ed.) Bruised Memories: Communal Violence and the Writer. pp 111-112. 84 Debates surrounding the ‘Two Nation theory’ or essentialist Hindu nationalist discourse mobilised people into exclusive ideological biases. In turn, this assisted in forming strident communal camps over that period. 85 Partha Chatterjee conducts an analysis of the reasons behind the second Partition of Bengal. He outlines how the first partition of Bengal was undone but the second partition became inevitable after some time. See Kaushik Roy (ed.) Partition of India: Why 1947? pp. 146-163. 86 Atin Bandyopadhyay’s Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje is one of the most moving narratives on the gradual disintegration of a happy communitarian presence in the wake of Partition. It is the first part of the trilogy comprising Aloukik Jalajan and Ishwarer Bagan. The novel centres on the activities of a small village near Narayanganj in Dhaka in erstwhile East Bengal. The narrative mainly represents the crisis of the Thakur family coming to terms with their village’s fast changing socio-political profile. Bandyopadhyay, through his poetic description of the idyllic village, heightens the sense of tragedy of an impending separation of lives.

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The narrative is peppered with frequent allusions to local cultural myths and legends associated with the Hindu-Muslim bond which in turn enrich the texture of narration. The author documents the growing awareness of the child protagonist Sona Thakur, his acute perception of the ongoing changes and the ultimate pain of leaving the village. Sona’s strong connection with Manindranath, his uncle, Isham Chacha, the devoted servant, and Fatema, his playmate, constitute a canvas of relationships characterised by mutual love and affection. The epical narrative weaves multiple threads of stories involving a cast of villagers like Malati, Joton, Jalali Biwi and Felu Sheikh. Overall, the hopes, aspirations, disillusionment and pains of separation from one’s own homeland are explored in the novel with deep sensitivity. 88 Joe Cleary works on the Partition theme in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, and illustrates how literature can be employed either as a means to consolidate or contest the official state cultures and divisive mentalities that reared their heads in the wake of Partition. See Cleary, Literature Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. 89 The conceptualisations of ‘desh’ as a category, and varied debates surrounding this concept have been explicated in this book’s chapter on Memory and Violence. 90 Badruddin Umar, who was in direct involvement with the freedom struggle in East Pakistan, gives an account of the political struggles which ultimately resulted in the formation of Bangladesh. See Umar The Emergence of Bangladesh, Class Struggles in East Pakistan (1947-1958). 91 Reminiscent of the charismatic entry of the firebrand nationalist leader, Sandip, in Tagore’s Ghare Bare (Home and the World). 92 Nationalist discourse promoting ‘home’ as an essentially Hindu space and an exclusively sacred place for women has been discussed at length in this book’s chapter on Women and Violence. 93 The novel takes an evocative look at the idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim coexistence in the village of Rajdia in East Bengal, pre-Partition. The novel covers the span of village life after the arrival of Abanimohan and his family in Rajdia in 1940s. The reader follows the gradual metamorphosis of village life, the sudden outpour of violence in the village, the brutal murder of the dedicated Irish doctor Lalmor in a whirlwind of communal retaliation. As in Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje, the novel essentially represents the growth of Binu as a deeply sensitive individual witnessing the collapse of the community’s structure in the village. Though the narrative is mainly concerned with the events in Hemnath’s family life in the village, it performs the role of commenting on the pressing socio-political issues of the time as well. The final stage of the novel records the atrocious murder of Jhinuk, Binu’s companion and the subsequent series of crises which push Binu and Jhinuk to relocate to Calcutta. Jhinuk’s reception in the community is characterised by strain and tension. The novel effectively elucidates the traumatic dimensions of Partition. 94 This line occurs in Lalithambika Antherjaman’s story “A Leaf in the Storm”. Trans. Narayan Chnadra. See Bhalla (ed.) Stories about the Partition of India Vol I. p. 163

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These lines occur in Gulzar’s poem “Toba Tek Singh”. Trans. Anisur Rahman See Ravikant and Tarun K Saint (eds.) Translating Partition. p. x 96 Feminist scholars such as Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Veena Das, Jasodhara Bagchi, and Gargy Chakrabarty attempted to retrieve the voices of the marginalised in numerous ways—voices which had no official validation and so were cornered and ignored. 97 See Sukrita Paul Kumar’s “Re-membering Woman” Pratilipi: A Bilingual Literary Journal December 2012 Web. 15 April 2013

98 In this particular interview given to Bhalla in Partition Dialogues, Sidhwa also contends that when women are attacked, it is not themselves per se who are the targets, but the men to whom they belong. It is humiliating for a man to see his woman being abused before him. 99 In this connection it is important to note that in the case of Bengal, while it is only recently that much has been said about the gendered nature of Partition violence, it has always widely been acknowledged that violence against women did take place. We can mark the start of a change with the appearance of The Trauma and the Triumph edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta. 100 See Anwesha Sengupta’s “Looking Back at Partition and Women: A Factsheet” South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 4, 1 (2012) Web. 22 March 2013

101 See Ella Moore’s “Partition: Everyday Lives and Loyalties in West Bengal” eInternational Relations Web. 22 March 2013 102 A version of this section has appeared in my article published in the journal Contemporary Discourse. See Choudhury, Suranjana “Secular Families: Communal Violence and the Question of Women’s Honour in Select Partition Narratives” Contemporary Discourse: A Peer Reviewed International Journal, Vol.2 (1) ISSN 09763686, January 2011:130-135. 103 These lines are from Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Lajwanti” translated by Alok Bhalla, in his edited compilation Stories about the Partition of India Vol I. p. 72 104 Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Lajwanti” and Jamila Hashmi’s “Ban-Vaas” are two of the most well-known narratives from the western part, drawing upon the theme of Sita’s exilic condition in The Ramayana. The present-day Sita is first raped and then forced to live a life of shame and disgrace. In her exile she receives insults and mental torture. 105 This narrative focuses exclusively on the problems and difficulties associated with camp lives as a consequence of the large-scale displacement that occurred during Partition. The narrator, Writobroto, is shown to be a construction overseer deputed to look after the construction-related issues in Bakultala P.L. Camp. It unfolds the layers of shady politics and corruption which surrounded such refugee camps during the time. The novel examines how Writobroto, who was once a distanced onlooker, gradually becomes entangled in the web of the camp’s politics. On the one hand, the narrative records the predicament of a destitute woman like Kusum and the kind of ostracism she has to undergo even from the other camp

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inmates. Through the gradual unveiling of the complexities of camp life, the narrative constitutes a poignant documentation of the levels of injustice meted out to these helpless, homeless groups of people. The righteous Writobroto strives hard to fight against the prevalent corruption and to improve the camp’s conditions. In the process he is framed by a group of wicked adversaries. However, the novel ends on a note of optimism after Writobroto marries Kamala, an inmate of Bakultala P.L. camp. 106 Jill Didur draws upon Tanika Sarkar’s discussion on gender and nationalist discourse in South Asia to validate her arguments on the same issue. See Jill Didur’s Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. 107 In this context it is useful to recall how Uma Chakravarti questions the construction of nationalist discourse of a mythic Hindu-Aryan identity during nineteenth century, in “Whatever Happened to Vedic Dasi? Orientalism Nationalism and Script for the Past”. See Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. pp. 27-87 108 This novel explores the predicament of an abducted woman, Sutara, and exposes the hypocritical traditions of a society which perpetually marginalises women like her. Sutara is a victim of communal violence during the infamous Noakhali riots. Within a span of just one night she loses her parents, her sister disappears, and she becomes a victim of the riot. She is given refuge by a neighbouring Muslim family where she is brought back to health through their constant nursing. When she is taken to her brother’s family in Calcutta, her reception within the family is marked by both tension and ambiguity. Eventually she is sent to a boarding house where she completes her education and finds a job as a teacher in Delhi college. In fact, this is a permanent exile for her, because her relatives in Calcutta implicitly indicate that she is not needed in the family. The narrative unveils the levels of ostracism and public criticism Sutara has to encounter at every moment of her life, and shows how she is left to lead a life of isolation. However, the novel ends with the sign of a new beginning for Sutara when Pramode, her sister in law’s brother, proposes marriage to her. The novel is looked upon as one of the most sensitive takes on the duplicitous functioning of the society towards its women. Here I would like to mention that I have used the translated title of Enakshi Chatterjee, but the textual passages used in the chapter are all my own translations. 109 In interviews conducted by Butalia, Bhasin and Menon, these social workers have provided specific circumstantial problems that they encountered while working in the recovery operations of abducted women. 110 I have discussed extensively the psychic dimensions of traumatized subjectivity and its repeated expression in the later stages of life in my chapter on Memory and Violence. 111 In a different context, Susan Stanford Friedman explains how the concept of virginity as a prize and a badge of male honour is common to many cultures. She cites the example of Edwidge Danticat’s novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, to substantiate her argument. See Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Bodies on the Move: A

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Poetics of Home and Diaspora” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 23, 2 (2004) pp. 189-212 112 Lata Mani’s argument is based on the practice of Sati across various cultures in India during the colonial period, and the debate advocating its abolition that was widely generated. She discusses it in her essay “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India”. See Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History New Delhi: Kali For Women, 1989. pp. 88-126 113Ekghore is used here to denote a state of banishment from the folds of society. In a general sense ekghore refers to a condition of being excluded from society; it is seen as a form of punishment given in response to flouting so-called social and moral codes. Here Sutara is rendered ekghore because of her marginalised status as an abducted woman. 114Pilshuj refers to the holder of a lamp; when a lamp is lit and radiates brightness, the holder remains in darkness. Here the author uses the metaphor of pilshuj to indicate the perpetual darkness which envelopes the lives of abducted women. They are condemned to lead a life of negligence and oblivion. 115 Here it is important to remember another story which focuses on the Western division: “Shei Chheleta” (“That Boy”) by Jyotirmoyee Devi. The story traces how Raj encounters her long-lost abducted mother in a pathetic state. Her mother, who had led a protected life in a wealthy family, is rendered homeless in a brutal turn of events. Like Sutara, her life is also marked by betrayal, shame and dispossession, both social and psychological. 116 Kavita Daiya deliberates on Terry Eagleton’s assessment of Clarissa’s rape in Samuel Richardson’s text in order to examine the implications of rape in Aya’s life in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man. See Kavita Daiya’s Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Postcolonial India. 117 Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar’s arguments are based on the differences in nationalist discourse regarding women and the way female writers conceptualized the experience of women in three contexts: the middle-class Muslim reform movement, the Algerian Revolution, and the Partition of India. See Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar’s Haram in the Harem: Domestic Narratives in India and Algeria New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. 118 These lines are from Anjali Bhardwaj Datta’s essay, “Gendering Oral History of Partition: Interrogating Patriarchy” Economic and Political Weekly 41, 22 (June, 3-9, 2006) p. 2229. 119 Interestingly, after Partition there was a huge transformation in the public sphere with the emergence of women as working people, especially in Bengal. As the majority of the displaced people gravitated towards Calcutta it was natural that the entire socio-economic structure underwent a radical change. Images of busy women crowding the streets of Calcutta are a common representation of the fallout of Partition. 120 Navnita Chadha Behera points out the major changes in status, and in the identities of the migrant women and the multiplicities rooted in such a

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construction. See Navnita Chadha Behera(ed) Gender, Conflict, Migration: Women and Migration in Asia. 121 This novel delivers a very shattering picture of a refugee family struggling hard to eke out an existence in the period following Partition. The narrative underscores specifically the hardships experienced by Nita, the elder daughter, in order for the family to sustain themselves amidst many difficulties. She is represented as the archetypal sacrificing daughter whose glory lies in giving up her entire being for the proper functioning of the family. In her perpetual struggle for her family, and in her constant endeavours to make her people happy, she is rendered painfully lonely. Her lover, Sanat, deserts her, only to find companionship in her more beautiful sister Gita. Towards the end, when family attains some measure of stability, she is consumed by the wrath of terminal illness. The novel ends with her tragic death and her brother’s realisation of the many other Nitas suffering the same plight in the newly partitioned nation. 122 Rachel Weber explores the ways in which the spatial form and the social process interact to produce maps of territoriality and identification. See Rachel Weber’s essay “Re (Creating) the Home” in Bagchi and Dasgupta (eds.) The Trauma and the Triumph Vol I. pp.59-79 123 Here it is important to mention that in her essay, “Refugee Women, Immigrant Women: The Partition as Universal Dislocation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”, Chakraborty explores the politics of imagining similarities between these two different kinds of displacements. See Gera Roy and Bhatia (eds) Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, Resettlement. pp.227-239 124 Uditi Sen explores the various images or stereotypes regarding Bengali middleclass refugee women that circulated in post-Partition West Bengal: the image of the raped woman, the image of the socially and economically marginalised woman and the image of the breadwinner. See Uditi Sen “Spinster, Prostitute or Pioneer: Images of Refugee Women in Post Partition Calcutta” EUI Working Papers Max Weber Programme MWP 2011/34 Web. 14 April 2013 http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/19216/MWP_Sen_2011_34.pdf 125Tapasya, a movie from 1976, explores similar themes of sacrifice, following those made by the eldest daughter Indu to look after her siblings. She too is exposed to unending demands from her family members. See Tapasya Dir: Anil Ganguly Perf: Rakhee, Parikshit Sahani, Asrani Rajsri Pictures 1976. Film 126 Daiya looks at the film as a Marxist critique of women’s commodified exploitation, whose melodramatic excess highlights the economic and familial abjection of the urban, working-class, Hindu female refugee Nita. See Kavita Daiya’s Violent Belongings pp.144-147 127 Darini Rajasingham Senanayake talks about the problematic empowerment of the Tamil Muslim women living among competing nationalisms in the postconflict zones of north-east Sri Lanka in the process of the mediation of multiple identities in Navnita Chadha Behera(ed) Gender, Conflict, Migration: Women and Migration in Asia. pp. 175-204. 128 Gargy Chakravartty mentions Rani Dasgupta’s documentation of varied roles taken up by women to sustain themselves in Dasgupta’s article “Deshbhag

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Udvastu o Meyera” (“Partition Refugees and Women”) in Coming out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal. 129 Portions of arguments used in this chapter have featured in some of my articles. See Choudhury, Suranjana “Wrecked Human Marches: Partition Exodus in Some Literary Narratives from Bengal” The Visva-Bharati Quarterly. Vol. 22(3&4) ISSN 0972043X, September, 2013: 171-182, Choudhury, Suranjana “Pangs of Being Un-Homed: Engagements with Displacement and relocation in select Partition Narratives From Bengal” The NEHU Journal (Vol. XII, No.1) ISSN.0972-8406, January-June, 2014 and also Choudhury, Suranjana “Difficult Displacements, Lost Homes: Partition in Select Autobiographical Writings” in Journal of Literature and Culture Studies (Vol V, Issue 1) June, 2018, ISSN 23481188. 130 These lines are taken from Sankha Ghose’s poem “Prothom” (“First”) included in his poetry collection Hashi Khushi Mukhe Sarbonash. p.56. The translation is mine. 131 This is the lyric of a song featured in the Hindi film Refugee (2000) directed by J.P. Dutta. The film deconstructs the validity of the formation of borders, and their impact on individual lives through the medium of a love story. The lyric was written by renowned poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar. The translation is mine. 132 In the case of migrants who went to Pakistan, it was initially a promising moment because they held the view that Pakistan, as a nation, would offer them better living, and greater opportunities to start anew in life. For the people who came to India, Partition meant a loss of land, culture and familiar society. 133Though it is called the exchange of population, in the case of Partition it is essentially ‘coerced migration’ involving obligatory departure. Most of the Partition narratives talk about the waves of forced displacement and their concomitant strands of anguish and trauma. Partition is the prism in which the stakes in the study of forced migration become sharper. 134 These scholars have variously worked on diverse dimensions of migration and relocation studies. Their research provides a wider scope for developing comparative analytical frameworks for understanding how borders and partitions continue to mould social changes in the contemporary world. 135 Hannah Arendt’s views on the status of statelessness and its relationship with human rights are specifically incorporated in “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of Rights of Man” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt very pertinently points out that the calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, adventure or pursuit of happiness, but that they do not belong to any community at all. 136 This transformation in the sphere of language usage signifies that along with a major shift in the space of habitation, the displaced people were also greatly appropriated by the dominant cultural stream of West Bengal. While Dyash is a Bangal expression used by the East Bengalis, Desh represents the more refined and standardised Bengali term. 137Meghna Guha Thakurta is an expert in gender studies. Her own familial connection with Partition prompted her deep examination of the subject. In her

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works, we find family reminiscences of fear and sorrow at the time of Partition that led to diasporas of families on both sides of Bengal. For her, families are the sites where the memories of individuals and generations are constructed and negotiated. 138 Their pioneering works on Bengal displacement and relocation provide a nuanced analytical framework for understanding the details of refugee problems in West Bengal. See Prafulla Chakraborty’s The Marginal Men, Ranabir Samaddar edited Reflections on Partition in the East and Refugees and the State: Practices of Care and Asylum in India, 1947-2000, Joya Chatterjee’s Spoils of Partition, Bengal and India,1947-1967. 139 A huge scale of dislocation affected not only West Bengal but also Assam and Tripura. The new physical frontiers which were created also shaped the polities which these provinces circumscribed. 140 Ranajit Roy emphatically elaborates on the aspect of the rehabilitation strategies in West Bengal in his article “Poschim Banger Udvastu: Kendra Rajya Dwando Rajniti” (“Refugees of West Bengal: Centre-State Conflict and Politics”) in Deshbhag: Smriti o Stobdota. Bashabi Fraser also draws upon Ranajit Roy’s thesis on Partition displacement and its impact on government policies as elaborated in Roy’s The Agony of West Bengal. 141 Meghna Guha Thakurta makes a similar observation in her article “Uprooted and Divided” where she talks about a frightening and tense situation during the nine-month occupation of Dhaka by the Pakistani Army. Even though daily activities were carried out as normal, people were constantly under threat and fear. 142 Ranabir Samaddar points out that the nation becomes marginalised in South Asia through the inter-relationship of seasonal migration subsistence production and peasant relations in community formation. He argues that such migration involves an entire spectrum of rights which needs to be analysed keeping in mind the context of South Asia. See Ranabir Samaddar, The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal. 143 Painters such as Satish Gujral and Jogen Chowdhury have used painting as a medium for expressing their perception of this cataclysmic event. Their paintings reflect an intractable solitude and alienation that is closely associated with Partition. 144Bandyopadhyay has also worked on this subject in another book called Deshbhag, Deshtyag (Partition and Displacement) He observes in particular that in many narratives on Partition, violence recurs as a dominant theme. For the victims, the act of violence appears to be more paradoxical than the act of dividing the country. 145The film Chhinnamool (1951), directed by Nimai Ghosh, depicts the pain and crisis associated with the dislocation of Partition. It captures the tragedy of a divided state. The plot is a loosely structured drama about a group of farmers from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) forced to flee to Calcutta after the tumultuous and bloody events of 1947. Using a cast made up of non-actors, and using no make-up and no songs, the film has a distinct documentary feel. 146Niharranjan Gupta’s Kalo Bhromor is worth mentioning. Amitav Ghose’s The Glass Palace is a pertinent text here. Supriya Choudhuri, the celebrated Bengali

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actress, talks about her own experiences of dislocation from Burma in her autobiographical narrative Amar Jibon Amar Uttam, which was serialised in the magazine Sananda. 147These lines are taken from Amrita Pritam’s poem “Divided” which is quoted in Nonica Datta’s “Transcending Religious Identities”, in Partitioned Lives edited by Gera Roy and Bhatia. p. 15. 148Many national archives and libraries have preserved photographs of train journeys taken during Partition migration. Some editions of Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan use one such image as the cover photo. 149 The cover photo of Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter was taken by Sunil Janah. Fraser obtained this photograph from a web archive: 150 This novella by Shanta Sen takes an engaging look at the spiral of events which displaces the all-loving pitamohi (grandmother) from her ancestral land in the wake of Partition. The narrative reflects on the annual celebrations which took place in the grandmother’s house during Durga Puja and which would bring all the family members to enjoy a blissful vacation in her idyllic household. However, the violence of Partition destroys everything, and forces the grandmother to perform a gruelling journey from her home in order to seek shelter at her son’s home in Calcutta. Her journey is fraught with untold miseries and painful episodes. When she finally reaches her son’s house, she is left with barely any strength. However, she manages to survive through the night to narrate her experiences of suffering to her grandchildren, so that they may witness the pain and trauma of dislocation embodied in pitamohi. 151 Most of the personal reflections and reminiscences on Partition inadvertently speak of a sense of attachment to an ancestral land. Home, in this regard, emerges as a site for preserving personal ties and emotional values. 152One is reminded of Raja Rao’s Kanthapura where the village grandmother weaves the story together. Her narration brings in a synthesis of diverse perspectives and concerns. 153 Dorin, here, refers to a drawer—a wooden box attached to the dressing table for holding all the necessary homely items. Mago, being ignorant of the English word, appropriates it to her own dialect and terms it as ‘dorin’. 154 In his study, Parthasarathi Bhaumick primarily shows a deeper historical relation to the modern construction of ideas about nations and borders which are in turn influenced by European colonial interventions. See Parthasarathi Bhaumick’s “The Year of Independence, the Year of Partition: Between History and Memory” in Debra Castillo and Kavita Panjabi (Eds.), Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas. p. 51-60 155 In colonial cultural discourse, Kalapani meant exile and confinement in the prisons of the Andamans across the sea. It was a form of severe punishment for the offenders who dared to fight against the British administration. 156 Lenny, the child protagonist in Ice Candy Man, bears witness to the rapidly changing surroundings and her own life is shaped by these sudden changes. Her role does not remain confined to being only a child; she inadvertently becomes

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involved in a whirlwind of volatile episodes. It is worth mentioning here that Kamakshiprasad Chattopadhyay’s short story “Bulbuli” records a similar strand of Partition violence as experienced by Bulbuli, a girl child and the narrator of the story. 157 Monmayee Basu’s observations are based on interviews conducted with the displaced Hindu women who had migrated during Partition. All of them had to face huge discrimination and neglect from the government, while attempting to rebuild their lives in India. 158 In the context of any discussion on minoratarian claims on the nation, it is useful to remember that films such as Garam Hawa, Naseem, Zakhm, Fiza and Mammo, like many literary fictions, are concerned with the ambivalent and anomalous place of Muslims in the discourses of Indian nationhood and citizenship. They ask us to consider what happens when one inhabits a marginalised and dispossessed subject-position and what kind of ethical and political claims can be articulated from such positions. 159 In Neelkontho Pakhir Khonje, also, Sona’s family decides to leave for West Bengal, fearing that they would lose respectability and honour in a Muslimmajority state. For a long time, the family had received respect from their Muslim neighbours, but they were anxious that after Partition such things would drastically change. 160 One is reminded of Syed Walilulah’s “Ekti Tulsi Gacher Kahini” (“The Story of a Tulsi Tree”) in which an abandoned house is occupied by homeless migrants. The story evokes a sentimental tone involving the left-behind treasures of the departed family. 161 Ranajit Guha, the noted historian, examines the peculiar predicament of an exile attempting to assimilate in a new and alien environment. See Partha Chatterjee (Ed.), Small Voice of History: The Collected Essay by Ranajit Guha. 162Sharanarthi literally means someone seeking refuge and protection from a higher power, whereas Udavastu means someone who has been extricated from his/her home. In Bengali, the word is often combined with the word bhita (or bhite), a word connected to the Sanskrit word bhitti meaning ‘foundation’. The idea of ‘foundation’ is again associated with the idea of ‘male ancestry’ so that the combined word vastuvita reinforces the association between patriliny and the way in which one’s dwelling or home is connected to the conception of foundation. Dipesh Chakrabarty has elaborately discussed this aspect in “Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the aftermath of the Partition” Economic and Political Weekly, 31, 32 (August10, 1996) p.2143-2151 163 Some notable anthologies include Sandip Bandyopadhyay’s Deshbhag: Smriti O Swatta (Partition: Memories and Selves), Semonti Ghosh (ed.) Deshbhag: Smriti O Stobdota (Partition: Memories and Silences), Madhumoy Paul (ed.) Deshbhag: Binash O Binirman (Partition:Destruction and Reconstruction) 164 Sukeshi Kamra uses this term in her article “Partition and Post-Partition Acts of Fiction: Narrating Painful Histories” in Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement edited by Anjali Gera Roy and Nandin Bhatia.

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Kamra uses it to denote the total disruption of meaning and coherence in a partitioned world. 165 This novella by Sunil Gangopadhyay captures the anguish and turmoil of refugee existence very effectively. The narrative is set against the backdrop of a refugee colony in Calcutta which was established some years after Partition occurred. Arjun, the protagonist, is a modern delineation of the valiant mythical hero who had waged a grand war to protect his community. The author re-situates the epic in the modern context in order to bring forth the changing dimension of man’s relationship with his community. Arjun, a young victim of Partition, aspires to change his life through his academic achievements, but he finds himself trapped in the conflicts afflicting his colony. When the owner of an adjacent plywood factory conspires with the landowner to evict the colony, the situation worsens and the other refugees turn to Arjun for leadership. This is a critical juncture in the novel because Arjun has to decide between standing up for his marginalised, dispossessed community or abandoning them for a better life of his own. The novel also conducts a sharp critique of the rising capitalist rhetoric which engulfed society in the post Partition phase. Like the invincible archer of the Mahabharata, Arjun’s final decision propels him to take actions that are underpinned by his bond with the colony inhabitants. 166 Muktasainiks refer to the warriors who fought during the Bangladesh Liberation War. 167 One is reminded of a film such as Tapan Sinha’s Atanka which projects the menacing presence of young-boys-turned-petty-criminals, perpetrating violence and victimising people in their vicinity. 168 George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a brilliant take on the oppressive regime of a ruling force named as Big Brother, and his league. It renders a frightening picture of coercive power completely annihilating individual voices. 169 This is a translated part of a Lalon song by Sudipto Chatterjee. Lalon was a Bengali Baul, a saint and a mystic. He was a radical thinker who rejected all of the boundaries constructed by religion, caste, and creed. He is looked upon as a secularist and an iconic social reformer; he continues to exercise great influence upon contemporary art and culture. Refer to Chatterjee’s translation

170Parzania is an extremely engaging film about the Gujrat pogrom of 2002. This film traces the plight of many minority citizens of Gujarat and conducts a sharp criticism of the narrow communal politics and the complicity of the state in the entire process. See Parzania Dir. Rahul Dholakia Perf. Naseeruddin Shah, Sarika, Corin Nemec, Raj Zutshi. PVR. 2007. 171Mr and Mrs Iyer is a movie that is intended as a protest against the strident identity politics that are based on a polarized conception of religions. The movie strives to explore an alternative worldview which is more tolerant and accommodative. See Mr and Mrs Iyer. Dir. Aparna Sen. Perf. Rahul Bose, Konkona Sen Sharma, Bhisam Sahni, Surekha Sikri. MG & Tips. 2002.

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Martha C Nussbaum discusses the importance of compassion and care in a world disturbed by conflict and terror attacks. She also problematises the concept of compassion and looks at its varied applicability and functionality since the 9/11 attacks. 173 Tridivesh Singh Maini, along with two scholars from Pakistan, Tahir Malik and Ali Farooq Malik, has done significant work on the theme of humanity amidst the Partition violence. Their work unravels a repository of incidents which talk about mutual trust and faith in the wake of Partition. See Tridivesh Singh Maini “Traces of Humanity in Indo-Pak History”. Journal of Religion, Conflict and Peace, 4, 2(2011) Web. 11 April 2013. 174 Nandy’s lectures feature in a blog post called “Cuckoo’s Call”. Web. 14 March 2013 175 Khaled Ahmed is a leading political analyst of Pakistan. He wrote his review of Humanity amidst Insanity in an article entitled “Partition: Only One Quarter Human” Web. 14 March 2013

176 The concept of ‘Satyagraha’ was developed by Mahatma Gandhi in the course of his fight against colonial rule. It refers to “insistence on truth” and it implies a particular practice which is intended to lead to non-violent resistance. Gandhi’s adherence to non-violent opposition had an impact on a global scale. 177 See Sean Scalmer’s essay “Globalising Gandhi: Translation, Reinvention, Application, Transformation”. He contends that the globalisation of Gandhi offers many lessons to contemporary students of global and radical politics. The nonviolence inspired by Gandhi has passed across the polity and energised social movements of many kinds, and this process has produced new types of collective performance 178 William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954) is an allegorical novel which looks at the dark, evil side of human nature. It traces the collapse of civilising forces when a group of children find themselves inhabiting an isolated island without any adult supervision. It shows the exposition of a violent, merciless world in that abandoned habitation. However, it shows that a few of the children retain their civilised selves to save their disintegrating world. 179 In the preface to his edited collection Bhed-Bibhed (Differences and Disharmonies), Manabendra Bandyopadhyay discusses the various aspects of communal violence and its varied expressions in Bengali literature. 180 The novel is a poignant depiction of the human relationships which were turbulently affected by the menace of communal hostility before Partition. The narrative traces the chain of events which shapes the consciousness of Sulekha, the strong-minded woman protagonist of the novel. Although from one perspective this is a narrative which revolves around the unusual love story between Sulekha and Sultan Ahmed, it also talks about the socio-political issues which were troubling society at that time. Sulekha and Sultan come from the same place and have shared a familial association since their grandfathers’ time. Sultan experiences a deep emotional attachment towards Sulekha, but she responds to it

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with cynicism and bitterness. As the communal tension escalates, Sulekha holds Sultan responsible for the growing tension and decides to murder him as an act of vengeance. However, Sulekha fails in her attempt and is held captive at Sultan’s home. Towards the end, when Sultan accompanies Sulekha to Calcutta to return her to her family, her bitterness towards him disappears. At the end, Sultan is assassinated by a group of Hindu killers and Sulekha clutches at his lifeless body, proclaiming him to be her husband. 181 Manik Bandyopadhyay, one of the finest voices of modern Bengali literature, wrote perpetually against exploitation and the depravity of human nature. He was compulsively engaged with the rural society of Bengal and addressed the darker, unexplored shades of human behaviour. 182 Shanta Sen’s novel Jonmer Mati (Ancestral Land) gives a similar description of people’s neighbours appropriating their deserted plots. When Gayatri visits her ancestral village after many years, the place has changed beyond recognition and she realises that their property is being used by a neighbouring family. 183 Beniwal’s observation is based on his analysis of Indian-English fictions on Partition such as Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, H.S. Gill’s Ashes and Petals, Raj Gill’s The Rape, Chaman Nahal’s Azadi, and Manohar Malgaonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges. 184 Bhisam Sahni responds similarly to a question posed by Alok Bhalla in an interview on Partition violence and his memory of it. See Alok Bhalla, “The landscape of Memories and the writing of Tamas: An interview with Bhisam Sahni” in Settar and Gupta (eds.) Pangs of Partition: The Human Dimension. pp. 83-116. 185 Here, it is useful to remember another narrative of Bandyopadhyay’s: Adim Ripu (Primal Desire), which talks about the violence that ripped through Bengal before Partition. It was a moment when life in Calcutta was under a perpetual a pall of menace and danger. In Adim Ripu it is Bantul Sardar, a Hindu antisocial, who generates fear amongst the local people. 186 This article features in a special section discussing Rabindranath Tagore. Web. 2 April, 2013.

187 Berel Lang deliberates on this aspect of Holocaust writings in the introductory chapter of his compilation Writing and the Holocaust in which he introduces the subject of holocaust writings. 188 The 2013 Shahbag protests, which were associated with a central neighbourhood of Dhaka, Bangladesh, began on February 5, 2013 and later spread to other parts of the country as people demanded capital punishment for Abdul Quadar Mollah— who had been sentenced to life imprisonment—and for others convicted of war crimes by the International Crimes Tribunal. Thousands of Bangladeshis joined the demonstration to strengthen their cry for justice.