Partition Studies

From Tattered Past to Triumphant Present: Weaving Partitioned Lives by a Dalit Girl-child in Kalyani Thakur Charal’s Novella Andhar Bil O Kicchu Manush

///
585 views

Atreyee Sinha1 & Shuchi2
1Research Scholar, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. ORCID: 0000-0001-6755-2019. Email: atreyee.lterature@gmail.com.
2Assistant Professor, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. ORCID: 0000-0001-9462-8664. Email: shuchi.hss@nitmz.ac.in.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.15 
Abstract Full-Text PDF Issue Access

Abstract

Inherited memory reflects the intensity of the impact of incidents, experienced by the ancestors on the descendants, and in the case of the partition of Bengal, these memories of memories are about both the violence-induced partition and its distressful reverberations as well as about the amiable and delightful past habitation in East Bengal. However, the awful commotion that the survivors confront steals all the researchers’ attention, pushing the amicable exhibition in the past land to the background. Again, the transportation of memory to the second generation of these refugees assists them to reconstruct as well as to dismantle the eulogized notion of the lost land and look to analyze the past incident in a more pragmatic way that consequently leads to a dichotomous intellection of the two generations, as can be found in the novella Andhar Bil O Kicchu Manush (Waterbody Named Andhar and Some People) by Bengali Dalit writer Kalyani Thakur Charal. The juvenescence dealing with the postmemory of past times by the progeny of the refugees, more specifically by a Dalit girl in this novella, paves the way for further study on the class, caste, and gendered space of Dalit women in partitioned Bengal from the perspective of a child. A deductive, analytical, and objective method has been used in this research to comprehend the factual local historiography of a particular community in a specific locality of the border region of West Bengal through a fiction based on the collective memory of the populace.

Keywords: postmemory, Bengal, Namasudra, refugee, childhood, second-generation

You might be interested in

Narrating “India”: Liminal Narratives of Northeast and Assertion of Identity

///
1K views

Liji Varghese
Assistant Professor of English, All Saints’ College, Trivandrum, Kerala, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-5373-5911. Email: liji.eng@allsaintscollege.ac.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-10. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne27

First published: June 25, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

The canonical notion of the Nation has always been a highly problematic and significant motif in Indian English literature. A close perusal reveals the staggering conflicts that arise as the counter-narratives raise pertinent questions that dispute the validity of the official discourse. One may argue that it is too simplistic to think of a singular concept of ‘India’ that can appease the demands of pluralistic narratives. Rather, one should envisage ‘Indias’ that open itself to fluid perspectives and accommodate polyphonic narratives. It is at such a juncture that writings from the Northeast India play a decisive role as they effectively re-mould the concepts of identity and authenticity in narrating the Indian experience. When writers like Siddhartha Deb, Anjum Hasan, and Anungla Zoe Longkumer examine the nuances of a liminal discourse that had hitherto been excluded from the nationalist canon, they become potent narratives that hint at the palimpsestic layers of a pluralistic discourse. The present paper tries to analyse works like The Point of Return (2003), Lunatic in My Head (2007) and The Many that I am (2019) as narratives that become persuasive layers of a palimpsestic notion of nation.

Key words: Liminal narratives, fluidity, palimpsestic India, identity and authenticity, Self/Other dichotomy


Narrating "India": Liminal Narratives of Northeast and Assertion of Identity

Introduction: Narrating the Nation

The nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries witnessed the nationalist movement in India making its presence felt in the myriad aspects of quotidian life. The growth of nationalist literature is concomitant with the idea of creating a nationalist discourse that expedited the creation of an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1986) which naturally served its purpose in disposing of the colonial yoke. Sunil Khilnani notes how the creation of the political entity called modern India has been fashioned out of diverse ideas. According to him, “the possibility that India could be united into a single political community was the wager of India’s modern, educated, urban elite, whose intellectual horizons were extended by modern ideas and whose sphere of action was expanded by modern agencies.” (2012, p.5). However, as the literary nation thus narrated began its sojourn after independence, the earlier paradigms that served to define it had to be constantly re-written to accommodate nascent narratives that had remained silenced in an earlier era. The monolith of ‘India’ has been replaced by plural narratives that celebrate the protean nature of ‘Indias’.

“In emphasising the fluidity of boundaries, … texts have moved a long way from the totalizing narratives of territorial nationalism. The idealism and absolute dichotomies of the early twentieth century cannot sustain a writer who lives in a more ambiguous and tentative world.” (Mukherjee, 1992, p.148)

The task of narrating the new ‘Indias’ has been unreservedly taken up by modern Indian English writers like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Manu Joseph and so on who believe that the personal is the political. In the decades following Indian independence, the sacrosanct ideal of the Indian nation and its official narratives were closely emulated in literature as well. Though there were voices of dissent, they were few and far in between. The dawn of the new century brought forth a class of writers who deliberately foregrounded liminal narratives and their untold perspectives. Narrating the nation is a complex task and narrating the liminal discourses couched within the nationalist narrative is even more intricate. Bhabha acknowledges the complexity of this process when he comments on how it evolves into a “… liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense cultural locations.” (Bhabha, 1990, p.299).

If one is to observe the narration of a nation like India, there is a surprisingly diverse variety of indigenous cultures jostling with each other for space and voice. “This discordant material was not the stuff of which nation-states are made; it suggested no common identity or basis of unity that could be reconciled within a modern state.” (Khilnani, 2012, p.152). The very notion of a fixed national identity becomes extremely cliched as it trivialises the pertinent signifiers of identity like sexuality or ethnicity or social class that each individual embodies. Huddart opines that “the power of a national narrative seems entirely confident of its consistency and coherence, but is all the while undermined by its inability to really fix the identity of the people, which would be to limit their identity to a single overpowering nationality.” (2007, p. 111)

The post-independence era witnessed a number of counter-narratives that sought to (re)define the ideas of identity and authenticity through potent discourses that sought radical revisions of the official narrative. The official narrative of nationalism clashes violently with the counter-narratives as they both follow different ideological tangents. The discourse of nationalism is one that is “predicated on exclusion” (Munasinghe, 2005, p.155), while liminal narratives stress on the ‘otherness’ that had been displaced from the mainstream. “Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual – disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities” (Bhabha, 1990, p.300).

It is in such a context that literature of Northeast India emerges as powerful counter-narratives that displace complacent notions of mainland India from asserting their perceived supremacy over the margins. The Northeast states had nursed an uneasy relationship with the Hindi heartland of India and had often been deliberately erased from what is touted as mainstream Indian culture. The literature from the Northeast area has made a powerful comeback in the recent decades and proudly stays away from the themes that preoccupy the official canon. While it is too simplistic to club together with the individual literary narratives of the various states under the rubric of Northeast literature, the same has been done by many critics as there are overarching themes and motifs that acknowledge a shared past. The precolonial oral narratives of the various tribes celebrated the unique and dynamic nature of the region. The Ahom dynasty in Assam nurtured a rich literary tradition and the invaluable Meitei scripts of precolonial Manipur reveal a heritage that is impressively expansive in its scope and design. The colonial need to homogenise the Northeast was an extremely complex process that shaped the later literary traditions of the region, with regard to its linguistic, cultural and political tangent. The postcolonial narratives of the region were often in English that passionately asserted the historic and social individuality of the Northeast. Commenting on the evocative nature of Northeast literature, Vivek Menezes comments that the reader is drawn “into an unknown world: tribal and globalised at the same time, not-quite India and perfectly content to remain that way” (Menezes, 2020). The Northeast literature is now characterised by poignant resonances of cultures that remain unique in the polyphonic narratives of modern India. The present paper tries to analyse how the crucial signifiers of identity and the Self/Other dichotomy manifest in layering the narratives of a palimpsestic nation by an intense perusal of works like The Point of Return (2003), Lunatic in My Head (2007) and The Many that I am (2019).

Gendered Identity and the dichotomy of Self/Other in Moulding Counter-narratives

In her Introduction to the anthology, The Many That I Am, Anungla Zoe Longkumer states emphatically, without any preamble, that the book is an attempt to narrate the Naga women’s account of history or specifically ‘herstory’. She says, “Instead of ‘others’ depicting a somewhat superficial image of the Nagas, it is Naga writers who are now espousing the need for honest probity into our inner selves in order to correct our past mistakes by creating a livable present” (Longkumer 2019, p.6). The Naga identity is here proudly proclaimed and the other narratives are dismissed as being “superficial”; narratives that masquerade as authentic but which lack credulity before the Naga Self. Chitra Ahanthem describes the book as “the socio-cultural history of Nagaland through its many women” (Ahanthem, 2019). One can even argue that the book and its creation constitute the emergence of a counter-narrative that revisits notions of Naga history and identity from a feminine perspective.

Identity is a crucial signifier in the creation of the Self and the process of asserting the authenticity of one’s identity is often quite complex.  “Rather than being primordial, identity is constructed, and its construction is strongly influenced by politico-historical and sociocultural conditions…. Depending on the context, an individual invokes different identities at different times” (Jayaram, 2012, p.56). One constantly seeks validation from other sources to assert a particular identity.

“Even more importantly, the self is projected in the first place in order to answer the glance of the other. Consequently, identity is not merely differentiated from alterity, the other, by singling itself out from a multiplicity of others; it is itself constituted in a dialectic process that interacts with the other” (Fludernik, 2007, p.261).

The Naga women writers have come forward to posit an identity that had earlier been silenced by master narratives of both the nation and patriarchy. They have initiated the “dialectic process” by a bold assertion that refuses to capitulate before the glance of the Other.

The validation of the Self doesn’t necessarily involve a blind negation of the Other; instead, it involves a keen awareness that accepts, disputes and re-creates the imposed sense of identity. In the essay, “Outbooks”, Narola Changkija narrates with great lucidity the clash of identities in her young Naga self when she develops awareness of the Others around her. “We lived in a tribal world, a Scheduled Tribes world, where our internal realities clashed with our external state of being. We were the descendants of ancient head-hunters, but we were dependent on the generous funds of a Central Indian government. We were not like the plains people, the tsumars” (Longkumer, 2019, p.128). She is aware of their ‘otherness’ and questions their presence in the world of the Nagas. It is this awareness that moulds her own sense of self as opposed to a militant stance of rejection or a supplicant attitude of mimicking.

The liminal narrative created by the Naga women becomes even more pertinent as it links gender with the idea of Nation/State/Tribe. Traditionally, women’s role in nationalist discourse has been subjected to specific paradigms that furthered the stereotypical depiction of women as custodians of culture. “The new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honour of a new social responsibility, and by associating the task of ‘female emancipation’ with the historical goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate, subordination” (Chatterjee, 1986, p.248). This trope in nationalist discourse is cleverly subverted in Vishu Rita Krocha’s story, “Cut Off” when Tasu the patriarch acknowledges that the stories of history and myth change for the better when women are involved. The traditional role of women as passive participants in men’s militant history is disputed when women establish peace in a situation that could have wiped out many lives. In a thorough subversion of gendered roles, the man is grateful that women intervened (Longkumer, 2019, p.35). “This may mean that women are simultaneously both less militaristic and less nationalistic because militarism is often seen as an integral facet of a national project” (Walby, 1996, p.252). War and violence are negated as constructs belonging to an outdated discourse and women chart the borders of a new discourse that looks at other alternatives as opposed to the earlier way of life.

Othering the Self: Notion of Authenticity in Liminal Narratives

The metanarrative of the nation often imposes a set of signifiers that define the parameters of normalcy. “A shared bedrock of pre-determined differentials that include religion, language, ethnicity and/or caste, work in conjunction with the existing cultural systems to infiltrate the collective consciousness and become ‘normalised’” (Silva, 2004, p.15).  The liminal narratives of a geographic region like the Northeast pose a threat to the metanarrative as it celebrates its ‘otherness’ and foregrounds its difference as its identity. The tension that arises when liminal narratives clash with the metanarrative often gathers its momentum from the notion of authenticity. How does one define authenticity and who is qualified to be the authentic voice of the metanarrative? Siddhartha Deb and Anjum Hasan play with the concept of authenticity when they depict how the process of othering becomes the crux for counter-narratives that deconstruct the notions of Self/ Other.

In narratives from the Hindi heartland, especially visual narratives that cater to the edicts of ‘popular (Bollywood) culture’, people from the Northeast and the Southern parts of India are caricatured, thus emphasising their ‘otherness’. Analysing the situation, Nityananda Kalita points out that this “national-centric discourse about the Northeast shaped mostly by former bureaucrats and retired army, police and intelligence officers is heavily pro-state and insensitive to the vulnerabilities of the common man and dismissive of the frequent transgressions of rights of its own citizens by the state” (Kalita, 2011, p. 1358).  The Point of Return and The Lunatic in my Head eschew simplistic narratives of unity found in nationalistic discourse and address the conflict-ridden narrative of the Northeast from the perspectives of both the indigenous people and the Bengalis. The novels also subvert the Self/ Other dichotomy when the narrative is focalised1 from the perspectives of non-indigenous people in Northeast who view it as home. They become the Other in the eyes of the natives who regard them as outsiders. They do not belong to the Northeast and therefore they are the Other, and the illusion of being an Indian who has chosen to reside in another part of India becomes one that mocks its own pretentious ideological framework. In The Point of Return, Dr. Dam and Babu are perplexed and saddened by the stark realisation of their otherness. They are termed as useless Bengalis coming over the border (Deb, p.22). And in a very telling sentence, Deb captures the predicament of the Other, who had tried to forge a new sense of Self. “No use for Bengalis, always coming over the border.” They said nothing, looking away at the Indian flag fluttering in front of the guard-house” (Deb, p.22). The Indian flag is a symbol of the nationalist discourse that harbours ideals of unity among diversity and the fragility of such ideals is exposed when Bengalis are termed as outsiders by the indigenous Hill people. The colonial era’s attempt to homogenise the Northeast with the ‘Indian mainland’ witnessed cultural and linguistic impositions on the natives. The Britishers’ attempt to standardise the vernaculars by imposing Bengali language was met with stiff opposition. The subsequent influx of Bengalis from East Pakistan during Partition and later during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war made the situation in Northeast (especially, the state of Assam) even more volatile. The indigenous people viewed the migrants with suspicion and hostility and this can be viewed as a continuum of their resistance to the erstwhile narratives of colonial hegemony. The conflict is rooted in the natives’ fear of “losing cultural identity and political power and not receiving its share of the region’s resources” (Kalita, 2011, p.1358). Deb’s portrayal of the tension between the natives and the ‘Bengalis’ like Dr. Dam and Babu emphasises this aspect. Such a narrative strategy can also be viewed as a parody of the official mainstream discourse where the roles of the Self and Other are subverted.

Dr. Dam muses about how people are deeply divided on account of their ethnicity.

“There had been a time when ethnic differences had been unimportant, and when he thought about it, even now most of his tribal colleagues were remarkably unprejudiced. If anything, it was his fellow Bengalis and other nontribal groups who were insular, with a vague sense of superiority over the tribal officers (Deb, p.74).

As the novel is narrated in a reverse chronological manner, we understand that Dr. Dam makes this observation at an earlier point in time and that the passage of years has eroded the fabric of unity that the metanarrative of the nation imposed on the individual states. The metanarrative of the Indian nation carries the vestiges of the colonial mission of homogenisation and this makes it even more problematic. The insidious ways in which the colonial power controlled the Northeast and the ensuing linguistic, cultural and racial conflicts are seldom recorded in the official discourse of the nationalist struggle. The renowned political scientist, Sanjib Baruah comments on how the colonial imposition of arbitrary political borders of the Northeast catered to the Britishers’ economic and administrative interests. He notes that such policies are carried forward by the Indian nation and argues that the term Northeast embodies the “history of a series of ad hoc decisions made by national security-minded managers of the postcolonial Indian state” (qtd. in Roychowdhury 2021). The conflict between the indigenous people and the Bengalis can be traced back to the colonial era, which witnessed a forceful imposition of the Bengali language on certain parts of the region. The Bengali presence in the region was perceived as an extension of the colonial regime and this worsened the relationship between the two communities. Dr. Dam’s observation about the Bengalis’ prejudice emphasise how the indigenous people were often alienated in their own land. As the narrative unfurls, the Bengalis are soon relegated to the status of the Other, just as they had viewed the tribals a few years earlier. When the tribal people make this distinction between themself and the immigrant Other, it becomes a counter-discourse to claim their sense of self that had earlier been effaced in the official narrative of the Nation. One can argue that “the novel shows the urgency of re-narrating the nation from the margin and also calls for the rethinking of the concept of nationhood and national identity or belonging.” (Mishra, 2021).

Hasan’s Lunatic in my Head takes this debate further when the outsiders are termed as dkhars and viewed with extreme hostility. The novel explores the seething undercurrents of the ethnic conflict that rages through the veins of Shillong. The political, regional and linguistic cartography of the Northeast had been remarkably altered during the colonial era and the initial years of the post-independence period. During the colonial period, the Bengali presence in the region was encouraged by the Britishers who wanted to assimilate the socio-cultural diversities of the various states into a homogenised mass for ease of governance. The violent undercurrents of Partition and the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 witnessed successive waves of immigrants settling in the Northeast and this further heightened the ethnic tensions in the region. The people of Northeast define identity in terms of their ethnic and linguistic markers and the presence of outsiders who attempt to dilute these signifiers of individual identity has always been a point of conflict. The conflict depicted in Lunatic in my Head has to be analysed from this perspective. Aman, one of the primary focalisers in the narrative, is confused and scared by the hostility that he faces from Max and his cronies because he has always considered Shillong his home. One can argue that home need not always be a location with definite spatio-temporal co-ordinates. It is a concept that is concomitant with a state of security; a feeling of being ‘at home.’ Aman is an outsider who seeks validation of his self. While he is accepted by his Khasi friends, Ribor, Ibomcha and Bodha, there is a strong wave of hostility that he faces due to his status as an outsider. Aman is caught in the ethnic tension that is one of the crucial conflicts raging within the Northeast. After decades of marginalisation, the Northeast internalises this conflict and the resultant Self/ Other dichotomy is one that had been fostered by their invisibility in the national metanarrative.

Sophie Das, a child born to a Bengali father and a ‘North Indian’ mother, internalises this conflict when she shuttles between the security provided by Kong Elsa, the Khasi matriarch and the veiled hostility that she imbibes from Jason, Elsa’s son. Her pain and humiliation at a party (Hasan p. 98-99) make her realise that the world is indeed different for different people. Sophie is ignored at the party because of her outsider status and if not for Elsa’s intervention, the child would have gone hungry. Sophie longs to belong to Elsa’s world so as to defy the mantle of the outsider. “She thought that the nicest thing, the nicest thing by far, . . . would be if she could somehow turn into one of them, somehow become Khasi” (Hasan p. 99). Sophie’s longing to be a Khasi is again a subversion of the tropes seen in mainstream narratives where the marginal dreams of a space of belonging. In the narrative of the Northeast, Sophie is the marginalised, who yearns to gain acceptance through finding Selfhood. Her self has been othered by the rejection at the party and she wishes to reclaim the same by appropriating the elusive identity of a native. The primary marker of identity here is ethnic and Sophie covets this unique identity. Bhagat Oinam comments on the complexities that underline the politics of identity in the Northeast, “As much as caste-based identification and division mark the state of the social and political structure in mainland India, the sociopolitical reality of Northeast India can be well captured through ethnicity-based identities and their dynamics” (Oinam, 2008, p.19). Sophie’s upper-caste identity becomes redundant as she lacks the ethnic status that would help her belong. Hasan has admitted that she deliberately foregrounded the narratives of migrants in the Northeast as it was a theme no one ever addressed (cited in Rahman, 2008). Thus, we have the evolution of counter-narratives within the counter-narratives of the Northeast. The Indian mainland has a number of Northeast migrants and the appalling discrimination that they face is seldom addressed in the metanarratives of the nation. Hasan’s counter-narrative focuses on a conflict that stems from the colonial policy of assimilation and subsequent migrations. The steady arrival of migrants soon turned into an exodus that threatened the demographic balance of the region. The natives’ hostility to the outsiders can also be viewed in the light of their growing anxiety towards what they perceived as a cultural hegemony in terms of linguistic and racial obtrusions. Therefore, Sophie and Aman become the face of the outsiders though they long to belong. The conflicts within the narrative can never be perceived in simplistic terms as it carries the embers of a tension that arose centuries ago.

The ethnic conflict raging within Shillong is emblematic of the identity conflicts that take place throughout India. It is a microcosm of the fissured world that we live in. The place is symptomatic of the nation that we belong to, an India that “is riddled by extremism and hatred for the other, for the outsider and where your identity is increasingly being attached to fixed, political categories, leaving no space for any fluidity and understanding of those who do not fit in into neat compartments” (Singh, 2019). The liminal narratives of Shillong and the other Northeast cities clash with the ossified dominant discourse that hinges on the ideas of nationalism and territorial integrity. As we are busy contesting the notion of authenticity, where does that leave the idea of India? Who then, is the real Indian, and whose narrative is the most authentic? As the earlier notions of a national discourse are now replaced by fragmented narratives, the idea of the nation itself has undergone a sea change. Khilnani notes that “the lines of political connection now run across and among these fragments, and are producing an intricate tessellation of identities” (Khilnani, 2012, p.193).

Conclusion: Towards a Palimpsestic Narrative of Nation

David Huddart defines palimpsests2 as “overwritten, heavily annotated manuscripts, on which earlier writing is still visible underneath newer writing: they offer a suggestive model of hybrid identity” (p.107). In an era, which celebrates the fluidity of narratives, it is perhaps imperative to explore nation as a palimpsestic narrative. A narrative that disputes canonical absolutes and embraces the protean power of nascent discourses. The literature from Northeast, both in English and in regional languages, contributes greatly to the rich yarn of a palimpsestic narrative. By foregrounding lived experiences and value systems that are distinctly different from the mainland culture, these liminal narratives forge explosive links between identity, gender, and the politics of power.

The sub-nationalist narratives of the Northeast have emerged as powerful counter-discourses that do not cater to the normative categories of the official narrative. The normative narratives that attempt to paint a glossy picture of turbulent political realities have now exploded in the face of persistent sub-nationalist currents. The monolithic ideals of religion and race; the deification of nation as motherland and the celebration of cliched ideals like unity in diversity are now actively disputed by counter-narratives. The Northeasterners’ pride in their ethnic identity far surpasses their political allegiance to the Indian nation. In the novel, Lunatic in my Head, Aman notices the slogan “We are Khasis by Blood, Indians by Accident” (Hasan, 2007, p.32) as he explores the city with his Khasi friend, Ribor. The slogan becomes a symbol of the principal ethnic identity that the Khasis hold dear. Rather than taking umbrage at this blatant questioning of national identity as one’s primary social marker, one should view identity as a coalescing signifier that binds together the notions of nation, tribe, community, religion and gender into a fluid construct. “Their cultural foreignness to the Indic cultural system clearly marks off the hill “tribes” from the rest of Indians. The non-Indic-ness is the mark of “tribal” identity in the Northeast” (Kalita, 2011, p.1367). The ethnonationalism of the Northeast gains momentum through such palimpsestic narratives as they contest the official discourse of a pan-Indian identity.

India is a ‘nation’ that is home to teeming multitudes that subscribe to diverse socio-cultural, linguistic and religious contexts. How then can we fixate on a notion of a singular identity? In contemporary India, the very idea of defining one’s national identity is an act that is politically charged. Oinam analyses how the concept of “othering the other” (2008, p.21) becomes crucial in the configuration of identity in Northeast India. The counter-narratives that emphasise this process of othering resonate with the reality of the Northeast as opposed to the mainland’s predilection to blatantly ignore the source of conflict.  The narratives of Northeast often emphasise the motif of conflict as it outlines the volatility of its socio-political structuring. These narratives enhance the palimpsestic reality of narrating ‘India’ and the ensuing liminalities are as important, if not more important than homogenising metanarratives. “Nation and community remain important, it is just that they need to be imagined in new ways” (Huddart, 2007, p.117). While there is no need to eulogise and idealise the emerging protean narratives, one should embrace its resistance to cower before the monoliths of hegemonical structures and ideological frameworks. “There is no ideological or cultural guarantee for a nation to hold together. It just depends on human skills” (Khilnani, 2012, p.207). The power of the people to narrate and sustain their unique narratives should be lauded as it sets out to trace uncharted territories of “imagined communities.”

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

Endnotes

  1. Focalised: A term used in narrative theory. Focalization specifies the concept of perspective and can be categorised into the focalizer (the one who sees) and the focalized (the one who is seen). Genette and Mieke Bal are the leading theoreticians who have formulated the various aspects of focalization. According to Genette, there are three categories of focalization; non-focalization or zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization. Zero focalization is characterised by a panoramic point of view. In internal focalization, events are filtered through characters internal to the narrative. Lastly, external focalization refers to a stringent reduction in the amount of narrative information that is available.
  2. Palimpsests are defined as manuscripts or written materials from which the earlier writing or drawing has been erased to create a new layer that can be used again. In ancient times, it was a matter of necessity to re-use these manuscripts due to the acute shortage of parchments, that were primarily used as writing material. The term has also been used in the fields of architecture and archaeology. In modern literary criticism, the idea of palimpsests has been deployed to suggest models of hybridity and plurality. Jawaharlal Nehru viewed India as a palimpsest that has layers of thoughts, beliefs and value systems inscribed as part of its rich heritage. David Huddart has commented on Salman Rushdie’s play with the idea of palimpsestic history in his novels. Critics have commented that Rushdie might have borrowed this palimpsestic ideal from the ideas of Nehru. In the Indian context, one can also view the nation as a palimpsest of pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial histories which exist in a continuum.

References

Anderson, B. (1986). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso

Ahanthem, C. (2019). Review of The Many That I Am. Books and Conversations. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from booksandconversations.wordpress.com.

Bhabha, H.K. (1990). Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation. H.K. Bhabha (Ed.). Nation and Narration. (pp. 291-322). London: Routledge

Chatterjee, P. (1986). The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question. K. Sangari and S. Vaid. (Eds.). Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. (pp 233-53). New Delhi, India: Kali for Women.

Deb, S. (2003). The Point of Return. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

Fludernik, M. (2007). Identity/alterity. D. Herman (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. (pp. 260-73). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Hasan, A. (2007). Lunatic in My Head. New Delhi, India: Penguin Books.

Huddart, D. (2007). Homi K. Bhabha. Routledge Critical Thinkers Series. London: Routledge.

Jayaram, N. (2012). Identity, Community, and Conflict: A Survey of Issues and Analyses. Economic and Political Weekly, 47(38), 44–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41720163

Kalita, N. (2011). Resolving Ethnic Conflict in Northeast India. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 72, 1354–1367. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44145746

Khilnani, S. (2012). The Idea of India. Haryana, India: Penguin Books.

Longkumer A.Z. (Ed.). (2019). The Many that I am: Writings from Nagaland. New Delhi, India: Zubaan Publishers.

Mishra, K.N. (2021). Review of The Point of Return. India Education Diary. Retrieved December 21, 2021, from indiaeducationdiary.in.

Menezes, V. (2020, September 23).  Why is Writing from the Northeast often Ignored by mainland Indian literary culture? Scroll. https://scroll.in/community/article/973821/different-ways-of-belonging-literature-from-indias-north-east-states

Mukherjee, M. (1992). Narrating a Nation. Indian Literature, 35(4 (150)), 138–149. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23337240

Munasinghe, V. (2005). Narrating a Nation through Mixed Bloods. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 49(2), 155–163. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23178877

Oinam, B. (2008). State of the States: Mapping India’s Northeast. East-West Center. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep06484

Rahman, A. (2008). Review of Lunatic in My Head. Hindustan Times. Retrieved November 27, 2021, from hindustantimes.com.

Roychowdhury, A. (2021). How the many imaginary lines drawn by the British continue to generate and impact conflicts in the Northeast. The Indian Express. Retrieved January 21, 2022, from indianexpress.com.

Silva, N. (2004). The Gendered Nation: Contemporary Writings from South Asia. New Delhi, India: Sage Publications.

Singh, A. (2019). Review of Lunatic in My Head. The Seer. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from theseer.in.

Walby, S. (1996). Woman and Nation. G. Balakrishnan (Ed.). Mapping the Nation. (pp. 235-54). London, UK: Verso.

Dr. Liji Varghese is an Assistant Professor of English at All Saints’ College, Trivandrum, Kerala. She is also an Approved Research Guide registered with the University of Kerala and has a number of publications and presentations to her credit. Her areas of interest include Gender Studies in Digital Media, Cultural Politics and Indian Literature in English.

Partition and its Afterlife: Tracing Home, Memory and Longing in the Imagination of the Displaced Sylhetis

////
2.5K views

Suranjana Choudhury
Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-3662-9252. Email: tushi.chou@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne26

First published: June 25, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract:

As people had to choose between one nation and the other during and after the Partition of 1947, homes were lost and lives were altered forever. India’s northeast, despite continuously bearing the consequences of this historical experience, remains largely an unacknowledged area in Partition studies. Any cursory exploration of Partition scholarship would reveal that Punjab and Bengal remain the primary sites of investigation. Where does one locate specificities of Partition experience of India’s northeast? Creative writers and artists in this region have also engaged with Partition and its seminal impact on the society and culture of India’s northeast. Through a study of select Partition writings from India’s northeast, this paper will examine the different registers of public and personal memories of Partition and its afterlife in the literary imagination of the displaced Sylhetis to bring forth a better understanding of the perpetuity of dislocation, loss and anxiety in the spheres of everydayness. Drawing upon Memory Studies and discourses concerning home and identity, this paper aims to explore how literature becomes important vehicle for representing inscription and transmission of Partition memories and connected idea of a lost home.

Keywords: Partition, Northeast, Sylhet, Memory, Home

To Remember:

To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. (Sontag, 2003, p. 115)

The act of remembering is compulsively tied up with the act of forgetting because one initiates the occurrence of the other. This phenomenon of simultaneity is symptomatic of various registers of remembering- collective and individual. Paul Ricoeur in his exploration of arsmemoriae observes if “a measured use of memorization also implies a measured use of forgetting” (Ricoeur, 2006, p. 68) and proceeds to further explicate issues concerning the relationship shared between remembering, forgetting and memory. Ricoeur, in his analysis of this complex and layered relationship, contends that it is the initiative to recall or remember that provides crucial scope to reframe forgetting. (Ricoeur,2006) The idea of ethics and aesthetics of memory and its working also assumes significance in our understanding of this connectedness between remembering and forgetting. As a conceptual framework for analyzing historical events, Memory Studies as a discipline offers useful insights and valuable interpretations. This subject of memory and its concomitant dimensions have attained crucial potency in the context of renewed interest invested in addressing and understanding the Partition of 1947 and its afterlife. As people had to choose between one nation and the other during and after Partition, homes were lost and lives were altered forever. Shelley Feldman (2004) while discussing the subject of displacement and its cascading effects in the context of Partition comments pertinently:

For those who chose to move from their place of residence after that date, they were no longer merely changing residence, as in shifting from one city to another for employment or education, but instead were risking immigrant or refugee status in a place that had been, only the day before, part of a shared national space, their home. (p. 113)

The tormenting process of displacement entailed devastation of lived space, cultural practice and social ties. It also signified violence of loss and the unsettling emergence of an immensely difficult life for the displaced. Appropriately noted by Ayesha Jalal (2013) as Partition being “a defining moment that is neither beginning nor end”, it continues to remind us that its perpetuity belongs to our time, to our everyday realities. (1) To this day, this historical episode which is more of an ongoing process significantly impacts discourses concerning identity formations, dynamics of nationhood and communal politics of entire South Asia. The chief engagement of this paper is with select Partition writings from India’s northeast to situate memories of this catastrophic event and the bearing of such memories on constructions of home and identity among Sylheti community residing in the northeast. Through an analysis of chosen narratives, this essay proposes to examine the different registers of public and personal memories of Partition and its afterlife to bring forth a better understanding of the perpetuity of dislocation, anxiety and longing for a lost homeland in the spheres of everydayness as shared by the displaced Sylhetis in different writings.

India’s northeast:

India’s northeast remained primarily an unacknowledged and unexplored site of analysis in Partition studies till very long. However, the story of Partition here, like many other marginalized narratives, has curiously entered the realm of visibility and scholarship only at the present times.  Any discussion of Partition experience has addressed Punjab and Bengal as two sites that suffered the violence and loss triggered by division and associated dislocation. It is important to note here that for a very long-time official projects and academic endeavours tended to overlook the primacy of Partition as a seminal occurrence altogether. Instead, one witnesses that maximum attention had been directed towards celebrating and marking 1947 as a glorious historical juncture of the end of oppressive, long-drawn colonial rule. Kavita Daiya (2008) in her discussion on Partition points out how after 1965, Partition violence largely disappeared from public discussion and how it was relegated to a remote past from the perspective of Indian nation-state. It was desirable that the past should be forgotten to maintain harmonious communal relationships within the nation. In his plea for an appropriate revision of historiography, Gyanendra Pandey (2004) has rightly argued that a very simplistic separation has been made between Partition and violence which in turn has led to omissions and erasures of important truths and insights pertaining to Partition experiences. David Gilmartin (1998) in his essay, “Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative”, had pointed out that the primary issue is the apparent irreconcilable dissonance between articulating a history of ‘high politics’ and that of ‘popular violence’. However, over a phase of the last few decades, historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, and memoirists have directed their attention towards the duality of independence from British colonialism and the enormity of complexities that characterize refugee issues and idea of nationhood. As Tarun Saint (2010) argues in his study of alternative modes of representation and contends that “such counter-narratives allow for the voicing of alternative perspectives and a reckoning with some of the more unpalatable and even grotesque aspects of the Partition experience and its aftermath.” (2) Seeking to retrieve undisclosed gaps and silences, recent studies have initiated valuable discussions about what happened and how things happened. These findings have helped in mapping out the complex nature of Partition legacy and its connected ramifications.

It also remains true that these alternative trajectories of Partition studies have compellingly been centered around Punjab and Bengal experiences. Even today a major research gap in Partition scholarship is inadequate engagement with India’s northeastern region.  It is important to remember that Partition has not rendered uniform experience shared by those who crossed borders in the east and the west, it altered on the basis of ethnic, class, caste, gender differences. The case of India’s northeast reiterates the dimension of characteristic heterogeneity of Partition history. Because of the paucity of scholarship on this area, very little has been known to the rest. This contentious past rooted in individual historical constructions and notions has “produced and reproduced the kind of social and political milieu within which the North East region (NER) is situated at present.” (Yumnam,2016, p158) Sanjib Baruah’s contention that in the case of Assam, specifically, the meaning of Partition which has been opening slowly and gradually over time through a tortuous process renders important meaning in the context of understanding multiple truths about Partition in the northeast. (Baruah,2015) When Partition became a reality it impacted community lives, social fabric, and culture of northeast in more ways than one. The displaced communities had to negotiate with numerous problems in the aftermath of the division of the country and continue to remain affected because “India is yet to frame transparent policies linking rights and laws regarding them.” (Sengupta,2016, p. 192) It separated northeast India from the rest of newly formed India except for a slim passage commonly referred to as chicken’s neck. Udayon Mishra (2000) in The Periphery Strikes Back provides an assessment of how Partition made Assam a landlocked province because Chittagong port which was a major outlet for Assam tea became a part of East Pakistan due to Partition. It had an adverse impact on the socio-economic structure of this region. Not only that, it immensely affected societal compositions and everyday realities of various linguistic and ethnic communities who were part of the people of northeast. Binayak Dutta (2019) in his discussion on this aspect pertaining to the Partition experience in India’s northeast alerts us:

The Partition of Bengal and Assam in 1947, culminating in the Radcliffe Line of 1947 divided not only the Hindus and Muslims of this region on religious and ethnic lines, it also divided the smaller ethnic communities like the Khasis, Garos, Hajongs, Rabhas, Karbis Koch-Rajbongshis, the Reangs and the Chakmas, to name a few. (para.9)

This wide-scale diversity of cartographic ramifications and border alignments with altered realities of belonging and identity reminds us of the urgency to recognize Partition as a defining moment that has had far-reaching consequences in the larger scheme of South Asian politics and culture and which to date remains unscripted and unacknowledged.

Sylhet and its specificities:

“My heart cries for the islands on the river Padma, o my dear compassionate folk

My heart cries for the islands

Who shattered my peaceful home, my happy dreams- o my dear compassionate folk?”[i]

As in the case with many cultural and ethnic communities in the northeast, Sylhetis have also been crucial recipients of the Partition experience and its associated terrains of subject formations. The story of Sylhetis in the context of Partition is not the story of a moment, it is the narrative of a continued exile, movement, and resettlement. Sylhet Referendum that had happened around seventy-four years ago and which led to the Partition of Assam is a crucially significant episode that has not been told adequately in mainstream Partition histories. The subtext of Partition (Sylhet) is more absorbing than the dominant text of Bengal Partition because it offers an entirely new perspective to our understanding of Partition politics. (Hossain, 2013) In recent times, questions have started being asked about the reasons behind such absence of representation and inadequate visibility of this important chapter of Partition. It had in reality permanently changed the lives and futures of generations of Sylhetis who were displaced from their homeland to arrive as refugees in the newly formed nation-state. In the wake of the decision to hold the Sylhet Referendum, there was a sincere assumption that Referendum would initiate a proper, clear mandate on the issue of Partition. Unfortunately, the reality was otherwise, a great number of people were displaced, dispossessed and rendered homeless within a very short span of time. Subsequent to the Referendum, most of Sylhet, except the three and a half thanas of Patharkandi, Badarpur, Karimganj and Ratabari, was transferred to East Pakistan. Referring to the complex layers of contextual politics and machinations that shaped the orchestration of the referendum, Mousumi Dutta Pathak (2012) notes that it was the “shared responsibility of the two religious communities of East Pakistan- the Hindus and the Muslims and the two linguistic communities of Assam or specifically the Brahmaputra Valley- the Assamese and the Bengalis.” (159) Because a sense of unpreparedness prevailed around the event, the displaced community struggled hard to negotiate with the changed circumstances. This forced displacement of Sylhetis, as argued by Anindita Dasgupta, “created and erased the newly drawn national boundaries by building diasporas and ‘de-territorialized’ fractured identities across South Asia on the one hand, and by raising serious questions about the authenticity and citizenship of Partition migrants on the other.” (2014,p.15)Seven decades on, this specter of the past and contentions surrounding its materiality raise fundamental questions about memory, home, and identity.

In this context, it is useful to indicate the potential of literary representations of Sylhet chapter of Partition to understand the negotiations of the public as well as personal memories of this historical experience. Literature is perhaps one of the most potent means of properly expressing essential truths about human dilemmas and understanding the world around us. It is useful to recall what Svend Erik Larsen (2016) notes about the role of literature:

Human experience, broken or not, is always local; it takes place as it were. But literature is always invested with translocal motifs, genres, metaphors, symbols, plots; characters travel across cultural boundaries in order for any local literature to come into being and, hence, to suggest interpretations of a local life world. Literature makes possible a shared understanding of human experience, but it does so by turning it into memory in a translocal perspective. (514)

The issue of how and what to represent in the midst of loss and crisis of displacement was not easy to resolve, especially keeping in mind the fraught history of Referendum politics and its connected dissonances. Furthermore, people who were at the receiving end of Partition-induced displacement were intensely busy resettling and starting life anew. These groups of displaced Sylheti people were engaged in rebuilding lives and homes in different parts of northeast. Moreover, the experience of loss and pain was raw and fresh for many to be able to come up with meaningful articulations. A sense of reticence marked literary imagination of creative writers and artists who could have taken this up. This initial lack of literary responses, in the words of Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das, should be viewed as a failure of the writers to “distance themselves from their immediate context and explore the themes in literary productions.” (Bhattacharjee &Das,2012, p.xi)It is pertinent to note that Barak Valley of Assam, which is Bhattacharjee and Das’s point of reference, happens to be the primary locus of most discussions concerning Sylheti culture and society in a post Partition milieu. Speaking about this pall of silence surrounding Partition, Amitabha Dev Choudhury points towards the lack of any internal evidence which may bring any ready-made answer to the issue. He further contends that “there is not a single signifier anywhere that can tempt the reader to read this silence itself as a narrative.” (Dev Choudhury, 2013) Eventually, this silence was challenged and new voices emerged to embody different layers of issues signifying post Partition predicament. One witnesses how the experience of loss and pain, consequent to displacement, produced important reflections on exile and memories of a lost home. A popular folk song records this measure of dispossession and vulnerability poignantly:

“O dear kin, you have visited my home after a long time

What shall I offer you here at my place?

I have neither roof nor hearth, only endless woes

Selling off all my possessions, I am bereft of all savings

I left my homeland because of Partition….”[ii]

This song further tells us how home before Partition meant prosperity and availability, this lost world, described with markers of plentitude, is reflective of an intimate, endearing and everyday memory. Here, this powerful engagement with Partition through the lens of memory is suggestive of a larger issue predicated on emotions of longing, loss, and return. The evocation of a lost place and longing connected with it is central to the analysis of literature written about a home left behind by the Sylhetis. And while memory of a lost homeland is invariably imbued with a discourse of loss, the idea of return is something that remains deeply problematic. As Stephan Feuchtwang (2003) has posited that a home is a mappable place of shared memory, acts of remembering, grieving and yearning demonstrate avenues for multifold layers of understanding home and belonging. It is interesting to note here that quite a few fictional representations written about lost home in Sylhet and subsequent trauma play out in various ways this interconnectedness between territory and self. Jhumur Pandey’s short story “Lost and Found” (originally published as “Mokkhodasundorir Haranoprapti”) is an apt example of this. At one point, Mokkhoda, the central figure in the story, reflects how her life is “based on memories; on dreams; on pain.” (Pandey, 2017, p.283) In exploring the relationship between mapping of places and the functional aspect of nostalgia Elizabeth Wilson (1997) points out that romance of nostalgia is tied both to a place which is lost and that we tend to understand our present through the remote perspective of the past. A complex web of desire and memory through which homeland is constructed by the protagonist here is symptomatic of many such constructions by survivors of Partition. Lore Segal in her work “Memory: The Problems of Imagining the Past” (1998) claims how recollection is a double experience like a double exposure, the time frame in which one remembers superimposes itself on the remembered time and the two images fail to synchronize perfectly at any point. The short story is replete with a delirious outpouring of an individual about a spatial entity of the past that is defined through its plentitude, bountifulness, and a kind of emotional comfort that is completely absent in post Partition life. The fragmented, non-sequential narrative switching continuously between past and present is heavily invested on the production of a sheltered home which is profoundly connected with the identity of the speaker. Her desire for her village concentrates equally on objects and activities thereby representing an affective intensity for a world that was known, whole, and that also must be experienced as a lack in the present context. This compulsion, as explained by Halbwachs, (1950) is the reason for remembering places and objects. Focusing on an amalgamation of objects and activities, Mokkhoda remembers her land, the sky, the water, and the sports had she indulged in:

“Mokkhoda remembers playing prisoner in the rain. She remembers Bamacharan Bhattacharya’s little school. Steamed leaves of amrul, the soft flesh inside palm fruits, tall tamarind trees, Karimchacha, the banks of the river Manu, Nehru at Panchabati, Aminabibi, a sweet dish made of taro roots. Some patchy visions and memories assail her.” (Pandey,2017, p.283)

Her remembrance in terms of earth, water, plants and other elements of nature can be read as a layered lamentation of emotions she associates with the topography of her erstwhile home and it also serves as a reminder of an embodied experience of a territory with which she shares a deep sense of belonging. The noted author Amit Chaudhuri, discussing Ritwik Ghatak’s engagement with Partition in his films, records how air, water, and sky are invoked as properties available to the homeless to embark on the task of memory-making. Chaudhuri notes:

Ghatak’s images of Partition, thus, are the elemental ones of land, water, and sky, suggesting the composition of the universe in its original form, and belonging to mythology of creation. It’s not so much history-book Partition we have here as the world as an immigrant or exile or newcomer would see it, starting from scratch and reconstructing his life and his environment from nothing.” (Chaudhuri, 1997, p.95)

Mokkhoda with her lost son and husband seeks out an escape from a life that has turned topsy-turvy owing to Partition and which shall not offer her any relief from her immediate circumstances of destitution and denial. Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2013) in her analysis of Siddharth Deb’s novel demonstrates how this “spatio-temporal elsewhere” with its vivid description of “tempestuous rivers, fishes and snakes, its groves overflowing with mangoes, guavas and jackfruits” is lost to Dr. Dam’s mind. (111) Kabir further contends how that left behind place is “a knot around which swirls remembering and forgetting, narrating and silencing.” (77) The concluding part of the story foregrounds the need for connecting Mokkhoda’s personal narrative of loss and rumination with the larger narrative of country’s Partition and how she finds her lost husband and son not in the real sphere of existence , but in the realm of a fractured, dream-like sequence of narration .The final lines of the story which say, “the shower of memories and dreams are running in rivulets down her shrunken body”(Pandey,283)and also how “Mokkhoda spreads her arms out in deep and longing”(Pandey, 283) give a sense of the merger of the linguistic with the somatic to establish an illusory reconciliation.

In Amitabha Dev Choudhury’s short story “Wake Up Call” (originally published as Ghoombhanganiya), it is possible to discern an interweaving of the theme of memories sweeping across generations and the texture of longing for another time and place. This story told from the perspective of a second-generation recipient of the Partition experience represents the trope of interconnectedness and entanglement of impressions of homeland and mental cartography remembered, desired and articulated by different subject positions. Just as arbitrariness of political boundaries and new forms of belonging and citizenship had assailed Thamma in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, similar mode of affliction is conveyed through the character of Masi, an elderly woman in the neighbourhood of the narrator.

Alastair Bonnett, (2015) talking about the persistence of loss in the realm of migrant nostalgia, makes us aware about how loss and longing have different consequences. He states how this sense of loss and longing “range from and shift between creative attempts to re-script identity in new contexts to forms of exclusionary identity politics” (p. 97). Masi’s persistent yearning for home and concurrently her desire to return that remains unfulfilled imply a loss of personal wholeness and moral certainty which is examined as an important component in Bryan Turner’s discussion about the second level of nostalgia. (Turner, 1987) Masi’s mental map cataloguing “lush green fields; vast horizons, endless expanse of water, full-grown crops of corn bending downwards in the vast open golden fields; the archetypal dwelling places of rural Bengal; the big ponds; the clamouring fish; the village barns spilling over with the overflowing reserve of harvest…” (Dev Choudhury,2012, p.142) is indicative of a reflexive, interminable relationship that she shared with her village. Edward Said contends in “Invention, Memory and Place” that in recent years it is possible to witness an increasing interest in the interface between humanities and social sciences: memory and geography or, more specifically, the study of human space. (Said,2000) This aspect is evident in most of the stories discussed in this paper. Anjali Gera Roy in her essay, “Memories of lost homes” (2020) provides compelling insights into the ongoing debates surrounding notions of home, displacement and longing in the context of India’s Partition. She notes, “The choice of places and objects- a street, a terrace, a fruit, a snack, a sport or a melody- that evoke sentiments of longing in Partition refugees is inexplicable to those who have not partaken in the cultural memories of those shared pleasures” (Gera Roy, 2020, p.138). The overt source of pain and loss in “Wakeup Call” is a kind of irresolution that will forever affect generations of displaced community in the northeast because of Partition’s cartographic consequences. What Jahanara Kabir terms as “Cartographic Irresolution” (Kabir,2013,72) while contextualizing northeast’s marginalization and its consequent identity politics is powerfully evoked in the narrative through constant endeavours to arrive at an understanding of a settled home. The emotional anatomy of Masi in relation to the territory she is unable to go back to throws out the set of complications unleashed by political conundrum on individuals who must wrestle with multiple identities, pasts and presents. Masi’s chronic ‘out of place’ situation is set in parallel motion with the narrator’s own sense of exile and longing. Focusing on inter-generational dynamics of remembrance and forgetting, the story is structured around a complex encounter between two generations’ affective ties with their partitioned pasts. For the narrator, a historical event that had happened much before his birth continues to influence his identity formation and determines inscription of such formations within particular spaces. The author examines psychological effects of quest for a stable and settled home on a subjectivity that does not remain unified, it gets blurred between the narrator, his mother and the character of Masi, as he reflects, “I wonder, after all these years, why couldn’t this land become her own? The search for one’s homeland eventually becomes synonymous with the longing for one’s childhood. Isn’t it a familiar adage that in old age a man enters his second childhood?” (Dev Choudhury, 2012, p.144) Fragmentation of memory is the tenor of this short story and it is through this fragmented and oblique representation of memory that one discovers a concern with deeper patterns underlying everyday experience of dislocation and longing for an elsewhere.

Svetlana Boym (2001) talks about restorative nostalgia as something that involves a desire to “rebuild the lost home” and views the past with an eye towards reconstituting and recreating it, it also implies a desire to relive those special moments. Very often, for the displaced community, it is used as a kind of strategy to ameliorate struggles pertaining to the experience of dislocation. It becomes important to draw on the restorative potential of nostalgia for the native home to cope with their existing dilemmas. Anjali Gera Ray gives an insightful analysis of emotional affiliation and affective belonging to the homeland and its subsequent impact and in this regard, she comments that nostalgic recollections oftentimes in selecting the convivial “exhibit an exilic yearning for a lost home and are coloured with emotions of love, care, attachment, friendship, happiness and comfort for spaces, objects, practices and people.” (Gera Roy, 2020, p.132) Mukti Choudhury’s memory piece “Tale of Broken India” (originally published as “Bhanga Bharater Kotha”) is another reminder of the role of memory-work in which identity of the displaced is brought into being at the intersection of place and selective remembrance. The narrative conducts a motion towards a place and time, a journey back in time from the ruins in the present. Like many other Partition survivors, the narrator places an array of visual detailing to establish his affiliation with lost physical space with all its material features and also to underline the close connection between memory and displacement. As the author describes:

Who do I explain and how do I explain that a sense of Viraha[iii] plays through my entire being? Through a journey into that remote homeland, I derive a wonderful pleasure, I smell the earth of my motherland. I feel the soft touch of paddy grain and I affectionately embrace the fragrance of shiuli-rose-gandharaj flowers. I rest my on head on the shore of Manu listening to fairy tales, at midnight of Monsoon I hear the cacophony of the boatmen of Hakaluki, I listen to the tune of Bhatiali, I take a long walk amidst Surma Valley touching the tealeaves on my way to the villages of Baramchal, Samser Nagar, Sreemangal, Chhatak, Sayestaganj, Chunarughat, Habiganj and immerse myself…. (Choudhury, 2013, p.245)

The author clings on to his personal memories describing and evoking haptic, sonic, and visual dimensions of his own place in the midst of decreasing collective anchoring and attempts to bring forth a unified locality with an enshrined past that will activate a better understanding of his self. Raymond Williams (1985) noted that “landscape takes on a different quality if you are one of those who remember” (72) and the remembering agent here through his cognitive mapping brings alive distant Sylhet land with all its everyday splendors and that mapping is constitutive of his own sense of self. It is useful to note here that remembrance, time, place and loss are phenomenological realities and it clearly implies how echoes of past places might resonate with displaced people also it is easy to map how the loss of a particular place produces a keen sense of nostalgia. One finds a similar resonance in Margaret E Farrar’s essay, “Amnesia, Nostalgia and Place Memory” (2011) where she argues how “accounts of people’s experiences of displacement—whether as a migrant, exile, or refugee—repeatedly emphasize the interconnections between body, mind, and place.” (728) Choudhury’s narrative shows how investment in memory entails the opening of a repeated process of continuous and fragile negotiations that may always remain a risk and may never offer final reconciliation. This is an essential point of view that runs through most of the narratives written about Partition. Indeed, this study has attempted to demonstrate how forms of longing and mental cartography assume a new poignancy in the context of newer battles of identity politics. The canvas of representations produced by Sylheti imagination insists on the layered nature of memory and illuminates our understanding of how home might not be a palpable, tangible entity, it might just exist only in writing.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

Notes

[i]  Hemango Biswas, the noted singer, composer, poet and political activist composed these memorable lines to convey his pain and angst after experiencing dislocation in the wake of Partition. The composition, in a way, talks about collective sense of suffering and longing for homeland.

[ii] This widely sung Sylheti folk song brings forth the idea of dispossession and vulnerability that attends to it. The entire song echoes a kind of sadness for having lost everything due to Partition and it is sharply contrasted with prosperous life before the division had happened.

[iii] Viraha refers to an emotion of separation and realization of love through that phase of separation.  It is a common trope used in Partition fictions and reminiscences to express the intensity of longing for homeland on the other side of the border.

References

Barman, Prsaun,( Ed).( 2013) Deshbhag, Deshtyag: PrasangaUttarpurboBharat.Vicky    Publishers.

Baruah, Sanjib. (2015).Partition and the politics of citizenship in Assam. In Urvashi Butali  (Ed.)    Partition: The Long Shadow. Penguin Publications.

Bonnett, Alastair. (2015 ).The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on        Modernity and Loss. Routledge.

Boym, Svetlana. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books.

Chaudhuri,Amit. (1997). Partition as exile. Index on Censorship, 26(6),92-96.

Daiya Kavita. (2008). Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Postcolonial India. Temple University Press.

Dasgupta Anindita. (2014). Remembering Sylhet: Hindu Muslim voices from a nearly forgotten story of India’s Partition. Manohar

Dev Choudhury, Amitabha. (2012). Wake up Call. In Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, and Dipendu Das (Eds.). Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. Niyogi Books.

Dutta Binayak. (2019). Lest We Forget: The Many Partitions and its Legacies in Northeast India Partition Studies Quarterly.

Farrar, Margaret. (2011). Amnesia, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Place Memory. Political Research Quarterly,64 ( 4),723-735.

Feldman, Shelley. (2003). Bengali State and Nation Making: Partition and Displacement Revisited. International Social Science Journal, 55(175) 111-121.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2451.5501019_10

Gera Roy, Anjali. (2020). Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India. Routledge.

Gilmartin, David. (1998). Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative. The Journal of Asian Studies, 57 ( 4),1068-1095.

Hossain, Ashfaque. (2013). The Making and Unmaking of Assam-Bengal Borders and the Sylhet Referendum. Modern Asian Studies,47(1),250-287.1017/S0026749X1200056X.

Jalil Rakshinda, Saint Tarun K, Sengupta Desbjani (Eds.). (2019). Looking Back : The 1947 Partition of India, 70 Years On. Orient Blackswan.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. (2013). Partitions’s Post-Amnesias. Women Unlimited.

Larsen Svend Erik. (2016).Memory,Migration and Literature. European Review, 24(4), 509-22. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.qmul.ac.uk/10.1017/S1062798716000053.

Misra, Udayon. (2000). The Periphery Strikes Back. Indian Institute of Advanced Studies

Pandey, Gyanendra. (2004). Remembering Partition. Cambridge University Press.

Ricoeur,Paul. 2006. Memory History Forgetting Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press

Said, Edward. (2000). Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry 26(2), 175-192.

Saint,Tarun K. (2010). Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction. Routledge.

Segal, Lore. (1998). Problems of Imagining the Past. In BerelLang(Ed.) Writing and the Holocaust. Holmes &Meier,58-65.

Sengupta, Debjani. (2016).ThePartition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities. Cambridge University Press.

Sontag, Susan. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador.

Turner, Bryan S. (1987). A Note on Nostalgia. Theory Culture and Society 4(1), 147-156.

Williams, Raymond. (1985). The Country and the City. Hogarth Press

Wilson Elizabeth. (1997). Looking Backward, Nostalgia and the City. In Sallie Westwood & John Williams (Eds.) Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. Routledge

Dr. Suranjana Choudhury teaches literature at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong.   Her areas of interest include Partition Studies, Women’s Writing and Cultural Studies. Her recently published books include A Reading of Violence in Partition Stories from Bengal published by Cambridge Scholars, UK, and a co-edited volume titled Understanding Women’s Experiences of Displacement: Literature, Culture and Society in South Asia published by Routledge.

The question of the ‘foreigners’ in select fictional narratives from Assam

/////
1.4K views

Rimi Nath
Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. ORCID ID 0000-0001-9366-5498. Email: riminath664@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-9. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne25

First published: June 25, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

In this age of metamorphosis of cultural transition and assimilation, in this age where everyone in one sense or the other is a migrant, the issue of identity can never be resolved. Iain Chambers (1994) holds that migrancy “calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation” (p. 5). ‘Home’ sometimes becomes a provisional location as it fails to provide assurance and security; and hence, in many instances, one witnesses an individual’s desire to break free, to migrate. Memory and narratives can be seen as symbolic ways of making homes, of negotiating different and competing allegiances. Jahnavi Barua’s novel, Undertow, Arupa Patangia Kalita’s novellas and stories like ‘Face in the Mirror’, ‘The Half-burnt Bus at Midnight’, stories from the Barak Valley of Assam like Moloy Kanti Dey’s ‘Ashraf Ali’s Homeland’, Amitabha Dev Choudhury’s ‘Wake Up Call’, Arijit Choudhury’s ‘Fire’, among others, provide multiple perspectives on the question of identity. The paper seeks to delve into select fictional narratives from Assam and analyse the question of ‘foreigners’, keeping in mind the current discourses on the issue of migration, especially the issue of illegal Bangladeshi migrants.

Keywords: Assam, identity, migration, Bangladeshi, foreigners

Introduction: The question of ‘foreigners’

Assam has been through different phases of ethnic nationalisms and the region has been through different phases of inclusion and exclusion geographically, ethnically and culturally. Assam has been grappling with the issue of ‘foreigners’ for a long time and the question of Bangladeshis, in particular, has become the most crucial factor in Assam’s politics. Terms that are used to describe Bangladeshis in Assam are: settlers, Bongal, bohiragoto (outsider), bideshi (foreigner), illegal migrants, illegal immigrants, invaders, Bengali peasantry, land-hungry Muslims, land grabbers, Mia Muslims, undocumented migrants, etc. (Shamshad, 2017, p. 59). In the book, Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia (2016), Partha S. Ghosh highlights how the issue of illegal Bangladeshi migrants is a “subject on which everybody seems to be knowing so much, still they know so little, largely because of the unavailability of hard data” (p. xii). There are assumptions, fragmentations, doubts, fears and lost/ forgotten documents that heighten the confusion.

Nandana Dutta, in the introduction to Questions of Identity in Assam (2012), points out “that existing interpretations of migration and nation did not and could not do justice to the location” (p. xx). When Assam was made a part of the Bengal Presidency in 1905, the fear of loss of identity because of the demographic changes, crept up, and the Bengali speakers were seen as the ‘other’. Bodhisattva Kar (2011) highlights the forgotten history of Bengali racism, on the other hand, during the partition of Bengal in 1905 where the Bengalis saw the Assamese as the ‘other’ (p. 45). Assam’s position as a separate province was restored in 1911, with the unification of Bengal. The Muslim League demanded that Assam be a part of East Pakistan. Assam, as a British colonial province, included Sylhet while prior to 1874, Sylhet was a part of Bengal (Baruah, 2015, p. 82-83). In 1947, Sylhet became a part of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) except for a portion of it (a part of Karimganj subdivision in Barak Valley) which remained in India. Sanjib Baruah (2015) highlights that for Assam “the meaning of partition has been unfolding slowly over decades through a torturous process” (p. 81). The British colonial rule encouraged the settlement of Muslim East Bengali peasants in Assam while Partition instigated massive movements. Many people migrated to Assam in 1965, during Ayub Khan’s regime in Pakistan, and Assam also sheltered refugees during and after the Bangladeshi Liberation War of 1971.

Shamshad (2017) lists five distinct phases of the anti-Bengali and later anti-Bangladeshi discourse in Assam. “The Bengali officials presented the immediate face of colonialism” (p. 253) and the anti-colonial, anti-Bengali discourse ensued from the fear of the Assamese elite – of loss of power. The second phase started with the fear of territorial loss which crept up with the arrival of the Bengali cultivators brought in by the colonial officials. The potential loss of demographic dominance during Partition is listed as the third phase. The tussle for language supremacy in the 1960s/70s is the next phase and the fifth phase is the Assam movement (1979-85)” (p. 253). The language issue in Assam created riots during the 1960s and 70s, where “the Official Language Movement of 1960 and the Medium of Instruction Movement of 1972…were based on the ‘Assam for Assamese’ ideology. The Bengalis of Barak valley had protested against it” (Ghoshal, 2021, p. xv). Weiner (1983) highlights that during that time Bengali Muslims had much to gain by siding with the Assamese (in securing their stay) but with the Assam Movement, this alliance faltered, where the “Bengalis in Assam – both Hindus and Muslims – became ‘foreigners’ to the Assamese” (Shamshad, 2017, p. 77). Shamshad (2017) highlights how gradually the Nepali migrants completely fell out of discourse and the only migrants who were considered ‘illegal’ were from Bangladesh (p.101).

The difficulty of identifying illegal immigrants persists and the question of rehabilitation or granting citizenship becomes complex and ambiguous. Neither the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IMDT Act) nor the Assam Accord could bring any resolution to the ‘foreigners’ issue. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) also has its shortcomings and pitfalls. The detection and repatriation of ‘illegal foreigners’ is an ongoing process as a recent news report states that “till October 31, 2021, as many as 1,42,206 illegal foreigners have been detected in the State. Among them, altogether 29, 663 were pushed back till December 15 of this year”. (The Assam Tribune, 2021, p. 1)

Shamshad (2017) points out that with Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) entry into Assam’s politics “Assam’s anti-Bengali ethnic nationalist discourse” changed to “anti-Bengali Muslim ethno-religious discourse” (p. 254). The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP)-BJP coalition further strengthened it. In Chatterji’s Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law and Citizenship in Majoritarian India – The Story of Assam (2021), we find a strong criticism of the Hindutva ideology and the writers voice their fear about ‘absolute nationalism’. The agitation in Assam against illegal immigrants has targeted Hindus as well; but with the changing political scenario, largely the Muslim population begins to get targeted:

“In Assam, the NRC and Foreigners Tribunals have commenced the political segregation of “national subjects” and rights-bearing citizens from “invaders” without rights. A disproportionate number of persons who are alleged to be “foreigners” and “illegal persons” are Muslims. “Miya” Muslims, from marginalised social classes are the principal target.” (p. 56)

We have seen the state changing its response to changing political scenarios. The recent development, i.e., the fourth amendment of the Citizenship Act in which the intent has been to grant citizenship to people who have fled religious persecution from neighbouring countries (including Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Jains and Zoroastrians), the Hindutva orientation of the government came under scrutiny amidst mass agitation. The anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) movement was based on the “Assamese” people’s “fear of demographic swamping…and raised, once again, questions about their citizenship rights” (Goswami, 2021, p. 1). While some saw NRC and CAA as discriminatory, especially against the Muslims, many saw CAA as discriminatory while they supported the NRC. The Hindus who have lived with the stigma of being illegal migrants in the region did not see the situation working in their favour either. The majority of the population did not seem to be aware of the historicity of the documents. NRC and CAA also saw opposite reactions from the general masses of the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys. The Bangladeshi issue has been a matter of much contestation heightening the difficulty of coming to any negotiable position.

To consider the citizenship debate, reports that show Indians giving up citizenship provide another perspective. According to a report published in The Wire, from 2016-20 just 4,177 persons were granted Indian citizenship – where “for every one person who has been granted Indian citizenship in the past four years and more, 145 persons have forgone their citizenship” (Bhatnagar, 2021, para. 2). Also, the statistics that four out of ten applicants were granted citizenship and that maximum applications came from the citizens of Pakistan are also data that need to be considered and evaluated at the national and regional levels.

Analysing Select Fictional Narratives from Assam

Fictional narratives from Assam provide different perspectives on the question of ‘foreigners’. Telling or writing a story can, to a large extent, help in the process of negotiation. Narratives can be a form of travel, which can traverse the distance between communities or societies in their exploration of inner journeys. In Jahnavi Barua’s Undertow (2020), the question of foreigners and the agitation against them is highlighted as an overpowering consciousness. The novel touches upon the turbulent times of the Assam movement, of how “the state had been thrown into chaos” (p. 17). The central character, Rukmini, has marched on the streets too. Rukmini ponders upon the bandhs in Assam (which has been absolute) where everything “came to a grinding halt” (p. 19):

“No one challenged the protests because everyone supported them, understood the need for them. Nothing so complete was possible without deep feeling. The people were gripped with an urgent desire to fulfill what the Boys had begun: to make the government do its duty; to expel illegal aliens, instead of arming them with citizenship and voting rights.” (Barua, 2020, p. 19)

“Four years now and the Agitation – it was aptly named, the movement the students had launched in 1979 – showed no signs of abating. The people of Assam had not lost hope or courage or energy yet. They spilled out onto the streets in their thousands when summoned by the student leaders – the Boys, as they were affectionately called – to picket and demonstrate and protest, and stayed indoors with windows closed and lights out when ordered to by the same leaders.” (Barua, 2020, p. 17)

The question of illegal immigrants in Assam has been quite complex because of the political, historical, and geographical reasons, as highlighted in the introduction. There have also been cases of people acquiring documents illegally facilitated by communal sympathy, corruption or carelessness on the part of the officials. It is difficult to demarcate illegal immigrants from ‘original’ inhabitants and “as a result, neither the Assamese Bengalis nor the Assamese Muslims could fully identify themselves with the Assam agitation” (Ghosh, 2016, p. 224). What the character, Rukmini, refers to as “so complete” may not have actually been absolute. Through her research, Shamshad (2017) also studies how the Assamese and Bengali Muslims saw each other:

“The ethnic Assamese representatives of the civil society who were interviewed in this research did not express any hostile views or see the Bengali Muslims/ Bangladeshi migrants as an economic or security threat.” (p. 253)

Shamshad (2017) highlights how “the exercise of violence is a constant factor in the process of ‘Othering’” (p. 250) – violence that is state induced and also the ethnic flare.

In Jahnavi Barua’s novel Undertow (2020), when Rukmini decides to marry Alex (an outsider from Kerala) “she felt like a traitor” (p. 19) adhering to the insider-outsider tension in her consciousness. She has been a traitor even to her mother who accused Rukmini of betraying “state and race and family” (p. 19). Rukmini realises the pain of being treated as an outsider when she herself receives such treatment from Alex’s family. Rukmini’s daughter Loya, who is raised in Bangalore, is surprised to see how “strong a subject it (politics) was in life here” (p. 86). Loya comes to know that “the illegal migrants had been received with open arms by the government, which, sensing the opportunity for a vote bank, had even issued them with citizenship papers” (p. 86-87). Loya also comes to know about Robin Koka’s grandson, who, being fascinated by the revolution against foreigners, joins the insurgents, the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam). In Assam, the anti-colonial discourse surged with the ULFA, where India was seen as the coloniser (Shamshad, 2017, p. 254). Since its inception in 1979, the insurgent organisation emphasised on the national liberation of Assam. They maintained that “the question of ‘secession’ is a mistaken one since ‘historically’, Assam has never been a part of the Indian nation and its location within the political map of India has to be explained simply as a fact of ‘colonial occupation’” (Kar, 2011, p. 57).

It is interesting to note that in Barua’s Undertow (2020) Loya questions the idea of a ‘foreigner’. When her grandfather tells her about the Ahom dynasty – “a race of princes from the Shan state of Burma” (p. 148), she insists that they are migrants, to which her grandfather remarks: “Isn’t everyone, in the beginning?” (p. 148). Her grandfather tells her about their assimilation,

“Yes, but they settled down. Assimilated. Converted to Hinduism from Buddhism and married our local girls. Why, they even gave up their old Tai language” (p. 148).

The statement raises questions like if forsaking religion or language can be the only way an immigrant may be accepted? What are the grounds of assimilation? Can the ‘foreigners’ of Assam ever assimilate? Can assimilation not happen if cultural/ religious/ linguistic differences are respected? Will Kymlicka in Politics in the Vernacular (2001) highlights how minority nationalisms are not always illiberal, pre-modern or xenophobic and questions, “…is it permissible to adopt illiberal policies in order to create conditions under which civic forms of minority nationalism can emerge?” (p. 277). There are no definite answers. The sad disappearance of Loya towards the end of the novel, when a blast rocks the Bazaar in Guwahati, shows the futility of violence. Loya embodies both the elements of an insider and an outsider (her father being an outsider from Kerala and her mother from Assam). In her disappearance, both the insider and the outsider become victims, where symbolically violence consumes all.

The plight of the refugees, their lost homelands, their trouble and brutal torture – are mainly captured in the stories from the Barak Valley of Assam. The stories also highlight how threats to life and livelihood lead to migration from Bangladesh as “the migration of the uprooted refugee families was primarily for seeking refuge and a national identity” (Ghoshal, 2021, p. 37). In Arijit Choudhury’s ‘Fire’ (2012), the protagonist, Mahendra Das, faces the consequence of not supporting the Assam Movement, the “cruelty meted out to innocent people, be it murder or arson” (p. 63). According to Mahendra:

“Spotting a Bengali-Hindu or a Muslim or a Nepali, immediately branding him ‘foreigner’ and inflicting torture on him is inhuman and unjust. Even if one is a foreigner that does not mean that he should be driven away or his house and belongings should be burnt down – Mahendra would never support this.” (p. 56)

In the story, we see that the nearby villagers (who are Bengali-Muslims) are called Bangladeshis although they have never been to Bangladesh. Mahendra’s house is set on fire by the people of his own village, who consider him to be a traitor, “an agent of the Bengalis!” (p. 56). Within the imagined nation/state, battle lines are drawn, as Siddhartha Deb in his novel, The Point of Return (2004), describes the nation as a fortress where “new battle lines were being drawn and fresh groups of people were being defined as outsiders, borders bristling with barbed-wire teeth” (p. 221).

When Ashraf Ali moves to Assam (to Karimganj) from Bangladesh as a child, in Moloy Kanti Dey’s ‘Ashraf Ali’s Homeland’ (2012), he feels happy –

“When? When did they cross the border? Why was there no wall anywhere? It was merely like a stroll from one street to another. Is this how the two countries were divided then? Ashraf seemed to be in a trance. Hindustan, Bharatbarsha. It’s not a separate country – rather an assurance that promises supply of food.” (p. 119)

The ‘shadow lines’ that borders are highlighted in his sentiments. When Ashraf Ali is marked as a foreigner amidst the Bangladeshi row, the fate of his family becomes uncertain. They are deported and their destiny remains unknown.

Fear and discrimination incite the surfacing of nostalgia for a lost or ‘imaginary’ homeland. In another story ‘Wakeup Call’ by Amitabha Dev Choudhury (2012), the narrator’s family has had to flee Bangladesh in the 50’s in order to survive. The narrator struggles to come to terms with his own identity as a foreigner as he cannot think of any place as his home other than where he is, i.e., Assam –

“Yes! This is my homeland, my own soil. Eternal! Embodiment of my soul! My beloved nest of tranquility! My dream! My memory! My identity!” (p. 148).

The fond memories or stories of a lost homeland linger but that place is no longer home. In any tale of migration, there is always a contestation between humanitarian support and nativist backlash. Partha S. Ghosh (2016) asks the much-debated humanitarian questions, “Is not it, once again, the question of refugees’ rights, and not state doing a favour to them? Minorities in Pakistan or Bangladesh were not responsible for the Partition of India.” (p. 220)

During the Assam Movement, there were numerous attacks in places like Barpeta, Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon, among others. In the larger backdrop of the anti-foreigners protest, the Nellie massacre happened. Samrat in Insider Outsider(2018b) writes: “The danger in any tale of victimhood is the obverse: victims on the one hand and villains on the other” (p. ix). In her stories, Arupa Patangia Kalita (2015) highlights the communalisation of the Assam movement. In the story ‘Face in the Mirror’ Kalita writes:

“In August, a young girl took many bullets in her body, her body was perforated by gaping holes. She had come from outside the state, looking for the body of her husband, crying and beating her breasts in sorrow. In March, a talented professor had committed suicide. 1991. The killings that defied counting.” (p. 138).

The protagonist of the short story shows her displeasure when her cousin’s husband, “a leader of Assam’s andolon, agitation” (p. 142) becomes angry as she praises her Muslim house help, Zamila. He tells his wife, “I now know why your sister is so fond of Bangladeshis” and then addressing the protagonist, he says, “You know Baidew, don’t indulge these people. You were talking about cleaning the bedpan etc. If you allow them to enter the house, they will even lick your feet…Keep an eye, if nothing can be done about them we’ll kill them all” (p. 146). The protagonist ironically smiles and says, “We’ve heard that people of Assam should forget about humanity. This is the time to forget humanity.” (p. 146)

As a writer, Arupa Patangia Kalita, often gets targeted for her stand against the brutality of the movement. This resonates in another story, ‘Surabhi Barua and the Rhythm of Hooves’, where the protagonist Surabhi Barua –

“Became one of the few who stood against the Assam agitation. She wrote a few articles, saying again and again that this overwhelming sentimental outlook would stand in the way of constructing a strong Assamese national character.” (Kalita, 2015, p. 194)

Expressing her viewpoints calls for trouble as it calls for trouble for “a section of intellectuals who had to pay a heavy price for protesting against the unreasonable dictat of the so-called separatist leaders” (Biswas, 2015, p. 215). Kalita’s writings, thus, make a strong comment on the meaninglessness of jingoism, xenophobia and mindless killings.

The writers discussed above, both from the Brahmaputra and the Barak valleys of Assam, bring to light the humanitarian ground relating to the question of the ‘foreigners’ in Assam. They are able to transcend the ethno-religious boundaries in raising their voice against atrocities and mindless divisions. In a world where border lines are rigorously drawn, the writers highlight the necessity of preserving borders from encroachers while at the same time they talk about the futility of violence. There is empathy and perceptiveness regarding what it actually feels to be an ‘outsider’.

Conclusion: Between Memory and Forgetting

Citizenship continues to be a contested domain in Assam. There is a jostle between the ideas of nationalism and globalisation. Colonialism continues in the form of subjugation: “the domination and denigration of the Hills, the delegitimation and chastisement of Bhati, the inauthentication and vilification of the ‘settlers’” (Kar, 2011, p. 54). This subjugation leads to ‘othering’ that brings in the question of authenticity. The search for authenticity has been crucial in any societal formation (province/ state/ nation). However, we can question if there is anything called authentic identity or if authenticity is a desire. In Assam the question of foreigners versus authentic citizens has been the reason for the region’s political and social volatility. The definition of ‘Assamese’ still remains a matter of debate and contestation. A recent report states how a sub-committee formed by the State Government in 2006 to formulate the definition of ‘Assamese’ as per Clause 6 of the Assam Accord still could not come to a conclusion after seeking views from different organisations and bodies as only a few organisations could submit their views in this regard (The Assam Tribune, 2021, p. 1). It is difficult to resolve the politics surrounding migration. The Assam agitation while initially upholding the agenda of safeguarding Assamese identity in the face of the fear of ‘foreigners’ soon degenerated “from an anti-foreigner agitation to an anti-non-Assamese agitation by turning its wrath against even the domestic migrants from other parts of India, mostly Bihar” (Ghosh, 2016, p. 223-24). Kar rightly says, “territorial nationalism can never abolish its mythical other – colonialism – which always threatens to lodge itself within the very claims of nationalism” (Kar, 2011, p. 57). Memory and narratives, in this regard, can provide multiple perspectives while trying to negotiate different and competing allegiances.

“Memory is also about what you decide to remember, so that you can make sense of what has been irrevocably lost” (Deb, 2004, p. 192). Memory, which operates within the realm of forgetting, distortions, manipulations/ modifications, partial memory, selective memory, representation and narration, plays an important role in the process of negotiation. Memories help in reshaping boundaries and, hence, help in the process of negotiation. Collective memory, especially that of trauma, is difficult to erase. But then there are questions asking if amnesia will reduce the effects of trauma or if it is justified to forget the trauma, if it is necessary to carry the burden of trauma or if forgetting the history of violence will lead to its repetition and if acknowledging the memories will lead to a kind of resolution? In the book, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (1998), Martha Minow writes – “To seek a path between vengeance and forgiveness is also to seek a route between too much memory and too much forgetting” (p. 118). Forgetting is also a very important part of memory and hence narratives play an important role in developing perspectives, as Benedict Anderson asserts, “all profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives” (Anderson, 1983, p. 204).

Any one kind of reading or interpretation will be grossly inadequate while dealing with such a sensitive issue and this paper does in no way want to preach or put across a one-sided view of the question under discussion. However, the paper wants to highlight the dangers of a lack of understanding and how across North-East India, as Samrat points out, “it will take only a little communal foolishness for a return to the bad old days” (Samrat, 2018a, p.171). Nationalism needs to be rethought and reinvented towards a more inclusive society where the aspirations of the masses are respected, the history of turmoil taken into consideration, where collective self-reflection, telling and re-telling of stories are encouraged. Most importantly, the political and media-hype that create fear-psychosis need to be regulated, systematic brain-washing that incites hatred needs to be avoided and the perspectives of “not only marginalised women but also other vulnerable segments like the indigenous and immigrant populations” (Goswami, 2021, p. 7) need to be heard and considered – where people are allowed to express their opinions without the fear of persecution, attack or marginalisation. Literary representations can help in negotiating different positions and standpoints – of memories, tales of loss, of place, of identities. They can be a means of cross-cultural travel, bringing revisions as well as a cultural revival and harmony.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

References

Anderson, Benedict. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.

Barua, Jahnabi. (2020). Undertow. Penguin.

Baruah, Sanjib. (2015). Partition and the Politics of Citizenship in Assam. In Urvashi Butalia (Ed.), Partition: The Long Shadow (pp. 78-101). Viking Penguin.

Bhatnagar, Gaurav Vivek. (2021). Over 6 lakh Indians Gave Up Citizenship Since 2017: Union Home Ministry. The Wire. thewire.in/government/india-citizenship-relinquished-granted-home-ministry-data-parliament.

Biswas, Ranjita. (2015). “In Search of Peace” in Arupa Patangia Kalita,Written in Tears (Ranjita Biswas, Trans.). Harper Perennial.

Chambers, Iain. (1994). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. Routledge.

Chatterji, Angana P. (In collaboration with Mihir Desai, Harsh Mander, Abdul Kalam Azad). (2021). Breaking   Worlds: Religion, Law and Citizenship in Majoritarian India – The Story of Assam. University of California, Berkeley: Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative, Center for Race and Gender.

Choudhury, Amitabha Dev. (2012). Wake Up Call (Subha Prasad Nandi Majumdar, Trans.). In Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das (Eds.), Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. Niyogi Books.

Choudhury, Arijit. (2012). Fire (Rumi Rani Laskar, Trans.). In Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das (Eds.), Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. Niyogi Books.

Deb, Siddhartha. (2004). The Point of Return. Picador.

Dey, Moloy Kanti. (2012). Ashraf Ali’s Homeland (Dipendu Das, Trans.). In Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das (Eds.), Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. Niyogi   Books.

Dutta, Nandana. (2012). Questions of Identity in Assam: Location, Migration, Hybridity. Sage.

Ghosh, Partha S. (2016). Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia. Sage.

Ghoshal, Anindita. (2021). Refugees, Borders and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India. Routledge.

Goswami, Uddipana, and Dutta, Abantee(Eds.). (2021). Making Peace Mutually: Perspectives from Assam. Bhabani Books.

Kalita, Arupa Patangia. (2015). Written in Tears (Ranjita Biswas. Trans.). Harper Perennial.

Kar, Bodhisattva. (2011). Can the Postcolonial Begin? Deprovincializing Assam. In Saurabh Dube (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Modernity in South Asia. Oxford University Press.

Kymlicka, Will. (2001). Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford   University Press.

Minow, Martha. (1998). Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence. Beacon Press.

Samrat. (2018a). How We Got Here: A Brief history of Being Dkhar in Shillong. In Preeti Gill and Samrat (Eds.), Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India. Amaryllis.

Samrat. (2018b). Preface. In Preeti Gill and Samrat (Eds.), Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India. Amaryllis.

Shamshad, Rizwana. (2017).Bangladeshi Migrants in India: Foreigners, Refugees, or Infiltrators? Oxford   University Press.

The Assam Tribune. (2021, December 23). 1,42,206 illegal foreigners detected in State till Oct, p. 1 [Press Release].

Weiner, Myron. 1983. The Political Demography of Assam’s Anti-immigrant Movement. Population and   Development Review, 9(2), 279-92.

Dr Rimi Nath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, Meghalaya, India. Her research interests include Indian Writing in English, South Asian Literature, Partition Studies and Diaspora/ Migration Studies. Her research papers have appeared in various journals and also as book chapters – the recent one is from Routledge, in the book Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (2022). She has been a member of various review boards of books/ journals. She is also engaged in creative writing and writes poems, haiku and short fiction. Her collection of poetry, Kushiara and Other Poems, was published in June, 2021 (Dhauli Books).

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

/
407 views

Sumallya Mukhopadhyay

Doctoral Fellow and Teaching Assistant, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4762-2099. Email: mukhopadhyay.sumallya@gmail.com,

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.31

PlumX Metrics

Abstract

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

 Keywords: Partition, Bengal, Refugees, Migration, Narratives, Ethnocultural

You might be interested in