review article

Memories of the 1947 Bengal Partition

and Its Aftermath: Tanvir Mokammel’s
Seemantorekha
Sumallya Mukhopadhyay
Doctoral Researcher,
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
mukhopadhyay.sumallya@gmail.com

This article examines Tanvir Mokammel’s documentary Seemantorekha as a historical text that
opens a representational space to engage with the memories of the 1947 Bengal Partition. See-
mantorekha documents the journey of four individuals to their erstwhile homes in Bangladesh
and West Bengal. In the moment of seeing their ancestral homes, they share the ‘Third Space’
of being, the premise of which transcends the ideological normative of nations and borders.

Keywords: Seemantorekha, refugees, Third Space/Space, Partition, West Bengal, East Pakistan/
Bangladesh

Documenting the 1947 Bengal Partition

Located at the Indian side of the India–Bangladesh borders, the Petrapole Railway
Station wears an abandoned look. In striking contrast to the present situation, it was
through Petrapole that countless batches of refugees had entered West Bengal during
the 1947 Partition1 and the following decades. The deserted station underscores
the festering wound that Partition still occupies in the collective memory of South
Asia. It is essential to distance oneself from the event to recognise the trauma of
it. However, in Seemantorekha2 (The Border Line), Bangladeshi filmmaker Tanvir
Mokammel engages with the event and examines its layered significance in the
context of the two neighbours—Bangladesh and West Bengal. It is at the Petrapole
Railway Station that he interviews three writers and artists—Amar Mitra, Ratanbasu
Mazumder and Pratul Mukhopadhyay. Unequivocally, they rue that the meteoric
rise of religious fundamentalism, coupled with jingoistic patriotism, has so much
damaged diplomatic relations, thereby making it difficult for people to freely visit
one’s neighbour. The following frame records Pratul Mukhopadhyay, who sings:

1
  Hereafter, referred to as the Partition.
2
  Seemantorekha (The Border Line), directed by Tanvir Mokammel, YouTube, 2018. [https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=1CplnC_5lco&t=7932s].

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DOI: 10.1177/2348448921999039
2 / Sumallya Mukhopadhyay

‘Both of us are Bengalis. Look what has happened to us—you are a Bangladeshi,
and you call me an Indian’.3
The Partition divided the province of Bengal into the Muslim-majority East
Pakistan4 and the region of West Bengal, remaining within India, with a Hindu
majority. The persistent fear of religious persecution forced minority communi-
ties to migrate from one to the other Bengal. What complicated the matter was
that migration across the borders did not remain restricted to years immediately
following the Partition. On account of palpable threat to life and limb, individuals
continued to take to migration.5 For instance, in December 1949 and early 1950,
there were widespread attacks on Hindus in East Pakistan,6 followed by violence
against Muslims in West Bengal,7 which impelled individuals to migrate. With
the introduction of the passport system between India and Pakistan in 1952, large-
scale migration took place in the eastern zone.8 After the sacred relic of Prophet
Mohammad disappeared at Hazratbal in Kashmir in December 1963, the fresh
spate of communal riots stimulated a further spate of migration.9 The prelude to
the Bangladesh Liberation War witnessed unprecedented forced migration, as
expropriated or fearful Hindu families sought refuge in makeshift refugee camps in
West Bengal.10 Even after de-escalation, following the war, many families refused
to go back to the newly formed Bangladesh.11 In the process, the Government of
West Bengal constructed camps to shelter refugees who were later rehabilitated in
various parts of West Bengal or in other states of India.12
Seemantorekha employs voice-over narration with descriptive commentary to
acquaint the viewers with the history of the period, starting from the Partition to
the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971). The narration is reinforced with flashes of
images of trains crammed with refugees, malnourished children standing with their
mothers in queues waiting for doles, a family of three eating from one single plate
and a field full of tents where refugees are sheltered. In the scenes preceding the

3
  Ibid., 1:02:54–1:03:04. [Throughout the paper, the quotations are translated from Bengali to
English by the author.]
4
  It may be noted that till 1955, the Eastern wing of Pakistan was called East Bengal. The Constitution
of 1956 formally renamed it as East Pakistan. In 1971, Bangladesh was formed as an independent nation.
5
  Cf. Debjani Sengupta, Mapmaking: Partition Stories from Two Bengals (New Delhi: Amaryllis,
2011), 184.
6
  Reports on Oppression of Minorities in East Bengal, File No.: (CR 138/50) B. May 1950, pp.
224–48, Dept. & Branch Home Political (henceforth, DBHP), West Bengal State Archives (hereafter,
WBSA), Kolkata, West Bengal and 2 February 1950, Amrita Bazar Patrika (henceforth, ABP), Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter, NMML), New Delhi.
7
  Dawn, NMML, 8 December 1949.
8
  ABP, NMML, 5 October 1952.
9
  ABP, NMML, 9 January 1964.
10
  Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, 2nd ed. (New Delhi:
Orient Blackswan, 2019), 206.
11
  The Statesman, NMML, 17 February 1972.
12
  ABP, NMML, 16 July 1959.

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sequence, the camera’s gaze follows the barbed wire fences on the India–Bangladesh
border. Tanvir Mokammel holds the view that Seemantorekha is a ‘journey film’,
for the film is structured around journeys that are ‘pivotal in the film’.13 Soon the
journey begins as the voice-over introduces us to the Cooper’s Camp in Ranaghat,
West Bengal. The angular view of the camera follows a mother and a child who walk
past the isolated barracks that form the camp. Here, the interviews are conducted on
the side of the road. The five interviewees narrate a detailed account of the camp,
while the camera, time and again, directs us to the road running parallel to it. The
mode of filming remains the same as the viewers are directed to the Dhubulia Camp
in Krishnanagar, West Bengal. The scene is punctuated with repeated references to
the pathetic condition of the settlement, and the voice-over tells of the death at the
camp of some 500 children in 1950.14 The West Bengal government had sponsored
a few resettlement centres in its endeavour to make the refugees self-reliant. Those
settled in these centres mostly came from the aforementioned camps. The camera
showcases a wide road flanked by trees on both sides as the viewers are taken to
Ashoknagar where a ‘production centre’ had been built to employ refugees. Though
the refugees here have designated rooms, the small structures lack proper ventila-
tion. It forces them to keep their front door open, making it amply clear that their
rooms have no privacy. When asked how difficult it is to live in this condition, one
of the interviewees laughs and replies, ‘It is very hot during the summers, but at
night the weather is as cool as Darjeeling’.15 The situation in Ashoknagar is quite
different from those who had settled in Jabardakal—forcefully occupied—colonies
in Kolkata. In fact, the Commissioner of Rehabilitation and Secretary of Relief
for West Bengal (1949–55), Hiranmoy Bandyopadhyay, writes that the refugees
who forcefully occupied the lands were ‘energetic’ souls who did not require much
institutional support.16 Notably, in one of the Jabardakal colonies at Bijoygarh
in Jadavpur, Kolkata, the location of the interview is on a house’s terrace. The
clustered, closed spaces of Ashoknagar give way to an open, breezy background
at Bijoygarh. In the initial segments of Seemantorekha, space appears as a crucial
discursive trope. It is one of the vital principles of sociopolitical organisation: ‘Our
epoch is one in which space takes [for us] the form of relations among sites’.17
The refugees in the Jabardakal colonies, nonetheless, had also to struggle.18 While
they were kept under strict surveillance,19 they had to fight with goons sent by

13
  Tanvir Mokammel’s email interview with the author.
14
  Seemantorekha, 20:13–20:16.
15
  Ibid., 22:55–22:59.
16
  Hiranmoy Bandyopadhyay, Udbastu (Kolkata: Shaitya Samsad, 1960), 31.
17
  Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics,
16, no. 1, (1986): 22–27.
18
  See Prafulla Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in
West Bengal (Calcutta: Lumière Books, 1990), 30–45.
19
  Restriction on the Movement of Refugees from East Bengal, File No.: (CR 155/50 PART) B April
1950, 311–17, DBHP, WBSA.

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the landlords to evict them from their humble abodes. Hence, the area is named
Bijoygarh—the bastion of victory.20 As the camera navigates its way through the
concrete edifices of Kolkata, the viewers are taken to the suburban town of Uttarpara.
The focus is now on the individuals who reside in the Permanent Liability Camp
at Bhadrakali, Uttarpara. Forced migration, death of male members in communal
riots and dearth of economic independence mean that the elderly women in the
camps are considered a ‘liability’ for the Indian State. On being questioned about
what the future holds for her, the interviewee, Indumati Dasi, despondently looks
away and says, ‘Will go to the Ganges, (pauses), what else’.21
The refugee crisis posed a unique problem because the individuals dispossessed,
owing to the Partition, were not rendered stateless;22 instead, they were entitled
to citizenship in the nation that they had migrated to.23 The political obligation to
absorb and rehabilitate the refugees imposed a heavy financial burden on the West
Bengal government.24 The union government intervened in the scheme of things and
designed plans to ‘unburden’ West Bengal of its expanding refugee population.25 In
the first phase, the refugees from East Pakistan were sent to the sparsely populated
Andaman Islands.26 Later, the Union Rehabilitation Minister Mehr Chand Khanna
met his West Bengal counterpart Prafulla Chandra Sen in Kolkata, deciding to
appoint a committee comprising Union and State Rehabilitation officials, to look
into the problem of rehabilitating refugees over various phases.27 The proposed
idea was to rehabilitate refugees in other states of India,28 especially Uttar Pradesh,
Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan.29
From the riverine areas of West Bengal, the viewers are now transported
to the hills in Nainital, Uttarakhand. ‘In 1952, seven settlements were created
here with each family receiving a house and eight acres of land’, an interviewee

20
  Seemantorekha, 27:36–27:41.
21
  Ibid., 32:04–32:06.
22
  Natasha Raheja, ‘Neither Here nor There: Pakistani Hindu Refugee Claims at the Interface of
International and South Asian Refugee Regimes’, The Journal of Refugee Studies 31, no. 3 (2018):
334–52.
23
  Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation After the Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019), 4–5.
24
  West Bengal Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons and Eviction of Persons, File No.: (4M-28/51)
B. June 1954, pp. 155–67, DBHP, WBSA.
25
  It is a well-established argument that there is a caste continuum in policies related to the
rehabilitation of refugees in regions outside West Bengal. Given the framework of this article, it is beyond
its scope to discuss the intersection of caste and migration from East Pakistan. For a detailed account of
caste and 1947 Bengal Partition, see Dwaipayan Sen, The Decline of the Caste Question: Jogendranath
Mondal and the Defeat of Dalit Politics in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
26
  Bandyopadhyay, Udbastu, p. 46.
27
  ABP, NMML, 16 July 1959.
28
  Papers and Correspondence with Rehabilitation Minister and Others, Subject File 2, 1953–76,
List No. 466-Papers of Ashoka Gupta, NMML.
29
  ABP, NMML, 16 July 1959.

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tells us.30 The camera records the verdant green countryside with the narration
showing the agricultural fecundity of the region. What it fails to record is the cul-
tural miscegenation that the refugees experienced due to the different sociocultural
ambience in Nainital. It seems, on the other hand, that the refugees in Andaman
Islands nurture little grievance regarding the facilities they were provided with.31
Ravinder Kaur suggests that the post-partition rehabilitation of refugees depended
on the refugees’ ability to perform the designated work and engage in productive
labour.32 The refugees in Andaman echo Kaur’s proposition. ‘We built it through
our physical labour,’ the interviewee says, ‘as we took to agriculture and fishing’.33
The refugees, who are settled in Dandakaranya, Central India, face problems adapt-
ing to the surroundings. In the interviews, they complain about the aridity of the
region. The recurrence of endemic diseases proves fatal to many.34 Tucked between
these narrations is the history of migration of refugees who had come back to West
Bengal in an island called Marichjhapi in the Sundarbans. The refugees who came
back to settle in Marichjhapi had to suffer state-sponsored oppression; they were
eventually evicted in May 1979.35
In its treatment of the theme of the Partition, Seemantorekha fashions a tem-
porality of its own. In the beginning, Seemantorekha skims over the rise of com-
munal politics in the 1940s to show documentary footage of families migrating
during 1947. The concern stems from Mokammel’s personal engagement with the
event. He is from Khulna, Bangladesh, and his mother was born in Basirhat, West
Bengal. In the course of the documentary, the voice-over reiterates the frequently
held argument that middle-class Muslims, who migrated to East Pakistan, benefit-
ted in the long run.36 On the other hand, as early as in September 1948, Filmindia
magazine called the Muslims in India the ‘living dead’ who were ‘orphans in their

30
  Seemantorekha, 38:24–38:30.
31
  For a different perspective on the refugee settlement in the Andamans, see Udit Sen, ‘Exiles
or Settlers? Caste, Governance and Identity in the Andaman Islands’, in Citizen Refugee, 115–60.
doi:10.1017/9781108348553.005
32
  Ravinder Kaur, ‘Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Post-colonial State in India’s
Partition’, Cultural and Social History, 6, no. 4 (2009): 429–46.
33
  Seemantorekha, 51:15–51:25.
34
  Ibid., 43:51–43:55.
35
  Ross Mallick, ‘Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the
Marichjhapi Massacre’, Journal of Asian Studies, 58, no. 1 (1999): 104–25; Annu Jalias, ‘Dwelling on
Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became “Citizens” and Refugees “Tiger-Food”’, Economic & Political
Weekly, 40, no. 17 (2005): 1757–62; Jhuma Sen, ‘Reconstructing Marichjhapi: From Margins and
Memories of Migrant Lives’, in Partition: The Long Shadow, ed. Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Zubaan,
2015), 102–28; Deep Halder, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre (New Delhi:
HarperCollins India, 2019); Sumallya Mukhopadhyay, ‘Thinking of Migration Through Caste: Reading
Oral Narratives of “Displaced Person(s)” from East Pakistan (1950–1970)’, Journal of Migration
Affairs, 2, no. 1 (2019): 113–31.
36
  Anindita Ghosal, ‘The Invisible Refugees: Muslim “Returnees” in East Pakistan (1947–71)’,
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 63, no. 1 (2018): 70.

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own land’, paying ‘for the sins’ of other Muslims who had migrated to Pakistan.37
Recent scholarship discusses how difficult it is for the Muslims in India to develop
and cultivate a sense of belonging.38 One is reminded of the predicaments faced by
Salim Mirza and his family in M.S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1974).39 By talking to
the Muslims who reside, at present, in Murshidabad, West Bengal, Seemantorekha
puts forward their viewpoint. One of them says that his family never thought of
migrating to East Pakistan. He has seen people of different faiths intermingle with
each other.40 Joya Chatterji warns about the narratives of ‘cultural assimilation’ that
led to ‘the creation of secular independent India’, because these narratives gloss
over the rather ‘harsher dynamics’ of Muslims being marginalised in society.41
Compared to the rest of the population, the Muslims in India tend to be underedu-
cated and underemployed.42 At the same time, Seemantorekha sheds light upon the
fact that some Bangladeshi nationals cross over to the Indian side for economic
reasons, allegedly without any formal paperwork. It narrates the story of Felani,
shot dead by the Indian security forces. In the documentary, a frame focuses on her
body as it is seen hanging on the barbed wire fences (Figure 1). The significance
of the image has to be understood in its relation to temporality because it ‘points
to the presence of an actual referent in the past’.43 The image is offered the screen
space for some 10 seconds as the camera zooms in on Felani. The Indian security
personnel remain silhouetted against the image.44 André Bazin observes, ‘I cannot
repeat a single moment of my life, but cinema can repeat any one of these moments
indefinitely before my eyes’.45 This intriguing aspect of documentaries and films
(and by that fact, of any art form) to record and repeat images on the screen brings
out, by contrast, the ephemeral nature of our experience. It makes the image time-
less as it gets cemented in our sensory perception.
Mokammel avers that ‘most of the political, economic and cultural problems
of our Sub-Continent are somehow rooted in the Partition’.46 He derives his own
inspiration to document the lives of refugees from the political and material

37
  Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (New Delhi: Orient
Blackswan, 2010), 130.
38
  See Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji, and Annu Jalais, The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim
Migration (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015); Joya Chatterji, ‘Of Graveyards and Ghettos: Muslims in
West Bengal 1947–1967’, in Partition’s Legacies, ed. Joya Chatterji, (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2019), 358–400.
39
  For a detailed discussion on Garam Hawa, see Sarkar’s Mourning the Nation, 190–99.
40
  Seemantorekha, 1:13:57–1:14:40.
41
  Chatterji, ‘Of Graveyards and Ghettos’, 384.
42
  Siddiqui, Muslim Educational Uplift, 7, cited in Chatterji’s ‘Of Being Stuck in Bengal Delta’, 436.
43
  Sarkar, Mourning the Nation, p. 20.
44
  Seemantorekha, 1:09:10–1:09:20.
45
  André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of Photographic Image’, in What Is Cinema, Vol. 1, ed. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 30.
46
  Tanvir Mokammel’s email interview with the author.

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Figure 1
Felani on the Barbed-Wire Fence

Spurce: Kino-Eye Films.

understanding of present-day society. In India, the present political dispensation

appropriates the communal discourses prevalent in 1947, and the ensuing experi-
ences of individuals being dispossessed, to make amendments to the criteria of
citizenship. It desires to correct the ‘historical wrong’ done in 1947 by granting
citizenship to minorities who look to migrate to India from its three neighbouring
countries.47 The historical wrong, if any, done during the Partition, pertains to the
arbitrary decisions, lopsided policies and piecemeal schemes that were drafted to
rehabilitate refugees who migrated across the Radcliffe Line. Rather than defin-
ing the Partition in communally charged rhetoric, it is crucial that we study it as a
process through which displaced individuals and minorities in partitioned nations
sought to rebuild their lives and communities after 1947. It is this long shadow48
of the Partition that Mokammel retraces in Seemantorekha and takes it further by

47
  ‘Historical Wrong Righted with CAA’, The Times of India, 22 December 2019, https://timesofindia.
indiatimes.com/city/goa/historical-wrong-righted-with caa/articleshow/72922902.cms (accessed 9
February 2020); Also see, ‘CAA Brought in Correct to Historical Injustice’, The Economic Times, 29
January 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/brought-caa-to-correct-
historical-injustice-pm-modi/articleshow/73693368.cms (accessed 11 February 2020).
48
  Of course, the author borrows the phrase ‘long shadow’ from Vazira Zamindar. See Vazira Zamidar,
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007).

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8 / Sumallya Mukhopadhyay

narrating the journey of four individuals—two Muslims and two Hindus—to their
erstwhile homes in West Bengal and Bangladesh.

The Third Space of Being

Navine Murshid opines that with the influx of Rohingyas in Bangladesh and India,
the ‘silence’ regarding the refugee crisis in South Asia was, finally, broken.49 The
silence that Murshid refers to has seeped in the body politic because of two reasons.
The first refugee crisis that South Asia experienced went hand in hand with Indepen-
dence from the Raj. The task of nation-building necessitated that the violence and
displacements of 1947 be read as an aberration in the nationalist historiographies
of the two nations.50 On the other hand, the trauma of being uprooted required the
refugees to distance themselves from the painful memory of displacement. Since
they could not express themselves, they preferred to bury the past in the deep
recesses of their mind. Such an action cannot be termed as forgetting in Freudian
parlance, it is not due to erosion of memory. Rather, it is a ‘purposeful conduct’
performed by the individual.51 On the other hand, for the past two decades or so,
there is a ‘memory boom’ in studies related to the Partition.52 ‘Partition survivors
whose stories have been largely consigned to oblivion or silenced for seventy years’
are now being actually called upon to share their narratives.53

49
  Navine Murshid, The Politics of Refugees in South Asia: Identity, Resistance, Manipulation (New
York: Routledge, 2013), 1.
50
  Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, 2nd ed. (London: Yale
University Press, 2017), xxiii.
51
  Richard Terdiman, ‘Memory in Freud’, in Memory, eds. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 95.
52
  Jay Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Contemporary
Historical Studies’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 27 (2000): 69.
The term ‘memory boom’ is used to denote the proliferation of oral narratives of partition refugees.
See Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1998); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998);
Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition and Punjabi Migrants of
Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Jasodhara Bagchi, Subhoranjan Dasgupta and
Subhasri Ghosh’s twin-edited volumes, The Trauma and The Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern
India (Kolkata, Stree, 2003 and 2009). The emergent discourses moved away from the high politics of
the event to highlight the plight of those who experienced the loss of home and family members. In most
cases, these scholars employed the methodology of oral history to unearth narratives of displacement.
For more on oral history and the 1947 Partition, see Devika Chawla, Home Uprooted: Oral History
of India’s Partition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Anam Zakaria, The Footprints of
Partition (Lahore: HarperCollins, 2015); Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of Separation (New Delhi:
HarperCollins, 2017); and Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices: Untold British Stories (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2019).
53
  Tarun K. Saint, et al., ‘Introduction’, in Looking Back: 1947 Partition of India, 70 Years On, eds.
Tarun K. Saint, Debjani Sengupta, and Rakhshanda Jalil (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2017), xviii.

Studies in People’s History (2021): 1–12

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Figure 2
Aparajita Ghoshal at Her Ancestral Home

Source: Kino-Eye Films.

Seemantorekha begins with the life story54 of Aparajita Ghosal, who recollects
how her father, a doctor, dressed in a burqa55, escaped the riots and migrated to West
Bengal, with the help of one of his Muslim friends. Soon, she is shown visiting her
ancestral home at Santhahar, Bangladesh. She makes her way to her home, and the
present owners show her the well that is kept and maintained as it was when she
left. She stands in front of a pond, adjacent to her home, and says she is ‘seeing it
for one last time in this life’. (Figure 2)56 Though Bangladesh and India are divided
by borders, the two nations remain connected by the rivers. In Rajshahi, as she
sits by the side of the Padma, her voice is heard in the background: ‘Ganga is my
mother, Padma is my mother…’.57
Unlike her sisters, Achiya Khanum migrated from Howrah, West Bengal, to
East Pakistan. She recollects the sight of her brothers leaving for East Pakistan,
and 9-year-old Khanum wanted to leave with them. She believed that Pakistan
would be a better country, very different from Howrah. When she was crossing
the borders, she asked her brothers, ‘The trees are all the same just like we had in

54
  Life story is the method of narration that allows scope for interpretation of past events as told by
the narrator. See Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010).
55
  An attire in Islamic tradition worn by women, which covers the body and the face.
56
  Seemantorekha, 12:16–12:18.
57
  Ibid., 3:46–4:00.

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Howrah’. One of her brothers replied, ‘Bengal is still the same; it has merely been
partitioned’.58 Now, the fragile figure of Khanum is seen clad in a spotless white
sari, trudging through the Khulna Railway Station, Benapole border check-post, and
reaching her erstwhile home. ‘I will stay for a month’, Achiya Khanum remarks.
We are, then, introduced to Gayatri Chakravarty who travels to Barishal, Ban-
gladesh, to see the original home of her family. She was born in West Bengal, but
the stories of pre-partitioned Bengal, which she heard in her formative years, have
inspired her to come to Bangladesh. This is a case of what Marianne Hirsch terms
‘transgenerational inheritance’.59 Chakravarty says, ‘It is surprising that the country
I have never seen has remained as a memory’.60 She refuses to call it nostalgia;
it is an experience that is intrinsic to her being. Chakravarty’s words substantiate
Hirsch’s argument that postmemory is not a ‘movement, method or idea’; rather,
it is a ‘structure of inter- and transgenerational return’ of embodied experience.61
Chakravarty, thus, remembers her grandmother’s story of commuting from Dhaka
to Barishal by the Kirtankhola River. The camera works its way through Chakra-
varty’s dilapidated, ancestral house, capturing the outer wall and the staircase. In
the end, Chakravarty says, ‘When I return to [West] Bengal, I will have the feeling
that I came here, stood on this ancestral piece of soil’.62
Ernest Gellner states that ‘having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity,
but it has now come to appear as such’.63 If the appearance of the nation is thought
of as an imagined community,64 it presupposes the membership of subjects in the
community on the basis of an uncontested, monolithic identity.65 It is a structure that
sustains itself through the practice of certain rituals66 that legitimise the power of the
ruling elites.67 The epistemological understanding of the nation does not encourage
different and alternative affiliations; the ideological form68 of it rests on the expres-
sion and realisation of the popular will and the self-determination of its common
identity.69 The migration of refugees after the Partition complicates the idea of the

58
  Ibid.,1:05:10–1:05:23.
59
  Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 33.
60
  Seemantorekha, 1:22:31.
61
  Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 6.
62
  Seemantorekha, 1:25:43–1:25:53.
63
  Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 7.
64
  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(New York: Verso, 1991).
65
  Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 12.
66
  Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and The National Question in the New
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21.
67
  Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 12–14.
68
  Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’, Review (Fernand Braudel Centre),
13. No. 3 (1990): 329–61.
69
  Sarkar, Mourning the Nation, 3.

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nation as new spatial imaginations characterise the concept of belonging.70 Bhaskar

Sarkar succinctly sums up this argument when he writes that for the refugees, the
‘geographical displacement amounted to no more than a few hundred miles, and
often much less. This strange proximity of the abandoned homeland, and the simul-
taneous sense of cultural–linguistic contiguity and difference, produced precarious
subjectivities, suspended between the lost home and the new nation.71 While the
borders map out the nation within a territory, the refugees are, through affective
attachment, drawn towards their ancestral home, which falls in a different country. It
opens a liminal space of belonging that disrupts the ‘logics of synchronicity’ of the
structure.72 The structure in question is the nation. When they visit their ancestral
home, the refugees embrace liminality in which ‘meanings and symbols’ of the
structure have ‘no primordial unity or fixity’.73 The life story of Manowar Ali is a
case in point. Ali comes to Basirhat to visit his former home. On his way, he harks
back to the days after the migration when his erstwhile well-established family
faced years of penury. In Basirhat, a few of the neighbours remember Ali’s father
and uncle, but they cannot help him identify his home. He frantically tries to locate
it. Soon, he finds the house only to realise that another building has been erected
on that particular piece of land. Seeing the crew of the film, people have gathered
around Ali. He tells them about his childhood days. The people do not know Ali,
but they listen to his stories wrapped in empathetic silence. The camera follows
Ali who walks on the path leading to the pond. Like Aparajita Ghosal, he tries to
imbibe the fleeting moments of his return to Basirhat. In the cathartic moment of
reconciling with their ancestral home, Ali and Aparajita, Khanum and Chakravarty
share a symbiotic, corporeal space that rests on emotional commonality and shared
experiences of mourning. It is the ‘Third Space’74 of being that is contingent on the
politics of the moment, based on imagination, attachment and longing.
The presence of the Third Space is intensely felt in the last phase of See-
mantorekha. On either bank of the Ichamati River, people gather to witness the
immersion of Durga idols. The boats fluttering the national flags of Bangladesh
and India row side by side. People wave at each other and collectively take part in
the celebration. A woman says, ‘Whenever I come to the river, I look at the other
side and pay obeisance to my birthplace…one can never forget one’s birthplace’.75
An individual remarks, ‘Since my childhood I see it happening. Now it is not only a

70
  For a similar argument, but in a slightly different context, see Sahana Ghosh, ‘Relative Intimacies:
Belonging and Difference in Transnational Families’, Economic & Political Weekly, 52, no. 15 (2017):
45–52.
71
  Sarkar, Mourning the Nation, 130.
72
  Homi Bhabha, ‘The Commitment to Theory’, in The Location of Culture, ed. Homi K. Bhabha
(London: Routledge, 1994), 36.
73
  Ibid., p. 37.
74
  Ibid., p. 39.
75
  Seemantorekha, 2:08:05–2:08:15.

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festival of Hindus; it has become a combined affair’.76 With their regime of power,
the nations, in general, dictate the process of mobility and movement of people.77
In the scenes that Seemantorekha portrays, the movement of people transforms
the regime of border control as nations and their agencies (in this case, the border
security forces) acknowledge the emotive and relative intimacies of the crowd.
The voice-over narrates that to mark the occasion of the International Mother Lan-
guage Day, each year on 21 February, the Benapole border check-post becomes a
meeting ground for people from either side of the borders. Seemantorekha covers
the event as cultural groups from both Bangladesh and India perform before the
audience.78 The borders do not dissolve, but they symbolically merge through the
unification of people.
The first film that depicts the Partition—Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul (1950)—
presents an old widow, who, after migrating from East Pakistan, is seen stuck
amidst the squalor of the Sealdah railway station. She tells one of her associates,
‘Let us go back home’.79 Seemantorekha pays a fitting tribute to Ghosh’s film by
pursuing the journey of four individuals to their erstwhile homes. Most importantly,
it opens a representational space that eludes the politics of polarity between home
and homelessness by transcending the ideological normative of nations and borders.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Tanvir Mokammel for his observations and would like to
thank the Partition Museum, Amritsar, for supporting a part of the archival work
cited in this article.

76
   Ibid., 2:08:50–2:08:53.
77
  Delwar Hussain, Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh–India Border
(London: Hurst and Company, 2013).
78
  Seemantorekha, 2:10:30–2:12:15.
79
  Chinnamul, directed by Nemai Ghosh, Youtube, 2017, 1:02:52, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=NXVSDlUKi8Q&t=3775s.

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