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The Long History of Partition
in Bengal
This book focuses on the aftermath of the 1947 Partition of India. It considers
the long aftermath and afterlives of Partition afresh, from a wide and inclusive
range of perspectives, and studies the specificities of the history of violence
and migration and their memories in the Bengal region. The chapters in
the volume range from the administrative consequences of Partition to public
policies on refugee settlement, life stories of refugees in camps and colonies,
and literary and celluloid representations of Partition. It also probes questions
of memory, identity, and the memorialization of events.
Eclectic in its theoretical orientation and methodology, this book will be of
interest to scholars and researchers of Partition history, colonialism, refugee
studies, Indian history, South Asian history, migration studies, and modern
history in general.
Rituparna Roy is Initiator, Kolkata Partition Museum Project, and Managing

Trustee, KPM Trust.
Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum, Kolkata, and former Director

of Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India.
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Emeritus Professor of History at Victoria University

of Wellington, where he was previously the director of New Zealand India
Research Institute.
The Long History of Partition
in Bengal
Event, Memory, Representations
Edited by Rituparna Roy, Jayanta

Sengupta, and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
First published 2024
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Rituparna Roy, Jayanta
Sengupta, and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay; individual chapters, the
contributors
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Bandyopadhyay to be identified as the authors of the editorial
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-30913-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-32891-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-31721-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003317210
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Contents
List of Figures viii

List of Contributors x
Introduction: Partition and Its Afterlife in Bengal 1

SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY
PART I
Partition and Refugees29
1 Of Conflict and Cooperation: The Material Implications of

British India’s Partition 31
ANWESHA SENGUPTA
2 Divided Landscapes, Fragmented Identities: East Bengal

Refugees and Their Rehabilitation in India, 1947–79 43
GYANESH KUDAISYA
3 Refugeehood in the Eyes of the Refugees: Voices of the

Victims of Displacement 69
ANINDITA GHOSHAL
PART II
Memory, Rememory, and Postmemory85
4 Frozen Time, Partitioned Mind: Tales of Seeking Refuge in

West Bengal After Partition 87
ANASUA BASU RAY CHAUDHURY
vi Contents
5 Life Stories and Material Objects: Revisiting the Memory of

the 1947 Bengal Partition 107
SUMALLYA MUKHOPADHYAY
6 Spaces of Anamnesis: The Partition of India and

An/Other Bengal 122
KRISHNA SEN
7 The “Lost” Land of Barisal: Crafting a “Nostalgia” of East

Bengal and the “Pain” of Partition 135
JAYANTA SENGUPTA
8 Partition’s Women: Inherited Memories of Remarkable Lives

and Times 150
DEBDATTA CHOWDHURY
9 The Creation of a Women’s Sphere: Adjusting to an ‘Alien’

Terrain in Post-Partition Bengal 170
APARAJITA SENGUPTA
10 Moving Memories: Remembering, and Forgetting, the

Partition of Bengal Between South Asia and the UK 184
JASMINE HORNABROOK, CLELIA CLINI AND EMILY KEIGHTLEY
PART III
Cultural Representation and Memorialization 209
11 Revisiting Bengal Partition: Katha and Myths at the

Interface of the Village and the Nation 211
SARBANI BANERJEE
12 Memory as Cinematic Praxis: The Art of Ritwik Ghatak 226

SREEMATI MUKHERJEE
13 The (im)Possibility of Representing Genocidal Violence:

Jewish Museum Berlin, Amritsar Partition Museum and
a Case for a Partition Museum in Kolkata 240
RITUPARNA ROY
Contents vii
14 Kolkata Partition Museum: Material Memory Through

Subaltern Narratives of Involuntary Migration 254
AURGHO JYOTI
Index 275
Figures
2.1 The Partition of 1947 and the Bengal region 44

5.1 The registration certificate of Pabitra Bhusan Bhattacharya,
dated 8 June 1948 112
5.2 Pratima Saha features on the opening page of the album,
dated 13 February 2016 114
5.3 From Pratima Saha’s photo album: the pond and the
ancestral home 115
5.4 The gold medal of Pratima Saha’s grandfather, Krishna
Kumar Saha, dated 1911–12 116
14.1 Gouri Mondal 261
14.2 Goshto Bihari Mondal 262
14.3 Baniz Uddin Mirdha 263
14.4 Rekha Das 264
14.5 Entrance at the first concentric shell of layered earth
belonging to each province in Bengal (West Bengal and
Bangladesh)266
14.6 Temporal thresholds and material memory – concentric
pathway between layers representing pre-colonial material
memory – earth shell to the left and brick shell to the right 266
memory – earth shell, followed by brick shell of different
textures, with terracotta and laterite to the right 267
memory – brick shell, followed by terracotta and laterite,
with painted plaster white walls and exposed concrete to
the right 267
14.9 Liminal space – the open transition expanse between
the central archaeological space and the tightly spaced
concentric spherical spaces representing historical periods.
The liminal space depth allows a view of all chronological
material shells representing historical periods 269
Figures ix
14.10 The central space is conceived as an archaeological site with

fragments of memory expressed as fragmented objects – oral
histories, fragments of habitation, and fragments of means
of migration, within an archaeological ruin 270
14.11 The fragments of habitation include multiple housing
scenarios of subaltern refugees, representing rural,
semi-urban, and urban habitation conditions. The
fragments of means of migration include different
transportation procedures 271
14.12 A close-up of the inner wall with refugee portraits pixelated
and embedded in concrete. Human sculptures in an endless
march along the path 271
14.13 The roof of the central space is a field of floating cylinders
in a gravity-free space. Each cylinder is made with the
earth from a particular district in Bengal. A circular body
of water is elevated at the center, surrounded by the
panoramic wall of refugees embedded in concrete 272
Contributors
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Emeritus Professor of History at Victoria Univer-

sity of Wellington, where he was previously the director of New Zealand
India Research Institute. His primary research interest is in the history of
nationalism and caste system in colonial and post-colonial India. His most
recent co-authored book is Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of
Dalit Refugees, 1946–1961 (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Sarbani Banerjee earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the Univer-
sity of Western Ontario. Her areas of specialization include post-colonial
literatures and theory, post-Partition Bengali literature and cinema, and
diasporic literatures. She worked as Dr S. Radhakrishnan Post-Doctoral
Fellow (University Grants Commission). Currently she teaches English in
the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT, Roorkee.
Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury is Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foun-
dation, Kolkata Chapter, and Editor of ORF Bangla. She specializes in
regional and sub-regional cooperation in South Asia, Geopolitics of the
Bay of Bengal, and Indo-Pacific, forced migration, and displacement. Her
recent publication remains Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of
Dalit Refugees 1946–1964 (co-authored with Sekhar Bandyopadhyay/
Oxford University Press, UK, 2022).
Debdatta Chowdhury is Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at Centre for
Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta in Kolkata, India. Her research interests
include gender and law and border/migration/Partition studies – especially
in the context of South Asia. Her monograph titled Identities and Expe-
riences at the India-Bangladesh Border: A Crisis of Belonging has been
published from Routledge in 2018. She has published with national and
international journals and has contributed to a number of edited volumes
and continues to do so.
Clelia Clini is Lecturer in Postcolonial Media and Culture at London Met-
ropolitan University. She previously worked as a Research Associate
on the project Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination at
Contributors xi
Loughborough University, London. Her research cuts across disciplines

with a specific focus on the cultural politics of migration and the South
Asian diaspora; South Asian diasporic literature and cinema; Indian popu-
lar cinema; gender, race, and the media; and migration and health.
Anindita Ghoshal teaches history at Diamond Harbour Women’s Univer-
sity, Kolkata, India. Her area of research includes Partition and refugees’
studies with special emphasis on east-northeast India and Bangladesh. She
is the author of two books, Refugee, Borders and Identities: Rights and
Habitat in East and Northeast India (Routledge, 2021) and Revisiting
Partition: Contestation, Narratives and Memories (edited volume, Primus,
2022).
Jasmine Hornabrook is a Research Fellow in Music at the University of
Huddersfield. She previously worked as a Research Associate on the
Leverhulme-funded project Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagi-
nation at Loughborough University, London. Her focus is on music,
migration, and the cultural transmission of heritage and memory in and
across South Asian diasporas. She is particularly interested in musical per-
formance, identity, religion, transnational networks, and the politics of
belonging across nation-state borders.
Aurgho Jyoti is the Founder and Creative Director of Architecture Urban-
ism Research (AUR), an architectural practice between New York and
New Delhi. His architectural work aims to create meaning through social
relevance and cultural significance. With a research interest in human
migration, he is Chief Architect for the Virtual Kolkata Partition Museum.
Educated as an architect at Harvard, Cornell, and School of Planning and
Architecture (SPA) Delhi, he has previously worked for some of the world’s
leading and Pritzker Laureate architecture practices – which include SOM,
OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Gehry Technologies, and Studio Fuksas.
Emily Keightley is Professor of Media and Memory Studies at Loughborough
University, London. Emily’s main research interest is memory, time, and
their mediation in everyday life, particularly with the role of media in
the relationship between individual, social, and cultural memory. Emily’s
recent work focuses on the relationship between migration, identity, and
memory.
Gyanesh Kudaisya researches late colonial and post-colonial South Asian his-
tory. He is Associate Professor in the South Asian Studies Programme and
Visiting Associate Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Stud-
ies at the National University of Singapore.
Sreemati Mukherjee is Professor, Department of Performing Arts, at Presi-
dency University, Kolkata. Her areas of interest are Feminist Theory, Post-
colonial Theory, African American Studies, Theatre Studies, and Music.
xii Contributors
She was Fulbright Visiting Lecturer Fellow at San Diego State University
in 2011. Her essays have been published by Routledge, Amsterdam Uni-
versity Press (AUP), and Litteraria Pragensia. Her latest book is The Many
Dialogues of the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita (Hawakal, 2021).
Sumallya Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Eng-
lish, Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies, Delhi-
NCR, India. He had been awarded the TATA Trusts – Partition Archive
Research Grant (2021) and South Asia Speaks Fellowship (2022). In
2023, he has been awarded the International Oral History Association
(IOHA) Scholarship. He is also the Asian Representative in IOHA Council
(2023–2026).
Rituparna Roy is Initiator, Kolkata Partition Museum Project, and Manag-
ing Trustee, KPM Trust. She has taught at several institutions in Kol-
kata, Leiden, and The Hague. She is the author of two academic books
and a work of fiction – South Asian Partition Fiction in English: From
Khushwant Singh to Amitav Ghosh (Amsterdam University Press, 2010);
Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000–2010 (co-editor,
Amsterdam University Press, 2013); and Gariahat Junction (Kitaab Inter-
national, 2020).
Krishna Sen is Professor and former Head of English at the University of
Calcutta and has received the university’s “Eminent Professor” award.
She was Leverhulme Professor of English at the University of Leeds, has
received the Fulbright and Nippon Fellowships, and has been Visiting Pro-
fessor or invited speaker at several universities, including Stanford, Berke-
ley, and SOAS. She has several national and international publications,
is on the editorial boards of international journals, and is a member of
international research groups.
Anwesha Sengupta teaches history at the Institute of Development Stud-
ies Kolkata, India. She is currently working on her monograph, which
examines the process of implementing Partition in India and Pakistan by
the bureaucrats and the political elites and the role of common people in
moulding it. She co-edits the Itihaase Haatekhari series that publishes his-
tory books for school children.
Aparajita Sengupta is CEO of the West Bengal State Book Board, Kolkata,
India. She has taught History at various government colleges of West Ben-
gal and at St Mary’s College, Indiana, USA. Her book For Home, Family,
and Nation: Women and the Politics of Gender in Bengal, 1870–1947, is
forthcoming in 2024. She is also a creative author in Bengali, with several
books of fiction and essays.
Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum, Kolkata, and former Director
of Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India. He taught History at Jadavpur
University and the University of Notre Dame previously. He is the author
Contributors xiii
of At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy and Regional-

ism in Orissa (Oxford University Press, 2015), Those Noble Edifices: The
Raj Bhavans of Bengal (Victoria Memorial Hall, 2019), and two books
in Bengali – Itihas o Samosomoy (Anustup, 2022) and Hensheldarpan
(Ananda Publishers, 2023).
Introduction
Partition and Its Afterlife in Bengal
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
The Partition of India in 1947 does not have many parallels in world history,
as it affected so many people when it occurred and has continued to affect
innumerable lives ever since. The event had a long, complicated pre-history,
as well as a prolonged aftermath. When the two nation-states of Pakistan
and India were created out of what was known as the British Indian Empire,
the provinces of Punjab in the north-west and Bengal in the east were to be
divided on the basis of religious demography. When the Radcliffe Line was
announced on 17 August demarcating the boundaries between the two new
states, Muslim majority areas of West Punjab and East Bengal, along with the
provinces of Sindh, North-Western Frontier Province, and Baluchistan, went
to Pakistan. The district of Sylhet was later added through a referendum.
This division was meant to solve the problem of the Muslim minorities in
British India. But instead, it created new minorities, as many non-Muslims
were left in Pakistan and many Muslims chose to live in India. So, the Rad-
cliffe Line had different meanings for different people. A nation’s desire for
ethnic purity creates an unnecessary fear of the minorities, and what ensues
as a result is the outbreak of violence and displacement of population to
drive these minorities out (Appadurai 2006, 4–13). Although no one really
knows the exact numbers, informed estimates indicate that as a result of
the Partition-related violence in the Indian subcontinent, about one million
people died, and about twelve million became refugees on both sides of the
border. The memories of this brutal violence and the pains of displacement
linger on in people’s mind, defining their identity, affecting their engagement
with their nation-states, and influencing their relationships with the residual
minorities in their midst, even after the lapse of seventy-five long years.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Partition has been extensively stud-
ied by both professional and amateur researchers looking at it from a large
spectrum of ideological positions as well as disciplinary perspectives. This
vast literature on Partition initially engaged with the ‘event’, as historians
asked why it happened and whether or not such a catastrophic event could
have been avoided, and most importantly, who was to blame for it. But then,
the focus of Partition studies moved from event to process, or to its long
DOI: 10.4324/9781003317210-1
2 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
aftermath, and, most importantly, to memories of violence and pain and

sense of loss of those who lost their loved ones and ancestral homes. The
experiences of other minorities like women and Dalits also came under inter-
sectional analytical scrutiny. While the older historiography was criticised
for being statist, seeking to construct national collectives, the newer histories
have been credited for retrieving individual experiences of violence and dis-
placement. It is virtually impossible to deduce any consensus view from this
vast literature. The Partition is indeed remembered in myriad ways by those
who suffered, those who watched from the sideline, and those who did not
witness it first-hand but heard about it. There are also walls of silence, which
are difficult to penetrate. We cannot discuss all these complexities in one
book. This book focuses on the aftermath of Partition, and it is concerned
only with Bengal, seeking to show the specificities of the history of violence
and migration and their memories in a region.
Reflecting on the significance of the recent shift in historiography, Gyanen-
dra Pandey observed:
It has turned aside from an exclusive concentration on high politics,

and the question of ultimate responsibility, to reopen other issues cru-
cial to an understanding of our recent history and politics; the suffering
of bewildered and angry men, women and children in 1947 (and since).
(Pandey 2001, 65)
However, historians like Ian Talbot (1996) and, more recently, Yasmin
Khan (2007) have forcefully argued that Partition happened not just because
of high politics, but popular agitations also contributed to it. Therefore,
the question of responsibility is frequently raised as it is integral to how we
remember Partition. It informs the strategy of the successor nation-states
to define their ‘natural’ citizens and identify their ‘Others’. It is, therefore,
crucial for any public memorialisation of Partition. So, to contextualise the
book, we will first discuss some of the major turns of events in Bengal’s tortu-
ous road to Partition and then move on to analysing how it is remembered
by those who had the misfortune of going through the traumatic event and
its aftermath.
Bengal’s Road to Partition

In the Introduction to his edited collection, The Partitions of Memory, Suvir
Kaul observed: “In India the rhetoric of secularism has to constantly strain
against the legacy of religious difference, a legacy sharpened to murderous
point by Partition, which insists on the violent separateness of ‘Hindus’ and
‘Muslims’ ” (2001, 7–8). However, for Bengal, it is difficult to pin down the
periods when this ‘violent separateness’ started in public life and when it
reached a point of no return, making Partition all but inevitable. Possibly it
was not until the end of the nineteenth century, following the emergence of
Introduction 3
a Muslim middle class, that a separate Muslim political identity vis-à-vis the
Hindus had begun to emerge in Bengal (Ahmed 1996). It took place within a
modern public space that colonial rule introduced in India, and there were two
major intellectual drivers behind it. First of all, it was in response to a strident
Hindu revivalist movement. But more important were the colonial cognitive
enterprises of the period in the forms of ethnographic surveys and decen-
nial census reports that enumerated, mapped, and ordered Indian society into
distinct religious groups. It introduced the modern demographic concepts
of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ and the developmental concepts of ‘advanced’
or ‘backward’. This statistical cognitive exercise revealed that the Muslims,
though a minority in the whole of India, were a majority in Bengal, but
despite that, according to all developmental indices – such as education and
economic status – they were a ‘backward’ community vis-à-vis the ‘advanced’
Hindus, who were a minority in Bengal but a majority in India. In a modern
competitive public space, it was this knowledge that transformed the ‘fuzzy’
communities into ‘enumerated’ communities (Kaviraj 2010, 13–14), and the
conceptualisation of religion as a community of interests began.
The first manifestation of this growing divide in Bengal could be seen in the
urban riots in 1896 and 1897. It was seen even more prominently during the
Swadeshi movement that was launched by the nationalists to protest the first
Partition of Bengal in 1905. This Curzonian administrative measure was
meant to protect and promote the interests of the Muslims who were numer-
ous in the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. The formation of
the All-India Muslim League in Dhaka in 1906 gave an impetus to political
mobilisation of the Muslim masses to safeguard this political advantage. So,
when the upper-caste Hindu nationalists organised the Swadeshi movement
against the Partition and overtly used Hindu religious symbols, they could
hardly evoke any positive response from the Muslims and the untouchable
castes like the Namasudras. When they tried to use force and social coercion
to impose their boycott programme, they faced stiff resistance (Sarkar 1973).
This was the first instance of a Dalit-Muslim alliance against the nation-
alists, mostly savarna bhadralok elite (Bandyopadhyay 2011). In 1906–07,
Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in different parts of rural Eastern Bengal.
Rabindranath Tagore in a series of critical essays in 1907–08 reminded the
nationalists that after neglecting for years the interests and sensibilities of
these depressed groups, they could not legitimately expect them to respond
positively to their political agenda which had nothing in it to alleviate the
conditions of these communities (Sarkar 1973, 82–86).
In recent years, historians Pradip Datta (1999), Andrew Sartori (2008),
and Neilesh Bose (2014) have shown that it was in the first two decades of
the twentieth century, particularly after the annulment of the first Partition in
1911, that Hindu hostility towards the Muslims in Bengal began to rise, and
consequently, a distinctive Bengali Muslim identity also began to emerge.
This growing Hindu aggression was due to many reasons. The Muslims
were held responsible for the failure of the Swadeshi movement. There was a
well-entrenched Hindu common sense that the number of the Muslims was
continually increasing through conversion, further jeopardising the position
of the Hindus as a minority. The Muslims too at this stage became linked to
a trans-regional and global Islamic identity. In the eyes of many Hindu bhad-
ralok, therefore, the Bengali Muslims began to appear as a group of violent,
proselytising foreigners. But, of course, not everyone shared those views.
At a national level, the attempt to integrate the Muslims to the nationalist
mainstream through the Lucknow Pact in 1916 was thwarted by the intran-
sigence of the conservative Hindu leaders within the Congress. Gandhi’s
endeavour to win them over through his support for the Khilafat movement
in 1920 did not go very far and ended in further Islamising Indian Muslim
identity, culminating in the Moplah riots of 1921. But in Bengal, as Semanti
Ghosh (2017) has argued, leaders like Chittaranjan Das and his contem-
porary Bipin Chandra Pal approached the problem differently. Instead of
homogenisation, they saw the Indian nation as a ‘federation of regional com-
munities’. For Das, the idea of federation extended to inner demographics of
Bengali society as well. Each social grouping had its own distinctive identity
and interests, which needed to be respected and represented in the nationalist
agenda. With this goal in mind, Das and the Bengal Congress negotiated the
Bengal Pact with the Muslims in 1923, recognising their legitimate claims to
representation (Ghosh 2017). But while the Bengal Pact was wholeheartedly
supported by the Muslim middle-class leaders, it was vehemently opposed
by a section of the caste Hindu bhadralok of Bengal who thought that it
would put Hindus in danger. More importantly, at its Cocanada session in
December 1923, Congress rejected the Bengal Pact. Had it been endorsed,
as one may argue counterfactually, India’s history might have been different.
However, it was also true, as Sabyasachi Bhattacharya has reminded us, that
despite a few concessions given in the public-political space, the principle of
exclusion dominated the day-to-day social transactions between the Hindu
bhadralok and their Muslim neighbours. And this “incivility of mutual exclu-
sion in private social transactions”, Bhattacharya argues, eventually became
the most important cause of conflicts in the public sphere in the 1920s and
1930s. And the situation reached a point of no return in the 1940s (Bhat-
tacharya 2014, 91–92).
In this process we need not ignore the role of the colonial government,
which by offering the Muslims a separate electorate in the Morley-Minto
Reform of 1909 provided political legitimacy to their identity as a ‘minor-
ity’. But the road from minority status to nationhood and the demand for
sovereign statehood was long and full of twists and turns. So, blaming only
the colonial government and its divide and rule policy will not suffice. We
should also avoid the essentialism of treating Partition as a culmination
of a ‘civilizational clash’ between Islam and Hinduism, although David
Gilmartin (2015) and Venkat Dhulipala (2015) have recently reminded us
that we need not ignore the influence of religion at the mass level, particu-
larly in north India. In Bengal too, Taj Hashmi (1992) has shown how in
Introduction 5
the post-Khilafat period, there was gradual Islamisation of class politics

of the east Bengali Muslim peasants under the leadership of the mufassil
mullahs and Muslim jotedars. In response to this Muslim mobilisation,
counter-mobilisation of the Hindus also began in 1924 under the aegis of
the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (for details,
see Jaffrelot 1996). From the mid-1920s, communal riots broke out in
many parts of India, including Bengal, around various issues like ‘music
before mosque’. Congress could not take any effective stand against the
riots as lately within its ranks the influence of the conservative Hindus had
increased.
Against this backdrop of political ‘Othering’, the ‘Communal Award’ of
1932, later incorporated in the Government of India Act of 1935, crystal-
lised the minority identity of the Muslims by entrenching the principle of
separate electorate. Mushirul Hasan (1993) has argued that the election that
followed in 1937 and the subsequent ministry formation by Congress consti-
tuted the watershed moment in the history of Muslim alienation from main-
stream nationalism, and it was from here that the road to Partition began. In
this election, the Congress scored a massive victory to form governments in
eight out of eleven provinces and thereafter sought to marginalise the Muslim
League, which had suffered badly in the election. Its refusal to share power
with the League in the minority provinces generated among the north Indian
Muslim elite a fear that they would be permanently repressed by a brute
majority.
But minority politics worked differently in the regional context of Bengal,
which was a Muslim majority province. Here, as Joya Chatterji argued in her
1994 book, following the Communal Award and the Poona Pact of 1932, the
bhadralok political elite who dominated Bengal politics until now found their
power gradually slipping out of their grip, as they were reduced to a minor-
ity in the legislature due to separate electorate for the Muslims and reserved
seats for the Scheduled Castes. The effects of Great depression also affected
their power of landlordism. This led to their renewed efforts to consolidate
the Hindu political constituency, resulting in a resurgence of what Chatterji
has called “Hindu communalism”. Bidyut Chakrabarty (2004, 2020), on the
other hand, has observed the rise of both Hindu communalism and Muslim
communalism in the period between 1932 and 1947. Suranjan Das too in a
recent article has observed “popular communalism” among both Muslims
and Hindus during this period, paving the way for a “a convergence of elite
and popular communalism” by the 1940s (Das 2020, 1079–1087). However,
some of the recent research has suggested that the polarisation was not yet so
clearly defined in the 1930s.
During this period, A.K. Fazlul Huq had mobilised the Muslim and
Hindu lower-caste peasants under the banner of the Krishak Praja Party
(KPP) around more class-based issues and did pretty well in the election
of 1937, undermining the position of the League. But neither KPP nor any
other party had a clear majority, and so, for forming a government, when
the negotiations with the Congress broke down, the KPP formed an alli-
ance with the Muslim League and secured the support of the Independent
Scheduled Caste legislators. So, in 1937, a Muslim-Dalit alliance effectively
blocked the bid for power by the savarna Hindu bhadralok leadership of
the Bengal Congress. Although Huq later joined the League and was given
the privilege of introducing the Pakistan resolution at its Lahore session in
1940, his relationship with Jinnah was never cordial. And his willingness
to forge cross-community political alliances had not diminished. It became
evident that when his ministry fell in 1941, he resigned from Muslim
League and forged a new multi-party coalition with Syama Prasad Mook-
erjee of the Hindu Mahasabha. Sarat Chandra Bose of Congress was also
supposed to join but was arrested before that could happen. This Progres-
sive Coalition ministry, popularly known as the ‘Syama-Huq ministry’, was
brought down in 1943 by the machinations of the Bengal governor and the
European lobby in the Assembly, which decided to support a new League
ministry.
But not until 1946 was there any territorial claim for a separate sovereign
state, as Ayesha Jalal (1985) has forcefully argued. Until then Jinnah’s main
demands were for parity of representation for the Congress and the League,
irrespective of the size of the population they represented, and the exclusive
right for the League to represent all Indian Muslims. Congress was unwilling
to accept these demands as it claimed to represent all Indians irrespective of
religion or caste. On this ground broke down two attempts at reconciliation –
one by Congress through the ‘Rajagopalachari formula’ in September 1944
and the other by Viceroy Wavell wanting to form a cross-party Interim gov-
ernment at the Shimla conference in June–July 1945. At this stage, for Jinnah
and Muslim League, the demand for parity was non-negotiable, but Pakistan
was not. This was evident in their positive response to the Cabinet Mission
Plan of 1946, which rejected the demand for Pakistan but proposed to set
up in India a loose federation of states, clustered into three groups – one
with Hindu majority provinces, one with Muslim majority provinces, and
the other consisting of Bengal and Assam. While Muslim League accepted the
proposal, Congress rejected it, as it preferred a strong centralised state which
it thought was necessary to preserve its fragile unity. Jinnah got frustrated,
lost faith in constitutional negotiations, and gave a call for “Direct Action”
to fight his way to Pakistan.
For a long time, the historiography of Partition related it only to this ‘high
politics’ at the centre. The question of popular agency remained a conten-
tious issue. For Bengal, Joya Chatterji had proposed to take the discussion of
Partition away from the ‘smoke-filled rooms’ of high politics to the ‘towns
and countryside of Bengal’ where the movement that led to Partition actually
happened (Chatterji 1994, 266–267). In response, Partha Chatterjee argued
that the decision to partition Bengal was entirely negotiated and decided in
Delhi. It was, he asserted, “historically inaccurate” to assume that masses
had any role in it (Chatterjee, P. 1997, 37). Recent researchers, however, have
Introduction 7
questioned this over-emphasis on ‘high politics’. As Yasmin Khan succinctly

puts it:
Ordinary Indians suffered and were affected but also shaped the out-
come of 1947. . . . Partition’s elitist politics and everyday experiences
are not as separate as they may seem at first glance because mass dem-
onstrations, street fighting and the circulation of rumours all over-
lapped with the political decision-making process.
(Khan 2007, 7)
David Gilmartin (1988) and Ian Talbot’s (1996) research showed how a mass
campaign was launched in Punjab to rally popular support for the demand
for Pakistan. As the demand was never properly defined, it meant differ-
ent things to different groups. The campaign established an organic connec-
tion between the desires and emotions of the masses and the aspirations and
actions of their leaders around the symbolic issue of Pakistan. A mass mobili-
sation campaign was also launched by the Bengal Muslim League in support
of the Pakistan demand. But unlike Punjab, where this campaign was led
by religious leaders like pirs and sazzad nashins and had a distinctly reli-
gious flavour, in Bengal it was spearheaded by leaders who had a more secu-
lar approach to politics. To the rural masses in East Bengal, as Taj Hashmi
(1992) has shown, it was presented as a ‘peasant utopia’ which could offer
liberation from the oppression of the Hindu landlords and moneylenders.
The members of the Purba Pakistan Renaissance Society as well as Bengali
League leaders like Abul Hashim and H.S. Suhrawardy appealed effectively
to Muslim middle classes and peasants alike, by defending Pakistan in terms
of the principles of social justice, self-representation, and freedom from all
kinds of economic exploitation and social discrimination (Ghosh 2017). To
some literary figures of the Renaissance Society, ‘Pakistan’ meant something
even bigger: it meant ‘liberation of the intellect’. It was inspired by Islam but
not defined by it; it would entail self-determination for all minorities and
not just the Muslims. There was a distinct element of Bengaliness in their
conceptualisation of Purba Pakistan, with a territorial vision of undivided
Bengal (Bose 2014).
The effectiveness of this campaign – in which Islam converged with the
socialism of the East Bengali peasants – was well-reflected in the result of
the election of 1946, which Jinnah had projected as a plebiscite for Paki-
stan demand. Muslim League in Bengal won most of the Muslim seats in
central and state legislatures, effectively marginalising KPP as a contender
for the Muslim constituencies. The results established Muslim League as
the sole representative of the Bengali Muslims and as a champion of Paki-
stan. After the election of 1946, in Muslim League rhetoric, the demand
for ‘independent states’ mentioned in Lahore resolution was confidently
replaced with the demand for “a sovereign independent Muslim state”
(Chakrabarty 2004, 4).
In the election of 1946, Congress too looked for a mandate for united
independent India and won most of the General seats, marginalising its other
contenders such as the Communist Party, Hindu Mahasabha, and the Sched-
uled Caste Federation. A Hindu mobilisation drive for Akhand Bharat or
Akhand Hindusthan had been launched in the late 1930s under the aegis of
the Hindu Mahasabha, particularly after V.D. Savarkar became its president
in 1938. The following year in February, at the provincial Hindu conference
in Khulna, he gave a call for mobilisation and militarisation of the Hindu
nation to counter Muslim demands for Pakistan. Syama Prasad Mooker-
jee joined Mahasabha in 1939 and started touring East Bengal countryside,
mobilising Hindu peasants, including Dalit and Adivasi peasants, for Akhand
Hindusthan (Bandyopadhyay 2004). The campaign helped the Congress, as
in popular perceptions there was not much difference between the Mahasa-
bha and the Congress, as some Congress leaders were also actively involved
in it (Das 2020). In response to this Hindu sangathan, Muslim mobilisation
also picked up further momentum.
Towards Violence and Separation

The culmination of these competing mobilisation drives was the Dacca riot
of March 1941, which, according to Suranjan Das (1991), marked the begin-
ning of overt politicisation of communal conflicts in Bengal, while previously
such conflicts were more localised and intermittent. It is important to remem-
ber, however, that this work of Hindu sangathan in rural Bengal by Mahasa-
bha leaders was continually interrupted by the formation of the Syama-Huq
ministry in December 1941, the Quit India movement in 1942, and the fam-
ine in 1943, which continually breached the communal divide. It was an
unsettled time, full of social tension which shrank the social space for nego-
tiating difference. In this period, Rakesh Batabyal has observed “a brutaliza-
tion of consciousness which began with the famine” (Batabyal 2005, 238).
Janam Mukherjee (2015) has also recently argued that the hunger, death,
dehumanisation, and a general feeling of despondency that the war and fam-
ine had engendered led to the psychological preparation for what happened
in 1946, the year of the riots.
The Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946 was the first of the ‘Partition
riots’, as Suranjan Das (1991) would describe it, and it has been studied in
detail by Das, Batabyal (2005), and more recently, Janam Mukherjee (2015),
Nariaki Nakazato (2015), and Anwesha Roy (2018). Previously, the entire
blame for this riot was put on the shoulders of the Muslim League and its leader
H.S. Suhrawardy; even a recent commentator describes him as “the princi-
pal manipulator of factors leading to the Killings” (Mukherjee 2021, 167).
But the more in-depth research mentioned previously shows that it was pre-
ceded and facilitated by inflammatory speeches flying from both sides – the
League as well as the Congress-Mahasabha combine. There were anticipation
and consequent preparations for violence among both the communities – the
Introduction 9
Muslims as well as the Hindus and the Sikhs. And the situation was aggra-
vated by the participation of professional goondas or criminal elements, both
Muslim and Hindu. The rioting crowds on both sides consisted of a cross
section of the population, both bhadralok and the working classes. Nakazato
(2015) has argued that the riot happened because of the existence of what
Paul Brass would call a “riot system”. And the inaction of the security forces
was due more to structural weaknesses of the administration caused by split
authority and divided control over the law enforcement machinery rather
than to the machinations of Suhrawardy and the Muslim League ministry.
According to official figures, 4000 people were killed, and 10,000 were
injured in the Calcutta riot, besides an enormous amount of property being
destroyed. It has been argued that this mayhem, in which all communities
had blood on their hands, deeply scarred the social psyche of the Bengali
population and destroyed the trust between the two religious communities.
From here, Noakhali and Tripura, where the next round of devastating riot
was to take place in October 1946, were not very far. In this latter riot, the
Muslims were in the offensive, and it resulted in the first wave of internal dis-
placement of the East Bengali Hindus. But there is no evidence of the Muslim
League’s direct complicity. Mahatma Gandhi rushed to Noakhali and spent
forty-three consecutive nights to bring back security. The Noakhali riot was
the last of the pre-Partition riots in Bengal that finished the process of politi-
cisation of communal violence, linking it to the broader organised subcon-
tinental politics (Das 1991, 201). Scholars like Bidyut Chakrabarty (2004)
and Bashabi Fraser (2008) have argued that it was the fear generated by the
Calcutta-Noakhali-Tripura riots that ultimately resulted in the Partition.
But possibly even in 1946, the breach of trust between the two communi-
ties in Bengal had not reached the point of no return! The year had begun
with unprecedented display of communal harmony in popular protest ral-
lies on the Rashid Ali Day on 11 February against the guilty verdict for the
Indian National Army’s (INA’s) prisoner Captain Abdur Rashid. Although
initially called by the student wing of the Muslim League, the demonstra-
tions were participated by the Congress and Communist volunteers alike,
and they fought pitched battles with the colonial police for three days with
three flags (green, red, and tricolour) in their hands (Chattopadhyay 1976,
1987). Anwesha Roy (2018) has documented that even during the Calcutta
riot, despite widespread violence, there were numerous volunteer groups, like
trade unions, political parties, neighbourhood organisations, and individuals
who were relentlessly working for reconciliation, communal harmony, and
relief for the afflicted, irrespective of their community affiliation. After the
election of 1946, there was on the table a proposal for a coalition ministry
between the League and the Congress. Even after the Calcutta riot in August,
there was a similar proposal for an all-parties government (Ghosh 2017). And
then, in early 1947, came the proposal for a united sovereign Bengal from
the Bengali League leaders Abul Hashim and Suhrawardy, supported by the
dissident Congress leader Sarat Chandra Bose and the Scheduled Caste leader
Jogendranath Mandal. But while Gandhi was ambivalent, the Congress high
command insisting on a unified, centralised Indian state, the Akhand Bharat-
varsha, was vehemently opposed to this idea (Chakrabarty 2004). However,
despite these “other histories”, unsettling the narrative of “a complete break-
down of social ties” (Ghosh 2017, 355), Partition did happen, because by the
closing months of colonial rule, the political polarisation and the competing
aspirations and apprehensions of the two situational minorities had reached
such a stalemate that Partition seemed to be the only way out.
Historians have differed in their reading of the political situation in these
last months of colonial rule. In the year of the riots, Rakesh Batabyal detected
“the hegemonic presence of the communal ideology” among the Bengali
Muslim population (2005, 260). Chhanda Chatterjee has seen a “jihadi
psychology of the Muslim League Ministries” (Chatterjee, C. 2020, 22).
Tazeen Murshid (1996), Semanti Ghosh, and Neilesh Bose, who have stud-
ied Bengali Muslim writing and politics of this period more closely, have
presented a more nuanced reading of the situation. At this stage, the Bengali
Muslim leadership remained vigorously opposed to the Congress proposal
of a centralised Indian state, because in such a future state, their political
aspiration for self-representation as a minority would surely be smothered.
But their concept of Pakistan was not a demand for Partition. They were
possibly even wary of the centralism of the League high command. They
visualised undivided Bengal as constituting Purba Pakistan, which would be
able to relate on equal terms to its western part, as well as to the rest of India
(Bose 2014, 198–227). It sounded more like the idea of ‘federation’ which
Chittaranjan Das had once championed. The Bengal Scheduled Caste Federa-
tion, led by Jogendranath Mandal, representing another minority group, also
aligned with the League, opposed Partition, and believed that a Muslim-Dalit
alliance offered the best chance for their deliverance from caste Hindu politi-
cal domination (Sen, D. 2018).
But, on the other hand, the Hindu bhadralok political elite, primarily
savarna, and representing a demographic minority within the specific context
of Bengal, seriously apprehended that in a Muslim majority Bengal, a possi-
ble Muslim-Dalit alliance would permanently reduce them to the position of
a minority, forever excluded from power (as it happened in 1937). It was not
until Jinnah’s inaugural speech at the Pakistan Constituent Assembly on 11
August 1947 that the Muslim League or its leaders had offered any clarifica-
tion about the position of the minorities in their imagined Pakistan (Kudaisya
2016, 46). Both Joya Chatterji (1994) and, subsequently, Partha Chatterjee
in a recent article (2016) have agreed that it was this fear which prompted
the latter to propose Partition of Bengal to create a Hindu-majority province
of West Bengal within the Indian Union.
Chhanda Chatterjee has recently claimed in a triumphalist tone that
the decision to partition was to salvage “at least the western districts of
Bengal . . . from the nightmare of the torture that was the legacy of the past
ten years of Muslim League rule” (Chatterjee, C. 2020, 54). But what did the
Introduction 11
Muslim League ministries actually do to hurt the Hindus? In Bidyut Chakra-

barty’s words: “The drive of the Muslim leadership to secure the privileges
of the hitherto depressed socio-economic community (namely the Muslims)
at the cost of the Hindus was what decisively shaped the articulation of the
demand for partition” (Chakrabarty 2004, 115; for a similar argument, see
Fraser 2008, 24). In other words, the crime of the Muslim League ministries
was that they tried to rebalance an existing imbalance of power through
a series of legislative interventions in the fields of agriculture, education,
employment, and local self-government (Das 2020, 1077). So, their efforts
were resisted and reversed by those who yielded power until recently.
To garner popular support for Partition, the Hindu Mahasabha, and its
leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee, at this stage launched a vigorous campaign.
On 4 April 1947, the Bengal Congress accepted the proposal to partition
Bengal. On 4–6 April, at a conference in Tarakeswar, Mahasabha leaders
outlined their programme for a mass campaign. The leaders moved in this
direction, as Yasmin Khan suggests, because a cross section of the Bengali
bhadralok – “landowners and merchants, tea planters and white collar
workers” – demanded partition of the province to protect their interests and
avert any unforeseen social catastrophe (Khan 2007, 74). Many Scheduled
Caste leaders opposed to Mandal also joined the campaign (Bandyopad-
hyay 2011). Chhanda Chatterjee (2020) has claimed that the Mahasabha
and Mookerjee played the leading role in this movement. But we need to
remember that following the Quit India movement in 1942, the political
strength of the Mahasabha was shrinking, and in the election of 1946, it was
practically decimated. So, the movement would not succeed, as Joya Chat-
terji has claimed (1994, 249–251), if Congress had not supported it. The
movement was not spontaneous but “well-orchestrated” and became most
powerful in the Hindu-majority districts of Western Bengal. On 3 June, the
viceroy announced the Partition proposal. There was no surprise when on 20
June 1947, at the meeting of the Bengal Legislative Assembly, the majority of
its Hindu members, including most of the Scheduled Caste members, voted
for Partition. But as a result of this political decision to separate, the lives of
about twenty million ordinary Bengali people – both Hindu and Muslim – on
both sides of the new border, were completely disrupted (Chatterji 2019, 40).
Willem van Schendel has documented the pain and the extent of this disrup-
tion in his book The Bengal Borderlands (2005).
It was ironic that the same Bengali Hindu bhadralok, who had opposed
the first Partition of Bengal in 1905, now enthusiastically supported its sec-
ond Partition. But this support was not uncomplicated, as Bengal moved
towards Partition through a complex winding trajectory. In the violence
that occurred, there was no clear division between the ‘perpetrators’ and the
‘victims’ – both communities suffered. Even in the middle of mindless vio-
lence, there was hope for reconciliation. There is no denying, however, that
in the closing months of the colonial rule, an awful lot of distrust and fear
had been generated, but it is difficult to put the blame exclusively on anyone’s
shoulder. Historiography of Partition for a long time remained preoccupied

with the causes of Partition and apportioning of ‘blame’. Some put the onus
on the Muslim League while others on the Hindu bhadralok. But in order to
understand why Partition happened, we need to move beyond the delimiting
framework of these ‘causation theories’ and take notice of the complexities
of a rapidly evolving situation in the late colonial period. We need to consider
the fact that both the Muslims and the Hindus, the two situational ‘minori-
ties’ in two different contexts – the Muslims in a pan-Indian context and the
Hindus in the local context – were fearful of majority domination. As their
political positions engendered by this fear became more and more rigid, the
space for negotiations shrank, and this made Partition inevitable in the end.
The Aftermath: Refugees

Once the political decision to Partition was taken, the actual bureaucratic
task of dividing India was twofold – first, drawing the boundary line between
the two states and then apportioning the assets, records, and the personnel.
Joya Chatterji’s study (2019, 49–121) has shown how the boundary line was
drawn by the Radcliffe Commission in unusual haste, without surveying the
topography of the region or talking to the local officials, and under tremen-
dous political pressure. It was drawn arbitrarily, completely disrupting the
lives of people who lived in the borderland or the chars. The Radcliffe Line,
Gyanesh Kudaisya argues in his chapter (Chapter 2) in this book, left both
East Pakistan and West Bengal economically vulnerable and demographically
complex, leading to more problems than solutions.
In comparison, the difficult task of dividing assets was accomplished
more efficiently and quickly by the bureaucrats from two sides, as Anwesha
Sengupta’s chapter (Chapter 1) in this book shows. They were meeting, no
doubt, in an environment of distrust, marred by violence between the two
communities, putatively representing two nations. And they had only sev-
enty days to accomplish this task. While there were some competition and
conflict in dividing the material objects, the real tussle was about the division
of ‘ideological assets’, which included official records, libraries, and museum
collections. While material objects could be more easily identified as ‘Hindu’
or ‘Muslim’ and apportioned accordingly, problems arose about those sites
or objects that represented the heritage going beyond this religious divide,
like the books in the imperial library, the ancient sites of Mohenjo-Daro and
Harappa, or the remains of Taxila. While the rival groups of bureaucrats
agreed more easily on the division of ‘infrastructural assets’, they contested
fiercely one another’s claims when it came to ‘ideological assets’ that were
significant for their respective nation-building projects.
Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the head of the two Boundary Commissions for Punjab
and Bengal, was supposed to divide the territory according to religious demog-
raphy. But the division was nowhere perfect, as many Hindus and Muslims
were left on the wrong sides of the border. In Punjab, this set the stage for the
Introduction 13
beginning of unprecedented violence bordering on ‘ethnic cleansing’, leading

to large-scale exodus of people which no leader on either side of the border
had ever anticipated (Tan and Kudaisya 2000; Khan 2007, 128ff; Nair 2011).
In Bengal, the story was somewhat different. As Gyanesh Kudaisya points out
(Chapter 2 in this book), about 42 per cent of the population of undivided
Bengal were left in East Pakistan after August 1947. But although the province
had its fair share of violence in 1946, in the Partition year it did not experience
any large-scale violence that could force a massive exodus of people. There-
fore, unlike Punjab, there was no state-organised exchange of population.
Among those who immediately crossed the border and came to West Ben-
gal were many high-caste Hindu bhadralok. Some of them were government
officials who opted to serve in India; others were landowning or professional
middle classes. Many of these people refused to accept the finality of Parti-
tion, and there was lot of movement back and forth across the Radcliffe
Line. Prafulla Chakrabarti’s pioneering work on the refugees in Bengal cal-
culated that only about 1.1 million people had moved to West Bengal until
June 1948 (1999, 1). In another seminal study on the Bengal refugees, Joya
Chatterji showed that most of these early refugees were “urban bhadralok”
or “rural Hindu gentry” or “businessmen” (Chatterji 2007, 115). And most
of them belonged to upper castes. In a recent study, Uditi Sen (2015) has
shown how using their social and cultural capital, they managed to reha-
bilitate themselves within a short period of time in various squatter colo-
nies in and around Calcutta. The two-volume anthology edited by Jasodhara
Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (2003 and 2009) brought together inter-
views and reminiscences, literary texts, documentary evidence, and analyses
to focus more fully on the lives and struggles of these early refugees in the
colonies, drawing our attention particularly to the labour and agency of the
refugee women.
But a large section of the lower-caste Hindu peasants of East Bengal did
not migrate at this point. They began to move after the riot of 1950. If Ben-
gal could avoid massive violence at the time of Partition, the violence that
broke out from January 1950 on both sides of the border repeated what
happened in Punjab in 1947–48. It immediately triggered a massive move-
ment of people – both Hindus and Muslims – across the border. Nehru tried
to stem the tide of migration by signing a pact with his Pakistani counterpart
Liaquat Ali Khan. This Delhi Pact of April 1950 was meant to restore com-
munal peace and security in two Bengals not only to stop migration but also
to encourage reverse migration. But he was unsuccessful, as steady streams
of Namasudra and other lower-caste peasants began to pour in throughout
the 1950s. Unlike Punjab, where outbreak of Partition violence led to a one-
time mass exodus of refugees, in Bengal refugee influx took place in waves
and was prolonged over a long period (Bandyopadhyay 2009, 48–61). Even
after the major riot stopped by April 1950, low-intensity violence continued
in East Bengal, and it went on for years. Haimanti Roy has called it “routine
violence” (Roy 2012, 147–176), Jayanti Basu (2013, xxiii) has described it as
“soft violence”, while Bandyopadhyay and Basu Ray Chaudhury (2022, 96)
have recently called it “conjunctural violence” caused by the specific circum-
stances of Partition. Not amounting to more than verbal abuse and minor
physical intimidation, prompted by an unusual resource crunch and severe
scarcity of space caused by the steady flow of Muhajir migration from India,
it destroyed the historic patterns of Dalit-Muslim relations in East Bengal,
forcing Dalit peasants to leave their land and hearth and migrate to West
Bengal. In the 1950s, about 2.4 million refugees came to West Bengal. The
next wave of refugee influx from East Pakistan took place in 1964, caused
by the Hazratbal riot; it brought in 419,000 refugees (Chatterji 2007, 112).
In recent years, there have been a number of new books which have looked
at the refugees coming through the eastern borders and have documented the
stories of their struggle for rehabilitation. While the earlier books edited by
Ranabir Samaddar (1997) and Pradip Kumar Bose (2000) critically looked
at the state rehabilitation policies, the recent ones have examined the actual
human impact of such policies on the refugees. Haimanti Roy (2012) has
provided an interesting and well-researched discussion of the public debates
over the new physical boundaries, national identities and citizenship, the pre-
dicament of the new minorities in two Bengals – the Hindus in East Paki-
stan and the Muslims in West Bengal – and their trans-territorial citizenship,
the legal imbroglio over evacuee property, and the new document regime of
entry permits, passports, and visas regulating who would be admitted as a
member of the new nation and who wouldn’t be. Uditi Sen (2018) has looked
at the story of rehabilitation of the East Bengali refugees in Andaman Islands.
Anindita Ghoshal (2021, 2022) focused on refugee rehabilitation in West
Bengal as well as in Assam and Tripura. While all these books on Bengali
refugees have pointed out that ‘refugee’ was not a homogenous category,
it is Pallavi Chakravarty’s recent book (2022) which has attempted a com-
parative study to show how differentially the diverse groups of refugees were
treated by the Indian state. The first differentiation she makes is between the
Punjabi refugees who were treated generously and the Bengali refugees who
were helped reluctantly. The second form of differentiation was between the
Bengali refugees who came before 1950 and those who came after. The first
group as mentioned earlier consisted mainly of upper-caste bhadralok and
the second group mostly of Dalit peasants.
In recent years, a number of books by Abhijit Dasgupta (2016), Swati
Sengupta Chatterjee (2019), and Bandyopadhyay and Basu Ray Chaudhury
(2022) have focused specifically on these Dalit peasant refugees who came
after 1950 and were not treated fairly by the Indian state. First, they were
put up in crowded refugee camps and eventually dispersed to neighbour-
ing states, Andaman Islands, and Dandakaranya, where conditions were far
from conducive to human habitation and opportunities for economic reha-
bilitation were practically non-existent. Gyanesh Kudaisya in his chapter in
this book (Chapter 2) has looked at the Dandakaranya situation in detail,
explaining why thousands of these refugees left Dandakaranya in 1978 and
Introduction 15
came back to West Bengal. In the meanwhile, a Communist-led leftist coali-

tion government had come to power in West Bengal, and these parties had
always advocated rehabilitation of refugees within the Bengali-speaking
region. But once in power, their policies changed, as they began to see these
refugees as burden for the already fledgling economy of the state. They were
first persuaded to go back, and when they refused and settled down in the
island of Marichjhanpi in the Sundarbans, they were forcibly evicted and
sent back to Dandakaranya. This episode has been critically examined by a
number of scholars, such as Ross Mallick (1999), Annu Jalais (2005), Jhuma
Sen (2015), and most recently Deep Halder (2019). The Bengali refugees, as
Kudaisya argues, were hard done by, although contrary to official stereo-
types, they were never lazy or rebellious; they invested their hard work to
rehabilitate themselves after losing everything due to no fault of their own.
The pain of displacement and the trauma of struggle for rehabilitation lin-
gered on in their memories.
These Bengali refugees never felt shy of protesting this stepmotherly atti-
tude of the Indian state and often asserted their rights to citizenship and
proper rehabilitation. Joya Chatterji (2019) argued that they looked at their
claim to rehabilitation as a matter of right rather than as an act of char-
ity. They repeatedly and candidly opened their minds in letters and petitions
they wrote to the state and central governments and to political leaders. In
these letters, as Anindita Ghoshal shows in her chapter in the present book
(Chapter 3), they refused to describe themselves as ordinary refugees fleeing
from another country. In their rhetoric, they were freedom fighters who were
caught on the wrong side of the border, when their land was partitioned by
an act of an alien state. So, they had a legitimate right to citizenship and reha-
bilitation in the new nation-state of their choice. And when that was denied,
they expressed in no uncertain terms their frustration and fury against the
politicians who they thought were reaping the benefits of freedom, for which
the refugees had paid the price.
Memory, Rememory, and Postmemory

As Maurice Halbwachs (1992, 22–25) has argued, collective memory of an
event – more so when it is a traumatic event of violence – is either historic
memory, mediated by texts, photographs, monuments, or rituals, or auto-
biographical memory of individuals recreated within the specific social and
cultural contexts of their own time and then communicated and transmit-
ted across generations. The refugees of Partition in India have remembered
how they lived through the experiences of displacement and have transmit-
ted those memories to their progeny to constitute or influence their identity
and their relationships with the post-colonial nation-states. Partition is thus
not just an event that happened in the past, but it is also a part of the lived
experiences in the present. But different individuals have remembered Parti-
tion in different ways. These memories are also periodically reconstituted to
negotiate identity in different social-cultural-political contexts. In a violent

traumatic event like Partition, where there was no clear separation between
perpetrators and victims, people often switched roles and passed through
a “slippery moral terrain” (Saint 2020, 3). Memories are, therefore, often
accompanied by silences or conscious acts of forgetting. These memories are
also regionally diverse depending on the specificities of the local situations.
While in Punjab such memories are more about the horrific violence they
encountered, in Bengal it is primarily about the pain of displacement and
struggle for rehabilitation and citizenship. While written history of this dis-
placement seeks to provide certainty, memory offers ambiguity and alterna-
tive perspectives, often at variance with the official narratives of Partition.
Following Urvasi Butalia (1998), in past two decades, we had several
remarkable monographs based on oral history method, on memories of Par-
tition survivors by Ravinder Kaur (2007), Devika Chawla (2014), Kavita
Puri (2019), or Aanchal Malhotra (2019, 2022). For Bengal, we have the
monograph by Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias (2013),
which documents the dialectics of remembering and forgetting by three gen-
erations of her family trying to grapple with the historical ruptures caused by
the Partition of 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 – the two
catastrophic events in her opinion being integrally related to each other. We
have also several articles and anthologies coming out in recent years, analys-
ing the memory, rememory, and postmemory of Partition survivors and their
progeny. In this connection, one needs to mention Anindya Raychaudhuri’s
monograph (2019) which discusses individual memories as well as artistic
representations of Partition in literature and films and covers both Bengal
and Punjab.
In the collective memory of the Hindu-Bengali refugees, Dipesh Chakra-
barty (1996) observed the sentiment of nostalgia and a sense of trauma, as
they imagined their lost homeland that represented for them both sacredness
and beauty. In this book, Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury (Chapter 4) argues
that this feeling of nostalgia remains so strong even after decades of living
in India that many of them still feel that East Bengal is their desh, the foun-
dational home, and this puts them in a permanent diasporic state of mind,
with affective ties to another nation-state. Of course, their experiences were
divergent, and memories of homeland were myriad. The upper-caste middle-
class refugees who had properties back home and after migration settled in
the squatters’ colonies in and around Calcutta had memories that were differ-
ent from those of the Dalit peasant refugees who did not have much property
left behind and after coming here lived in camps and were later rehabilitated
outside West Bengal. Yet, both groups suffered and struggled, and they also
remember their bitter encounters with an unsympathetic state machinery and
its unreasonable rehabilitation policies. There was yet another group of East
Bengali refugees who were settled in the Andaman Islands and were relatively
more successful in life. They are less nostalgic about their past and look more
to the future. As all of them narrate their experiences, it becomes evident that
Introduction 17
‘refugee’ was not a homogenous category, and their diverse experiences and
memories construct for them varied and complicated relationships between
their present and their displaced pasts.
The memories of Partition and subsequent struggles for rehabilitation are
embedded in individual experiences. But the problem of remembering Parti-
tion has been the hiatus of time between when it happened and when it is
remembered, sometime at a temporal gap of more than seventy years. Aanchal
Malhotra has recently told us about “the importance of material memory . . .
the ability of an object or a possession to retain memory and act as a prompt
to its recollection” (Malhotra 2019, 3). In this book, Sumallya Mukhopad-
hyay examines two case studies (Chapter 5) to show how such memories
are actually constructed and transmitted across generations through certain
objects which perform a mnemonic function. Objects like a land registration
certificate or a few photographs or a gold medal trigger old memories of
displacement and struggle for resettlement, which are then passed on to the
next generations. Partition thus becomes a living past, reconstructed in the
present, and survives in the personal lives of those who experienced it and
their scions who have heard about it.
In usual refugee narratives, we hear mostly about two groups, the ‘camp
refugees’ and the ‘colony refugees’. But there was yet another group of dis-
placed people – the upper-caste, landowning, and professional Hindu elites
of East Bengal, who also migrated, gradually over the years, but not as ‘refu-
gees’ in a conventional sense of the term. They did not depend on the state
but used their own cultural, social, and financial resources and relied more on
their family, kinship, and regional networks for survival in the new milieu of
urban West Bengal. Many of them liked to believe that this migration was not
permanent but eventually accepted its finality. And at that point, they too felt
a terrible sense of loss of their familiar world. As Krishna Sen shows in her
chapter (Chapter 6), they ‘disremembered’ and then recreated in ‘rememory’
certain selected social and cultural aspects of their familiar East Bengali life
in the new setting of their Calcutta dwellings and neighbourhoods. Through
this act of ‘anamneses’, or the symbolic act of remembrance, these displaced
people recreated the texture and flavour of a way of life they had left behind
forever. Sen narrates this story by reconstructing her own childhood mem-
ory of her extended family members involved in this act of ‘rememory’ after
arriving in the novel urban environment of post-Partition Calcutta.
From rememory, we move on to “postmemory”, as Marianne Hirsch
(2012) has called it. Families for many Partition refugees remained the site
where memories of a physically and temporally distant homeland were main-
tained and transmitted across generations. Such memories eventually consti-
tute the identity of subsequent generations as Bangal or East Bengali, who
affectively feel connected to an imagined space and the histories of displace-
ment of their families. In his chapter (Chapter 7), Jayanta Sengupta – who
grew up in a small town of West Bengal, Katwa – writes about this emotional
process of connecting to and reclaiming a life not lived in East Bengal at
first hand. He embarks on this journey through an unpublished memoir of

his grandfather – whom he never saw. Hemanta Kumar Sengupta wrote his
memoir during 1948–53 on his childhood days and working life as a govern-
ment official in the Barisal district of Eastern Bengal from the 1880s through
the 1930s. He was then transferred to Burdwan, from where he watched,
and subsequently wrote about, Independence and Partition, commenting on
nationalist politics and Hindu-Muslim relations in Barisal of the yesteryears.
His narratives, Sengupta argues, do not always corroborate the stories of
communal animosity that the mainstream historiography of Partition often
talks about. The chapter focuses on this memoir to examine two things: (1)
how did Bengali bhadralok government officials – the so-called collabora-
tors of colonial rule – negotiate the nationalist upsurge in the run-up to
the communalisation of the political climate and Partition and (2) how the
memoir framed his grandfather’s identity as deeply embedded in East Bengal
and crafted his own identity as a Bangal at two removes, invented decades
after Partition. Partition thus continues to remain a part of quotidian life and
recent history for many of us – not just for the refugees and their families
who were forcibly displaced by this event.
Stories of adult children of Partition refugees going back to Bangladesh
in search of their ‘lost identity’ or ‘roots’ are not rare (see Sen, I. 2012).
In this book, Debdatta Chowdhury in her chapter (Chapter 8) narrates the
memories she inherited from the female elders of her family about their lives
in pre-Partition East Bengal, their defiance of the colonial state, and their
involvement in revolutionary nationalism and, subsequently, in the Com-
munist movement. Eventually, after Partition they had to relocate to West
Bengal and struggled to resettle themselves in the new milieu of the refu-
gee colonies of Calcutta, using the intellectual and cultural capital they had
brought with them. This is a story of Partition-generated migration where
women were not hapless victims. It is a story of agency of three genera-
tions of extraordinary women who rebuilt the lives of their families braving
all kinds of adversities. Devdatta, representing the fourth generation, visited
present-day Bangladesh with her mother, to trace the spaces connected to the
lives of her great-grandmother and grandmother, who never cared to revisit
those places even after the birth of Bangladesh when travel became easier.
This reconnection completed for Devdatta, born in post-Partition West Ben-
gal, the imaginative reconstruction of postmemory of the long-lost past of
her family disrupted by Partition, thus re-engraving her identity as Bangal,
linking it to the two parts of Bengal across the international boundary. Such
reconnections make the subsequent generations of Partition refugees also
parts of the long history of Partition.
Chowdhury’s chapter also brings into the discussion the role of women
in this Partition-related experience of displacement and rehabilitation. For
a long time, women remained outside the discussion of Partition until two
books, one by Urvasi Butalia (1998) and the other by Ritu Menon and Kamla
Bhasin (1998), brought them to the foreground. But concerned mainly with
Introduction 19
the experiences of Punjabi women, this discussion remained pre-occupied

with the stories of abduction, rape, honour killings, and suicides. Some
recent studies of Bengali refugee women in both colonies and camps have
focused more on the agency of these refugee women, shedding light on their
roles as breadwinners for their families as well as leaders of public demon-
strations for rehabilitation. The two-volume anthology edited by Jasodhara
Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (2003 and 2009) first brought the gender
question to the foreground in the study of Partition refugees in Bengal, draw-
ing attention to the labour and agency of these women. The first full-length
monograph based partly on extensive interviews of the ‘refugee women’ of
Bengal was written by Gargi Chakravartty (2005). She drew our attention
to the ‘political activism’ of such women in colonies and camps. They were
encouraged and organised by the women Communist leaders of the Mahila
Atma Raksha Samiti, who had come into public limelight during the fam-
ine of 1943. However, as Chakravartty writes: “These women never ques-
tioned gender inequalities and preferred to combine political activism with
the additional burden of housework” (Chakravartty 2005, 71). As a result,
this public life did not result in their liberation from conventional feminine
roles prescribed for them by the patriarchy (Weber 2003), and their partici-
pation in the workplace as wage labour created middle-class anxieties, moral
panic, and stereotyping (Sen, U. 2011). “The outer world of politics”, writes
Roshni Sharma, thus “stays outside and does not affect the private sphere”
(2019, 254).
But Aparajita Sengupta in her chapter in this book (Chapter 9) looks at the
women’s question in a different way. She introduces another variable into this
discussion by analysing the memories of four ‘ordinary’ middle-class women,
who were not directly displaced by Partition but their lives were seriously
disrupted by it. They devised non-confrontational strategies to negotiate the
obstacles in their lives to build a career of their own as independent work-
ing women. They were not social rebels, nor did they reject familial roles,
yet they showed remarkable resilience and independence which cannot be
properly comprehended within the nationalist or feminist analytical frames.
It was through such determined endeavours, Sengupta argues, that the figure
of the ‘New Woman’ was being gradually crafted in modern Bengal.
How memories of Partition have survived and worked in transnational
diasporic communities is an under-researched subject. Jasmine Hornabrook,
Clelia Clini, and Emily Keightley show in their chapter (Chapter 10) how
such memories were transmitted across the national boundaries among the
Bengali diasporas – from both West Bengal and Bangladesh – now resid-
ing in the UK. As the diaspora is not a homogenous sociological category,
the nature of persistence of such memories depends on the global migra-
tion trajectories, socio-economic and cultural capital, and the myriad experi-
ences of displacement endured by different families and their ancestors. Such
memories are also not permanently imprinted or evenly transmitted across
generations; the narratives of the past are repeatedly reconstituted in every
historical period and context. Sometimes memories of the 1947 Partition fade
away with temporal distance and are overshadowed by recollections of more
traumatic subsequent historical geo-political changes, such as the Bangladesh
Liberation War of 1971. For many Bangladeshis, living in both the UK and
Bangladesh, the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 seems to
be more important and consequential than the Partition of 1947. The latter
event is seen only as an antecedent to the former more catastrophic change in
their community’s lives. By contrast, memories of 1947 in West Bengal seem
to be laden with nostalgia for a lost home due to wanton violence.
Cultural Representation and Memorialisation

Individual memory and cultural representational memory, as Anindya Ray-
chaudhuri (2019) argues, are dialectically connected, each influencing and
framing the other. Literature and films, unlike historical narratives, do not
aspire to give us accurate description of facts but recount how those facts
have affected and influenced our lives. They also ensure how these experi-
ences are remembered and re-imagined by the subsequent generations who
did not have any direct knowledge of the trauma. Indian literary production
in both vernacular and English language took time to pick up Partition as a
theme, and when it did, the focus was overwhelmingly on Punjab and the
depiction of violence (Roy 2010, 20–21). When the Partition literature began
to proliferate from the mid-1980s, as Jill Didur (2006) argues, it could be
read as an “alternative ‘record’ of the period” (4) or a “counter narrative”
(9) that unsettles the hegemonic nationalist discourse on Partition. Although
a bit late in arrival, a rich crop of literary texts on Partition was produced
in Bangla as well. In recent years, apart from the excellent monograph on
Bangla Partition literature by Debjani Sengupta (2016), we had several edited
collections of critical essays and translations, edited by Debjani Sengupta
(2003), Bashabi Fraser (2008), and Jayita Sengupta (2012). In recent years,
a number of memoirs by Dalit refugees, like Manohar Mauli Biswas (2015),
Manoranjan Byapari (2018), and Adhir Biswas (2022), have been translated
into English.
In contrast to historical narratives, literary representation of Partition
focuses on individual lives, universalises the particular, and vice versa (Khan
2020, 4). In this book, Sarbani Banerjee in her chapter (Chapter 11) critically
examines Sunanda Sikdar’s memoir, Doyamoyeer Katha, in which the author
recounts her personal childhood memories about a village in pre- and imme-
diate post-Partition days in East Bengal. These memories reveal how broader
subcontinental politics resonated in the localised social context of a remote
village in Dhaka and got tinged with expectations, myths, and dreams of a
better future on the other side of the border. These reveal the psychological
coping mechanisms of a minority population on one side of the partitioned
land, preparing to face the inevitability of demographic changes triggered by
Partition and forced migration from the other side. The random narrative
Introduction 21
style of katha makes such memory-telling distinctively different from the

historical metanarratives of grand truths. Such childhood memories of pre-
Partition village life and the immediate post-migration encounters in West
Bengal, recounted by the author from both spatial and temporal distances,
reveal the myriad ways the everyday people experienced, encountered, and
remembered the trauma of Partition.
Partition has also been represented extensively in Bengali films, although,
as Bhaskar Sarkar (2009) argued in his book, there was silence in the ini-
tial years as “a mode of mourning the nation”. But eventually, there was a
“resurgence of the repressed” as a postcolonial project of nation-building.
In this book, almost echoing Raychaudhuri, Sreemati Mukherjee (in Chap-
ter 12) argues that individual memories eventually construct what may be
called the collective unconscious that creates a cultural repository of symbols
and archetypes to remember a traumatic event like Partition. Within this
collective unconscious and by using its symbols and archetypes, the event
is memorialised in art and literature. Such memorialisation is not only to
respect the past but also to produce cultural accoutrements to remember
the event for future. In her chapter, Mukherjee looks critically at three films
directed by Ritwik Ghatak to chronicle the physical and psychological pains
of the people from East Bengal displaced by Partition. In this Partition tril-
ogy, Ghatak uses the archetypal cultural image of ‘mother’ who symbolised
life and death, creation, and destruction and stood as a signifier of a sense
of loss or nostalgia for a lost motherland. Such repeated re-telling of this
story not only provides a catharsis from collective trauma but also consti-
tutes what Ghatak defined as a “Social Collective Memory”.
Collective memory of an event eventually gets abstracted and institution-
alised through museums and archives to become the historical memory of a
nation or a wider community. But such public memorialisation also offers
its own challenges. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer (2009, 162–163) have
argued that although every event of genocidal violence is unique or excep-
tional, there are also some comparable features, and in any public remem-
brance of these events, a comparative framework always helps to understand
their proper historical significance. Partition is often compared with Hol-
ocaust. But as Isha Dubey observes, in view of “apparently un-conflicted
separation between the oppressor and the oppressed in the case of the Holo-
caust”, it is relatively easy to memorialise such an event “while grappling
with the idea of ascription of blame and victimhood”; for Partition, where
the distinction between the perpetrator and the victim was blurry, it becomes
“infinitely more complex and problematic” (Dubey 2021, 515). In his 2001
book, Remembering Partition, Gyanendra Pandey (2001, 60) had argued
that the memory of violence can only be institutionalised through museums
when we can distance ourselves from it, as it happened in Germany. In his
view anything like a Holocaust Museum did not appear in India because
Partition violence continued to be a feature of quotidian life in the recent
history of India.
However, one may also argue that in a situation where individual memo-
ries of loss are so easily appropriated into a statist discourse of communal
animosity, such memorialisation is all the more necessary. In the messy nar-
rative of Partition, as we have discussed earlier, there were many twists and
turns and much ambiguity to obscure any definitive ascription of blame. It
is necessary to communicate these nuances to the wider public to pre-empt
any reductionist reading of history. It may help to come to terms with the
violence of Partition by recognising its reciprocal character. Such memori-
alisation may, therefore, perform a pedagogic function by disrupting what
Meenakshi Chabra has called “memory practices that perpetuate collective
memories of unchallenged feelings of hate and animosity between and among
conflicting groups” (Chabra 2015, 11). It may, one can also hope, initiate a
process of closure and lead to reconciliation. The opening of the Amritsar
Partition Museum, on 17 August 2017 – some seventy years after Partition –
has initiated in a modest way such a process of memorialising Partition in
India.
Two essays in this book speak about a project that is already underway
to establish a similar Partition Museum in Kolkata. Rituparna Roy in her
chapter (Chapter 13) takes a comparative look at the Jewish Museum Berlin
and the Amritsar Partition Museum in Punjab to argue her case for a Kolkata
Museum. As we have already discussed, Partition was experienced differently
in Punjab and Bengal. Since the Bengal experience has received only a token
representation in the Amritsar Museum, a separate museum for Bengal is
clearly necessary, she argues. The project is already under way, and as a first
step towards its establishment, a virtual museum has been launched. Aurgho
Jyoti’s chapter (Chapter 14) describes its architecture and contents, which
consist of oral history narratives and a visual art gallery. For oral history
interviews, it tries to capture the stories of refugees who were subalterns, in
terms of both class and caste, as they have been mostly ignored in the extant
literature on Partition refugees. As for the art objects, it includes works by
artists from both West Bengal and Bangladesh. The exhibits and the archi-
tecture of the virtual museum thus seek to focus on the specificities of Bengal
and try to capture the story of Partition spread across time and space, cover-
ing both 1947 and 1971 Partitions that this geo-cultural region has under-
gone in recent history.
Partition was a complex event that had far-reaching impact affecting many
lives for generations. It is still a part of our living experiences. Scholars may,
therefore, never cease to inquire about it from their changing ideological
and personal positions anchored in the present. This anthology of chapters
is premised on the belief that it is still important to consider the long history
of Partition afresh, from a wide and inclusive range of perspectives. Given
the denseness of the subject, it focuses closely on one region only. The aca-
demic value of this volume lies in the fact that it brings together three distinct
aspects of the Partition story as it unfolded in Bengal – the event, the memo-
ries of the event, and representation of those experiences and memories. The
Introduction 23
themes of the chapters range from the administrative consequences of Parti-

tion, division of assets, to public policies on refugee rehabilitation, life stories
of refugees in camps and colonies, literary and celluloid representations of
Partition, to questions of memory and memorialisation of events through
museums. The chapters are written mostly from the perspectives of those
who migrated to West Bengal and settled in India. One chapter also looks
into how memories of Partition/s are retained and transmitted down to the
next generation of the Bengali diaspora settled in the UK. They show how
these memories and representations help them reconstruct their identities and
reconnect with a lost but re-imagined homeland in East Bengal, more than
seventy-five years after the separation.
This book does not offer a conventional archive-based narrative of Parti-
tion: the volume seeks to redefine and expand the concept of archive itself and
intends to bring in aspects of the Partition experience that cannot be unrav-
elled from conventional archives. It is an interdisciplinary book – different
authors have tested a variety of theories in the context of the Partition story. In
addition to archival sources, they have relied on different methodologies from
different disciplines, like memory studies, oral history, auto-ethnography,
textual analysis, film studies, and so on. Eclectic in its theoretical approach
and methodology, this volume, we expect, will be of interest not only to
scholars of Partition but also to general informed readers curious to know
about this momentous event in the history of the subcontinent.
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The Long History of Partition

Rituparna Roy is Initiator, Kolkata Partition Museum Project, and Managing

Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum, Kolkata, and former Director

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Emeritus Professor of History at Victoria University

Edited by Rituparna Roy, Jayanta

List of Figures viii

Introduction: Partition and Its Afterlife in Bengal 1

1 Of Conflict and Cooperation: The Material Implications of

2 Divided Landscapes, Fragmented Identities: East Bengal

3 Refugeehood in the Eyes of the Refugees: Voices of the

4 Frozen Time, Partitioned Mind: Tales of Seeking Refuge in

5 Life Stories and Material Objects: Revisiting the Memory of

6 Spaces of Anamnesis: The Partition of India and

7 The “Lost” Land of Barisal: Crafting a “Nostalgia” of East

8 Partition’s Women: Inherited Memories of Remarkable Lives

9 The Creation of a Women’s Sphere: Adjusting to an ‘Alien’

10 Moving Memories: Remembering, and Forgetting, the

11 Revisiting Bengal Partition: Katha and Myths at the

12 Memory as Cinematic Praxis: The Art of Ritwik Ghatak 226

13 The (im)Possibility of Representing Genocidal Violence:

14 Kolkata Partition Museum: Material Memory Through

2.1 The Partition of 1947 and the Bengal region 44

14.10 The central space is conceived as an archaeological site with

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Emeritus Professor of History at Victoria Univer-

Loughborough University, London. Her research cuts across disciplines

of At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy and Regional-

aftermath, and, most importantly, to memories of violence and pain and

It has turned aside from an exclusive concentration on high politics,

Bengal’s Road to Partition

the post-Khilafat period, there was gradual Islamisation of class politics

questioned this over-emphasis on ‘high politics’. As Yasmin Khan succinctly

Towards Violence and Separation

Muslim League ministries actually do to hurt the Hindus? In Bidyut Chakra-

shoulder. Historiography of Partition for a long time remained preoccupied

The Aftermath: Refugees

beginning of unprecedented violence bordering on ‘ethnic cleansing’, leading

came back to West Bengal. In the meanwhile, a Communist-led leftist coali-

Memory, Rememory, and Postmemory

negotiate identity in different social-cultural-political contexts. In a violent

first hand. He embarks on this journey through an unpublished memoir of

the experiences of Punjabi women, this discussion remained pre-occupied

Cultural Representation and Memorialisation

style of katha makes such memory-telling distinctively different from the

themes of the chapters range from the administrative consequences of Parti-

Biswas, Manohar Mouli. 2015. Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal,

Of Conflict and Cooperation

Divided Landscapes, Fragmented Identities

Refugeehood in the Eyes of the Refugees

Frozen Time, Partitioned Mind

Life Stories and Material Objects

The “Lost” Land of Barisal

The Creation of a Women's Sphere

Revisiting Bengal Partition

Memory as Cinematic Praxis

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2.1 The Partition of 1947 and the Bengal region 44