Bengal Partition Stories

Through oral histories, interviews and fictional retellings, 'Bengal Partition Stories' unearths and articulates the collective memories of a people traumatised by the brutal division of their homeland.

Usually books on partition are sob stories, but not this one. 'Rising from the Ashes of Bengal's Partition' is an untold story of the journey of a child born around the time of partition, who battled many hurdles and aspired to lead a new life - like a Phoenix. This is a story of his - and his generation's - unflinching determination to move ahead. This is the story of the real people who did not curse their fate and sit idle shedding tears. It covers a child's - and his generations - torturous journey from refugee camps and colonies to the world above the sky. The story covers a span of seven decades of time and space - people and events, politics and economics, corporates and their leaders and above all the kaleidoscopic panorama across the journey through Bengal and India. The book opens up several untraveled terrains - personal experiences, a person's struggle, sufferings, tears, joys and smiles. It documents people's perception about critical contemporary events, which conventional history does not cover. The author writes from the ringside, for example on how it was to work for the most reputed corporate of the country and, what happened in the business and economy when the 'Tiger' was 'Uncaged.' Sure, readers would like to run through the author's experiences. The author has poured his heart and soul out into writing this story.

An original and compelling account of the Hindu partitionist movement in Bengal.

This book engages with diverse modes of representations of Partition violence and its consequences in a selection of Partition narratives from Bengal. Violence constitutes one of the most obvious images of this traumatic period in Indian history. Its dynamics of representation—the nature of violence, its impact on society and the individual, the forms of its socio cultural and political implanting—invariably highlight the aesthetic sensibility of its writers. The book questions if it is possible to qualify violence with all its complexities, and examines how these narratives offer a critique of historical and political engagements with violence. The experiences of suffering, pain, trauma, affliction, torture, fear and betrayal are also constituted within the structural analysis of violence.

The Refugee Woman examines the Partition of 1947 by engaging with the cultural imagination of the ‘refugee woman’ in West Bengal, particularly in three significant texts of the Partition of Bengal—Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara; and two novels, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga and Sabitri Roy’s Swaralipi. It shows that the figure of the refugee woman, animated by the history of the political left and refugee movements, and shaped by powerful cultural narratives, can contest and reconstitute the very political imagination of ‘woman’ that emerged through the long history of dominant cultural nationalisms. The reading it offers elucidates some of the complexities of nationalist, communal, and communist gender-politics of a key period in post-independence Bengal.

This study looks at the rich literature that has been spawned through the historical imagination of Bengali-speaking writers in West Bengal and Bangladesh through issues of homelessness, migration and exile to see how the Partition of Bengal in 1947 has thrown a long shadow over memories and cultural practices. Through a rich trove of literary and other materials, the book lays bare how the Partition has been remembered or how it has been forgotten. For the first time, hitherto untranslated archival materials and texts in Bangla have been put together to assess the impact of 1947 on the cultural memory of Bangla-speaking peoples and communities. This study contends that there is not one but many smaller partitions that women and men suffered, each with its own textures of pain, guilt and affirmation.

Usually books on partition are sob stories, but not this one. ‘Rising from the Ashes of Bengal’s Partition’ is an untold story of the journey of a child born around the time of partition, who battled many hurdles and aspired to lead a new life - like a Phoenix. This is a story of his - and his generation’s - unflinching determination to move ahead. This is the story of the real people who did not curse their fate and sit idle shedding tears. It covers a child’s - and his generations - torturous journey from refugee camps and colonies to the world above the sky. The story covers a span of seven decades of time and space - people and events, politics and economics, corporates and their leaders and above all the kaleidoscopic panorama across the journey through Bengal and India. The book opens up several untraveled terrains - personal experiences, a person’s struggle, sufferings, tears, joys and smiles. It documents people’s perception about critical contemporary events, which conventional history does not cover. The author writes from the ringside, for example on how it was to work for the most reputed corporate of the country and, what happened in the business and economy when the ‘Tiger’ was ‘Uncaged.’ Sure, readers would like to run through the author’s experiences. The author has poured his heart and soul out into writing this story.