Memoirs of Homeland: Refugees of 1947 Bengal Partition in India

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Memoirs of Homeland: Refugees of 1947

Bengal Partition in India contain narratives of the plight of families who fell on the "wrong" side of the border after 1947 partition of Bengal Province of British India, focusing the plight of professional Hindu and Muslim Bengali population of the former province in the eastern region of British India. In their longing for "desh" or home these families often sought out natives of their home district in distant United States for comfort where both were minority amidst the native -born Americans. Strangely, they fled from each other just a few years back. Here is a selection of 22 stories in their own unedited words told to the authors.

Dr. Shefali Sengupta Dastidar is a former planner with the New York City Government. She has taught in Alabama, New York, New Jersey, among others. She had also worked in Kazakhstan and Uttar Pradesh State, India. She has a doctorate in Urban and Regional Planning from the Florida State University, a post-doc diploma from Harvard, a masters from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur and another masters from the Calcutta University, and a bachelor's degree.

Shefali has authored Regional Disparities and Regional Development Planning in West Bengal. She has received many awards and honors. Shefali is a founder of Probini Foundation that now helps education in 33 schools for the poor in Bangladesh, and in West Bengal, Assam and Mizoram states of India, and a cofounder of Indian Subcontinent Partition Documentation Project. She belongs to a Hindu refugee family from East Bengal/Bangladesh.

Dr. Sachi Ghosh Dastidar is a Distinguished Service Professor of the State University of New York. He has taught/worked in Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Kazakhstan, India, and Ireland. In 1990s he was elected to a New York City school district. He has a doctorate and masters in planning and a bachelor's in architecture.

Sachi has authored/edited eleven books and journals, including six books related to Bengal partition, and numerous articles, essays, short stories and travelogues He is recipient of three dozen awards and honors including two Senior Fulbright awards, and Distinguished Service Professor Award, among others. He has travelled to all seven continents, including Antarctica. He is a cofounder of Nassau County Bangla (Bengali) Pathshala (Sunday language school), South Asia Forum (of U.S.), Probini Foundation, and ISPAD: the Indian Subcontinent Partition Documentation Project. Sachi belongs to a Hindu refugee family from Bangladesh.

These are a selected list of stories of displacement of Bengali Hindus and Muslims as a result of partition of Bengal Province of British India in 1947. Both of our families were victims of partition fleeing their ancestral homes of tens of generations to West Bengal State of "Hindu India" from "Muslim East Pakistan" of the newly-formed Islamic Republic of Pakistan. After 1947 partition East Bengal was renamed East Pakistan forming the eastern wing of divided Pakistan where West Pakistan, now Pakistan, had 3,40,000 square miles of area with 45% of Pakistan's population, and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, had 55,000 square miles with 55% of the population. East Pakistan finally came to be known as Bangladesh after the 1971 Liberation War when the minority of Pakistan, then known as West Pakistan, which controlled the military and administration, went on a vicious genocidal war with the Bengali majority who voted for the winning Awami League Party in the 1970 general election. Winning Awami League wasn't allowed to form a government, instead terror was unleashed on the entire population with special target being the entire Hindu minority, almost quarter of the population, all secular Muslims, and all the activists of the winning pro-secular Awami League. Before our parents fled, the British Administration drew lines through two of the mixed British-Indian provinces of Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west, making our parents minority in their own homeland, targets for ethnic cleansing and creating a human catastrophe unparalleled in human history, yet the pain and misery were censored in Indian text books and remained unknown to outsiders.