Revisiting Partition Contestation, Narratives and Memories

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Anindita Ghoshal is Associate Professor of History at Diamond Harbour Women's University, Kolkata. Her area of research includes Partition and refugee studies with special emphasis on eastern/north- eastern India and Bangladesh. Currently, she is co-investigator on a research project titled Reckoning in Refugeedom: Refugee Voices in Modern History, 1919-1975, under the aegis of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at Manchester University. Her first monograph is titled Refugee, Borders and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India

The country's division was a colossal tragedy, a man made catastrophe brought about by hat headed and cynical politicians who failed to grasp implications of division along religious lines.

MUSIEKEL HASAN, Memories of a Fragmented Nation.

I WAS BORN in Balurghat, a sleepy town of the Dakshin Dinajpur district of West Bengal, India, near the Hili border with Bangladesh. I grew up in Kailashahar, another quiet mofussil town, the then headquarter of North Tripura district (now headquarters of the Unakoti district), located along the fencing of the Indo Bangladesh border, beside the Maulavi bazar subdivision of the Sylhet district of Bangladesh. It is probably because of the geographical location of these two tiny towns, family stories from my maternal side as well as numerous versions of almost the same tales of settling down in Kailashahar from our neighbours, Partition initially touched my being and the whole emotional world of my life. Interestingly, my own imagination and ideas about historical events like the famine of 1943 and Partition were shaped by the narratives of my family members who witnessed those phases of distress and suffered in many ways. Discussions about the political events and miseries of the middle or lower middle class families in Kailashahar were my first exposure to such complex multi-layered situations. This is when I started getting accustomed to diverse perspectives on the role of the political parties before and after Partition, including issues related to the expectation of the masses in the 1940s.

RITING THE acknowledgements of a book is perhaps W always the happiest part for the editor of a volume, as he/she naturally gets a chance to revisit his/her experiences and remember all the memories related to a particular event and time period as well the journey taken to finish the volume. This edited volume is essentially an outcome of a two-day international seminar organized by the Department of History, Diamond Harbour Women's University, Kolkata, titled 'Revisiting and Remembering Partition: Issues Related to Eastern and Northeastern India', held in August 2017, funded by the Department of Higher Education, Government of West Bengal. The seminar tried to locate critical locations of Partition, politics of displacement and processes of decolonization in eastern and north-eastern India. By emphasizing the interdisciplinary approach towards the studies of Partition around this region, it tried to understand the overall impact of Partition on postcolonial polity, society, economy, literature and films. However, this volume is neither just a seminar-oriented publication, nor are all the lectures that were presented in the seminar placed in this volume. Rather, as a naive editor, I visualized the volume to be more compact, thought of the respective subsections of this book at the very first stage and incorporated a few articles which were not presented in the seminar. Hence, I am truly grateful to those contributors who trusted my instinct, responded to my request to write for this volume, agreed to submit their write-ups within the deadline and, indeed, even under immense pressure, re-wrote some of the portions at my request.

I hope that one day displaced families of both sides of the fence will at least be able to freely across the borders and show their grandchildren where their grandparents had once lord and belonged

NN VOHKA, 91, Garden Town'

T HE PARTITION OF India, wrote French historian Alfred Cobban, created more problems than it actually solved The so-called 'independence' divided the country into two separate nations based on the religious identity of two major communities, Hindus and Muslims. The long process witnessed gruesome riots, the official exchange of population in the Punjab, the insecurity of both communities, the migration of minorities from two newly born nations to become a part of the majoritarian community on the other side of the border. The emergence of a brand new socio political category named 'refugees' in both the divided nations, India and Pakistan, which was unprecedented in the history of South Asia. Surprisingly, within only two and a half decades after the vivisection of united India and the birth of Pakistan, another component emerged as a crucial factor behind a different type of nationalist struggle within two factions in Pakistan. During this course of ideological changes, religion had to take a back seat. The Bengali language, the mother tongue of most of the citizens of the eastern wing of Pakistan, and the issue of linguistic identity became the driving force to fight another Nationalist struggle based on the notion of 'Bengali nationalism'. This finally led to the Liberation War of 1971 and the birth of a new nation named Bangladesh.Interestingly, the stories of displacement of diverse communities and refugee inflow did not end either in 1947 or in 1971.