Reconstructing the Bengal Partition
Reconstructing the Bengal Partition

Author: Jayanti Basu

Publisher:

Published: 2013-06-12

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9788190676090

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A psychological study of the Bengal Partition, a traumatic time that continues to resonate. Why has it been so hard for Bengal to recover from this catastrophe, shared with the people of Punjab, who faced much more brutal and horrendous violence over a short period? Was it due to very different historical circumstances? The refugees were targets of soft violence, an extreme form of mental assault that chilled them with fear till they fled. They could not tell whether old friends had become new foes. Were they imagining this or perhaps it was a true reading of the situation? Departures were spread over many years, preventing a sharper break with the past, prolonging their confusion over identity, the grief of being uprooted, of feeling unwelcome in the truncated state of West Bengal. The author interviews a number of respondents who were young children or adolescents from the bhadralok, the educated section of society, to gauge their understanding of Partition and how it affects their lives. She uses the insights of psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology. Alan Roland, the distinguished psychoanalyst, talks of how the depth of these interviews and Basus psychological understanding of each person give a new understanding of memory and the reconstruction of Partition in peoples mind.

Caste and Partition in Bengal
Caste and Partition in Bengal

Author: Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-06-27

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0192859722

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The book seeks to situate caste as a discursive category in the discussion of Partition in Bengal. In conventional narratives of Partition, the role of the Dalit or the Scheduled Castes is either completely ignored or mentioned in passing. The authors addresse this discursive absence and argues that in Bengal the Dalits were neither passive onlookers nor accidental victims of Partition politics and violence, which ruptured their unity and weakened their political autonomy. They were the worst victims of Partition. When the Dalit peasants of Eastern Bengal began to migrate to India after 1950, they were seen as the 'burden' of a frail economy of West Bengal, and the Indian state did not provide them with a proper rehabilitation package. They were first segregated in fenced refugee camps where life was unbearable, and then dispersed to other parts of India - first to the Andaman Islands and the neighbouring states, and then to the inhospitable terrains of Dandakaranya, where they could be used as cheap labour for various development projects. This book looks critically at their participation in Partition politics, the reasons for their migration three years after Partition, their insufferable life and struggles in the refugee camps, their negotiations with caste and gender identities in these new environments, their organized protests against camp maladministration, and finally their satyagraha campaigns against the Indian state's refugee dispersal policy. This book looks at how refugee politics impacted Dalit identity and protest movements in post-Partition West Bengal.

The Partition of Bengal
The Partition of Bengal

Author: Debjani Sengupta

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-10-22

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1316673871

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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.

The Long History of Partition in Bengal
The Long History of Partition in Bengal

Author: Rituparna Roy

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-02-13

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1003851894

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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.

Partition as Border-Making
Partition as Border-Making

Author: Sayeed Ferdous

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1000458954

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This book critically analyzes the Partition experiences from East Bengal in 1947 and its prolonged aftermath leading to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. It looks at how newly emerged borderlands at the time of Partition affected lives and triggered prolonged consequences for the people living in East Bengal/Bangladesh. The author brings to the fore unheard voices and unexplored narratives, especially those relating the experience of different groups of Muslims in the midst of the falling apart of the unified Muslim identity. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research and archival resources, the volume analyzes various themes such as partition literature, local narratives of border-making, smuggling, border violence, refugees, identity conflicts, border crossing, and experiences of the Bihari Muslims and the Hindus of East Pakistan, among others. A unique study in border-making, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, South Asian history, Partition studies, oral history, anthropology, political history, refugee studies, minority studies, political science, and borderland studies.

Migration, Memories, and the "Unfinished" Partition
Migration, Memories, and the

Author: Amit Ranjan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1003850065

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This book looks at migration through the lens of the Partition of India in 1947. The Partition uprooted millions of people from their homelands. This volume examines the initial difficulties faced by the refugees in settling down in their adopted land. It analyses the state’s efforts in facilitating the movement of refugees, the processes it initiated to resettle them after Partition, and the extent to which it was successful. This book also investigates the links between socio-political developments in contemporary India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as a result of the Partition. Drawing on archival sources, oral histories and literary representations, the contributing authors discuss and analyse the experiences of the migrated population. Part of the Migrations in South Asia series, this book will be an important read for scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, Partition studies, Indian history, Indian politics, and South Asian studies.

A Reading of Violence in Partition Stories from Bengal
A Reading of Violence in Partition Stories from Bengal

Author: Suranjana Choudhury

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-07-20

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1527557103

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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.

Citizen Refugee
Citizen Refugee

Author: Uditi Sen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-08-30

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1108425615

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Explores how refugees were used as agents of nation-building in India, leading to gendered and caste-ridden policies of rehabilitation.

South Asia
South Asia

Author: Dhananjay Tripathi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-24

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1000485501

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Post-colonial and post-partition South Asia, one of the fastest-growing and yet one of the least integrated regions of the world, is marked by both optimism and pessimism. This intriguing dichotomy of strength and weakness, security and insecurity, hope and fear, connections and disconnects underpins South Asia’s regionalism conundrum and gives birth to borders and boundaries – both material and mental – with a complex territoriality. The Janus-faced nature of South Asian borderlands – the inward nationalizing impulses entangled with the outward regional frontier-orientations – is a stark reminder that history of mobility in this eco-geographical region is much older than the history of territoriality and colonial cartography and ethnography. This collection of meticulously researched, theoretically informed, case studies from South Asia provides useful insights into bordering, ordering and othering narratives as practices and performances that are intricately entangled with identity politics and security discourses. It shows how a sharper focus on subterranean subregionalism(s), border communities, popular geopolitics of enmity, and transborder challenges to sustainability, could open up spaces for new multiple (re)imaginings of borders at diverse scales and sights including sub-urban neighbourhoods, school textbooks/cinema and trans-border conservation initiatives. The chapters in this edited volume have been contributed by both renowned as well as young emerging scholars, looking into the borders and boundaries in South Asia. Each chapter offers new perspectives and insights into themes like trans-Himalayan borderlands, India-Pakistan physical and mental borders, Afghanistan-Pakistan border and numerous social boundaries that we see in everyday South Asia. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.

Patriotism, Partition and the Persecuted
Patriotism, Partition and the Persecuted

Author: Debal K. SinghaRoy

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-07

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1000927148

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This book explores the theme of continuous wreaking of brutal persecution of a Hindu family on the one hand and the uncompromising efforts of Muslim friends and neighbours to protect this family on the other. It is set against the resultant and barbaric forces let loose after the propagation of the two nation theory, and the ultimate partition of India in 1947. Based on the soical biography of a Hindu family that stayed back in East Pakistan, it traces their journey, how they became 'other' in the country of their birth and faced persecution. This, being branded the other, led to part of the family migrating to Inida, away from their natal roots. The 1965 India-Pakistan war further brought prolonged separation and sufferings for these half-families living on both sides of the borders. Subjecting one to encounter helplessness, uncertainty and poverty in India, and the other to state sponsored apathy, coercion, arrests and physical tortures. The vicious atmosphere of violent communal aggression though did not stop their Muslim friends from protecting them. When the Muslim friend was killed by the religious fanatics in the newly liberated Bangladesh, the left behind member of the Hindu family realized that it was time to leave their motherland for India, where they died with the desire to go back to their motherland, buried along with them. Despite prolonged violence and tragic separation thereafter, numerous memories of the self-sacrificing efforts of the compatriots served as recollection in collective living in the Indian subcontinent.