Perspectives on Partition

Why does the Partition continue to be narrated as a Hindu-Muslim conflict when other communities too experienced its impact? Is the explanation an attempt to justify the ongoing love-hate relationship between India and Pakistan, where majoritarian religious identities hold sway in electoral politics? How would our understanding of history change if we learnt from the stories and perspectives of marginalised caste, linguistic and racial identities?

The Runaway Boy, published by Eka, is V Ramaswamy’s English translation of Manoranjan Byapari’s first book from the Chandal Jibon trilogy originally written in Bengali. The story puts caste at the centre of the narrative. The protagonist says, “My name’s Jibon, I’m a Chandal. What more do you want to know?” This frankness is missing from narratives that identify protagonists of Partition-themed stories only by their religion, and not by their caste, thus hiding their privileges and exaggerating their losses.

Byapari was born in Barisal in the mid-fifties when East Pakistan had not yet become Bangladesh. When he was three years old, his family migrated to West Bengal and they lived as refugees — first at the Shiromanipur Refugee Camp in Bankura, and later at the Gholadoltala Refugee Camp in 24 Parganas. He draws on these experiences to imagine the life of a Namasudra boy escaping from East Pakistan to India at the time of Partition. The protagonist’s identity makes him an outsider among Muslims as well as Hindus.

Bhaswati Ghosh’s novel Victory Colony 1950, published by Yoda Press, acquaints readers with the hardships faced by a woman named Amala Manna. She is forced to migrate from Barisal to Calcutta where she lives in a refugee camp. This protagonist’s resourcefulness, and her strong instinct for survival, help her build a new life amidst the most squalid of circumstances. However, in a society that upholds Brahminical supremacy and linguistic chauvinism, she is marked as inferior for being a shudra as well as a bangaal.

This novel makes readers confront the casteism that thrives in Indian households. The refugee woman is welcome only if she performs the role of a helpless beneficiary in need of charity from people who want to feel good about themselves. Her professional skills and her entrepreneurial qualities are considered as secondary to her social location. She wants to move on but she is never made to forget where she came from. Is she an outsider only in the marital home, or also in the nation state?

The Bengali spoken in Calcutta is different from the Bengali spoken in Barisal. Why does difference have to spark discord? This question is woven into the fabric of Ghosh’s novel that draws inspiration from the stories she heard from her grandmother who too migrated from Barisal, a district that witnessed widespread communal violence. Ghosh now lives in Canada.

The question of language is also taken up in Inherited Memories: Third Gener­ation Perspectives on Partition in the East, a collection of writings published by Zubaan with an introduction by Firdous Azim. This book approaches the Partition in a unique way. Instead of prioritising the first-hand narratives of Partition survivors, it foregrounds the perspectives of the third generation after the event took place. Hindsight reveals fresh insights.

In the foreword, while referring to interviews with “the non-Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh, generally known as the Bihari Muslims,” Nasez Afroz writes, “This community has been uprooted twice — in 1947, and again after Bangladesh’s War of Independence in 1971. When narrating their memories of 1947, all of them invariably talked about the memories of 1971 that they inherited from their parents. These testimonies are most striking, as their personal testimonies talk about a community living with refugee status since 1947.”

Apart from these three books published in 2020, Marina Wheeler’s The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab — published by Hachette India — offers another fascinating entry point into the Partition. The author, who is known to Indian readers as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ex-wife, is a human rights lawyer with a Sikh mother named Dip Singh who hails from the city of Sargodha that is now in Pakistan. Wheeler’s maternal grandparents migrated to India after the Partition.

Wheeler embarked on this family memoir after watching Gurinder Chadha’s film Viceroy’s House, released on the 70th anniversary of the Partition. She was troubled by the suggestion that, “unbeknown to Lord Mountbatten, the outgoing Viceroy, Britain had a secret plan to partition the country, to secure oil supplies and advance its own geopolitical interests in the brewing Cold War with Soviet Russia.” It did not match her mother’s story.

Wheeler considers herself half-Punjabi but she has not lived in Punjab and does not speak Punjabi. However, her story takes us right into the messy terrain of identities. Inter-racial marriages were not uncommon during the colonial period, so the impact of the Partition on the children of these couples merits study. We will never be able to construct a final picture of the Partition but fragments help us arrive at a deeper appreciation of how little we know.