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Exile and Memory: Re-membering Home After the Partition of Bengal Urbashi Barat

Urbashi Barat was born and educated in Calcutta, India. She has experienced several kinds and modes of displacement: geographical, cultural, emotional. Since her marriage she has lived in Jabalpur, in the centre of India, where cultural and social traditions are distinctively different from what she knew in her birthplace in Bengal. If her own family belongs to East Bengal – now another country, Bangladesh, from which they have been effectively exiled as a result both of relocation and Partition – her husband’s family migrated from their original home in West Bengal to Central India more than a century ago. She has been teaching English in Jabalpur for more than twenty years and is currently head of the Department of Postgraduate Studies & Research in English, at Rani Durgavati University, Jabalpur. She has published a book on Graham Greene and fifty research articles, mainly on women’s writing, postcolonial fiction, and English language teaching. One of her areas of interest at present is the South Asian diaspora. In this paper, she examines writing that derives from the partition of India and the brutality and degradation associated with the violent displacement of thousands of people following the imposition of invented borders. She focuses on two very different works, one in Bengali, the other in English, the first a factual recounting of the exilic experience, the other a fictionalised study of liminal lives, to discover the ways in which exiles from a partitioned Bengal attempted to make sense of what had happened to them by looking back at the past. The first work is an anthology of essays by sixty seven anonymous refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) now living in India, Chhere Asha Gram (The Abandoned Village), written not only to enable them to recover for themselves, in memory, their lost village homes, but also to enable people living in Indian Bengal who had not personally experienced exile to understand something of their sufferings. This collection of (male) voices centres on the refugee’s nostalgia, his inability to understand what has happened, and his yearning to re-establish himself without ever forgetting what he has left behind. The second text, Amitav Ghosh’s novel in English, The Shadow Lines, builds on the traditional Bengali opposition of house and home to explore the different ways in which home is remembered, imagined, and re-created by those whose experiences of continuous dislocation, their own and their ancestors’, have rendered them 214 Urbashi Barat

permanent exiles. As home and loss are narrativised, both fact and fiction suggest that the exilic memory, which Rushdie compares to shards of broken mirrors, does not simply recapture the past but creates a new reality which may have little in common with historical accounts. In both works, the remembered home ensures that the past continues into the present and loss is turned to gain, even as it also suggests that the condition of exile is permanent, irrevocable, and universal.

A Bengali nursery rhyme written just after India’s Independence soon became a classic expression of the popular feeling about a newly achieved political freedom: not joy or relief, but, rather, an incomprehension and an anguish that this freedom was gained at the expense of home and homeland, which were now so broken up that they could never be put together again. The mocking question that the poem asks, using a domestic parallel, points out that those who should have known better were as complicit in this act of reckless and irresponsible violence as those whose careless scribbles across a map had erased the plural identity of Bengal: “Teler shishi bhanglo bole khukur pore rag koro, / tomra je shob buro khoka, bangla bhenge bhag koro, / bharat bhenge bhag koro, / tar bela?” (‘when a little girl [accidentally] breaks a bottle of oil you’re so angry, what about the way you adult little-boys [deliberately] broke up and divided Bengal, and India?’, my translation). For Bengalis, Independence was also Partition, the invention of borders which permanently and irrevocably exiled entire communities. Even today, more than half a century after the event, the victims of Partition continue to explore the dimensions of their loss of home, to attempt to understand what it has done to their sense of identity and their social relationships. Remembering, as Homi Bhabha points out in The Location of Culture, is “never a quiet act of introspection. It is a painful re- membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (Bhabha 1994: 63). In this paper I use two very different works, one in Bengali, the other in English, as examples of some of the ways in which Hindu exiles from East Bengal attempted to make sense of what had happened to them through re-membering their lost home: like Derek Walcott’s famous broken vase (Walcott 1992), the recovery through memory becomes a (re)discovery of love and longing. Leaving home is not, of course, a new experience for Bengalis, who have traditionally loved travelling: the popular stereotype of the indefatigably peripatetic Bengali is part of contemporary folklore in India. Since the mid-nineteenth century,