University of Alberta The Refugee Woman: Partition of Bengal, Women, and the Everyday of the Nation by Paulomi Chakraborty A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English and Film Studies ©Paulomi Chakraborty Spring 2010 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. 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Examining Committee Stephen Slemon, English and Film Studies Heather Zwicker, English and Film Studies Onookome Okome, English and Film Studies Sourayan Mookerjea, Sociology Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, English, New York University I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of Rani Chattopadhyay and Birendra Chattopadhyay, my grandparents Abstract In this dissertation I analyze the figure of the East-Bengali refugee woman in Indian literature on the Partition of Bengal of 1947. I read the figure as one who makes visible, and thus opens up for critique, the conditions that constitute the category ‘women’ in the discursive terrain of post-Partition/post-Independence India. The figure of the refugee woman, thereby, allows us to map the relationship between the category women and the collective imaginary, specifically the nation. I argue that the figure of the refugee woman explicates, interrupts, and critiques the relationship of ‘women’ to the nation in the normative patriarchal nationalist discourse, which constructs women as a sign of the nation. The representational import of the refugee woman pushes the signification of ‘women’ in relation to the collective from a sign to that of a subject. My analysis of the refugee woman is, thus, a critical engagement with the tension between ‘women’ as figurative and ‘women’ as historical-material categories, although both are imagined within the field of discursive signification. I develop my argument by analyzing three major texts from West Bengal, India that respond to the Partition to critically apprehend the radical charge inherent in the figure of the refugee woman. These texts are the film Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star; 1960) by Ritwik Ghatak, and the novels Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (The River Churning; 1967) by Jyotirmoyee Devi and Swaralipi (The Notations; 1952) by Sabitri Roy. The larger argument of the dissertation is that the Partition, as a historical event, lies in contiguity and continuity with the normative regime of the gendered ‘everyday world.’ Therefore, the Partition allows us to examine the historical configurations of power that make the gendered everyday but that cannot be easily discerned from within the ‘everyday.’ Within the rubric of this larger argument lies my contention that the figure of the refugee woman has the radical potential to make visible the traumatic relationship between the extraordinary violence of the Partition and the gendered, ordinary, everyday life. Preface I could not imagine one ideal reader when writing this dissertation. My imagined audience comprised both global readers and readers who will identify this topic as local. I wished to be comprehensible as well as interesting to both groups, neither appearing parochial and obscure to one section, nor sounding unduly preambular and obvious to the other. Practically implementing this goal turned out to be far more difficult than it first appeared. Especially when providing the historical background and context for each text and argument, the pragmatic decisions about how much was enough but not excessive became particularly challenging. While I took consolation from the fact that this problem cannot be mine alone and many others before me in comparable situations must have faced the same predicament, misgivings of saying both too much and too little at the same time nevertheless haunted me. My response to this quandary was to fall back upon myself as an implicit benchmark about what was relevant and to what degree the background-story needed to be told. Born into a Bengali family that traces its ancestry to East Bengal on both maternal and paternal sides, and growing up in Calcutta in the 1980s and the 1990s, I have been submerged in a Partition culture and have always been interested in the Partition. However, this keen interest in the Partition did not at first seem to warrant an actual search of its histories and stories, outside what was immediately available. Taking the Partition as a dissertation topic changed my knowledge of, relationship to, and position about the Partition to the degree that I had not anticipated. When providing overviews of histories, debates, texts, and contexts, and faced with the question of how much detail was necessary, I have prioritized emphasizing what I myself would not have necessarily known unless I had taken up this project. Occasionally, I have left traces of my own biographical relationship to the texts and contexts in the footnotes as a way of clarifying when I was drawing from it to make methodological decisions or to arrive at insights. Indeed, I have taken to footnoting as another solution—and perhaps it is more a symptom than a solution—to speaking to a diverse audience. If the number of footnotes appears as excessive, they speak to the challenge of addressing an audience located at, and in-between, the global and local poles. Some of the footnotes offer explicatory or background information that I imagined a global reader unfamiliar with historical-geographic-cultural specifics will need, whereas others offer extra information and qualifications that I wanted to share with readers whom I imagined as already invested in these very specifics. Unfortunately, I could not distinguish the two kinds of footnotes from each other, and it is for the readers to encounter them and decide for themselves whether or not the content of the footnote is of interest to them. Beyond this somewhat unorthodox footnoting, I have also, of course, used footnotes more conventionally. Many footnotes contain the usual bibliographic information and citations that all dissertating students, I am told, feel compelled to write. Among these, occasionally, I have referred to scholarship in the field of Holocaust Studies. I am cognizant of the problem of using a set of theories that were formulated to understand a very specific event to analyze another and of the bigger problem if we presume that the Holocaust is a necessary referent for any discussion of collective trauma. Thus, except for occasional references to Adorno, Benjamin, and Lyotard—philosophers who cannot, surely, be reduced to a field— , these references are citations rather than tools of analysis in my dissertation. Therefore, these references are in the footnotes rather than in the main text. The reason they are at all there is because much useful work has been done in this field; in instances where I knew of resonances or parallels between my discussion and this field, it seemed counterproductive to not note them. Before the readers get to the dissertation, I would also like to explain the conventions I have followed in my handling of bilingual texts for this dissertation and translations and transcriptions where necessary. Where I have cited a text from the original Bengali, I have mentioned ‘Bengali’ inside the parenthesis where the in-text citation appears. This should inform the reader that the author being quoted appears in the slim “Bengali” section appearing at the end of the Bibliography. When the translation of a quote is mine, I have usually mentioned this in the same parenthesis unless otherwise obvious.