Organizer and Chair: Abhijeet Paul, University of California-Berkeley

Discussant: Daisy Rockwell, University of California-Berkeley

The distinctive features of the second partition of Bengal, with respect to the partition of Punjab in 1947, is widely recognized but rarely theorized. This panel of papers will explore a range of historical, fictional, cinematic and political representations of the Bengal Partition in 1947 in order to address the following question: How does one reconstruct the memory, forgetting, and trauma of the violence, displacement, and disenfranchisement of subjectivity that marked the formation of juridical orders and political imaginaries in the region? Some of the shared concerns raised by the panel explore the interrelated themes of sovereignty (statehood, territoriality, and identity), representation (historical, literary, and political) and narration (memory, history, and trauma).

  Riaz Khan's paper, entitled "The Predicaments of Post-Colonial Reconstruction of the Political," undertakes a close reading of political memoirs of two prominent politicians (Maulana Bhasani, Suhrawardy) in order to examine the interplay of local, national, and imperial politics during the second Partition of Bengal in 1947. Anis Ahmed's paper, entitled "The Literary Imagination of Violence and Trauma in South Asia" traces the unwitting submission of the fictional representations (Bengali and English) of communal violence to the nationalist imaginations of both violence and sovereignty. Abhijeet Paul's paper, entitled "After Nostalgia: The Bengal Partition of 1947 in Film" focuses on the Bengali partition films (and photojournalism) from the 1950s to the present day to explain the meaning of nostalgia and forgetting within the larger context of nationhood, displacement and trans-border migration between Bangladesh and India. Daisy Rockwell, discussant, provides a comparative framework for the Bengal Partition by invoking the Punjab Partition.

Riaz Khan, New York University

This paper examines the impact of elite and mass-based politics during Partition on the formation of political states in East Pakistan and Bangladesh. In European historical experiences, the concept of the political, according to one authoritative tradition, is intimately linked to the possibility of (public) conflict, and hence to the question of the legal order, whereas the liberal tradition, with its emphasis on publicity, representation, and consociality, has lost sight of its violent origins. In British India, colonial governments grappled with the peculiar paradox of legality and territoriality without sovereignty, neither British nor Indian. Since 1947, the post-colonial states sought to approximate the interests in the monopoly of violence and the "bracketing" of inter-national wars that are presupposed in the modern concept of the state. Yet, the politics that sought to transform political relations at independence were intimately shaped by the interplay among the juridical and administrative orders of imperial geo-politics, colonial administration, and elite formations that could not "presuppose the concept of the political." This broad consideration will enframe the reading of the memoir and biography, respectively, of Huseyn Suhrawardy and Maulana Bhasani, two politicians, with widely variant ideologies and styles, who distinctively shaped the elite politics and mass mobilizations that produced Pakistan and, subsequently, Bangladesh. The accounts provide an intimate glimpse into the worlds of mass and elite politics at Partition, while highlighting the broader tendencies of political transformations during this historical age.

Kazi Anis Ahmed, University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh

A significant body of literature in South Asia, and especially in India, has emerged in response to the partition of 1947. Both the narratives of the partition and their critical reception are mired in what Thomas Hansen and Richard Fox have rightly identified as a discourse of "pathology." It is partly a symptom of the trauma caused by the partition. The trauma is thought to result mainly from the enormous violence of the riots. But, as Sudhir Kakar writes, "It is not as commonly recognized that it may not have been the memories of this violence…but the division of the country…which has had the stronger psychological impact on most Hindus." As Kakar goes on to explain, in India "the defining principle…of national identity is territory." The trauma of the division quadivision is an important but missing dimension in partition debates. The best of the partition literature has been read as humanistic or nostalgic testaments. The worst is grossly nationalistic or communal. It is thus necessary to find a more productive definition of both the human and political meaning of the Partition.

Abhijeet Paul, University of California-Berkeley

In recent times historians such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee and a few others have acknowledged the presence of a larger body of narrative sources in the study of the Bengal Partition: memory, recollections, myth and forgetting. Further, they have shown how the texts of memory are essentially Hindu, thus stereotyping the position of the Muslim in the Partition narrative. However, there seems to be little or no engagement with the vast body of materials (photojournalism, film, local histories) in their works. In this context, I would argue that even a seemingly sentimental and nostalgic line of engagement can trigger a layered response to a number of themes of the Bengal Partition such as socio-economic and cultural displacement of the Hindu refugees, trans-border migration since 1971, pauperization and nationhood. For that purpose, I would like to engage with the photojournalistic sources and the cinematic texts such as Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamool (Rootless 1950), Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-capped star 1956), Komal Gandhar (E-flat 1961), and more recently, Supriyo Sen's Abar ashibo phire (Way Back Home 2003). Finally, I thus hope to demonstrate the need to expand and reconstruct the archives in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the Bengal Partition.

Joya Chatterji, London School of Economics

It has been widely acknowledged that the experience of partition in the east has not adequately been integrated into the analyses of the Great Divide of 1947. Even the most recent studies of the legacy of partition have, by their own admission, deliberately refrained from considering the Bengal case precisely because it was so ‘different'.

This paper attempts to explore the character of that difference. Drawing upon the findings of a number of scholars over the last five years or so, the paper will suggest that while the partition of Punjab has been understood as a single cataclysmic event, the partition of Bengal in contrast, has been analyzed, and is better understood, as a process. Studies of the Bengal partition has revealed that while the division may have begun in 1947 (or indeed earlier), it was not in any sense ‘completed' in 1947: it continued to unfold over several decades, with complex - and often unexpected - consequences.

Since time is short, the paper will look at only three aspects of ‘partition – as – process’ in Bengal: 1) the evolution of borders 2) migration and diasporas 3) the creation of minority communities.

It suggests that the study of the Bengal partition from this angle of vision has thrown up new and important concepts about partitions more generally. Above all, it argues, the Bengal experience throws into sharp relief the role of human agency - at many levels involved in the division of countries. This in turn allows a way out of the focus on 'victimhood' and ‘subjectivity' in which the study of the Punjab partition has remained mired.