Borderland Narrative of the Partition of Bengal - Koeli Moitra Goel & Anustup Basu

Event Date: Thursday, April 25, 2019

Time: 4:00 pm–5:00 pm

Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

Co-sponsored by the India Studies Fund at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC)

Koeli Moitra Goel

Borders and partitions have troubled histories of divisive politics in which neighboring communities walled off from each other continue to be shaken up by tremors of such divisions long after the actual event. This panel examines community experiences related to India’s Partition in 1947. In the aftermath of the British Raj’s decision to leave behind a divided territory in South Asia, the subcontinent was wracked by violent communal aggressions.

The history of western India becoming West Pakistan and Indian Punjab has been privileged in official Partition stories, academic research and popular culture. The eastern borderland of a broken, fragmented Bengal has largely been overlooked in mainstream discourses. Our panel hopes to contribute towards highlighting experiences of the communities along the Eastern borders of the newly crafted Republic of India from 1947.

As the original capital of the British Empire and later Bengali capital, Calcutta developed as a cosmopolitan center where art, cinema, and literature, as well as business and trade flourished. Bengal saw great prosperity during colonial rule, but it also underwent violent communal strife when the Partition forced Muslims out of a largely Hindu West Bengal and Hindus from a mainly Muslim East Pakistan. However, over the course of the next half century, a common language (Bengali) became a central platform of identity, superseding individual or class interests, and spurred the self-determination of Bangladesh and its independence from Pakistan.

Partition is a process which continues to shape social relations, political agendas, government policies, cultural histories, and most importantly ordinary lives in India and Bangladesh. Postcolonial interventions are called for: How can we best understand the violence when the Radcliffe Line was drawn? What legacies were lost as millions were forced to leave home and hearth and move to unfamiliar land on different sides of this arbitrary border simply based on their religious affiliations?
From personal perspectives to broader public memory, these stories form the inspiration for this panel. This panel will explore a fairly uncharted terrain of entangled identities, stratified citizenships, homes lost, and lives uprooted.

Anustup Basu

I will begin with two illustrations. Anecdotes if you will. I remembered them just before coming here. So forgive me if the details are a bit vague.

The first is an actual incident described in the historian Gyanendra Pandey’s book Remembering Partition. This was taking place about two years after 1947. Some people had put up a public notice in the dorms of the Aligarh Muslim University inviting applicants to join the Pakistan Army. It was candid and, as we would perhaps call it, naïve. The people who did it were incredulous when they were told that they could not do such a thing. 

Unimaginable in our times. What this tells us is that, even after that apocalyptic violence of the Partition and the greatest mass migration in the history of humanity, many were unsure about exactly what the Partition had done in terms of dividing a land and a people. What were the legal and political consequences of that division?

My second illustration is from Sunil Gangyopadhyay’s magnum opus Purbo-Paschim. It is a wide canvas story of a refugee family in Kolkata. There we see a theme of popular imagination and hope. In the novel people among the destitute community believe that they will eventually be able to return to lost ancestral villages. The Partition will be undone and the country – the two Bengals at least -- will be united in 1957.

1. What exactly does the Partition mean socially? Culturally, politically?
2. How permanent is this arrangement?
3. How is the pain to be absorbed in the long run? 

With this Preface I come to certain themes in Hindi and Bengali cinema of the 1950s. That is, the period of settlement. That of coming to terms with the permanence and legacy of the Partition.
Bhaskar Sarkar has written an excellent book on the Partition and Indian cinema. It is called Mourning the Nation. One of the major things that Sarkar says is that in the first few decades after INDEPENDENCE, there was very little cinema made, either in Bombay or Bengal, that directly addressed the Partition. Was about the Partition.

That is true and there are two reasons for that.
1. Censorship: Chances are, your film could get banned. Nastik (1954). A traumatized refugee in Bombay who turns to atheism and crime on seeing social hypocrisy and cruelty. Nastik was banned by censors on the grounds that it may hurt the sentiments of the Hindu community.
2. Sarkar forwards a Freudian explanation. A culture needs some time to absorb, work through trauma before it can start talking about it.

So there were very few films made on the Partition. There were examples like Manmohan Desai’s Chalia starring Nutan and Raj Kapoor, or Kidar Sharma’s Hamari Yaad Ayegi. In Bengal there were mainstream films like the Uttam Suchitra romances Bipasha or Shobar Opore. Apart from the famous Partition trilogy directed by Ritwik Ghatak.

These very different kinds of films, including non-serious ones, like the 1959 feature Milan, where Partition causes the lovers to separate, till they are reunited by an ingenious German Shepherd.
But, given that thousands of films were made across the 50s and early 60s, the number was strikingly small. The rest was a voluble silence.

But for me, the real question is not whether or to what extent Partition appeared in films. The question is, whether films could remain the same after Partition.
Let me invoke a memorable line from Rahi Masoom Reza’s memorable 1966 novel Adha Gaon. In rough English translation, it goes like this: “In short with independence several kinds of loneliness had been born.”

So this is the only point I would like to make today. After 1947, cinema, both in Bombay, as well as Bengal, was filled with different kinds of loneliness. Both these traditions, in different ways, became melodramas of loneliness. That of negotiating loneliness in a strange and alienating city.

Both Bengali and Hindi cinema in the 40s were dominated by the family melodrama – the social’ as it was called. Ergo, the usual run of the mill film usually featured drama and intrigue within the parameters of the feudal extended family. This template remained, but the screen of the fifties also became filled with lonely protagonists. Vagabonds, (Awaras), pickpockets, petty criminals, destitute people who arrived in the big city with nothing. No family or community or even caste identity. They lived in the pavements, slept on park benches or under street lights. Most of the time, these historical orphans came without biographical backgrounds. Yet often they would show markers of respectable upbringing and education. It was as if they carried the baggage of an unspecified historical devastation and uprooting. They had come from lost villages. Connoisseurs of Hindi cinema would recall the protagonist in Raj Kapoor’s classic Shri 420. A vagabond arrives in the big bad city with no money, but a BA degree (big deal in those times) and also without an identifiable past or clan identity.

We see culturally different, but equally noticeable forms of loneliness in Bengali film melodrama of the 50s, especially in the template massively popularized by the matinee idols Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. They gave expression to a new conjugal desire and yearning. It was that of a woman and a man, both often working, both often without distinguished family backgrounds, legacies etc., and both often coming from absent or dysfunctional families trying to struggle and find a place in the city teeming with refugees, the hungry, and the unemployed. This, unlike the couples of the old, was a distinctively nuclear couple. This nuclear desire is expressed best in the signature song sequences in these films, often set in utopian spaces – gardens in the moonlight, empty houses, picnic spots, nooks of nature -- that the otherwise bursting metropolis actually does not have anymore. 

I am afraid I will not be able to say a lot about Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema. This evening would be too small a time frame for that. It is in his cinema that we see the essence of the different kinds of loneliness. He depicts the present in the light of the past in each of its trilogies, but in a cinema of the imperfect tense. Loneliness is caused because selves and their memories themselves are partitioned. In his cinema, the Partition assumes the form of a primal division. Not just of the land and the population, but an entire civilization, linguistic universe and culture are ripped apart.

There might thus be very little Partition in both Hindi and Bengali cinema of the fifties and sixties. But Partition perpetually haunts cinema. It populates the screen with phantom figures weighed down by a primal loss. Different figures. Different stories. Different destinies. And different kinds of loneliness.