The book is called Operation without Anaesthesia, and it is so because the dissection was done even before anaesthesia could be applied and the terrible pain that it caused was vivid in all the articles in the bookRecently a book has been published from Islamabad, compiling articles from writers of both parts of Punjab. The book is called Operation without Anaesthesia, and it is so because the dissection was done even before anaesthesia could be applied and the terrible pain that it caused was vivid in all the articles in the book ... The magnitue of violence in the partition of Bengal was perhaps not as big as it was in Punjab, though it is not justified to compare riots (involving bloodshed) on a bigger or smaller scale, the wounds of Bengal's partition are still festering and the bleeding has not stopped yet, and the agony emanating from those wounds still strikes us, assuming new forms of violence or repeating old ones, affecting mostly the religious minorities in Bangladesh. After the riot in Kolkata in mid-August, 1946, and the subsequent ones in Noakhali and Bihar, politicians had thought that partition would put an end to the bloodletting. They were proved wrong. Furthermore, partition came with an entirely new phenomenon that none could have predicted: Thousands and thousands of people were uprooted from their land overnight. A sea of people had left their homes for unknown destinations. The refugee crisis overwhelmed and crippled both countries. One of the biggest refugee crises of the 20th century had thus set in. Partition of Punjab deeply affected writers in India and Pakistan. Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chander, Khuswant Singh, Kamleswar, Ismat Chughtai, Khaja Ahmed Abbas, Qurratulain Hyder, Ajeet Cour, among others, have written many famous works of fiction about partition. In spite of her bias towards the Muslim League, Momtaz Daulatana’s thick novel, The Divided Heart, becomes an appealing tale of inter-religious relationships that end in separation. The novel deals not only with key historical figures behind the partition, it also lends us a sociological perspective in addition to unfurling the human angles in all their dimensions. A number of other books deserve mention: Gyanendra Pandey’s Remembering Partition, S Settar and Indira Batista Gupta’s Pangs of Partition, Robikanto and Tarun Saint’s Translating Partition, Mushirul Hasan’s Inventing Boundaries, Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon’s Borders and Boundaries, Suvir Kaul’s The Partitions of Memory and Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of the Silence. Not the political history of Pubjab’s partition but the human aspects of this event have been considered in these narratives. For example, Butalia dug through many letters culled from Refugee Rehabilitation Department to bring out accounts of suffering from women whose voices have so far been silenced. Compared to Punjab, we are surprised to see that there is a dearth of writing about the partition of Bengal. This dearth is evident both in West Bengal of India and Bangladesh, even though massive-scale migration of Hindu minority communities from erstwhile East Pakistan to Kolkata had deeply shaken the entire West Bengal. As the editor of a collection of short stories (Raktamonir Har) on partition published by Sahitya Academy in 1999, Debesh Roy was unhappy to notice this dearth. There were plenty of powerful writers in Bengali. In Roy’s consideration, writers such as Bibhutibhushon, Tarashankar, Manik and Satinath – all of them were productive during or after partition. Tarashankar’s “Shabari,” Bibhutibhushon’s “Kushol Pahari,” Manik’s “Apod,” and Satinath’s “Porichita” were about partition and they were compiled in that very collection. Even so, Roy writes, “None of these four writers, nor those who were born between the First World War and 1930 – the young bunch who had started writing fiction around 1947, have explored partition as a watershed event in our history. The writers of the 1920s who wrote in the modernist vein – have not written about this either. But writers of these three groups have written about the riot in 1946 or the famine that had struck four years earlier; they have written about many other upheavals between 1945 and 1947, such as Rashid Ali Day, the naval rebellion, etc. But none of them really captured the over-arching realities caused by the partition, especially the refugee crisis that massively changed the demography of the West Bengal …”
Writers of Bangladesh have not been as drawn to 1947 as to 1952 and the political events leading to the Liberation War in 1971. She believes India and Pakistan are well ahead of us in revisiting the partitionWhat Niaz Zaman realised as the editor of The Escape and Other Stories of 1947 (University Press Limited, 2000) is not very different from Roy: Writers of Bangladesh have not been as drawn to 1947 as to 1952 and the political events leading to the Liberation War in 1971. She believes India and Pakistan are well ahead of us in revisiting the partition. There were some fundamental differences in the social-political context between erstwhile East Pakistan and West Bengal. Refugee crisis became a huge problem in West Bengal. It is easy to channel the anguish of the refugees -- who were forced to migrate – into triggering more communal riots. The Kolkata riots in 1950 were stoked by many groups. Literary reflection on the events and consequences of 1947 involved not only artistic but also social and political aspects. The grey areas might have stalled writers to write about this. Conversely, from the very beginning in East Pakistan, there was a conspicuous attempt to attach more importance to the non-Bengali refugees, especially the Biharis. That’s why though the then Pakistan government did its part in welcoming the Biharis, the educated Bengali middle class did not … In the 1960s, when refugees were rehabilitated in Mohammadpur and Mirpur, most of them were non-Bengali refugees and Bengali refugees from West Bengal were few and far between. In the 1960s, the Daily Jugantor (published from Kolkata) opened a section called “The village that you left behind,” which was edited by Dakkhinaranjan Basu. Refugees from East Pakistan wrote letters to the editor of this section, expressing their feeling for their ancestral homes. But to do so in this part of Bengal was tantamount to sedition in those days. Artistic treatment of 1947 through fiction was thus stalled by non-artistic reasons. It is impossible to capture in a simple narrative the enormous impact that partition had and still has on the people India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But we have to keep discovering our roots through careful examination of all the different aspects that there are to partition, because it is only by keeping the memories of partition fresh that we can grasp the many layers of our current society and politics. That Bangladeshi writers, in the post-independence era, have been getting back to the events of partition is caused by the need for reaching a comprehensive understanding of the partition. In the post-independence era, quite a number of good novels have been written about the partition. They are Abu Zafar Shamsudin’s Padma, Meghna, Jamuna; Shamsuddin Abul Kalam’s Kanchangram, Akhteruzzaman Elias’s Khoabnama; Rashid Karim’s Mayer Kachhe Jachchhi; Shawkat Ali’s Dalil and Warish; Syed Shamsul Haq’s Golpo Kolkatar; Makbula Manzoor’s Kaler Mandira; Selina Hossain’s Katatare Prajapati; Mahmudul Haq’s Kalo Borof; Taslima Nasrin’s Phera; Rahat Khan’s Phire Asa; Ekhlasuddin Ahmed’s Phire Dekha; Kayes Ahmed’s Nirbashito Ekjon; Imdadul Haq Milon’s Deshbhager Por; Anisul Haq’s Cheari Ba Budu Orao Keno Desh Tyag Korechhilo; Salam Azad’s Deshbhager Golpo. Amitabh Ghosh’s novel, The Circle of Reason, deals with the riots of 1964 in Dhaka. Very recently Jashodhara Bagchi and Shubhoranjan Dasgupta have edited a book entitled, The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India. Published by Stri from Kolkata, it is an appealing documentation of the struggles of women affected by partition. In 2002 was published Memories of Genocidial Parition from Sri Lanka, in which Jharnadhara Chowdhury of Noakhali’s Gandhi Asram was interviewed by Amena Mohsin. We believe the subject of partition will receive more in-depth and illuminating artistic treatment from writers of both fiction and nonfiction. Instead of bypassing it, we must revisit partition as frequently as possible, to complete our understanding of 1947, and thus, of our identity.
(Translated by Rifat Munim from Mofidul Hoque’s Deshbagh, Sampradayikata Ebong Sampreetir Sadhana, published by University Press Limited, Second Edition, 2012)Mofidul Hoque is a co-founder and one of eight Trustees of the Liberation War Museum. He is a writer, researcher and publisher based in Dhaka.