Silence: a deliberate choice?

SEMANTI GHOSH

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Faiz Ahmed Faiz was one of the greatest poets of the Partition of 1947. The enigma of 15 August 1947 was brilliantly captured in one of his well-known verses: Suna hai ho bhi chukka firq-e-zulmat-o-nur/ Suna hai ho bhi chukka hai bisal-e-manjil-o-gam/Badal chukka hai bahut ahl-e-dard ka dastur/ Nishat-e-basl halal o ajab-e-hijr haram (I have heard that darkness is faded away by the clear rays of light/ I have heard that pangs of parting are embalmed by the joys of union/ Those who have been pained by all this are now changing/ To be virtuous is to be happy now, vice is the sorrow of separation).

This poem not only portrayed the chaos and unrest of the time, but also revealed a deeper truth: the stunned confusion in the minds of the onlookers who were not sure how to react to the overwhelming events, facts and stories of Partition, the stupendous extent of massacres and migrations. The enormity of the loss and tragedy could not be immediately fathomed, and the resultant emotions seemed to defy all prevalent modes of comprehension and expression. Surely, 1947 was a time when language, both written and oral, fell woefully inadequate for the demands of the reality.

Taking the cue from Faiz, we can try to understand why in the world of post-1947 Bengali literature we are faced with a curious indifference towards this watershed event. Bengali homeland was abruptly cut into two random parts with millions of people uprooted, tortured and butchered. Bengali society and economy bore the worst kind of setback for the next few decades. But strangely, Bengali culture, specially the field of literature, showed a stubborn immunity from the devastating realities around. It was often noted that although the eastern and western borderlands of India went through a similar fate in 1947 and similar pains of violence, abduction, migration and resettlement, there were also certain important differences in the process and outcome between the two experiences.

However, what is not adequately pointed out so far is that the field of literature is one of such sites of stark disparity. While in northern and western India, the human drama of Partition has been consistently taken up as the theme of hundreds of novels, stories and poems, resulting into the emergence of a rich genre of ‘Partition literature’, on the eastern side, we can only find a strong silence in the field of literature in divided Bengal, thus rendering ‘Partition literature’ a rather lopsided character. This discrepancy appears to be thoroughly intriguing as the dislocation of population in the East turned out to be a longer process, stretching over a few decades, hence affecting a couple of generations by its sheer magnitude.

 

Recently the historiography of Partition is tending more than ever to rely on the literary archives. A major thrust of recent scholarship on Partition has been to draw more on ‘people-centric accounts’, no less as an effort to provide a necessary corrective to state-centric and high politics perspectives of the events of 1947.1 As a result, though entirely new and poignantly rich archives are opening up, but, strangely, we continue to accept a curious limitation of these archives: the absence of the entire gamut of eastern experiences. This absence of eastern voices is taken so much for granted that even when writing directly on ‘the literature and human drama of 1947 Partition’, scholars can afford not to mention a single example of Bengali literary source.2 

The volume of Bengali Partition literature is clearly meagre as compared to that of Punjab. However, the silence in general and the sporadic nature of dealing with the social issues of post-Partition Bengal in literature still merit a serious probing. It is important to remember that silence often tells us much about the context of the silence, especially when the context is torn and brutalized by violence. We know that Urdu/Hindi writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, Intizar Hussain, Bhisham Sahni or Rajinder Singh Bedi, and Punjabi writers like Kartar Singh Duggal provided on the one hand graphic accounts of violence perpetrated during this period and the traumatic effects of violence on the target communities, families and individuals on the other. But we also know that Partition trauma meant much more than direct violence and its direct impact.

Violence in this context was also embedded in the more subtle levels of memory, nostalgia or a continuing pain of dismemberment. Does Bengali literature also represent a dearth of such experiences as well? Do we identify any pattern in the realms of silence and in the realms of remembering? Do we consider the same reasons of silence in our appreciation of the Bengali literature generated in West Bengal and the markedly different trend of Bengali literary trend emerging after 1947 in East Pakistan and the later Bangladesh? These are the questions which ought to be brought into fore by scholarly studies and problematized through historiographical analyses. These are the questions which have been long neglected and now almost forgotten. Moreover, these are the questions which take us back to Faiz and remind us of the unsettling fact that stupefying calamities can sometimes thwart the everyday process of judgment and comprehension – a process without which literary expressions can be rendered hollow and meaningless.

 

Remembering Auschwitz, Adorno once famously commented that it did not make sense to write poetry any more. George Steiner, the great post-Holocaust cultural critic, also thought that the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies without reason. While writing on the 1947 holocaust of Indian subcontinent, Urvashi Butalia noted that the women victims of Partition violence had a tendency to turn silent when asked to recount their experience, as if ‘words would suddenly fail speech as memory encountered something too painful, often too frightening to allow it to enter speech.’3 The silence all of them spoke of is a silence chosen consciously. Looking at Bengali literary world, can we notice the same kind of deliberate silence? Or was it an unnoticed silence, a phenomenon creeping in mostly due to a collective absent-mindedness?

 

Hasan Azizul Haque, an eminent author of contemporary Bangladesh, observes that although on both sides of the border, those who had never imagined that they would have to leave everything they possessed and known in life for an unknown destination were forcibly transformed into refugees and penniless beggars overnight, our literature ‘chose not to serve its obligations’ to portray the magnitude of the pain and loss of Bengali society.4 This comment in its literal sense points towards a matter of choice. But a careful reading of his position would indeed make it clear that his use of the word ‘choose’ is nothing but figurative. By employing the characteristically harsh and self-critical style of post-colonial left-leaning Bengali intelligentsia, who feel deeply apologetic of the stands the Communists and left radicals had taken before and after Partition, he in fact refers to a hugely frustrating collective failure instead of a conscious choice. However, what prompted this collective failure to persist in the field of literature for decades is a different question altogether.

But before delving into the question of collective obliviousness, we need to emphasize two striking features of existing Partition literature in Bengal, which is clearly limited in terms of volume and nature. First, though it is difficult to explain the general frame of silence in terms of a self-conscious choice, in one respect the Bengali writers seem to have treaded a conscious path. Almost without exception, they tended to deal more with the subtle and sensitive aspects of Partition and not with the terror and the trauma of the event. As if the mindless violence were not a theme worthy of literary attention and literary expression, the Bengali authors preoccupied themselves with the emotional journeys and practical hardships after Partition.

 

Atin Bandyopadhyay’s famous novel Nilkantha Pakhir Khonje (In the Search of a Blue-necked Bird), Narayan Gangopadhyay’s Sroter Sange (Along with the Tide), Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Purbo-Pashim (The East and the West), Sankha Ghosh’s Supuri Bon-er Sari (Rows of Betel-nut Trees), and Sunanda Shikdar’s Dayamoyeer Katha (The Tale of Dayamoyee) to list a few, are written in different decades, but each of them expressed the pain of losing one’s homeland and living a life haunted with bitter memories and sometimes with an unfounded optimism of a reversal of fortune, of returning to the ‘paradise lost’. The authors would deliberately avoid as their subject the harsher realities of revenge, bloodlust or the ethnic cleansing. They would rather focus on the gradual unfolding of psychological drama resulting from the untold violence.

The omission is so deliberate and striking when contrasted with the writings of authors like Saadat Hasan Manto or Bhisham Sahani that one cannot but conclude that this is intentional and not accidental. The inability of the educated, middle class bhadralok Bengali authors to come to terms with the brutality of community violence stands out in stark contrast with their northern/western Indian counterparts. Their own psychological discomfort towards violence and habitual avoidance of the unpleasant historical realities barred them from attempting fictional representation of the immensely traumatic ordeals of an injured and massacred population.

 

However, while this can be considered as rather discreditable on the part of the Bengali authors, in at least one respect they deserve a special mention. Removing the focus from the immediacy and ferocity of violence, they eventually deliver a far better understanding of the startling uncertainties and the unforeseen turns of events during and after Partition. We come to know how in 1947 the boundary demarcations were hurriedly drawn and took the entire border population by surprise, how the confusion spread and hardships were multiplied by such widespread lack of information.

The same uncertainties continued to haunt the lives of the refugees in subsequent decades. Almost every literary piece and memoir of Bengal points out how these uprooted communities underwent unspeakable adversities and misfortune, but continued to nurture a nostalgic longing for the land they still considered their own, their homeland or ‘desh’.5 Why is the aspect of nostalgia given such prominence by the authors? Perhaps they wanted to underscore how the unsettling present and the uncertainties of the future constantly forced the refugee mind to indulge itself in a world of hope and fantasy, a craving for a return to their ‘own’ land in some near or distant future.

Such was the impact of 1947: the massive act of partitioning the subcontinent into three parts remained an incomprehensible, incredible fact to the many millions of Bengal for a reasonably long time to come. Bengali novels like Khoabnama (A Biography of Dream) by Akhtaruzzaman Iliyas, Dayamoyeer Katha (The Tale of Dayamoyee) by Sunanda Shikdar, Sat Ashman (Seven Skies) by Shamim Ahmed and poems of Bishnu Dey, Mangalacharan Chattopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay or Sankha Ghosh – all reverberate the longing for a ‘home’, not knowing where to look for it, here or there: Ekhane okhane dekho kato gharchhara lok chhayay hanpai/ Park-e chhauni-te path-e mansion-er baranda-i saan-er sajya-i/ Ki je bhabe ghar chhere khonje bujhi desh/ Kothai je jabe bhabe Haora-i naki se Dhaka-i (Look around at the homeless people, panting in the shades,/ At the parks, camps, roads, porticos of the mansions, lying on hard stone-slabs,/ What goes on in their minds, do they search for their homeland/ Where should they go, to Howrah or to Dhaka: Bishnu Dey, ‘Jal dao’, Anwishto, 1950).

 

We must note, therefore, just as the literature of Punjab Partition aptly depicts the trauma and horrors of 1947 massacres, the relatively less known literary works on Bengal Partition throw a rare and useful light on the continuing political, social and economic uncertainties of the time and the tortuous journey of resettlement such uncertainties led to.

This is all the more remarkable as in Bengal, unlike in Punjab, migration has not been a matter of a short stretch of time. Instead, Bengal experienced waves of migration all through the six decades after 1947, for which it was often termed as ‘Long Partition’. During this period, realities often changed; so did the anxieties of the migrants or the minorities. In his outstanding novel Agun Pakhi (The Bird of Fire), Hasan Azizul Haque describes how families which stubbornly resisted the prospects of migration in the aftermath of 1947 had to succumb ultimately to manifold social-economic pressures. Clearly, this furnishes the reader with a more complex account of the trials and tribulations of minority communities on both sides of the border, and points toward the delayed impact of Partition. In view of all this, one might conclude that, although scanty in number and scattered in nature, Bengali novels, stories and memoirs of Partition have an unusual story to tell.

 

The second prominent feature of Bengali Partition literature is the sheer dominance of autobiographical accounts. The discomfort of the authors to deal with violence and humiliation in the fictional narratives is compensated to a certain extent by these autobiography-writers, whose narratives sometimes entailed vivid descriptions of riots witnessed first-hand. One must remember, however, that the memoirs occupy a controversial space in the historiographical analysis and the high degree of subjectivity must be acknowledged at the outset in order to use them as historical sources. Dipesh Chakarabarty would remind us how ‘a traumatized memory has a narrative structure which works on a principle opposite to that of any historical narrative.’6 But, this remains a historian’s predicament. Standing on a relatively safer platform, a literary critic would perhaps say that memory gives structure to every narration and, therefore, provides a perspective to grapple with the frightening diversities of the real world. Precisely for this reason, memoirs claim an important place in Partition literature. They give form and shape to the individual micro-history as well as tell its audience quasi-real stories.

 

As early as in the 1950s, the Bengali vernacular daily Jugantar published a series of essays, later collected in a volume called Chhere Asha Gram, edited by Dakshinaranjan Basu. The authors recollected their memories of the native villages of East Bengal. The yearning for the home they had left behind was intertwined with the account of struggle they had to face in an alien land of West Bengal. Interestingly, the process of acclimatization gradually started to influence their visualization of the deserted ‘home’.

The path-breaking article of Dipesh Chakrabarty on this anthology of memoirs is a rare example of scholarly attempt at deciphering the voices of the eastern Partition. It points out how the urbanity of Kolkata-centric literary sensibility eventually induced the image of ‘idyllic village’, its necessary ‘other’, and how even in the minds of the self-styled writers of an uprooted community the journey to the eastern Bengal countryside was becoming a homage trip to the pastoral beauty of the Bengali landscape. ‘In other words,’ Chakrabarty would say, ‘this memory places the idyllic village squarely in the middle of the country/city question as it had evolved in Calcutta’s urban culture.’7 

This vision of idyllic village had a double purpose: it provided an emotional anchor amidst the alienation of a different life and, at the same time, served well to produce an enlarged view of the trauma of violence and dislocation. Even without going into details of violence, a heightened impact of the devastation could thus be created on the audience. The typically Hindu bhadralok sensibility was maintained as well, even as the typically Hindu nationalist version of the inevitability of Partition due to Muslim communalism could be amply emphasized.

As against this trend of memoirs informed by Hindu nationalist fervour, there are a few accounts which tell us some personal stories of Partition from the other side, that is, the Bengali Muslim society. Autobiographical accounts like Abul Mansur Ahmed’s Amar Dekha Rajnitir Panshash Bachhor (Fifty Years of Politics as I Saw It) and the ‘Bangabandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Asampata Atmajibani (The Unfinished Autobiography) are extremely important texts in this respect. They not only provide different versions of the Partition story, but at the same time illuminate the difficulties and uncertainties of the post-1947 Bengali Muslim journey. A recent addition in this trend, Sirajul Islam Chaudhuri’s Chhatrabhanger Purbapar (Before and After the Devastation) deserves mention as it deals with the hitherto unexplored plight of the Muslim families dislocated from the metropolis of Kolkata only to undergo the painful daily struggle of being ‘declassed’ in mofussil towns of East Pakistan.

 

In his autobiographical account, Chaudhuri takes the pain of clarifying the ‘real’ cause of the all-round devastation, and points out that the sufferings in East Pakistan after 1947 were not so much due to Partition but due to the ruthless self-assertion of capitalist class in power. Alongside such pronouncements, his political views begin to taint the narration of events.8 Chaudhuri thus reminds us of the political predilections of the viewer of Partition as he translates his own experiences and understanding into an autobiographical or fictional narrative. Often authors with strong political leanings felt totally dissuaded to address the human agonies which accompanied Partition. On both sides of the Bengal border, one can identify distinct, though different, political imperatives which impeded the process of fictional representation of Partition.

 

On the eastern side of the border, there was a definite mood of political victory after 1947. This mood succeeded to a great extent to overwhelm the pain and trauma of the time. Ranging from the motivated political personalities like Sheikh Mujib to the college students of 1947 like Sirajul Islam Chaudhuri, almost everyone considered such tribulations as a necessary price for a long awaited gain of Muslim ‘homeland’. It deemed more important, therefore, to focus on the positive accomplishments and hidden potential of the new state than on the loss, fear and frustrations. Even those who rose up against the political, economic and cultural domination of West Pakistan, 1947 continued to denote a critical point of departure from the previous modes of control, that is, from the clutches of Hindu nationalist supremacy. Recent memories of riots made the fact of ‘Hindu’ control especially unacceptable.

One may remember in this context a short story titled ‘Gayatri-Sandhya’ by Selina Hossain, a reputed novelist of Bangladesh. There we read about a scared young couple fleeing across the border by train in 1947. They are fleeing not only because they considered the eastern part of Bengal a safer place to stay, but also because the man wants his pregnant wife to deliver their child in the hard-earned land of Pakistan. As the train enters Rajshahi, the passengers hear the cries of a newborn baby. The story ends with this birth. The child is named Pratik Ahmed. ‘Pratik’ being the Bengali word for ‘symbol’, the optimism about a freer and happier homeland is pronounced with no uncertainties. As a consequence of such waves of hope and joy, and the corresponding fear of social-political taboo if one spoke in terms of loss, the trauma and the pain of Partition seldom surfaced in literary works. The fear of taboo was truly real, especially for the minorities of the new nation-state. Therefore, the voices of Hindu migrants from East Bengal have been more prominent,’ observes Meghna Guha-Thakurta, ‘than Muslim migrants from West Bengal.’9 

 

The political climate played an equally significant role in determining the nature of the creative appreciation of Partition experience in West Bengal. As the Communist Party of India gained a stronger foothold in this state than in other parts of India, the entire literary and artistic world of West Bengal bore unmistakable signs of Communist control and, as a consequence, a deep-seated ideological discomfort about Partition. The Adhikari thesis of 1942, that is, ‘the recognition of the right of separation of individual nationalities’ was a thing of the past. Rajani Palme Dutt’s staunch opposition of the Pakistan scheme transpired as the official stance in and after 1947. Partitioning a country, or a province, on the basis of Hindu-Muslim community identities, identities which were necessarily ‘false consciousness’, was unacceptable and, therefore, unacknowledgeable. It is interesting to note that even after 1947, the Communist Party was not divided, but continued as a unitary establishment. As the Communists consistently denied the fact of Partition, so were the problems triggered by Partition. It remains a chapter of huge shame in the history of the Communist movement in India that the plight of the millions of refugees never received their attention for the simple fact that this community could not be defined and characterized in clear terms of class struggle.

‘To fight communalism in all its manifestations’ was the explicit instruction to the Communists and leftists of India after the August riots of 1946. But how could an author write about Partition or the refugees without referring to these ‘communal’ constructions of identities? Could the speakers in biographies or the authors of fiction locate violence with its independent trajectory without being distributed over an anonymous population designated by the terms ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’? This is where the Bengali left-leaning authors faltered gravely, and as a result, tended to shy away from addressing the violence of Partition.

 

Worse still, they often ventured to explain the refugee predicaments in terms of the usual categories of class conflict. To give a few examples, short stories like ‘Ahalya’ or ‘Janmabhumi’ by Nani Bhowmik, ‘Path-er kanta’ by Rameshchandra Sen, ‘Palanka’ by Narendranath Mitra or ‘Adaab’ by Samaresh Basu: all of these chose to revolve around the same ‘essential reality’ of class struggle and gradual awakening of the proletariat.

Debes Ray, a leftist literary critic and an eminent author, identifies the cause of the silence in Bengali literature over the issue of Partition to be the inability of the ‘literary form’ to expand in such a way as to encapsulate the complexities of the time. He added that the confusion and quandary about the ‘morality’ of the event led to this crisis of the ‘form’. While there was no place for moral confusion in the cases of war, famine or genocide, Partition was an instance where the question of morality was at best one of dubious nature. However, one can make out where Ray’s anxiety is coming from, and why the questions of violence and human tragedy cannot claim a worth of their own. In fact, it was not the crisis of the ‘literary form’, but the crisis of the literary judgment that seems to be the cause of this silence. It is also not too far-fetched to assume a correlation between this literary judgment and the leftist ideology at large.

Sometimes ideological dilemma, sometimes denial, sometimes discomfort and sometimes the continuing realities of dislocation and disruption: Bengali literature of the post-1947 era could not rise over the vast sea of silence for various reasons. Nevertheless, present-day Bengali authors often seem less reluctant than their older counterparts to tread the silent realms of the Partition experience. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines deals with the riots of 1964, a much later phenomenon but still integrally connected with the fateful events of the late-1940s. He asserts there that the author must engage in a fight against this silence as ‘it lies outside the reach of intelligence, beyond words.’10 More than six decades after the Great Partition of 1947, Bengali literary world can only hope for braving the fight and escaping from the trap of history that it once constructed and maintained zealously.

 

Footnotes:

1. Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. 177.

2. Ian Talbot, ‘Literature and the Human Drama of the 1947 Partition’, South Asia, vol. XVIII, Special Issue, 1995, pp. 37-56.

3. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Penguin India, Delhi, 1998.

4. Hasan Azizul Haque, Kathasahityer Kathakata. Jatiyo Sahitya Prakashani, Dhaka, 1981, p. 16.

5. Anasua Basu Raychaudhury, ‘Nostalgia of "Desh", Memories of Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 December 2004, pp. 5656-7.

6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Memories of Displacement: The Poetry and Prejudice of Dwelling’, in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Permanent Black, Delhi, 2002, p. 117.

7. Ibid., pp. 127-131.

8. Sirajul Islam Chaudhuri, Chhatra-bhangerPurbapar. Bidyaprakash, Dhaka, 2012, p. 36.

9. Meghna Guha-Thakurta, ‘Uprooted and Divided’, in Jasodhara Bagchi and Shubharanjan Dasgupta (eds.), The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India. Stree, Calcutta, 2003.

10. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines. Ravi Dayal Publisher, Delhi, 1988.

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