Colonial History of India

[acharya]

December 25, 2004

Nostalgia of 'Desh', Memories of Partition

The riots that broke out in erstwhile East Bengal soon after Partition saw a steady inflow of refugees into West Bengal. In the more impersonal government accounts, refugees formed part of a vast logistical exercise. They had to be housed in camps, issued voter and ration cards and, in some cases, provided due compensation. But each individual refugee story is a tale of individual loss, of escape and survival in a new land; a narrative rendered especially poignant by the sudden whiff of nostalgia for a lost homeland or 'desh'. In the more jingoistic present, 'desh' has taken on a connotation similar to the patriotic fervour, 'nation' evokes. However, for refugees, as the personal narratives in this article reveal, 'desh' will forever remain in place as one's homeland, now only sustained by memories.
Anasua Basu Raychaudhury

The partition of India in 1947 was a cathartic event. The British India gave birth to two separate states – India and Pakistan – on the basis of the so-called two-nation theory. On the eve of and immediately after the creation of these two new states, communal tension and riots gripped the subcontinent. The communal frenzy not only killed thousands of people, it also uprooted and displaced millions from their traditional homeland, their ‘desh’. This displacement forced many to search for a new home away from home. Partition had made their homeland hostile and they started imagining that peace and security were on the other side of the border.

The partition was traumatic to those people who, having faced physical violence, humiliation and sexual assault, were compelled to leave their homeland. These uprooted people had to first sustain themselves in survival mode in a somewhat alien land. If the relatively well-off people could sometimes reconstruct their lives on the other side of the border in newer pastures with comparatively less struggle, for those belonging to the middle and lower middle classes, it was almost impossible. Many of them even had to spend several years in the refugee camps before they could imagine a better life. Many of them could not even return to their original occupations and, therefore, felt a sense of alienation and irreparable occupational loss even after partial rehabilitation.

Although the ‘past’ of these people remains in many ways, their present, their desh is nowhere in sight. The refugees, who have been surviving in camps for five decades and have not yet been rehabilitated, still remain the prisoners of the past. It seems that their lives and times have frozen within the boundaries of the camp. To some of them, it is even better to live the rest of their lives with memories of the past rather than de-freezing it. They live with their memories – the memories of happier days in their desh and unbearable agony of losing their friends and relatives during communal tensions and riots. Sometimes, these memories of happier times, memories of abundance can be somewhat imaginary. It is possible that some of these people actually never saw abundance. Similarly, sometimes without even witnessing violence with the their own eyes, they tend to live with the fear of communal holocaust. As the present has very little to offer them, the past seems to envelop their entire existence.

It is against this backdrop that this article intends to capture the dynamics of the tussle between the sentiment of nostalgia and the sense of trauma of some of these displaced Bengali Hindus from East Pakistan. In this tussle, shared memory could be a powerful mechanism through which the shelter-seekers acquired a specific identity. In fact, the reality of displacement from their desh due to the violence accompanying partition did not stop these people to work for the progress and prosperity of their adopted land. Although the refugees felt some kind of detachment in their new place of residence, that detachment did not come in their attempts to make the adopted land more livable for themselves.

A few narratives of these refugees may indicate that they have either gained or lost many things in material terms through their displacement. Sometimes they have been able to create a new ‘para’ or a locality of their own in this new land. Still the adopted land remains a distant caricature of their desh. Their desh may not be reinvented and remains only in their memory.

Memory indeed “is the engine and chassis of all narrations”.1 In fact, memories are objects that tumble out unexpectedly from the mind, linking the present with the past. From the narratives of past it becomes possible to understand how these displaced persons perceived their own victimisation and to what extent it came into conflict with the identity ‘imposed’ on them or the one they accepted. It has been argued that, “a traumatised memory has a narrative structure which works on a principle opposite to that of any historical narrative”.2 A historical narrative, after all, concentrates on an event explaining its causes and the timing, but what it perhaps cannot explain is whether the subjects belong to the ‘marginalia of history’ like ‘accidents’, ‘concurrences’ or not. This is why one sociologist has rightly pointed out that, “memory begins where history ends”.3

It is worth mentioning here that, the narratives are always related to some sense of the self and are told from someone’s own perspective “to take control of the frightening diversity and formlessness of the world”.4 Through the narrative, the self finds a home, or would perhaps, to use Sudipta Kaviraj’s words, “describe the process better if we say that around a particular home they try to paint a picture of some kind of an ordered, intelligible, humane and habitable world”.5 Here the self tells the story to an audience – in this case the author – and thereby creates a kind of relationship with the listener.6

It may be that, “the historical self configures memories differently from the way the ahistorical self does.”7 Therefore, although the memories of these refugees may be subjective in nature, these could act as a rich archive of the experience of displacement. Keeping this in mind, the present article would intend to capture the tone and nature of reminiscences of a few uprooted people – their childhood memories, their upbringing, as well as their sense of trauma. It also tries to discuss the contrary relationship between the sweet memories and the bitter memories against the backdrop of their shared past.

For the sake of our analysis of the nostalgia of desh, the present article would be divided into two parts. The first part would concentrate on the narratives of these displaced persons on the basis of interviews taken by the author during her visits to the districts of Hooghly, Nadia and South 24 Parganas in West Bengal. The second part of the article would intend to argue that desh and nation are two different categories. While the nation is largely an imagined category, desh is frequently revisited in memories. The nation, therefore, may be a product of imagination, but desh is a concrete but distant reality for the uprooted people as it remains encapsulated in their past. The nation may be placed against a time and space, but desh, for these refugees, existed at a certain moment and in a distinct space associated with their childhood and younger days, their friends and playing fields, their village and para, their riverside walk and natmandirs (where the worship of Hindu idols used to take place).

To illustrate these points, the present article would concentrate on three different narratives of the persons who had a common past. All three narrators had to flee from the newly created East Pakistan (earlier known as East Bengal) in 1947 due to communal riots and were compelled to take shelter on the other side of the border. All three protagonists happen to be from the same district; Barishal, situated in the south-western part of East Bengal, and which was soon to earn notoriety for the inhuman atrocities against Hindus during the partition riots. It is known that, after partition, following the riots of February 1950, large numbers of Bengali Hindus migrated from East Pakistan to West Bengal, Tripura and Assam. These three narrators belonged to that group. Initially riots broke out in the Khulna district of East Pakistan where Muslims attacked the Namashudra community. The stories of their brutality against Hindus spread like wildfire and had a spillover effect. Therefore, from Khulna, the riot soon spread over a wide region that included Rajshahi, Dhaka and Faridpur. But in those places, the riots were very sporadic in nature. The most organised and planned violence took place in the village called Muladi of Barishal district.8

Keeping this background in mind, this article intends to analyse the recalling and forgetting of a few displaced persons who escaped the ordeal of communal violence in their partitioned, and therefore, lost homeland. We also try to indicate how the nostalgia of desh left its imprint on major Bengali literary works and films of the immediate post-partition period.

I

Nostalgia (nostos+algos):9 yearning/pinning for the past, reminiscing, remembering
Hironprova Das and her golden days at Jalisa: I met Hironprova Das in front of the office of the refugee camp at Cooper’s Notified Area. She had come to collect her rations that she has been receiving from the government of India since she became a refugee. When I met her, she would have been about 70 or 75 years of age. She is tall, thin and fair wearing a white ‘than’. When I disclosed the purpose of my visit, she thought for a while before she agreed to talk to me. We sat on the bench behind the office gate. Our conversation began thus:

“Mashi tomar desh kothae go?” (Auntie, where is your desh?)
“Amra to purba bonger lok”. (We are from East Bengal.)
“Purba bonger kothakar?” (Which part of East Bengal?)
“Barishaler.” (From Barishal.)
“Gramer nam mone ache?” (Can you remember the name of your village?)
She nodded, “Jolisha gram, Bakharganj thana.” (Village Jolisha, police station Bakharganj.)
“Tumi kotodin ekhane achho?” (How long are you here?)
“Ayto ki ar mone achhe. Oi Muladite riot hoilo na, tar poreito amra desh chharlam. Tao to hoilo gia panchash – ekanna batsar.” (Is it easy to remember all these? We left our desh after that riot in Muladi. It must now be fifty-fifty-one years.)
“Tumi ki ekhane vote dao?” (Do you vote here?)
“Hyan.” (Yes.)
“Tumi etodin dhore ekhane achho, vote dao, tahole tomar ki ekhon etai desh hoe gyache?” (You are here for so many years; you have a voting right here; is it your desh now?)
She retorted:
“Na na, eta ki koira desh hoibo? Ekhane thaki, sharanarthee ami, amar desh to Barishale tomare koilamna gramer nam. Koto kishu chhilo amago oikhane. Jakhan desh barir katha, jomi jomar kotha mone pore, tokhon mone hoina je ar baicha thaki.”10 (No, no, how can it be my desh? I live here; I am a refugee; my desh is in Barishal; didn’t I tell you the name of my village? We had so many things there. When I remember my desh, our house, our landed property, I don’t feel like living any more.)

Hironprova Debi is from Barishal district of erstwhile East Bengal. Her father owned a grocery shop. She grew up in a more or less well-to-do traditional Bengali joint family. Her family possessed a small piece of land where the Muslim ‘projas’ (subjects) of her own village used to work. Still she can remember her ‘janmo-bhite’ (ancestral house), ‘desher bari’ (the original home), ‘khelar math’ (playground) where she used to play her favourite game, ‘daria-banda’ (a traditional sport of East Bengal, particularly popular among young girls) with her elder brother, sisters and younger cousins. She especially remembers the Durga Puja days when she used to receive new clothes and had fun with her cousins. She even remembered distinctly their ‘pujar ghor’ (room for worshipping) where her mother used to worship Radha-Madhav. She spent the happiest moments of her life in her village, Jolisha, when she was a kid. When she was only 13 years old, she was married to a farmer from Patuakhali in the same Barishal district. But, unfortunately she became a widow within two years of her marriage and came back to her natal home at Jolisha.

Cherishing the sweet memories of her childhood days, she paused. I asked her why she had to leave Jolisha, if she loved her desh so much. She stared at me for few moments, closed her eyes and said: ‘because of the riots’. In Jolisha, the riot took place a day after ‘Shib-chaturdashi’. In her own words:

Uri baba! Allah-o-Akbar koiya shob dheye ashtesilo. Rashtae tokhon kotto lok. Ami Bhubanre loiya shib mondIr jamu koiya raona hoichi. Bhuban hoilo amar bhaignar dyaor. O amago barite barayite aisilo. Chhoto. Amar sathe amar parar-i aro jona aat-dosh lok silo. Aymon somoy ora amago upor jhapaiya porlo. Oder hate khola talowar, lathi, ooff! Ki kopakupi hoilo. Amar chokher samnei. Amar kol theika Bhubanre taina niya kopailo. Rokte amar kapor bhijja gelo. Ami je palamu she shakti nai tokhon. Thik ei bhabe (she showed me the way how the rioters chopped Bhuban)… Kono rokome amar dadar nam dhoira chitkar korte silam ami. Tokhon ki hoilo janina – oder ekjon koilo ei o to Radhika Ranjan Duttar bon, e tora ki korli. Oder theikai amare naki bashae phiraiya dia gyase. Amar ar ki hoisilo mone nai. Oi rokte bheja kapore chilam kotokhhon tao mone nai. Er por to praye tin mash ami rate ghumaite pari nai, bhat khaite pari nai, bomi ashto… (Oh god! They were chanting Allah-ho-Akbar and were rushing towards us. Streams of people on the road! Bhuban and I left for Shib temple. Bhuban is my distant relative. He came to visit us for an outing. He was small. I had eight or ten other people from our locality with me. In such a situation they suddenly pounced upon us. They had open swords, sticks, my god! Oh! What a riot took place! In front of my eyes! They snatched Bhuban from me and stabbed him. My dress got drenched in blood. I didn’t have the strength to flee then. I was only screaming and calling for my elder brother. I don’t know what happened – one of them suddenly said, my god! She is the sister of Radhika Ranjan Dutta. What have you done? Ultimately, those people must have returned me home. I don’t really remember what happened. I can’t remember how long I was in that bloodstained dress. I could not sleep for next three months, could not eat also, I had a nauseating feeling…)

She told me that the riots continued for seven to ten days which made it clear to them that their desh, their homeland was no longer a safe place for them to live in. She blamed the musalmaans from outside their village for the riot. She said:

Amago dyasher mollahra to bhaloi silo. Amago proja silo. Oi bairer thika jara aisilo, taraito gondogol pakaise – ora to Bihari – na hoile pore Hindustan-Pakistan bhag hoibar poreo to amra amago dyash chhaira kothao jai nai. (The Muslims of our locality were nice enough. They were our subjects. The people, who came from outside, were behind the troubles – they were Biharis; after all, even after the partition, we did not have to leave our desh.)

Ultimately, the fear and insecurity forced Hironprova and her family to leave their home in 1951. With her younger brother, and niece she left for Barishal town. Her mother had already left with her second brother. Their traditional joint family was thus broken. After staying a few more days at Barishal town, Hironprova crossed the international border and reached Bongaon of India and took shelter at one of the transit camps there. She also got her refugee identity card from the Indian government. Since then, Hironprova Das has been a ‘refugee’ and began her new journey for searching a new home.

For the last 51 years, the Cooper’s Permanent Liability Camp in Ranaghat has been Hironprova’s ‘new home’. Having heard the traumatic experiences of her life, I asked her whether she wants to visit her homeland again or not. She answered with a smiling face, ‘yes’. Sometimes she is in favour of visiting her home, her birthplace and her desh again, but when the bitter memories of the riots pop up in her mind she loses her urge to go there. Despite her horrid experiences in her village, she still remembers Jolisha as her desh – the land of abundance, but a land of no return.
Marriage in the time of riot: Seventy-three-year-old Nonigopal Babu lives now in Birati in the northern suburbs of Kolkata. This place is essentially a refugee colony area, where the majority of the population are Bangals (people from East Bengal). Nonigopal Babu is a fair, short, fat and bald man. He was born in a place called Brahmandiya of Barishal district. He was in his village till Class VI. As his village did not have any high school at that time, his family decided to move him to another village named Deher Goti for further education. In the memories of his childhood in his nature village, he remembered everything – his home, family, the names of his schoolteachers, friends, neighbours, in fact, the memories of his upbringing.

He grew up in a traditional joint family. Nonigopal Babu’s father was a ‘nayeb’. Their house was big but ‘kuccha’, made of mud and a roof of tin. He could even remember the large baranda (balcony) surrounding his whole house. It was so large that they often used it as their bedroom. They had large grain cultivable lands which usually made available a huge amount of grain throughout the year. Probably because of this land, most of his elder brothers and cousins preferred to do some land-related job rather than pursuing higher studies. Their immediate neighbours were Hindus, while the Muslim habitations were quite far off. But the Muslims used to come to their house and work as labourers. They also maintained cordial relations with them. He recalls the days of the Durga Puja, Kali Puja, Dol Utsav and Nabanna. These were the special occasions when Musalmaan labourers used to come to their house and his mother used to give them food. Once in a while, he also went to their houses, but of course, his visits were on some specific purpose or the other.

He still cannot forget his friends – Biswanath, Paresh, Chandan and Rahman – who remain deeply associated with his childhood memories. When he was shifted from Brahmandiya to Deher Goti he used to live in a Hindu family as a paying guest. Life became quite monotonous then. He did not even know his neighbours enough, he was only busy with his studies. Every year, he impatiently looked forward to the days of the Durga Puja and Garamer Chhuti (summer vacation). A few days before the Durga Puja, he used to leave for his village and had real fun there during the vacation.

After passing his intermediate examination, Nonigopal Babu came to Kolkata in November 1948 for his graduation. He secured admission in Bangabashi College, and later became a commerce graduate from the same institution. He used to stay at his aunt’s place in Chetla during those two years. Just after the completion of his studies in college, his father arranged his marriage. He went back to Brahmandiya for his marriage in March 1950. In his own voice:

Amar kache biyer byaparta aykdike anander ar ayk dike dukhher. Biye korte giyei to ami rioter modhye porlam. Hindu-Musalmaaner modhye je ki bibhotsho maramari – nijer chokher samnei dekhlam. (To me, my marriage was a happy, and at the same time, a tragic experience. I was caught in the riots when I went for my marriage. I witnessed the worst kind of riots between the Hindus and Muslims.)

Gradually he was to give me vivid descriptions of the riot – how it started in his village, what happened to his family and ultimately how they survived. He told me that, though initially the riots had broken out due to the rumour that the son-in-law of Fazlul Haq, the former prime minister of undivided Bengal had been stabbed in Kolkata, it picked up momentum when local Muslims joined hands with ‘outsiders’ – the Bihari Muslims. When a large group of Muslims attacked their village, the fightened villagers approached the local Muslim leader, Altafuddin Mohammad for their safety and security. At last, for fear of death, they took shelter in a big house, which was guarded by Altaf with his gun. But Altaf was the only person who had a weapon there. Naturally he did not fight for long. The Muslim fanatics soon killed Altaf. According to Nonigopal Babu:

Ora Altafke jokhon kate, amar baba, bhagnipati – ora lukiye chhilo oi ayki ghore. Dadao chhilo to oi ghore. Ora Altafke marar pore amar bhagnipatir kachhe or hat gharita chailo. O dyae ni, tai oi rage ghari shuddhu hat ta kete nilo. Er por ar ekta ki jeno chhilo, otao dyae ni bole mathata nabie dilo. Ami chhilam pasher ghore. Tai beche gelam. Amar boner samne marlo tar shami ke. Baba badha dite galo. Babar ghareo kop marlo ora. Oto rokto charidike – se drisya ami ajo bhulte parina. Chokh bujlei sei drishya…11 (When they were chopping Altaf, my father and brother-in-law were hiding in the same room. My brother was also in that room. They asked for my brother-in-law’s wristwatch after killing Altaf. As he refused, they cut his hand with that watch. He had something else. He refused to hand it over also; so they beheaded him. I was saved as I was in the next room. They killed my sister’s husband in front of her. My father was trying to stop them; so they stabbed him on his neck also. So much blood everywhere! I can’t forget that scene still now. Whenever I close my eyes, I can see that scene…)

Within a few days, however, they were rescued by his relatives. They were shifted to another place called Shajira. Gradually, they proceeded towards Barishal town where Nonigopal Babu talked to the superintendent of police (SP) to help them return to Kolkata. With the SP’s help, they first went to Khulna by boat, and then to Sealdah station of Calcutta by the Khulna Express train. He could not bring all his family members with him at that time. But, by 1954, all the members of his family had shifted from Barishal to Calcutta. Their new life of searching peace and security began.

Narrating his traumatic experiences of the Hindu-Musalmaan riot exhausted, Nonigopal Babu while I, having heard of his experiences, became speechless for a while. When we resumed our conversation I asked him about his desh. In his response, he portrayed a picture of his desh and home in a manner, that combined the idea of sacredness and beauty. But, when I asked him whether he still considers Brahmandiya as his desh or not, he said with emotion:

Aykhon ami ar amar desh Barisal kokkhono boli na. Keu jadi jiggasha kore je desh kothae chhilo, tahole ami bolbo Barisal; na hole boli amar desh 24 Pargana. Amader kachhe desh badle gyache, karon je desh amader rakhlo na, pochhondo korlona, tariye dilo, meredhore tariye dilo, take ami desh bolbo? Ei to Bangadesh hobar pore amari relative koto gyalo oi dike. Ami jai ni. Rasta-ghat okhankar ekhono chokhe bhashe. Kintu ami jabo keno? (I never say that my desh is Barishal now. If someone asks me that where was your desh, then I would answer Barishal; otherwise I say that my desh is in 24 Parganas. Our desh has changed. After all, that country did not allow us to stay, drove us away, beat us away. How can I call that my desh? After the creation of Bangladesh, so many of my relatives went there. I never went. I can still visualise the streets and riversides. But why should I go?)

Nonigopal was emotional. According to him, communal violence had defiled the sanctity and beauty of his native village and home. Perhaps, and for the bitter memories of violence, he does not any longer want to recognise Barishal as his desh, but the nostalgia of desh in his mind still remains.
Renubala and her gold chain: Renubala Debi was also forced to leave her village due to the Hindu-Muslim riots. Like Nonigopal babu, she also thinks that Barisal was her earlier desh. This is because of two reasons – first, for the last 50 years she has been staying in Jirat of Hooghly district, and second, her own desh has been transformed to a Musalmaan’s desh. She is even reluctant to visit her own village again, where she was born.

Renubala Debnath was born in the year of 1936 at the village of Muladi of Barishal. She grew up in a joint family. Her father used to look after their land. When she was only four years old, her mother died. While narrating her ‘desher barir kotha’ (stories of her ancestral house) she told me their family had once owned many things – a huge piece of land, large orchards of mango, jackfruit, coconut and areca nut. Four families from her grandfather’s side lived there besides their own. Within a huge campus they had four houses, many times bigger than their present house. The Hindus including, kayasthas and brahmins used to live near their house. Her portrayal of her village and her house repeatedly indicated sense of abundance and vanity.

Renubala Debi had studied up to class III. She can still remember her school, which was built with the help of Kundu family in their village. She remembers her schoolteachers – Niranjon Seal and Jonardon Kundu, who were killed by the Musalmaans during the riot. She misses her childhood friends – Lila, Baby, Dipali and Anjali – who were lost during that turmoil. When she was 13 years old, she was married to a person from Nashipur village. Her husband did not have any dependents; his parents had died few years ago before their marriage. So, Renubala Debi used to live in her parental house at Muladi with her husband. She told me that she often shares her childhood memories with her sons and daughters.

Then quite suddenly she brought in the subject of riot. In her own words:

Panch din, panch rattir riot hoilo – bagane, bagane ghurlam – tarpor hater sankha bhainga, sindur muichya Musalmaan bari giya roilam”. (I did not interrupt her. She kept on saying) Babare jedin katlo, ekta sonar har diya dilam – bhablam harta dile jodi ora babare phirayia daye. Hoilo na – babare katlo ar amar hartao galo…(she started crying) Janen amar jyatha moshayreo katse – pukurpare gaser shonge baindha other katlo – ami, amar swami, amar dada, boudi ar other maiyata shokkole mila Musalmaan barite giya lukailam. Oi Majid Khan, Osman Khan, jago barite amra lookaiya silam, ora bhalo lok asilo koiyai amra baiccha galam.12 (We were hiding in different orchards for five days and five nights. Then I broke my sankha (sacred white bangle that a Hindu wife wears as a symbol of her marriage) and removed vermilion from my forehead and went to stay with a Muslim family. I gave them a gold chain the day they killed my father; I thought that they would spare my father after getting the chain. It didn’t work – they killed my father and I lost my chain also. Do you know, they killed my elder uncle also? He was tied to a tree on one side of the pond and then killed. My husband, elder brother, sister-in-law and their daughter – all of us went to a Muslim family for shelter. We took shelter in Mojid Khan and Osman Khan’s family. They were nice people. So we were saved.)

Renubala’s tragedy of losing her father as well as her gold chain provoked me to think more deeply about her trauma. Probably her trauma of violence and her sense of loss are so deep that she can hardly de-link her loss of ‘sonar har’ (gold chain) from her father’s death. She offered her precious gold chain to the perpetrators with the expectation that this could save her father. But that was not to be. In the process, she eventually lost both her father and her gold chain. She could neither get her father back, nor could she get back her chain. The tragic loss of her father in front of her eyes, in a way, made her loss of chain even more unbearable.

After some time, I asked her when the riot broke out in her village. She said that on a Friday morning, everybody had begun indicating that the riots might break out at any moment in their village, but ultimately it took place on the next day. During that communal tension, she heard that many villagers of Muladi took shelter in the police station on the riverbank. But unfortunately, most of these villagers were killed by the Musalmaans inside the police station itself and their bodies thrown into the river. Moreover, the rioters abducted many young girls and women during that time. She, however, confessed that she did not see them being abducted, they were busy saving their own lives. However, she saw Romoni Kundu and his wife, smeared with blood. Both had been stabbed by the Musalmaans, but were still alive and gasping. She knew Romoni Kundu very well because Romoni Babu belonged to the same Kundu family, which had helped set up her village school.

The riot continued for five days. When the tension lessened, they tried to return home. But there was nothing left. Their house had been partially burnt and completely looted by the Musalmaans. They did not have any other alternative but to somehow stay there at least for a few days. Meanwhile, they took the decision to leave their home, their desh.

Sudhu ekta dhuti-kapore oi desh chaira ei deshe ashchi, …tokhon amader bastuhara abostha…ki abostha chilo amago deshe, ar ekhon ami kopal doshe bhikhari. (We left that country and came to this one with hardly any belongings…then we were uprooted. We were so well off there, and here we are beggars due to our ill fate.)

Renubala and her family left Muladi and reached Chandpur of Barishal by boat. From Chandpur, they took a steamer to reach Khulna, from where they could catch a train to Kolkata.

As the influx of refugees continued interminably, the helpless and uprooted people reached the reception and interception centres at the Sealdah station. From these centres, the refugees were subsequently sent to transit camps and permanent relief camps. During that phase, the government of India decided not to send the refugees straight to the rehabilitation camps mainly due to the magnitude of influx. Moreover, many of these refugees were supposed to be sent to other parts of the country. But immediate arrangements could not be made possible for their travel. Therefore, the relief and transit camps were established in different parts of West Bengal to provide immediate help to these people.

Anyway, after reaching Sealdah station, Renubala and her family secured some relief from the Indian government. Renubala’s brother-in-law helped them secure shelter in one of those transit camps. From Sealdah station they were later shifted to the Chandmari camp located at Kalyani in Nadia district in West Bengal. They stayed there for one year. During their camp life, they tent, a ‘dry’ dole obtained a as well as some cash dole for their survival. Later on, a large number (rations) of refugees from the Chandmari camp was rehabilitated in several batches, and Renubala Debi’s family was one of them. Eventually, they secured 10 ‘cottahs’ (10 cottah – 16 acre) of land, a fixed amount of tin and some money for constructing their house in Jirat. Since then this has been their new home.

After listening to her traumatic experiences, I asked her whether she wanted to visit her native village again or not. She simply roared:

Na na ar kokkhono jabo na. Oi ottachareito choila ailam. Ar jabo na. Amar mamato bhai to ekhono okhane thake. Amar swami koisilo jabar jonya. Ami koisi jabo na. Konodino na. (No, I shall not ever go there. We left because of torture. Shall not go again. My cousin still stays there. My husband also told me to go. I said that I would not go. Never.)

Like Nonigopal Babu and Renubala Debi, thousands of other Bengalis were rendered refugees due to the riots that followed partition of 1947. They were displaced from their desh, from their ‘foundational home’ (that best conveys the feeling for one’s desh), where they could never return to. They lost everything they had – home, friends, relatives and all their material possessions – and had to start their lives afresh. In the way, their bitter memories of partition, riot and loss of near and dear ones have mostly overshadowed the sweet memories of childhood days. In the tussle between the sweet memories and bitter memories, their memories of desh have not evaporated. Thus, desh remains trapped in their past, in their nostalgia and in their memory.

Milan Kundera has said: “Nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return…Nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing.”13 Perhaps. One, who has lost his or her home and desh due to partition and riot, is perhaps be in an appropriate position to suffer from such nostalgia.

II

Desh (n): a country; a land; motherland; native land; a state; a province.
Nation (n): people or race organised as a state.

The Bengali word desh means one’s native land, one’s homeland. The idea of home is somehow tied with that of foundation signifying one’s habitual abode ‘Vastu bhite’. Vastu bhite is another Bengali word, which means exactly the same as the foundational home. In Sanskrit vastu means home and bhite, the Bengali word originating from the Sanskrit word bhitti, means foundation. The notion of foundation has a special connotation in Bengali language. It signifies one’s permanent place of residence, one’s ancestral place. This place is different from one’s temporary place of living. In common usage, the Bengali language has made a distinction between the permanent place of residence and the temporary one, using two different words – desh and basha. Basha is always a temporary place of residence and one’s sense of belonging to this place is momentary. On the other hand, desh has a concept of permanent dwellings associated with the idea of land. Probably that is why in English the corresponding word of desh would mean homeland, motherland. Desh is the place where one’s ancestors have lived for generations. Sometime it is argued that, the idea of foundation is closely related to the idea of ‘male ancestry’ and the word vastu bhite reinforces the association between ‘patriliny’ and the home.14 There may be other Bengali synonyms of desh and basha, but these two words are most popularly used among Bangals in common parlance.

The notion of desh is more culture-specific. One’s ancestral land desh has a strong cultural bond with one’s self. One’s birth, one’s childhood, one’s growing up – all these are culturally associated with the place where one belongs. To Hironprova Debi, it is Jolisha, her native village, with which she has been associated gradually since her birth. She still cherishes her childhood days at Jolisha. She remembers her janma bhitte, Radha Madhav’s pujor ghor, and the name of her favourite game ‘dariabanda’.

To Nonigopal babu, his home belongs to Brahmandiya, the place with which he has a close cultural affinity. He speaks of Durga Puja, Kali Puja, Dol Utsav and nabanna, when the Muslim projas used to come to their house and occasionally the female members of his family distributed food among those projas. His way of portraying his desh not only specifies the idea of sacredness, but also other secular cultural values. He perhaps deliberately says that their family used to maintain a close relationship with the Muslim projas in their ‘gramer bari’ (village home). Nanigopal Babu’s eager wait for ‘goromer chhutti’ and ‘pujor chhuti’ to return to his gram clearly indicates how close he was to his home and village. It was like a return to his roots from the world outside.

In case of Renubala Debi, her desh belongs to Muladi, where she lost her mother at an early age and where during childhood, she was mostly occupied with household activities. She remembers the childhood friends she lost during the Hindu-Muslim riot. As a whole, she portrays a picture of her desh with a abundance and vanity. The narratives of Hironprova, Nonigopal and Renubala perhaps make another thing clear that the concept of desh is also somehow linked with the idea of a geographical space. The notion of desh, in that way, helps establish a close relationship between the self and a particular geographical space. Due to the cultural and spatial specificities the concept of desh is associated with, persons from the same place tend to maintain close cultural links among themselves even after may years’ in ‘exile’. Moreover, to these uprooted people the word desh carries a special significance. Having been exiled from their foundation, these people willy-nilly try to maintain a close psychological connection with their home. Their idea of lost home generates a feeling of nostalgia. While searching for a new home away from home, the cultural bond of these hapless people with their foundations gets strengthened through their nostalgia and their memories.

In that sense, the narratives of these three displaced persons are basically collective memories, and are in the form of flashbacks, as envisioned by these people. This flashback relates to the idea of past, a nostalgic past, which is remembered as reality. Moreover, their visualisation of this flashback is in the form of a reconstruction. As they reconstruct their past, they idealise it. Their reconstructed past is based on both bitter and sweet memories. They remember their childhood days, their belongingness and their violent past – a past marked also by riots, homelessness and uprootedness. And while recollecting the sweet memories of childhood, they introduce their desh to others with an idea of beauty, sacredness and of enduring cultural values. In fact, it also indicates that the Bengali Hindu’s traditional cultural values has incurred a major blow due to the violence that accompanied partition.

On the other hand, their past, also marked by violence, and violence “is seen here as an act of sacrilege against everything that stands for sanctity and beauty in the Hindu Bengali understanding of what home is”.15 In their narratives, desh is everywhere. In one way, the desh is related to their happier times and in another, it is also associated with their sense of homelessness.

Hiranprava Debi and Renubala Debi left their home after the riots of 1950. Before these riots, female members in their families lived in a private space, the ‘andormahals’ of their respective houses, remained behind the veil, and were mostly ignorant of outside realities. Suddenly, they found themselves on the streets, in the public sphere. They, like many other women, who were accustomed to living in the private sphere, almost overnight they had to fend for themselves in the public spaces, due to the communal violence. Growing up in traditional Hindu families, as young girls, they had never socialised with any man other than the members of their own families. But Partition and the riots that followed suddenly brought them into contact with a whole host of men as part of their journey in search of a new home.

Hironprova Debi, was an widow when she left her home. Subsequently, she found shelter is the Cooper’s Camp and became a ‘permanent liability’ to the government of India. For the last five decades she has been staying in this camp. She is alone. Therefore, she did not get any chance of being rehabilitated permanently. Perhaps that is why in her loneliness, she looks back to her desh where she had everything. For her, the present only means a fixed amount of irregular cash dole and rations from the camp authorities. She not only lives with her past, she also lives in her past. Her nostalgia of desh is always with her.

But, for Renubala Debi, her desh Muladi has been occupied by the Musalmaans and she refuses to call it her desh. After her rehabilitation, she got 10 cottahs of land and some amount of money to set up her new home on the other side of the border. Slowly, it has generated a sense of belongingness for Renubala Debi. As time passed, a new relationship between her land and self developed. Nevertheless, she misses her desh. Therefore, to her, this present existence is like that of a beggar compared to what they had in their desh. Moreover, the burden of the trauma, which she carries from the days of riots, adds to her memories of desh.

Bramondiya frequently appears in the memories of Nanigopal Babu. It is the desh of his childhood days and at the same time the desh where he has lost his near and dear ones. This loss has left a permanent scar on his mind. So he does no longer want to acknowledge Brahmondiya as his desh. But close cultural ties still exist with that little-known village of East Bengal where he was born, where his ancestors lived for generations.

III

Over the years, numerous memoirs, literary pieces, books and scholarly articles depicting the refugees’ feelings of uprootedness from East Bengal have multiplied. The nostalgia for desh has been reflected in the poems of Jibonanda Das (especially in his Ruposhi Bangla)16 and Bishnu De (in his book Swandwiper Char).17 They have all portrayed their villages as idyllic haunts where happiness and peace went hand and hand. These writings and memoirs of the pre-partition days give us the impression that there was no major animosity between Hindus and Muslims in the rural areas of Bengal till the second half of the 1940s. Things, however, changed suddenly and took a violent turn after the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946. The impact of the killings polluted the sacred and secular atmosphere of the villages and towns of East Bengal, which ultimately forced Hindus to flee from their beloved homeland, their desh.

Against this backdrop, the reminiscences of the uprooted are like a perpetually yearning for a ‘Paradise’ forever lost. Such feelings are prominent in a book called Chhere Asha Gram (The Abandoned Village)18 edited by Dakshinaranjan Basu. It is a collection of essays, serially published in the Bengali vernacular daily Jugantar around 1950. The authors of these essays recollect the memories of their native villages of East Bengal. They not only express their feelings of uprootedness in this book, but also describe their struggles for existence in an alien land, the over-crowded city of Kolkata.

Similarly, Birendra Chattopadhyay in his poem Udbastu (The Homeless),19 Sankar Basu in Shoishob (The Childhood),20 Prafulla Roy in Anupradesh (Infiltration),21 Narayan Gangopadhyay in his book Sroter Shonge (With the Tide),22 and above all, Atin Bandopadhyay in his famous novel Nilkantho Pakhir Khonje (In Search of A Bird Called Nilkantho)23 wanted to express the pain of losing one’s homeland. In his novel Purbo Paschim,24 Sunil Gangopadhyay tells the tale of two friends on either side of the borders. The narrator Pratap echoes his grandmother’s nostalgia for her desh Dhaka. The grandmother lives with her past memories of Dhaka and not of the son she has lost, nor of the son who has left for the US forever. The past, that grandmother reconstructs is a pre-partition past of her own, the past of her birthplace, her homeland.25 All these writings are, in a way, interesting compendiums of nostalgia of pre-partition days and trauma of the partition-induced violence.

Most of these uprooted people did not have any idea at the time of their departure that they would never be able to return to their desh. They expected to be back in their ancestral place in the near future. In fact, it took several years for them to realise that they could never return to their own land, to their desh. This failure to reconcile with the permanent loss of homeland becomes clear in the narratives of the victims, who were either personally victimised or witness to the catastrophe from a close proximity.

This sense of uprootedness has also been reflected in some of the Bengali feature films made in the immediate post-partition period. Filmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak and Nimai Ghosh were overwhelmed by the trauma of partition victims. Nemai Ghosh’s ‘Chinnomul’ (1951) was the first Bengali feature film on the partition. It tried to capture the dynamics of the relationship between the nostalgia and trauma of the uprooted people. The way the characters of these films narrate their feelings gives an impression of their tremendous anguish and raise of homelessness. To them, partition was an inexplicable event. Ritwik in his trilogy on partition, ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ (1960), ‘Komolgandhar’ (1961) and ‘Subarnarekha’ (1962) deals with the same sense of homelessness and agony of being detached from their traditional lifestyles, from relatives as well as from the familiar surroundings.

These publications and films indicate that the partition has left a permanent scar on the psyche of the uprooted. To them, the loss of home seems to be a loss of self and the acquirement of a new identity. The uprooted people have lost their established identities based on certain, shared ideas about ‘personhood’, ‘collectivity’ and ‘social struggle’, and were forced to accept identities imposed on them by others and by an imposing reality. In the process of acquiring a new identity, the memories of the displaced persons compel them to mourn their ‘irreplaceable’ loss. And these collective memories prevail through generations.

Let us consider Kalyani Sarkar of Bansberia Women’s Home (Bansberia Mahila Shibir). She is about 45. Kalyani’s mother Renuka Debi is the Permanent Liability member of the Home. Renuka Debi left her desh Bikrampur in Dhaka with her husband and one month-old daughter Kalyani. Although Kalyani was born in Bikrampur, she cannot have any memory of that place. Kalyani spent her childhood days in Jirat where their family stayed after displacement from desh.

When she was nine or ten years old, her father died. Her mother Renuka Debi shifted to this women’s home with her two children. Since then she had grown up within the boundaries of this home. When I asked about her desh, she was giggling and spontaneously responded,

Bikrampur, amader original desh. Desh barir golpo amar maer kach thekei to shob shona. Ar ekhon amra ekhane thaki – ei porjonto. (Bikrampur is our original desh. I came to know about my desh, our ancestral home from my mother. We now stay here. That’s all.)

The memories her mother Renuka Debi cherish, have been slowly passed on to Kalyani. After all, “often it is the next generation which ultimately makes the reverse journey to the place about which they possess memory of memories, the place they have never actually seen, yet which constitutes a part of their being the place about which they have only heard family reminiscences, tales and anecdotes as they grew up”.26 Kalyani’s is a classic example.

Where there are the memories of partition, there are the memories of desh. The idea of desh, which these hapless, displaced people have envisioned through their selective memories, is in some way different from the contemporary usage of the word desh, which has a nationalistic overtone.

Since the days of nationalist movement, the idea of desh has been associated with the idea of motherland. In the process of nation-building, the concept of desh has been used as an important tool for strengthening the idea of ‘national integration’ of India. The usage of the word desh in contemporary popular culture and politics wants to construct the idea of a nation. When Manoj Kumar, a matinee idol of India as a protagonist of a patriotic film, sings: “Mere desh ki dharti sona ughle, ughle hire moti…” (The soil of my nation generates gold, diamond and jewels), it carries nationalistic overtones. When the punch line of an Indian-made motorbike says, ‘Desh ki dhadkan’ (Heartbeat of the nation), desh implies nation.

In other words, the idea of desh, which the nation-makers perceive is quite different from that a displaced Bengali nurtures. To the displaced persons, the desh is their ancestral place, their sacred land of memories. To them, “worshipping of the land of the village was equivalent of worshipping one’s ancestors”. This desh was not an imaginary concept. It actually existed in the past, and currently exists in their memory and nostalgia. When nation is desh, it remains an ‘imagined community’.

As Benedict Anderson would argue, the nation had been imagined into existence. To him, the nation is an “imagined political community – imagined both inherently limited and sovereign”. It is imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.27 The nations are “fictions in a sense; but the process by which this fiction is created is real”.28 Sometimes, a nation has been described as ‘a soul, a spiritual principle’.29 Here the essence of nation is a psychological bond, which joins the people into one community.30 This community is not racial or tribal in its nature but it is historically constituted community of the people.

In that sense, the nation has a past, a constructed past with a vision for the future to be realised. In that discourse, some goal has to be achieved on the basis of that constructed past. But for the homeless, for the displaced people in Bengal, their desh does not seem to have a future. It only has past. Most of the uprooted Bengali Hindus do not even want to revisit their original desh. Their desh must have changed now, they apprehend. Their desh was some place else and now it is a place of no return. It can only be revisited in memories and nostalgia. It has lost its spatial existence.

Address for correspondence:
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Notes

1 See Indrajit Hazra, ‘A Time To Remember’, The Hindustan Times, Kolkata, November 22, 2002.
2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 31, No 32, August 10, 1996, p 2143.
3 Pradip Kumar Bose, ‘Memory Begins Where History Ends’ in Ranabir Sammadar (ed), Reflections on Partition of the East, Vikas, New Delhi, 1997, p 85.
4 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, Subaltern Studies VII, OUP, New Delhi, 1993, p 13.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid, p 33.
7 Ashis Nandy, ‘State, History and Exile in South Asian Politics: Modernity and the Landscape of Clandestine and Incommunicable Selves’ in Ashis Nandy, The Romance of the State: And the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics, OUP, New Delhi, 2003, pp 117-18.
8 Prafulla K Chakrabarty, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal, Lumiere Books, Kalyani, 1990, p 26.
9 See Ranjan Bandhopadhaya, ‘Chaitanyamoyotai Tar Saratsar’ in Desh, February 4, 2003, pp 71-78.
10 Interview with the author in the Cooper’s Camp, Ranaghat in the Nadia district of West Bengal on December 13, 2001.
11 Interview with the author in Birati of Kolkata at the residence of Nonigopal Mukherjee on March 12, 2002.
12 Interview with the author in Jirat of Hooghly district at the residence of Renubala Debnath on November 29, 2001.
13 See Milan Kundera, Ignorance, Faber and Faber, London, 2002.
14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2002, p 120.
15 ibid, p 121.
16 See Jibonananda Das, Ruposhi Bangla, Signet Press, Kolkata, 1957.
17 See Bishnu Dey, Kabita Samagra,1st part, Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 1989.
18 See Dakshinaranjan Basu (ed), Chhere Asha Gram, The Abandoned Village, Jugantar, Kolkata, 1975.
19 See Birendra Chottopadhaya, Nirbachito Kabita, Bharabi, Kolkata, 1970, p 82.
20 See Sankar Basu, Shoishob, Dhrupodi, Kolkata, 1983.
21 Prafulla Roy, Anuprabesh, Dey’s Publication, Kolkata, 1996.
22 Narayan Gangyopadhaya, Sroter Shonge, Mitra O Ghosh, Kolkata, 1978.
23 Atin Bandopadhaya, Nilkantho Pakhir Khonje, Ruprekha, Kolkata, 1971.
24 Sunil Gangyopadhaya, Purbo Paschim, Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 1995.
25 In this context please see Nias Zaman, A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, The United Press, Dhaka, 1999; Subharanjan Dasgupta, ‘Life – Our Only Refuge’ in Ranabir Sammadar (ed), op cit, pp 162-75; Sandip Bandyopadhayay, Deshbhag, Deshtyag, Anushtup, Kolkata, 1994.
26 Pradip Kumar Bose, op cit, pp 80-83.
27 Please see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1983; Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, Hutchinson, London, 1960; Homi K Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration, Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York, 1990; and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, OUP, Delhi, 1993 for further details.
28 Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, OUP, Delhi, 1998, p 144.
29 Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ in John Hutchinson and Anthony D Smith (eds), Nationalism, OUP, Oxford, 1994, pp 17-18.
30 Joseph Stalin, ‘The Nation’ in John Hutchinson and Anthony D Smith (eds), op cit, pp 18-21.