My father and grandmother were first-generation victims of the Partition of India. But they were among the lucky few who managed to escape the horrors of riots and refugee camps because they had relatives living on this side of the border who helped them rebuild their lives. The scars they suffered were, therefore, more emotional than material.
My father rarely spoke about the Partition. He was studying in college in Calcutta when the Partition took place. He moved in with relatives he barely knew and later joined his mother and nine siblings in a two-roomed flat. He did confess to me once in a moment of vulnerability that it took him years to accept that he would never go the back to the home that he had left without saying a final goodbye. After my father passed away, I discovered in a file marked “important documents” an Indian passport with a canvas cover that had once been red but had browned with age. Inside was stamped the name of the town nearest to his village and the year of his visit, which was sometime in the 50s of the last century. I was astonished, for my father had never told me that he had gone back home after the Partition. Then I reasoned that perhaps it had not felt like going home. He was a stranger unwelcome in the very place that he had once called home.
Unlike my father, my grandmother seized on any excuse to talk about the home that she had left behind. She held forth at length about her country home peopled with relatives both near and distant as well as sundry outsiders, where food and conversation always flowed. She spoke effusively about lush rice fields rich with gleaming harvests, green meadows where her children played and rode cows and buffaloes, the ponds and the thickets and the haunted places where ghosts were always in abundant supply. She frequently recounted, with a mixture of sadness and happiness, stories about the highpoint of the year, which was the Durga Pujo when the whole village would come alive. She also whispered bitterly about rivalries and jealousies about property and money that had forced her to send my father away for his safekeeping. I enthusiastically repeated these stories to my father who smiled sometimes, frowned more often and asked me to stop encouraging grandma. I loved listening to stories as most children do. But they were simply stories about a faraway land of which I was not a part of. With the arrogance and cruelty that children are capable off, I told my grandma that I was glad that they had moved to a city and we had not grown up to be country bumpkins with little education and less style. Such pronouncements had little effect on grandma who continued to drift blithely between two worlds, the world she held so close to her heart and the other she was forced to live in.
A view of a community Durga puja pandal made up of bottles in Kolkata. Photo: PTI
Then came 1971 and the Bangladesh War. The wall around my father suddenly cracked and the light came flooding in. My father, together with other elders in the family, talked incessantly about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Mukti Bahini, listened to radio broadcasts late at night and proclaimed with certainty that Bangladesh would be free. The excitement rubbed off on me and other children in the family as well. Our home in Kolkata became an imaginary extension of the battlefields in Bangladesh. We stood on chairs, reciting Mujib’s Ramna Maidan speech word for word and sang “the voice of not one but a million Mujibur” at the top of our voices. We also heard news about the mass killings, the refugees and the bad behaviour of certain foreign powers. All this excitement crested on the day that Bangladesh became free. Our combined joy knew no bounds. Strangely, from then on, I began to feel a strange kinship with the distant land that I had never seen and for the first time in my life wished that I could go to visit the place that my grandma called home. But I made my loyalties clear. When father or grandmother talked of “our” independence, I rushed to correct them. The independence of “Bangladeshi Bangalis”, I would point out, “you are not them. You are now West Bengali Bangalis and we have been independent for a long time”. Children like clear boundaries and are uncomfortable with ambiguity. The Partition of a land was supposed to lead to a partitioning of minds. Otherwise, what was the point?
The ambiguities came to haunt me later. After the passing of the earlier generation, it was as if I, and sundry other members of our generation, had to take on the responsibility of keeping the memories of our origins alive. Old albums and other memorabilia, and above all old stories were shared and treasured. We sometimes talked to our children about that part of their ancestry that they could no longer legally claim. And our children listened to these stories which were just that – stories. Only these were true stories, kept alive as memories.
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My daughter was about ten years old at the time. School was about to give over for Durga Pujo. One day, she returned from school and asked me “Ma, why don’t we go home for the Pujos? So many of my friends do.” After a pause, she said, “Why don’t we have a country home (desher bari). My friends go there with their families. Their relatives come too. Such fun!”
My answer came naturally, “We did have a country home. Perhaps we still do. It’s just that we have lost touch.”
From that day on, I began to tell my children much that I had learned over the years about a part of my heritage, a heritage that was also theirs. I spoke about an extended family in a lovely village set in lush green fields, of whispered scandals, prolific ghosts, of loss and despair but also new beginnings. My children listened with a new interest. For these were now no longer stories of a foreign land but also a part of their identity. They learned, as I had earlier, that in gaining new identities, we don’t lose old ones. We learn to live with all of them. Partitioned lands do not have to lead to partitioned minds and hearts. Beautiful memories do not have to be crowded out by horror or bitterness. With an enlarged range of vision, beautiful memories can stay with us forever.
Shukla Sanyal is Nurul Hassan Professor of History at Calcutta University.