Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter Edited by Bashabi Fraser, Anthem, Price not mentioned

As a traumatic experience in the history of the Indian subcontinent, the Partition has far-reaching implications. Grisly violence and massive displacement of people are two of its most prominent features. It has caused unprecedented demographic changes, triggering re-orientations of the socio-economic structures of the subcontinent. At a deeper level, however, it has brought about another significant transformation, which consists in the changed perception of history itself. Speaking about the pre-colonial African past in Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall says: “The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual ‘past’, since our relation to it, like the child’s relation to its mother, is always-already ‘after the break’. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth.” In the context of India ’s colonial past, the Partition represents a break within a break; it is a temporal correlate of the spatial segmentation represented by the barbed wires.

The volume under review incorporates fictional representations of this break. However, it does not deal with the Partition as a whole, but confines itself to the Bengal Partition. Bashabi Fraser writes in the introduction that the reason behind this bias lies in the desire to correct a historical imbalance which made the Punjab Partition far more important in popular fancy and historical document than the division of Bengal.

The book includes 39 translated stories by different Bengali authors, and also three poems by the editor herself. The criterion for selection has been to include only those stories that have not appeared in some other representative edition. This explains the absence of Rabindranath Tagore’s “A Mussalman’s Story,” or any of the Partition stories by Ritwik Ghatak. Such a rigid editorial policy was not particularly called for, because, one feels, repetitiveness is not as unsatisfactory to the reader as incompleteness. But if we judge the book by what it offers rather than by what it does not, we must admit that the stories here have been strenuously collected from diverse sources in order to provide as much insight into the Partition as possible. The translations and the annotations are expertly done, although a few editorial lapses, such as the missing hyphen and the letter ‘d’ in the sentence, “...they were well hiden”, jar.

The stories in this volume give various nuanced perspectives on the Partition. The helplessness of the victims amidst the violence is sensitively delineated, but the moot question which concerns the writers is linked to the problem of the construction of identity at a time of communal tension. The fragility of communal identity is underscored in stories like the “Infidel” (Atin Bandyopadhyay) and “Hindu” (Dibyendu Palit) while class identity is shown to undercut the communal one in stories like “The Ledger” (Manik Bandyopadhyay) and “Honour” (Narayan Gangopadhyay). The issue of women’s plight comes to the fore in quite a few stories, highlighting an invisible partition in social-cum-familial consciousness that distinguishes between male and female victims of the same calamity, trying to disown the latter.

A tale, according to the Italian oral historian, Alessandro Portelli, “creates a special time, ‘a time outside time’”. Stories in this volume create time for speculation on a fractured, misshapen history and show how it works silently in our quotidian existence.