This study looks at the rich literature that has been spawned through the historical imagination of Bengali-speaking writers in West Bengal and Bangladesh through issues of homelessness, migration and exile to see how the Partition of Bengal in 1947 has thrown a long shadow over memories and cultural practices. Through a rich trove of literary and other materials, the book lays bare how the Partition has been remembered or how it has been forgotten. For the first time, hitherto untranslated archival materials and texts in Bangla have been put together to assess the impact of 1947 on the cultural memory of Bangla-speaking peoples and communities. This study contends that there is not one but many smaller partitions that women and men suffered, each with its own textures of pain, guilt and affirmation.

The fragmentation of Bengal and Assam in 1947 was a crucial moment in India's socio-political history as a nation state. Both the British Indian provinces were divided as much through the actions of the Muslim League as by those of Congress and the British colonial power. Attributing partition largely to Hindu communalists is, therefore, historically inaccurate and factually misleading. The Partition of Bengal and Assam provides a review of constitutional and party politics as well as of popular attitudes and perceptions. The primary aim of this book is to unravel the intricate socio-economic and political processes that led up to partition, as Hindus and Muslims competed ferociously for the new power and privileges to be conferred on them with independence. As shown in the book, well before they divorced at a political level, Hindus and Muslims had been cleaved apart by their socio-economic differences. Partition was probably inevitable.

Through oral histories, interviews and fictional retellings, 'Bengal Partition Stories' unearths and articulates the collective memories of a people traumatised by the brutal division of their homeland.

This book critically analyzes the Partition experiences from East Bengal in 1947 and its prolonged aftermath leading to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. It looks at how newly emerged borderlands at the time of Partition affected lives and triggered prolonged consequences for the people living in East Bengal/Bangladesh. The author brings to the fore unheard voices and unexplored narratives, especially those relating the experience of different groups of Muslims in the midst of the falling apart of the unified Muslim identity. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research and archival resources, the volume analyzes various themes such as partition literature, local narratives of border-making, smuggling, border violence, refugees, identity conflicts, border crossing, and experiences of the Bihari Muslims and the Hindus of East Pakistan, among others. A unique study in border-making, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, South Asian history, Partition studies, oral history, anthropology, political history, refugee studies, minority studies, political science, and borderland studies.

An assessment of the devastating social, political and economic consequences of the partition of Bengal.

The Refugee Woman examines the Partition of 1947 by engaging with the cultural imagination of the ‘refugee woman’ in West Bengal, particularly in three significant texts of the Partition of Bengal—Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara; and two novels, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga and Sabitri Roy’s Swaralipi. It shows that the figure of the refugee woman, animated by the history of the political left and refugee movements, and shaped by powerful cultural narratives, can contest and reconstitute the very political imagination of ‘woman’ that emerged through the long history of dominant cultural nationalisms. The reading it offers elucidates some of the complexities of nationalist, communal, and communist gender-politics of a key period in post-independence Bengal.