The Hindu Business Line : Divided memories

How relevant is the Bengal Partition after six decades? "It is still very relevant," says Dr Bashabi Fraser, the Indian-born Scottish writer. "The eastern border was never a sealed border, always porous, and the exchange of population and property between the two sides of Bengal never took place on the same scale as on the western border with the result the influx continues in the east, even today. Sometimes it slows down to a trickle and sometimes it swells into a flood but it never stops," she observes.

Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter, a 622-page collection of stories edited by Dr Bashabi Fraser and brought out by a London-based publisher, was recently launched by the British Council in Kolkata. There are 39 stories, all on Bengal Partition, written by 31 eminent authors; interestingly, all the translators, including Bashabi, are women.

There are several reasons why Bashabi chose the subject. One reason, as she explains, is that many of her generation in Bengal grew up with parents and grandparents who were victims of the Partition and had experienced the trauma and the sense of loss caused by it. Uprooted from their homelands with little to fall back on, they had struggled to eke out a living in a new land; and for some of them, the western part of Bengal was an alien country. Even the languages spoken were different. "With the majority of these people gradually passing away, I suddenly felt a void; it suddenly dawned on me that soon there will be no living person to corroborate what happened at the time of the Partition and my emptiness was even more because for the present generation, which also includes my grownup daughter, the Partition is no more than a footnote in history," she says.

Moreover, as she says, "I notice an amazing silence on the Bengal Partition in most books on the Indian Partition; these books choose to concentrate on the western border. For example, Mushirul Hasan's India Partitioned: The Other Side of Freedom, though an excellent book, is surprisingly silent on the Bengal Partition. Why this is so? I confronted Mr Hasan and his reply was that Bengal never witnessed the same kind of violence as Punjab. I know he has a point but then it is also true that we in Bengal also had our share of violence, maybe not in 1947, but in 1946 and even before. In 1946, we had great Calcutta killing, then Noakhali Tippera and there was no stopping this tide of violence as it was repeated in retaliatory and counter-retaliatory measures in Bihar and then to Punjab, leaving it singed and scorched till and after Partition. In my opinion, the events in Bengal ultimately led to the Partition of India, that is, divisions of both Bengal and Punjab.

"But I must express my indebtedness to Mr Hasan, whose book inspired me to work on the present anthology and I'm particularly grateful to him for his writing an excellent Foreword for this book. I'm not a historian, or a sociologist but my analysis has been endorsed by him.

"In the West also, where I live, I would often meet people who would say that they were aware of the Punjab Partition but not so much about the Partition of Bengal. This was shocking to me, to say the least. The book therefore is a collection of compelling retellings of the Bengal Partition by those who had first-hand experience."

Choosing the stories for translation proved to be a Herculean task but Bashabi laid down certain criteria. First, the stories must be powerful in their literary value. Next, the theme must have a universal appeal. "I took care that the theme reflected the various aspects of a society falling apart, ridden by riots, abduction and violence but capping it all there is humanism. There is complexity of rootless-ness and crisis of identity, the nostalgia, the memories but above everything ordinary people find the strength to go beyond their narrow confines to help each other and the people of "other" community. Women bore the brunt of the Partition violence and many of the stories in this volume bring out the trauma of gendered suffering. Whether it is Bengal, Punjab, Bosnia or Rwanda, the story everywhere is the same."

She quotes from her poem, "This Border", in the book:

"This border that now decrees

One shared past with two histories

This border that now decides

The sky between us as two skies

This border born of blood spilt free

Makes you my friend, my enemy".

Bashabi expresses her thanks to the translators, who had a difficult task of retaining the flavour of the original. "On the whole the translators have tried to avoid being pedantic and have done their best to convey the full meaning and the flavour of the stories in Bengali for an English-speaking audience," she says.

Born and educated in Kolkata, Bashabi is an academic and writer currently based in Edinburgh. At present, she is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Edinburgh University, and an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at The Open University in Scotland and the West Midlands. Some of her other books include Tartan & Turban (Luah Press, 2004) and A Meeting of Two Minds: The Geddes-Tagore Letters (Word-Power Books, 2005). Right now she is working on a book on the Scots in India. Her husband, Neil Fraser, is a social scientist in Edinburgh University, and daughter Rupsa has completed her Master's from a British university.

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