Partition as Border-Making

East Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh

Sayeed Ferdous

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000458954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'India e dell'Asia meridionale

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.

1
FROM NOSTALGIC ’47 TO THE PRESENTNESS OF PARTITION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003098409-1

Prologue: Malda, Abba, and the bygone time^*

It all began with my childhood, long before I could even think of myself digging in this site of history. While Abba (my father) was relating stories of his school days, the name Malda for the first time appeared in the story. He was a student of Malda Zilla School. Two silver and gold-plated medals from those days and bits of success stories have hardly any relevance in this piece of work, apart from the fact that Abba had spent his childhood in Malda where Dada (my paternal grandfather) had a job. The family was living in a neighbourhood at Ingrejbazar;¹ however, our ancestral place was Chapai Nawabganj, in the district of Rajshahi, which later became a part of Pakistan, while neighbouring Malda became part of post-Partition India. That was the first, among numerous other fragmented pieces of narrative, where the partition of British India was mentioned, nothing special, but a mere family story like hundreds of others. Today, looking back, the first thing I try to sort out, do these memories have any contribution to my sense of history? What is, in fact, the relationship between emotion and history?

After completing his higher secondary education at Malda, Abba came to Dhaka in the early forties. He was a student at the University of Dacca. From the tiniest fragments of his utterances, I can remember him talking about the tense moments of Partition, expressed most often through the demonstrations of rival student groups. ‘We were prepared but stood calmly. They entered in to the building one by one, raising their hands, saying “Jay Hind!” We restrained ourselves and waved them back.’ Chanting Jay Hind is referring to the group aligned with Indian National Congress. Abba was involved with the student wing of the Muslim League. The latter had been considered as the platform, demanding a separate Muslim land. Contrarily, Congress had been seen as the party fighting for undivided India, and only reluctantly accepting the divide.² But, why, in the first instance, had Abba gone to Dacca instead of Calcutta? His immediate elder sister had studied at a renowned college in Calcutta. So then, why Dacca for him? Because the drum beating of Partition was getting louder and, being Muslim, he found it worthy? Was it solely because of Partition, or was there something else? I may assume hundreds of such things that had influenced the decision-making, but they can remain only assumptions now, as Abba died in 1985 and I lost my first connection to Partition long before I could have even imagined this research.

In my days of growing up, I had uneasiness regarding Abba’s involvement with the Muslim League. The latter, after Partition, suffered role reversal from heroes to the villains in the history of East Pakistan/Bangladesh. The League had taken a stand against the independence of Bangladesh and allegedly came to be known as shelters for pro-Pakistani elements. The question in my mind was why, being a moderate Muslim, had Abba become associated with the League, instead of the secular Congress? For me, the Muslim League used to be a communal banner and something that I would like to disassociate with, considering myself a secular person. It is only now that I can see my sense of history was occupied by the secular Bangalee nationalism that denounced all other political positions. For Abba, things were different. It was a crucial choice for many to join the Muslim League; for Abba – and many others like him – the League did not represent a symbol of ‘communalism,’ but a platform of religious-national identity offering autonomy to the oppressed Muslims of India. A historical shift had taken place in the years between my adolescence and my father’s; state, nation, and identities had emerged, and everything attached with them attained new meanings. Is it possible to trace this shift of meaning?

Beginning: The mismatch

One of my Bihari ³ interlocutors once told me, ‘since you do not have the experience with the Hindus, you would never be able to understand how it was.’ Clearly he was referring to pre-Partition India. Shamsul recollected an incident from his youth. One morning, he was standing by a tea stall and someone was reading the daily newspaper. Being next to the person Shamsul was trying to sneak a peek. Noticing his interest in the newspaper, a Hindu babu made a remark, ‘Reading the newspaper! Do you want to be a leader, eh?’ The grief still haunts Shamsul, ‘See! What an insult there was in his utterance; I said nothing, but left that place silently.’ When I was young, I often heard from Amma (my mother) that the Hindus would never allow the Muslims to rise and, therefore, the demand for a Muslim land was aptly justified. I found Amma a ‘rational’ human being otherwise. I was terribly shocked in encountering such elements of ‘communalism.’ I thought she was inherently prejudiced. Again, I am now, rather, interested to explore how such mistrust towards the ‘other’ is often historically constituted and how an individual’s feelings get entangled with the historical trajectories they pass through.

This mismatch continues about the post-Partition years and came up routinely during my fieldwork. Standing in present-day Bangladesh, which formally separated from Pakistan through a nationalist uprising, it seems to be pretty much obvious to me that the majority of people would have no sympathy for Pakistan. I was expecting accounts of the discrimination of the Pakistani state towards East Pakistan or stories of ethnic rivalry between non-Bangalees and Bangalees. To my astonishment I discovered that people seemed largely sympathetic towards the fallen state of Pakistan. Apart from memories of everyday experiences of misbehaviour and discrimination, they also seemed to be positive about the relationship between Biharis and Bangalees. In a similar way, when they spoke about their refugee days in 1971, when millions had to flee to India, I was expecting a tone of gratitude. My sense of history is informed by the canonical voices of the state that portray the role of India as the great saviour of East Bengal. ‘Friendship’ and ‘fraternity’ are the words chosen in almost every instance in describing the Bangladesh–India relationship. In stark contrast to this I found people largely spoke about their suffering in the refugee camps – loss of lives and properties caused by some opportunist Indians, looting by Indian troops declaring curfew in the newly independent land.

To understand this mismatch, one must have to look into how a particular past has created particular meanings for different groups of people in East Bengal. First, they were Indian, but then became Pakistani, or, in some cases more specifically they wanted to be East Pakistani,⁴ and ultimately they turned out to be Bangladeshi. Researchers have identified how this double decolonization⁵ had an impact in creating ‘contestatory’⁶ process and narratives of Partition in Bangladesh.

Unfolding through contradictory experiences

While for some in Bangladesh remembering Partition is a truncated narrative of the Bangalees, and the beginning of suffering for Hindus and other non-Muslims, particularly with their painful exodus,⁷ this concern often gets drowned out by the cacophony of noise surrounding the celebration of 1971. I, however, would like to stretch the issues of non-Muslims further. Although we have heard from the Hindus who had to leave, what about the Hindus/non-Muslims who had chosen, or were bound, to remain in East Bengal and experience the unfolding trajectories of minority identity? What about their expectations at the rise of secular nationalism culminating in the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971?

Conversely, the formation of Pakistan was a focus of joy and jubilation for millions of the East Bengal peasantry, who considered the pre-Partition Indian era as one of oppression, which had been overcome by some sense of autonomy at Partition.⁸ Where has this jubilation and enthusiasm gone? During the post-Partition days many Biharis considered Bangalees improper Muslims, and therefore distanced themselves from the latter. In a role reversal, these Biharis went from loyal citizens of Pakistan, to the betrayers of Bangladesh, and are still paying off this cultural legacy.⁹

In historiographical practice in Bangladesh, apart from the nationalistically charged critique of the Pakistani rule, until recently, almost no rigorous attempt has been made to unfold the undercurrent complexities and dilemmas in the social and cultural life of that time. To what extent the canonical voice of nation and state is capable in addressing the multifold facts and complexities of history embedded in the emotions and lives of ordinary people? It would also be interesting to ask why – and how – Partition turned out to be a taboo? It even requires no explanation at all from Bangladeshi academia.

Returning to my own perspective, I must acknowledge that my understanding of Partition has undergone significant self-scrutiny in recent years encountering contradictory meanings and feelings about Partition from different sections of society. Initially Partition existed in a nostalgic frame for me; it was my father’s nostalgia – but, of course, this was infectious. I remember, during my first visit to India, by road on the way to Calcutta, we were passing through Malda and I reminded my spouse that it was my father’s childhood place. Obviously, there was no reason to expect anything that I could be able to connect in myself through the memories of Abba, who had already left us a seeming eternity ago. I still looked through the window, as if I was trying to find out something or someone familiar.

In our living room in Dhaka we have a revolving bookshelf, one of the few things I asked for my household from my Amma. The original owner of the bookshelf was Basanta babu, a senior ex-colleague of Abba at the Pabna Edward College. Pabna was then part of East Pakistan, and like millions of Partition migrants, on both sides of the border, Basanta babu had decided to cross to the other side a few years later. Before leaving, he had approached Abba to keep some of his furniture. As far as I can remember from Amma’s anecdote, that Abba was not willing to assent to the request – I do not know why. Whatever might be the case, two beds, the bookshelf, and an easy chair of Basanta babu were kept in our house; after all these years, even today, I remain unsure whether there was a nominal price agreed, or not. A few years ago, from the memoirs of an ex-student of the college, I read about the painful decision-making behind another Hindu professor’s final journey to India.¹⁰ While reading it, as if I can see the face of Basanta babu, an old man, giving up his favourite belongings to someone, whom he may or may not like, and I can feel the intensity of the gloom written on his face. Partition imprinted a powerful impression on my mind even before I recognized it.

But the story has got its other side as well. Like Basanta babu, many of the Hindu professors had left for India, and, into that vacuum, Abba, in only the very second year of his joining, became the vice-principal of the college, before soon being promoted to Principal. It is worth remembering that, before joining the Pabna Edward College, Abba had served for few years at Malda College, immediately after completing his Masters at Dhaka University; that was just before Partition (Figure 1.1). But after Partition, he switched to another college, now located in Pakistan, a move that eventually opened up a fortune in his career. Whether those decisions were all calculated or not, but what mattered at the end of the day that Abba was definitely among the privileged ones in the process of Partition. But millions of others were not – some had planned something, but ended up elsewhere, and some did not have the luxury to plan anything at all.

Figure 1.1 Abba’s journey on both sides of the borderline. Screenshot of the map using the ‘My Maps’ application of Google Maps. The thicker grey line that separated ‘A’ from ‘B’ & ‘D’ represents the Raddcliffe line. See online at, www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?hl=en&mid=1k1Ft1DfdPZXv17SaWJiasrxBoUs&ll=24.434964582707863%2C89.2683792&z=8 accessed on April 14, 2021, BDT 14:11.

Therefore, Partition offered experiences that reflect contrasting aspects of the process, replete with mismatches. However, some sociopolitical developments that had taken place in Bangladesh in 2013 have exposed the ultimate consequences of such mismatches to me. I was bewildered to experience the violent encounters between secularists and Islamists, in both real and hyperreal spaces. The clashes came about with the trial of the ‘war criminals’ of the 1971 war. Along with millions of others, I thought even though four decades have passed, this would have a symbolic significance for those who had lost their nearest ones in the war. But things got complicated as there was an accusation from the political groups, that the trial was being motivated by a desire to suppress the political oppositions. In the course of the event it came out that, on the one hand, the ruling elites were trying to use the trial as a political-electoral weapon; on the other hand, the individuals and organizations involved in the crimes of 1971 were trying to escape the trial by pointing out flaws within the legal process. The Islamist political party, who were involved in the war crime, had managed to destabilize the country in expressing their rejection of the verdicts against its leaders. That was shocking for many of the elite, secular middle-class educated people.¹¹ In like manner that Butalia explains the violence against Sikhs in India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, where people’s responses made her curious about the ongoing impact of Partition,¹² for me the incidents of 2013 in the streets of Dhaka and in elsewhere in Bangladesh have had a similar impact. While all these things were going on I was in the middle of my research in the UK, but I was keen on the day-to-day development and unfolding of incidents in Bangladesh. Taking departure from my little comfort zone located largely within the secularist-elitist niche, which merely offers a top-down framework to explain the religious politics, I instead became curious about people’s support for the Islamists at a grassroots level. I was trying to conceptualize whether people’s sympathy to the lost state of Pakistan, which I came across during my fieldwork or their short-lived jubilation for the post-Partition Muslim identity, which had been silenced in all these years, had anything to do with this newly experienced Islamist challenge to the secular foundation of Bangladesh. The events compelled me to think through how contemporary political and social identities in Bangladesh are rooted in Partition, and how potently the latter is far more than an event of the past, but fundamentally a process continuing to unfold in contemporary life....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 From nostalgic ’47 to the presentness of Partition
• 2 Partition literatures and East Bengal
• 3 Making of the border, state and nation
• 4 Under the same roof
• 5 Partition prolonged along the border
• 6 Partition: To be continued?
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index