This panel looks at three-quarters of a century’s reflections on the Partition, allowing questions of what gets said when, how, and by whom to be brought into high relief. More specifically, the large swath of time allows us to address the issue of memory and representation’s historical temporalities, from the immediate post-Independence decades, to the Bangladesh War and its aftermath, to the decline of socialist-developmentalism, the rise of religious politics, and the new democratic-majoritarianism. Thus, the panel will focus on the following questions: How do narrative and representation relate to public memory and how does that relation change through time? To what extent are varying aspects of experience available to conscious reflection at different moments in history, and how did this imagination’s modalities of representation change over the course of the seventy-five years following the Partition? How does the subcontinent’s past figure in the work of a new generation of filmmakers, museum curators, and writers, for whom the events in question have only ever taken the form of narratives of past history? The three papers in this panel also illuminate how contingencies of political geography cut across personal and collective histories, and how these intersections were variously marked and mediated by literature, film, and public representation generally.
Rini Mehta examines the re-packaging of Partition narratives as nationalist nostalgia in recent Bengali cinema. Noting the increasing obsession with the past in Indian films, she reads Srijit Mukherji’s film Rajkahini and its cooptation of the Hindu-nationalist trope of self-immolation in a narrative about liminal characters: prostitutes in a brothel caught between two countries. She explores how the liminality of Mukherjee’s characters combines with the sepia-tint and muted colors used by the cinematographer to turn the past into a texture, creates an affect that feeds the metropolitan cinematic experience of enjoyment through nostalgia. Situating Rajkahini’s trajectory towards the spectacular in the context of an increasing demand from a globalized Indian and diasporic viewership for glossy and richly textured re-enactments of violence, Mehta claims that Mukherjee’s film depicts only to obscure, not to reveal.
Chandrica Barua’s paper studies the interplay between diaspora, memory, and embodiment through the exhibits in the Museum of Material Memory (MOMM). The museum narratives—mediated by materials and usually written by the children/grandchildren/other relatives of Partition survivors—take the form of remembrances of the survivors’ stories. Sometimes, these are new “histories” imagined by the tellers based on both material inheritances and the recounted memories of survivors. Barua claims that this unique relationship between the rememberer and the event is not merely mediated by experience or recall, but by “imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” Examining how the postmemories curated in MOMM reveal an intimately felt separation, she reads the aftermath of the Partition as region-diaspora inflected, with stateless memory, stateless longing for desh (native land). Second, the paper dwells on the reading of the Partition through such new digital-private-institutional archives. Ultimately, it problematizes the definitions of and the nature of previous investments in archive, memory, and the history of Partition.
Through a study of autobiographical and fictional narratives, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard examines a major Partition-related transformation in the lives of middle-class women refugees—their increasing participation in wage-labor. The economic collapse stemming from displacement, compelled many formerly-homebound women to seek paid-employment. Given the competition over jobs, many took up “stigmatized” professions in sales or entertainment. The paper analyzes literary depictions of how refugee women struggled to restore normality in families subjected to massive upheaval. While wage labor granted them a partial release from traditional gender roles, it came at a price—the loss of respectability and, consequently, the forfeiture of traditional domestic lives. Mookerjea-Leonard thus examines how the writings evoke the quiet courage of refugee women who through forging a “new normal” set off a society-wide transformation that made women’s paid-employment not only socially acceptable, but also, respectable.
The presentations will be followed by Nalini Iyer’s responses to the papers.
Following a brief panel description, introduction of panelists, three fifteen-minute presentations, and a ten-minute response to the papers, the session will conclude following a fifteen-minute Q&A.