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Gedu Mian and the Partition of Tripura

Sam Dalrymple — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 13:48:05 +0000

Since Partition, Tripura has been cut off from ‘mainland India’ and today it feels like a remote backwater. But it wasn’t always this way; only seventy years ago it was a flourishing centre of arts and culture, and a leading contender for the title of artistic capital of Northeast India. This essay looks at the changes brought on by Partition in Tripura through the eyes of an elephant mahout-turned Pakistani separatist, Mohammad Abdul Barik Khan, commonly known as Gedu Mian.

The Partition history of Tripura isn’t very well known today, even within India itself, but few places were as affected. In just over a decade this “small thumb of land that juts into Bangladesh from Assam’s northeast”^{^[1]} underwent a greater and more violent demographic shift than anywhere in the subcontinent outside of Punjab.

The effects of Partition are visible everywhere you go in the state. In October 2021, I drove south from the state capital of Agartala to the terracotta lake city of Udaipur in search of a grand Mughal Mosque. It was built by prince Shah Shuja when he fled across his Empire’s eastern frontier after losing the Mughal war of succession to his elder brother, the Emperor Aurangzeb. The Maharaja of Tripura,^{^[2]} whose small kingdom in the Patkai hills had long resisted Mughal rule, granted Shuja refuge and protection.

Rice paddies gave way to hills cut by vast canyons and traversed by rickety bridges, and I passed through evergreen jungle that sheltered wild elephants – once the backbone of the economy but now reduced to an endangered species. Udaipur was a pretty, laid back temple-town, perched below a ridge of hills and dotted with ponds, but nobody there had heard of the mosque I was looking for: I was always pointed in the direction of a modern dargah.

It was only after an hour of searching in searing sunlight and brutal humidity that I spotted a dome looming behind a small concrete house. Shuja’s Mosque – testament to a time when Tripura was able to fend off the mightiest empire India had ever known – lay in ruins, and was being used as a store room. The family living there told me that the Muslim devotees who used to worship here fled to East Pakistan in 1947. Three decades later this family of destitute Bengali refugees had moved in, seeking shelter from genocide across the border. The Mosque built by a refugee is now home to refugees.

Shuja’s Mosque, now a store room. Photo Credit: Sam Dalrymple

Since Partition, Tripura has been cut off from ‘mainland India’ and today it feels like a remote backwater. But it wasn’t always this way; only seventy years ago it was a flourishing centre of arts and culture. The exuberant Maharajas of Tripura were some of the great pioneers of photography in India: Maharaja Bir Chandra, the architect of Tripura’s modern capital Agartala, had acquired one of the first two cameras available in India, built a darkroom, and converted part of his palace into the state’s first photography gallery.^{^[3]} His protegee Rabindranath Tagore (who briefly enjoyed a career as Tripura’s unofficial revenue advisor) became the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, while a scion of his royal dynasty, S.D. Burman became one of the most important and influential musicians in Indian cinema. The neoclassical Ujjayanta Palace possibly inspired the palace in Hergé’s Tintin.^{^[4]}

Rabindranath Tagore with the Maharaja of Tripura Radha Kishore Manikya during a visit to Tripura in 1900. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1923, when the sixteen-year-old painter and polo player Maharaja Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya became the 186^th Manikya to take the throne,^{^[5]} he embarked on a construction spree across the state. He built gardens and fountains, a floating art-deco palace on the great lake at Neermahal, and a vast Indo-Saracenic college in Agartala. New roads were constructed where previously traffic could only move down the dark rivers that cut through the densely bamboo-forested hills. By 1939 the Maharaja was enacting a series of progressive reforms, zealously drafting a modern constitution for his state “where traditional Indian culture harmonises with modern thought”^{^[6]} that would ensure democratic elections and women’s rights in his state.^{^[7]} He opened a series of deaf and dumb schools for disabled children in the rural areas and during the Dhaka riots of 1941, he opened the state to “at least 15,000 Bengali migrants” on the grounds of humanitarian aid.^{^[8]}

But with the coming of World War II, Tripura society was to change forever. News rattled over the radio on December 8^th 1941 that the Japanese had attacked the American port of Pearl Harbour. By Christmas the Japanese had conquered Malaya, crossed onto Burmese soil and began a march towards Delhi. A new wave of refugees streamed into Tripura from Burma, fleeing from the Japanese, and Tripura was put on a war footing.^{^[9]} Taxes skyrocketed and conscription was imposed but for some in Tripura, the war provided great opportunities.

Mohammad Abdul Barik Khan, commonly known as Gedu Mian, grew up on the banks of the Haora River from a hereditary family of elephant mahouts (drivers). The region around Agartala had been a great source of elephants for centuries^{^[10]} but as the city urbanised, Gedu Mian abandoned the elephant business to find work in a car garage as a taxi driver. He married into a reasonably well-off family, and with help from his father-in-law became a small-time contractor.^{^[11]} Eventually he even set up a private bank called Khush Mohol and began loaning money to the Maharaja Bir Bikram himself.

Agartala’s Ujjayanta palace is said to have inspired Gaipajama Palace in Hergé’s Tintin. Photo Credit: Sam Dalrymple

As the Japanese swept through Southeast Asia and began to approach the Patkai hills dividing India and Burma, the British made a last-ditch attempt to industrialise and defend the Eastern reaches of India. Money poured into the state to build new roads, armouries and military cantonments. Gedu Mian, the former elephant mahout, proved business savvy and in 1942 unexpectedly bagged a contract to build Tripura’s first ever airport. By the end of the war, he was the wealthiest non-royal in Tripura, and had moved into a grand new house in central Agartala called ‘Gedu Mian Bari’, its façade resembling the palace of the king himself. Gedu Mian and the Maharaja enjoyed a close relationship, even as many of the upper-class nobility looked down on him as ‘nouveau riche’.^{^[12]}

But not everyone did well out of the war. The trickle of refugees was turning into a raging torrent and discontented hill communities found a voice in the magnetic tribal ascetic Ratanmoli Noatia, a Kali devotee from the nearby Chittagong Hills who raised his flag in revolt. His movement emphasised tribal solidarity against Bengali foreigners.^{^[13]} Although quickly crushed, Noatia’s movement was symptomatic of the worsening relationship between Bengalis and indigenous communities in the state under the stress of war. Maharaja Bir Bikram, himself from the indigenous Tiprasa community, set up a forested reserve in which only tribal communities were allowed to settle, temporarily alleviating tribal concerns whilst continuing to allow Bengali refugees to settle in the state.

The Gedu Miah Masjid in Agartala. Photo Credit: Sam Darymple

The war came to an end in 1945, but the refugee crisis kept on growing. By this time, the Pakistan movement had polarized neighbouring Bengal and by September 1946 a frenzy of killing that began in Calcutta spread down the dark Meghna River to the districts of British India that surrounded Tripura. Between 50,000-75,000 people, mostly Bengali Hindus, took shelter in Tripura; the newly constructed college alone accommodated four thousand destitute refugees.^{^[14]}

The mass influx of Bengalis into Tripura was beginning to shatter the visage of harmony between Bengalis and the tribals, but the Maharaja could hardly turn the new arrivals away. These people were also, in everyday practice if not theory, his subjects. In the 18^th century, Tripura’s Bengali speaking plains had been confiscated by the British, and the Maharajas were reduced to the status of zamindar landlords there. This estate was called Chakla Roshanabad.^{^[15]} The bizarre colonial division of Tripura and Chakla Roshanabad was never really an issue before and as late as 1931 Chakla Roshanabad was still “held to form with the [Tripura] state an indivisible Raj.”^{^[16]} It was from this zamindari estate that refugees were now arriving.

As Maharaja Bir Bikram faced new tensions from within his dominions, he also faced challenges from outside his state. The politicians in New Delhi had made it quite clear that the princely states would be forced to ‘integrate’ their kingdoms with one of the new dominions: India or Pakistan.^{^[17]} Tripura State was on the border and had the option to join either India or Pakistan. After briefly toying with an independent ‘Tribalistan’ in Eastern India similar to a Crown Colony plan then doing the rounds among a section of British administrators, Maharaja Bir Bikram decided to join the Hindu-majority Tripura state to India.^{^[18]} The issue was that the neighbouring Chakla Roshanabad zamindari had a Muslim majority, and as a part of British India it was to be massed in with East Pakistan no matter the Maharaja’s decision. Virtually every single road in Tripura state passed through Chakla Roshanabad, and the Maharaja’s income there funded the princely state administration. If a border were to divide the hills from the plains, the economy would be decimated.

Before he could negotiate a solution to the problem of his accession, Maharaja Bir Bikram abruptly passed away from chronic pneumonia on May 17th, 1947. His heir was a minor, and so the king’s Bundela wife Maharani Kanchan Prabha Devi set up a regency council to make a decision on Tripura’s future. In an act of neutrality, she declared both 15^th and 16^th August – the independence days of India and Pakistan respectively – as public holidays to be celebrated in both the Manikya dominions, which still included both the princely state as well as the zamindari estate in the plains.

As August rains pelted down on the flooded streets of Agartala, the British left the Indian subcontinent and improvised borders were hastily branded onto the landscape, separating a Hindu-majority India and the newly created Muslim-majority Pakistan. East Bengal became a part of the new Pakistani state separated from the rest of Pakistan by thousands of miles of hostile Indian territory. In the words of Salman Rushdie, Pakistan became a “fantastic bird of a place, two wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God.”^{^[19]} Separated from the mainland by the new state of East Pakistan, India’s Northeast was also transformed into a uniquely tenuous geographical oddity, only connected to the rest of India by a 10 kilometres strip of land that would become known as ‘the chicken’s neck’.

Squashed in between the two new fragile states was Tripura, now cut off from the world by two new borders.

By late October the President of the Bengal Congress Committee was writing to Sardar Patel that “There is now no regular communication between any territory of the Indian Union and the State [of Tripura]”^{^[20]}, urging the immediate creation of roads to the state from elsewhere in the country. Cut off from every single road into the state by the new borders (which sundered links even into neighbouring Assam), the Agartala Airport that Gedu Mian had built became the only link between Tripura and the rest of India.

It was in this environment that Gedu Mian became the leading voice for merging Tripura with Pakistan in the state.^{^[21]} Mian’s bank had recently failed, but ever resourceful, he had converted the building into a motel^{^[22]} and moved into social work and politics. He had formed a new pro-Muslim League political party – the Anjuman-e-Islamia^{^[23]} – in 1945 and as the situation grew worse, he began canvassing support for Tripura’s merger with East Pakistan.

The details of what happened next are hazy, but according to most accounts Gedu Mian managed to persuade several of Tripura’s Hindu elite – notably the Chief Minister Satyavrata Mukherjee^{^[24]} – to support a merger with East Pakistan rather than India.^{^[25]} Gedu Mian also joined hands with the anti-immigration indigenous rights party ‘Cheng Crak’, led by the late King’s younger brother Durjoy Kishore. Gedu Mian convinced him that only a merger with Pakistan would stop Bengali Hindus fleeing to the state and outnumbering the indigenous tribal population.^{^[26]}

By November 1947, Mian was leading major protests across the state. The Swaraj daily newspaper predicted than an economic blockade of Tripura was imminent.^{^[27]} Alarming intelligence began to reach New Delhi that “preparations are being made to invade Tripura. Several pamphlets inciting Muslims to conquer Tripura and annex it to East Bengal are in circulation in Eastern Pakistan”.^{^[28]} Two government servants separately wrote to Sardar Patel urging him to take action.^{^[29]} “I am rather distressed to hear that tactics similar to those employed in the case of Kashmir are being resorted to by Pakistan for creating trouble in Tripura state,” wrote K. C. Neogy.^{^[30]}

In the whirlpool of rumours, it is hard to gauge what was actually going on.^{^[31]} Certainly “The situation in Tripura… was not nearly so bad as was reported in the press”.^{^[32]} Rumours that the Tripura Maharaja planned to annex the Chakla Roshanabad estate were shared across the border, which were blatantly false. But whatever the case, by mid-November several rival militia groups had been set up across the state. The Congress and Communist Party – usually bitterly divided over everything– joined hands with the anti-Pakistan Muslim organisation ‘Tripura Rajya Praja Majlish’^{^[33]}. The Kirit Bikram Rakshi Bahini ‘resistance force’ was formed to intimidate the Anjuman and make sure Tripura didn’t fall to Pakistan.

Hill Tippera In the Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1907. Wikimedia Commons.

As the situation worsened, the Maharani dissolved the regency council, made herself sole regent, and flew to New Delhi “to secure Indian help to abort a possible Kashmir-type operation in Tripura”.^{^[34]} Sardar Patel assured her of full military support from the Indian government and soon after, the Governor of Assam Akbar Hydari arrived in the state. Finally, on 11^th November 1947, the Maharani announced “The Accession of this state to the Dominion of India” which had apparently been “decided by the late ruler after due consideration and full consultation with all sections of the people”.^{^[35]}

Five days before Christmas, Jawaharlal Nehru fired Chief Minister Satyavrata Mukherjee, and two weeks later Durjoy Kishore was forced to resign and leave the state.^{^[36]} Gedu Mian and his family fled to Comilla – 50 kilometres across the border in East Pakistan, where they faded from relevance. His grand house in Agartala, Gedu Mian Bari, was seized by the state and today has been converted into the Regional Coaching Centre Agartala.^{^[37]} “There was evidence of pro-Pakistani elements at work in Tripura,” wrote Nari Rustomji, Governor Hydari’s advisor, “but we were fully alert and quickly pounced on the trouble-makers.”^{^[38]}

The Maharani signed a merger agreement with the Government on 9th September 1949,^{^[39]} and so the ancient kingdom of Tripura ceased to exist.^{^[40]}

When the dust had settled, ‘Tripura’ emerged as part of the Indian Union, and ‘Chakla Roshanabad’ as part of East Pakistan. Just like Punjab, Bengal and Assam, the events of 1947 partitioned the dominions of the Manikya dynasty between two new states. The new border was a disaster for Tripura: only 50 miles from South Asia’s greatest port at Chittagong, the state found itself cut off from its entire export economy and 1000 miles away the nearest available Indian port, Calcutta. Tripura’s only train station was 3 kilometres on the other side of the border.

The border was also fatal to all of the Maharaja’s tenants who ended up in East Pakistan. When Pakistan abolished the zamindari system in 1950, the Maharaja’s land was seized as ‘Enemy Property’. Most affected by this was not the royal family, but the ziratia tenants who lived in the zamindari but owned land in Tripura state. “Within a few years, they had been turned from the Maharaja’s loyal subjects into Pakistani foreigners without rights…the ziaratias, unlike the Maharaja, were not compensated in any way.”^{^[41]}

Over time, much of Tripura’s elite Muslim community left the state. They were frequently perceived as separatists by the Indian Government now, and “in April 1950, Tripura officials were instrumental in the burning of Kamalpur town and the killing and driving out of its Muslim population. In 1951, the Tripura government started requisitioning land owned by Tripura Muslims in the border area in order to settle Hindus who had fled there from East Pakistan.”^{^[42]}

Meanwhile, thousands more Bengali Hindu refugees poured into the state and within three years Tripura would undergo a dramatic demographic shift. The new government scrapped the 800 kilometres² tribal reserve set up by Maharaja Bir Bikram “for increasing land revenue, economic growth and particularly for refugee rehabilitation.”^{^[43]} This was the first of several such acts, which gradually chipped away at the tribal reserves. “Hundreds of Bengali refugee settlements started springing up in the hills, often bearing names like ‘Atharacard’ (Eighteen Cards) or ‘Baiscard’ (Twenty-two Cards)”^{^[44]} after the number of families in the town that had been allotted government refugee cards.

Until 1947, indigenous tribal communities had been a majority in Tripura state, or Hill Tippera. By the 1980s, they comprised less than 25%.^{^[45]}

As Tripura’s indigenous population became a minority in their own homeland, ethnic tensions exploded into violent riots, sparking one of the first insurgencies in India’s Northeast. In 1980, 250-400 Bengalis were massacred in the village of Mandai, just on the edge of Agartala in a brutal show of racial violence. The justification for the violence was an alleged Bengali plot to change Tripura’s demography.

Although ignored in most of the country, events in Tripura were watched by the rest of the Northeast. In the words of Subir Bhaumik, “Powerful nativist movements in neighbouring Assam and Meghalaya and elsewhere in the region hold up Tripura’s example of demographic transformation to justify their campaign against unrestrained migration from neighbouring countries.”^{^[46]}

After East Pakistan descended into genocide in 1971, ever more Bengali refugees sought refuge in India’s Northeast. The term ‘infiltrators’, used by parliamentarians in Tripura to identify Bengali immigrants since the 1960s gained currency across the region.^{^[47]} In 1985, the ‘Assam Accord’ was signed to stop Bengali migration to Assam state and prevent it from ‘turning into another Tripura’. To do so, a new ‘National Register of Citizens’^{^[48]} was established in the state.

Only a handful of books have been published on the Tripura conflict, and it is still widely unknown to most Indians outside the Northeast. But we ignore it at our own peril. The refugee crisis here is crucial to understanding the fault lines of modern South Asia.

In 2019, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah announced that the National Register of Citizens would be extended to the entire country. Attached to the Register was a controversial new ‘Citizenship Amendment Act’, which effectively rendered Muslim immigrants from post-1971 as illegal immigrants while protecting refugees from other religious communities. As protests broke out across the country, the European Parliament has warned that the legislation is “set to create the largest statelessness crisis in the world.”^{^[49]}

Notes and References

Hazarika, S., Strangers of the Mist: Tales of War and Peace from India’s Northeast (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2011), p. 123. ↑
A Twipra dynasty from Burma’s Arakan. See Bhattacharjee, A., & Vittal, B., S. D. Burman: The Prince Musician (Tranquebar: Westland Publications, 2018), p.3. ↑
https://www.indianmemoryproject.com/178/. ↑
It is a common claim in Agartala that the Ujjayanta palace inspired the Gaipajama Palace, featured in the two Tintin stories Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus. I have not found independent evidence of this. ↑
As cited in Lintner, B., Great Game East: India China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (Noida: Harper Collins India, 2016), p. 203.This official number is somewhat controversial, deriving from the 15^th century text ‘Rajmala’ which listed 149 kings of Twipra as of 1431. The historical accuracy of the list has since been called into question. ↑
Chakravarti, M. “Documentation of the Process of Integration of Princely Tripura with the Indian Union” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 314. ↑
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU2iS-o2quc. ↑
Ghoshal, A., Refugees, Borders and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), p. 144. ↑
Lintner, B., Great Game East: India China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (Noida: Harper Collins India, 2016), p. 204. ↑
Ghoshal A.,” Statelessness or Permanent Rehabilitation: Issues Relating to the Chakmas of Chittagong Hill Tract in Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura” In ed. Bhattacharyya A., Basu S. Marginalities in India (Singapore: Springer, 2018), p. 265. ↑
Private Interview, Subir Bhaumik, November, 2021. ↑
Private Interview, Subir Bhaumik, November, 2021. ↑
Bhaumik, S. Insurgent Crossfire: North-East India (New Delhi: South Godstone: 1996), p. 68. ↑
Ghoshal, A., Refugees, Borders and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), p. 144. ↑
The zamindari was often called ‘Plains Tipperah’, as opposed to Princely ‘Hill Tipperah’. In the 1920s Hill Tipperah was renamed ‘Tripura’, whilst the plains retained the name ‘Tipperah’. ↑
Hunter, W. W. The Imperial Gazetteer of India, New Edition, published under the authority of His Majesty’s Secretary of State for India in Council. Vol 13. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908-1931), p. 119. ↑
Chishti, S. M. A. W., Political Development In Manipur 1919-1949 (Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science: Aligarh Muslim University, 1979).Sudhirkumar Singh, H., Socio-Religious and Political · Movements in Modern Manipur (1934-51) (Doctor of Philosophy Thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University), Chapter 6, p. 144. ↑
Bhaumik, S. Insurgent Crossfire: North-East India (New Delhi: South Godstone: 1996), p. 69. ↑
Rushdie, S. Shame (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), p.178. ↑
Chakravarti, M. “Documentation of the Process of Integration of Princely Tripura with the Indian Union” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 318. ↑
According to Seyyed Sajjad Ali, a journalist based in Tripura, the movement was not led by Gedu Mian himself, but rather he became a casualty of it by association. Ali argued that there is little evidence that Mian’s protests showed any evidence of pro-Pakistani leanings. ↑
Private Interview, Seyyed Sajjad Ali, December, 2021. ↑
Ghoshal, A., Refugees, Borders and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), p. 143. ↑
Chakravarti, M. “Documentation of the Process of Integration of Princely Tripura with the Indian Union” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 319. ↑
Sinha, S. P., Lost Opportunities: 50 Years of Insurgency in the North-East and India’s Response (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers and Distributors, 2007), p. 131. ↑
Seyyed Sajjad Ali, a journalist based in Tripura, argues that the movement was spearheaded by Durjoy Kishore, and not led by Gedu Mian himself. ↑
De, R. K., “Merger and Princely Tripura’s Political Transition: 1947-49” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 349. ↑
Chakravarti, M. “Documentation of the Process of Integration of Princely Tripura with the Indian Union” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 332. ↑
De, R. K., “Merger and Princely Tripura’s Political Transition: 1947-49” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007). ↑
Chakravarti, M. “Documentation of the Process of Integration of Princely Tripura with the Indian Union” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 320. ↑
The best summary of these rumours can be found in De, R. K., “Merger and Princely Tripura’s Political Transition: 1947-49” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 348-9. ↑
Chakravarti, M. “Documentation of the Process of Integration of Princely Tripura with the Indian Union” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 336. ↑
De, R. K., “Merger and Princely Tripura’s Political Transition: 1947-49” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 347. ↑
Bhaumik, S. Insurgent Crossfire: North-East India (New Delhi: South Godstone: 1996), p. 70. ↑
Chakravarti, M. “Documentation of the Process of Integration of Princely Tripura with the Indian Union” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 318. ↑
Bhaumik, S. Insurgent Crossfire: North-East India (New Delhi: South Godstone: 1996), p. 70. ↑
Private Interview, Subir Bhaumik, November, 2021. ↑
Chakravarti, M. “Documentation of the Process of Integration of Princely Tripura with the Indian Union” in ed. Nag, S., Gurung T. & Choudhury, A., Making of the Indian Union: Merger of the Princely States and Excluded Areas (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), p. 320. ↑
The state became a Union territory a month later 15 October, and a state of India in 1972. ↑
There was resentment for many in Tripura that the decision to join India had been made by a foreign regent (the Maharani was from Panna in Madhya Pradesh. To this day many of the state’s residents resent that their state was merged with India by a foreign regent.) ↑
Van Schendel, W, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2005), p. 127. ↑
Van Schendel, W, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2005), p. 99.↑
Bhattacharyya, G., Refugee Rehabilitation and Its Impact on Tripura’s Economy (New Delhi: Omsons Publications, 1988), p. 17-20. ↑
Bhaumik, S., “Tripura, Ethnic Conflict, Militancy and Counterinsurgency” in Policies and Practises. 2012. 52: p. 8. ↑
Bhaumik, S., “Tripura, Ethnic Conflict, Militancy and Counterinsurgency” in Policies and Practises. 2012. 52: p. 5. ↑
Bhaumik, S., “Tripura, Ethnic Conflict, Militancy and Counterinsurgency” in Policies and Practises. 2012. 52: p. 4. ↑
Van Schendel, W, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2005), p. 195. ↑
The first NRC was conducted in Assam in 1951. ↑
https://indianexpress.com/article/world/set-to-create-largest-statelessness-crisis-in-the-world-european-parliament-to-debate-caa-next-week-6236738/ ↑

The Question of Sylhet and The Assamese-Bengali Divide

Udayon Misra — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 04:07:57 +0000

This chapter focuses on the Referendum in the Bengali-speaking district of Sylhet and how the Assamese-Bengali animosity in post-Partition Assam was considerably aggravated owing to it. An attempt is made to show how the question of status of the Assamese language was closely linked with the question of Sylhet, which tilted the scales against an Assamese linguistic majority in the province. The chapter traces the history of Sylhet’s incorporation into Assam and how this had all along been resisted by the Assamese, who wished to see a homogenous Assamese homeland.

It analyses how Bengali perceptions about the Assamese ‘betrayal’ of Sylhet are not based on historical facts and that such assumptions have flourished and found their way into scholarly works; that though the Assamese did want Sylhet to be separated and they had strong reasons for it yet the Assamese middle-class leadership represented by the Assam Congress was neither in a position to influence nor did it have any direct hand in influencing the outcome of the Referendum in favour of Pakistan. The chapter also takes up for discussion the language issue and concludes on a positive note by referring to the dissipation of Assamese-Bengali rivalry and the emergence of greater standing and cooperation between the Brahmaputra and Barak Valleys.

Citation

Book Cover, Burden of History, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Rivalry of the Valleys

Partition politics in Assam came to be dominated in the months immediately preceding Independence by the question of Sylhet. The question of the separation of the district of Sylhet from Assam through the Referendum of 1947 has always been a contentious issue for both the Assamese and the Bengali Hindu population of the state. While the latter has been assiduously maintaining that but for Assamese eagerness to see the district go to Pakistan, Sylhet would have remained in post-Partition India, the former welcomed the results of the Referendum because they never accepted the overwhelmingly Bengali-speaking district of Sylhet, which was incorporated in Assam in 1874, as a part of their province. In order to understand the issue of Sylhet and its ramifications in post-Partition Assam politics, it would perhaps be necessary to go back a bit in history when boundaries were drawn and redrawn to accommodate the administrative needs of colonial rule. Only then would it be possible for one to understand why the question of Sylhet still continues to be a major point of contention between the Bengali Hindus of Assam and the Assamese. Assamese political opinion had always favoured the separation of the district of Sylhet from Assam. There was also substantial political opinion in Sylhet itself favouring its reunion with Bengal. Apart from the all-important fact that the Assamese middle-class elite believed that the separation of the populous Bengali-speaking district from Assam would pave the way for a more or less homogenous Assamese homeland, economic considerations too played a role in this, primarily because Sylhet was a revenue deficit district.^{^[1]} From 1826, when Assam came under British rule, the province was tagged with Bengal as an administrative adjunct. It was in 1874 that the province was placed under a chief commissioner and three districts of Bengal, namely Sylhet, Goalpara, and Cachar, were added to it. In 1905 when Bengal was partitioned by Lord Curzon, Chief Commissioner’s province of Assam was joined with a part Eastern Bengal and it was named Eastern Bengal and Assam, with its capital at Dhaka. It was only in 1912 that Assam became a separate province together with Sylhet,^{^[2]} Goalpara, and Cachar. While the incorporation of Cachar and Goalpara^{^[3]} was viewed as normal, these areas of pre-British kingdoms, the addition of Sylhet was always seen as an anachronism not only by the Assamese middle class but also by several British administrators.^{^[4]}

Addressing an all-party meeting in October 1935, Mohammed Tayyebulla declared: ‘Sylhet is a permanently deficit district of Assam. The average deficit from the year 1930-31 up to 1934-35 stood at 18.5 lakhs. Poor Assam is bled white.’ He was of the view that the district was ‘alien’ to the people of Assam and it was needless to keep it in Assam.^{^[5]} Historians writing on the region have held contrary positions regarding this contentious history. Amalendu Guha says that Sylhet ‘historically, as well as ethnically, was an integral part of Bengal’.^{^[6]} But a recent work on the subject insists that despite this, Bengal was indifferent to the fate of the Sylhetis during the Referendum and argues that the transfer of Sylhet to Assam in the formative years of national spatial imagination removed Sylhet from the territorial imagination Bengal’.^{^[7]}

The separation of Sylhet from Assam has occupied a central position in the discourse of Assamese-Bengali relations in Assam right from the early decades of the twentieth century. There was a consistent demand in Sylhet that the district should be reunited with Bengal because Assam was a ‘backward’ province. In a letter dated 11 August 1925, the officiating chief secretary to the government of Assam, in reply to the Government of India’s directive to find out the opinion of the people of the Sylhet regarding reunion with Bengal, writes:

The subject has been extensively discussed in the press and on the platform, and unquestionably the bulk of the educated Hindu opinion in the Sylhet district favoured re-union with Bengal….The desire for unification is based on sentiment. The Bengali Hindu of Sylhet feels that he is looked down upon by his brothers in Bengal owing to his being included in a province inhabited by semi-civilised tribes and by the Assamese whom he considers to belong to a lower standard of civilisation than he does, and he feels keenly that he is not appreciated if indeed he is not actively disliked by the Assamese who in his estimation is inferior. The leading Hindus of the Assam valley if they do not actively dislike the Hindus of Sylhet at least disown any kinship with them and regard them with feelings of jealousy….The fact that the administration of Sylhet is carried on at a loss gives them an additional reason for desiring that the district of Sylhet should go to Bengal. But it was undoubtedly these feelings of jealousy that led the Assam Valley members of the Legislative Council to support the resolution adopted in July 1924.^{^[8]}

Referring to the debate in the legislative council in January 1925 about the status of the Jaintia Parganas, the official says that they are indeed temporarily settled, that they were under the Jainta Rajas, and that ‘there is considerable feeling in these Parganas against transfer to Bengal’. About Cachar, the memo states that ‘while there may be something to be said for the transfer to Sylhet, the transfer of Cachar is hardly a practical proposition…Cachar has always been intimately associated with Assam, to which it gave a Kachari dynasty and in almost every district of which small bodies of its original inhabitants are to be found to this day’. Referring to the argument that the region is inhabited predominantly by Bengali settlers, the memo adds:

The Bengalis now inhabiting the district of Cachar, while forming the majority of the population are mere settlers there and can hardly claim they have annexed the district and have right to demand its transfer to Bengal. Arguments based solely on numerical strength and linguistic affinity, if admitted, would at the present rate at which immigration from Mymensingh into several districts of the Assam valley is going on, entitle Bengali settlers in these districts after a few years to assert that they were in the majority and that therefore the districts in which they had settled should go to Bengal.^{^[9]}

The memo refers to the legislative assembly resolution on the transfer of Sylhet and says that Cachar was added ‘as an afterthought’. The memo also states:

The resolution recommending the transfer of Sylhet Cachar (meaning South Cachar) was carried with the aid of votes of the members representing the Assam Valley constituencies. The case of Cachar was really not discussed, and if the Assamese members considered the matter at all, they were so anxious to get rid of Sylhet and the Sylhetis that they were prepared to let Cachar go as well if that was the only way of getting rid of Sylhet. Since then there has been a pronounced change of feeling and several of the members who supported the resolution now admit that they made a mistake about Cachar. The Governor in Council does think it necessary to discuss the case of Cachar further.

The letter was written to ‘comply with the instructions of the Government of India and to find out the real wishes of the people concerned’.

In reply to the above letter, H. Tonkinson, joint secretary to the Government of India, stated that unlike the status of Sylhet, Cachar was an integral part of the province of Assam and the Government of India did not favour its inclusion in Bengal. The joint secretary observed in the following manner:

In the first place the Govt. of India consider that the question of the transfer of the district of Cachar from Assam to Bengal need not continue to complicate the main issue of whether the district should be transferred or not. They observe that the original motion of the Assam Council merely recommended the transfer of Sylhet, and that at a later stage an amendment was moved on Cachar. In the Bengal Council an amendment urging the transfer of Cachar was lost.^{^[10]} The Govt. of India are of the opinion that Cachar is an essentially Assam district and, that moreover, its transfer to Bengal would mean the isolation of the Lushai Hills district.^{^[11]}

In the same letter the Government of India stated that the Jaintia Parganas, then a part of the Sylhet district, historically belonged to Assam.^{^[12]} From this, it appears that the stand taken by the Assam Congress regarding Cachar was actually endorsed by the Government of India’s position on the matter concerned. Thus, the colonial administration too favoured the transfer of Sylhet from Assam, while accepting that Cachar was an integral part of Assam.^{^[13]} This was much before any idea of the country’s division on religious lines had taken shape.

Ever since the annulment of the partition of Bengal in 1912 and the amalgamation of the Surma Valley, made up of the district of Sylhet and the plains of Cachar, with the newly constituted Commissioner’s province of Assam, civil society moves were afoot among the inhabitants of Sylhet and the Surma Valley for its reunion with Bengal. Initially, the Muslim intelligentsia supported the separation of Sylhet from ‘backward’ Assam. Representations were made to the government by the Sylhet-Bengal Reunion League, which was made up of leading Muslims and Hindus of the Surma Valley.^{^[14]} The Bengal Legislative Council passed a resolution, moved by A.K. Chanda, in 1918 asking for the transfer of Sylhet to Bengal.^{^[15]}

However, in the course of time a large segment of the Muslim leadership started opposing the separation of the region from Assam, and linguistic and cultural considerations for uniting with Bengal were ‘gradually’ subsumed by religious factors. This, as has been pointed out by some scholars, became even more apparent after the chief commissioner initiated the policy of proportional representation of different communities in government jobs on the basis of population. This policy was instrumental to a certain extent in pushing the question of linguistic and cultural solidarity of the Sylheti Hindus and Muslims to the backseat and bringing to the fore the argument that Muslims as a whole had more to gain by Sylhet being with Assam rather than uniting with Bengal.^{^[16]} This change in the Muslim position was also because of the pressure being mounted by Brahmaputra Valley Muslim leaders such as Syed Muhammad Saadulla, who believed that the transfer of Sylhet would endanger the interests of the Muslims of the state as a whole. Polarization along religious lines started to gain pace by the late 1920s, and many see this as a direct fallout of the Khilafat movement when Muslim religious leaders took a prominent and often deciding role. Despite all this, Muslim public opinion was still quite divided, as may be seen in the voting pattern, on the resolution moved by Brojendra Narayan Choudhury in 1924 in the provincial legislative council. While the Hindu members of both the Brahmaputra and Surma Valleys voted for the transfer, five Muslim members voted against and six voted for the motion, while all the European members opposed the transfer.^{^[17]} Another resolution for Sylhet’s transfer was moved in the Assam Legislative Council by Sadananda Dowerah in 1926. This process of the polarization of opinion on religious lines continued throughout the 1930s.

It was the Lahore Resolution of the AIML that put a final seal to the Hindu-Muslim divide in the Surma Valley over the question of re-union or otherwise with Bengal. Muslims now supported Sylhet’s retention in Assam and Hindus still insisted on reunion with Bengal.^{^[18]} But the prospect of Partition once again changed the equation, with the Hindus now wanting to stay in Assam (India) and the Muslims opting for Surma Valley as a part of Pakistan. The Muslim leadership had initially thought that Sylhet’s Muslim population was crucial to make Assam a part of the proposed Pakistan as a Muslim-majority province. But the dropping of the Cabinet Mission proposals on grouping brought forth the idea of a referendum in Sylhet. Thus, while Assamese Hindu opinion on Sylhet’s transfer was consistent right from the beginning, it was the Hindus and the Muslims of Sylhet and the Surma Valley who kept changing their positions in line with political developments.

Notes & References

Sylhet was always a revenue-deficit district and this was one of the reasons why despite its eagerness to join Bengal, the latter was not willing. When the question of Sylhet being separated from Assam and joined to Bengal arose, the government of Bengal in its telegram dated 28 August 1925, raised the question of the financial effect of such a transfer. It claimed a contribution from the government of Assam as a set-off against the deficit of the Sylhet district. In reply to this demand, the joint secretary of the government of India (Home) wrote: ‘The Government of India are of the opinion that although Assam will be better off financially after the transfer of the district of Sylhet, after that transfer the district will form part of the Bengal Presidency and there will be no reason why the Government of Assam should pay any contribution on account of it to the Government of Bengal.’ (Letter from the Joint Secretary of India, Home Division, to Chief Secretary of the Government of Assam, AICC Papers, p. 4, 1938, NNML, New Delhi.) ↑
At the time of its incorporation into Assam, Sylhet had a population of approximately 1.72 lakhs. The total population of Assam minus Sylhet at the time was some 2.5 lakhs. At the time of Partition, out of the fourteen districts and frontier tracts of Assam, the Sylhet district alone had about 31 percent of the total population of Assam and it had a Muslim majority of about 61 percent. Assam’s population at the time of Partition included 35 lakh Hindus, 34 lakh Muslims, 7 lakh Scheduled Castes, and 26 lakh tribes. ↑
For a detailed description on Goalpara’s status, refer to Sangamitra Misra, Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011). Between 1765 and 1822, following the imposition of the East India Company’s rule in Bengal, the permanently settled parts of Goalpara were included within the district of Rangpur. In 1822, Goalpara was formed into a separate district of northeast Rangpur, also in Bengal. In 1826, the year of the beginning of the formal colonial intervention in Assam, northeast Rangpur was separated from Bengal and included within the Assam Valley Division. In 1867, northeast Rangpur became part of the newly formed Chief Commissionership of Cooch Behar. The following year it was placed under the jurisdiction of the Judicial Commissioner of Assam. In 1874, Goalpara was included as a district under the new province of Assam but was transferred to Bengal after the Partition of 1905. In 1912, Goalpara was once again included within the jurisdiction of Assam. (Misra, Becoming a Borderland, p. 16fn1). ↑
Nirode Kumar Barooah, Gopinath Bardoloi: ‘The Assam Problem’ and Nehru’s Centre (Guwahati: Bhabani Print and Publications, 2010), p. 36. ↑
A.C. Bhuyan and S. De 9eds), Political History of Assam 1920-1939, vol. II (Guwahati: Government of Assam, 1978), p. 294, quoted by Barooah, ‘The Assam Problem’ and Nehru’s Centre, p. 105. ↑
Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam 1826-1947, (New Delhi: ICHR, 1977), p. 27. ↑
Saptarshi Deb, ‘The Construction of the Sylheti Identity in Assam’, thesis submitted to the University of Hyderabad, 2015, p. 109. Deb goes on to add that Sylhet’s extreme north-eastern location and by virtue of its being placed with ‘backward’ Assam, amidst “wild aboriginal races”, coupled with its peculiar speech raised doubts about its “Bengaliness”’. ↑
Letter from the officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Assam, no. 1573-Pol-3860-AP, dated Shillong, 11 August 1925, to the Government of India, AICC Papers, p. 4. ↑
Letter from the officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Assam, no 1573-Pol-3860-AP, dated Shillong 11 August 1925, to the Government of India, AICC Papers, p. 4. ↑
It was such moves that accentuated Assamese fears of a ‘Greater Bengal’. ↑
Letter from the Joint Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, no. 81-25-Public, dated Simla, 24 October 1925, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Assam, The Assam Gazette, 20 January 1926, part VI, AICC Papers. ↑
Letter from the Joint Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, no. 81-25-Public, dated Simla, 24 October 1925, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Assam, The Assam Gazette, 20 January 1926, part VI, AICC Papers. ↑
The Sylhet issue was debated in the Indian Legislative Assembly in January 1926 when a member moved a resolution for the transfer of Sylhet and Cachar to the Bengal Presidency because ‘a great wrong had been done to these districts’ by joining them to Assam. No decision was, however, taken on this resolution. But the Assam council debated the transfer issue once again in its special session of January 1926 when a member, Sadananda Dowersh, moved a resolution for the transfer of Sylhet to Bengal. The Assamese member argued that such a transfer would finally put an end to the rivalry between the two valleys. Interestingly, this motion was opposed by a Sylheti Bengali member from Sylhet who insisted that the district had made rapid strides after its amalgamation to Assam and that ‘bar, benches and subordinate services, which were once dominated by the Bengalees, were now manned by the Sylhetis. For details, refer to Bhuyan et al., Political History of Assam, vol. II, pp. 287-8. ↑
In 1917, several deputations from the Surma Valley made up pf both Hindus and Muslims demanded the transfer of Sylhet to Bengal. Brahmaputra Valley Muslims opposed the transfer, Saadulla, while opposing the transfer, suggested that in case it was given affect to, then the entire Brahmaputra Valley be transferred to Bengal and adequate measures be incorporated for the ‘preservation of Assamese nationality, culture and language’. Refer to M. Kar, Muslims in Assam Politics (New Delhi: Omsons Publications, 1990), p. 114. ↑
Kar, Muslims in Assam Politics, pp. 113-14. ↑
Deb, The Construction of the Sylheti Identity, p. 70. ↑
The motion was carried out by twenty-two votes against eighteen. Assamese leaders such as Rohini Kanta Hati Baruah supported the transfer on the ground that the Sylhetis were never a part of the Assamese nationality. Taraprasad Chaliha had reservations about the transfer because he felt that this could affect the status of the Governor’s Province but eventually gave in to what he believed to be the overwhelming sentiment in the Surma Valley, which favoured a reunion with Bengal but opposed the transfer of Cachar. Refer to Kar, Muslims in Assam Politics, pp. 116-22. ↑
Saadulla made it clear that the demand for transfer of Sylhet was primarily a demand of the educated Hindus of the Surma Valley. ↑

Midnight’s Borders

Samrat Choudhury — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 05:02:34 +0000

A conversation with Suchitra Vijayan

Borders and border-making – and the redrawing of borders, often by force of arms – are the material of much of history, and international politics. It is also, unfortunately, increasingly a part of current affairs once again. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is only the latest and most large-scale example of an attempted redrawing of borders by force. Even on India’s own borders, for example with China, there are continuing tensions and frequent jostling for contested territory.

Citation

No country in the world has had a redrawing of borders that affected more human lives than India. Its new borders, marked on paper by imperial and communal politics, and on the soil by blood, came into existence through Partition in 1947. The impact of that redrawing is still being felt in the politics of the country in the form of aggressive Hindu nationalism. Yet, few Indians ever visit the places that became borderlands. Suchitra Vijayan, political analyst and author of Midnight’s Borders (Context, 2021) is one of the rare ones who did, on an epic journey along the country’s land borders with Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and Myanmar.

PSQ Executive Editor Samrat Choudhury spoke with the author about her journey, her book, the realities of life for people living in those borderlands, and more. Excerpts from an interview:

Samrat Choudhury: This very epic journey…you mentioned that you were obsessed with completing it…where did this obsession come from and what prompted you to start on it in the first place?

Suchitra Vijayan: The early Afghanistan-Pakistan work was almost 10 years ago. I was still a graduate student; I had just come back from Afghanistan. What made me start was very different from what me finish it. I was in a place in my life where I felt intellectually curious, I felt deeply unhappy with the way scholarship was being written, I had concerns about how I thought the social world I was living in was this mixture of many things…I had been born in India but I had lived pretty much most of my life since 17 outside…and in some ways, all of these forces had affected who I was, the work that I was doing. Once I got to Afghanistan it became very clear that I was deeply disappointed with the way journalism was depicting our social reality but also equally disappointed with the way in which academia was refusing to think through the critical arguments one should be making. Like all young people who feel they know what is great and best about the world, I set about saying I am going to do this, and this is going to be so much better than everybody else because I know so much better, which is in some ways a Don Quixote kind of journey, because I was charging against a windmill…

SC: What was this windmill?

SV: The very act of traveling, seeing, writing, thinking that I could do it better than anyone else, not realising that the act of creating knowledge, the act of writing, is mediated by so many other things. The capacity to see and write does not mean you are going to have the capacity to publish, the desire to travel and investigate and research does not mean you are going to have the resources, the capacity to have a great idea does not mean you are going to translate into a sentence that can convey your meaning…so there are so many things that go into creating something that you think is important and valuable. That is good, I think, starting with so much belief that you can do something and you can do it better than anyone else…that was good, it started the journey. Very quickly I felt humbled, by many things. I felt humbled by my incapacity to do what I felt was a good job. One thing I did do along the way was write, keep notes, be objective to the truth that I would not make this an ideological project, that I would make this into a project to write about a social reality. When I came back from the first leg of travel, I knew that there was something that was churning within India, at least within the territorial limits of where my home where I was born is entrapped in. I felt that something was churning and I had to write about it in a meaningful way. I started with writing believing that I did not know anything, and I would start from a place of not knowing, and I would start by educating myself, traveling, finding ethical ways of writing about it.

SC: What was the premise of the book? Did you already have a book in mind?

SV: I had a visual project in mind. When I finished traveling the Pakistan-Afghanistan side of it, it became…I did not go with saying I am going to travel the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the border came much later as part of trying to answer another question…

SC: What was the question?

SV: The question was why was the world’s largest territorial army in the longest war, and what was happening in these places, so it is a very different question from the border question. That led me to embed with the US forces that took me to the Paktika province and I saw how so much of what was happening was not about just Kabul, it was about the creation of these communities, the creation of nation-states, the ways in which we think of this world…

SC: What do you mean by “creation of nation-states”?

SV: What happened in the aftermath of the departing colonial powers…often when I was in Afghanistan, the racial memory of a border was not with Pakistan. It was not even with the India that we see. People were constantly referring to histories and memories and ideas of good and bad and right and wrong in very different contexts than the one that I was taught…whether it was history books or reporting on Afghanistan. People were speaking in the language of history, the language of freedom and dignity, this long battle. Every Afghan I spoke to spoke never in terms of the present, they spoke in terms of fighting an imperial colonial army for a much longer time. They were speaking about the destruction of their homes, their dignity, what happened to their land, loss of poetry, about food they could no longer cook, about families that got decimated. People were not thinking in terms of the concept of nation-states, they were not fighting under a flag, they were fighting for protecting their sense of who they were. There is a line that did not make the book where someone says, ‘you know, sometimes we go to battle even to protect our graveyards, because if they destroy our graveyards, how do we know even our ancestors existed here?’

SC: Was there a territorial concept that went with all of this?

SV: I don’t think people thought in terms of territory. People thought in terms of frontier. People had memories of the ancestors traveling from Paktika all the way to Kashmir, or going to Hyderabad in current-day Pakistan, or making the long journey from Torkham to Calcutta…people talked about the sense of history and memory that expanded beyond territory. This was true not only in Afghanistan. The Gujarat chapter does not exist in the book, because the people I spoke to did not want to be a part of the book. There was this wonderful little story about this family that had little vials of sand that the family had collected for over 200 years. They would leave the Rann of Kutch and walk all the way to Sindh in current-day Pakistan. Along the way as the colours of the sand changed, the great-great-great grandfather had started collecting the different shades of sand, and the family still had some of these vials with them. So, for them marking territory was not so much marking off ‘hey this is where my story began and ended’ but this was far more nuanced and cosmopolitan in a way that we don’t understand, this cosmopolitanism of very small places…this memory of something more expansive, more free.

SC: A bit of nostalgia colouring this perhaps?

SV: We do know that these communities did travel so much. We know that people did travel all the way from Afghanistan to Calcutta. So yes, not so much territory, but an expansive frontier where so many things mingled…

SC: But that immediately raises more difficult and complicated questions, because it was only possible as it was all part of the British Empire, so we have to thank imperialism for the expansiveness!

SV: I don’t think we understand how capitalism and empire in the early parts of the 20^th century and a good seventy years before that changed the way people travelled, but the sense of traversing the subcontinent was always there. Maybe the ways in which people and communities were transported, were moved, that speeded up, of course the railways and posts changed the momentum of it…

SC: So, they’re nostalgic for Akhand Bharat! Haha…

SV: They’re nostalgic for a sense of freedom and dignity. Nobody calls it Bharat. The word that was used was Hindustan, whether in Rajasthan or Afghanistan. So maybe it’s Akhand Hindustan! Haha…

SC: You looked at India’s borders with various countries – Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Myanmar – and obviously each of these has its own characteristic flavour if you will. So now several years on, what are the striking characteristics of each that stayed with you?

SV: It is really hard to answer a question like that. Generalisation is a tool all writers need. So, I want to start by saying that the world changed every 100 feet. That said…the thing about the Bangla border is the porosity of it. It is just one of those unfence-able borders. There were borders I went to in 2013. By the time I went back in 2018, the new fence that was put up in 2013 was already rotted and rusted and destroyed in many places. There is a certain sense of nature itself militating against all of this…there’s the lushness of it. The Pakistan border cutting across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Kashmir, you see a certain kind of annihilation. You see no people. This kind of a militarised border is so much more clinical. Kashmir is a very different landscape of mass graves and graveyards. The one with China is for me the most interesting because you see aspects of all of it there. You can’t fence that part of the world but at the same time there is a push for a certain kind of militarisation that is happening. One thing that is similar across all these borders is that the presence of military installations is growing, the presence of Indian boots on the ground is growing. Militarisation accompanies with it a specific kind of devastation to the landscape. If the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had a certain kind of devastation, the India-Pakistan border is one of the largest land-mined places in the world…What I remember from all of these places is the acerbic humour of the people to deal with all of this.

SC: Was it humour about the absurdity of the situation?

Humour became a way to question people in power, to deal with the everyday absurdity of their lives, humour took many forms but the most utilized form was to critique power. In a place where regimes of impunity reign, people evolve ways to respond to this.

SC: Why does the State try to do such things?

SV: That answer will become a book! I think it goes back to the founding of the Indian republic. A founding that had to bring in and encompass so many people who were not willing to be part of the republic. Much of it is that foundational violence still playing itself out in multiple permutations and combinations. Second, one thing that I found across all nation-states…states are always very surprised when they encounter resistance. This is true of Bosnia, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Iran, Turkey…the state despite having at its disposal a long history, is always surprised when people resist, and people’s most natural response is resistance. The status quo of human life is I think always leaning towards a certain sense of dignity and freedom. Maybe we articulate it differently in different epochs and eras but states use violence to control people and people resist that violence.

That is very fundamental to how things work out and it is not new. In temples in Tamil Nadu, murals have descriptions of local peasants revolting against feudal landlords. You can think about even Tamil history as a great succession of kings or you can think about everyday common people fighting against feudal lords for over 800 years. Rebellion was just very much a part of the life of Tamil country. I think that is true of most communities. Rebellion and resistance are common. The Indian state has abdicated its responsibility to govern. It has used extra-judicial laws from the beginning, whether it is AFSPA, PSA, now UAPA…the very first amendment of the constitution goes against the values of the freedom struggle. So, I think there is this constant struggle. Some want more freedom, some want promises and guarantees of federalism, and some never wanted to be a part of this republic. In the book I talk about the remote Khiamniungan (Naga) region where there are gravestones that say, “The Indian Army killed my son.”

SC: So, is it a heartland and periphery thing? After all, the heartland thinks, what’s there to complain about, we are the best Vishwa-Guru in the world, why are those evil people fighting against the best country in the world?

SV: When I started the book, I did believe it was a heartland and periphery thing. I don’t think so any more. What happened in India was a transfer of power from white sahibs to brown sahibs. Today the fight is not between heartland and periphery, it is between India’s ruling elites, the classes and castes that benefit from the Indian state, and the vast majority of those who do not. I remember the massacre in Tuticorin where sharpshooters standing on top of police vehicles shot down peaceful protesters. We saw a lot of this coming out after the institutional murder of Rohit Vemula, where you saw those fault-lines not so much as centre and periphery but as a fault-line between those who have continued to benefit from the Indian state and its eccentricities and those who have not. We forget how India’s elites still act like they are feudal landlords. Starting from business to journalism to art, literature, culture…map the people who now tend to write and tell stories about India. It is still mainly the handful of people who happen to be beneficiaries of the state. Borderlands are everywhere. They are everywhere because the foundational document that birthed this republic was birthed with a question of liberty and equality but we never really tried to work on these promises.

SC: It can be argued, that after all America, which is the oldest large democracy in the world, has had much more time to work out these issues, but I don’t think they have made much progress towards making a more equal society. They are not doing a great job of removing inequalities of class or even of race. So then one would have to say that similar borders apply in American and other democratic countries of the world as well?

Look, America was founded as a nation to help grow a mercantile population. America was not built on the ideals of freedom and democracy; America was built on the idea that rich white men could do whatever they wanted. American values are built on slavery, capitalism and inequality. All these three are essential to American democracy which is not a democracy in any meaningful way. America needed slavery. Once slavery got done you had Jim Crow. Now that Jim Crow is gone you have the prison pipeline where you continue to incarcerate black and brown people belonging to the Muslim faith and you pay them 8 or 16 cents an hour for their physical labour. How is that not slavery? Consistently manufacturing a class of rights-less citizens is what drives capitalism. Inequality is what drives the American democracy. That is true of the Indian state in a very different context. As a post-colonial nation-state, what drove India in 1947 is very different from what drives India today. Of course, there is a continuum…but I don’t think we should be comparing ourselves to American democracy or any of the European democracies. Let us understand that whether it’s Europe or America, the foundation is racial inequality. Indian and post-colonial democracies were supposed to strive for something larger, not copy the European models born out of years of colonial projects. We talk about equality but equality always seems to be as Ambedkar says, a topsoil. If you talk about liberty, you would not have UAPA, AFPSA, PSA.

SC: Even communist countries don’t seem to be doing any better. Look at China. They have, I think, the second-largest number of billionaires in the world, and they are not doing too well with the people in Xinjiang or Tibet.

SV: I agree with you. Communist China also draws on some of the very same foundations. There is a new book that looks at the Uighur population in Xinjiang and it draws on the idea of “terror capitalism.” Terror is essential for capitalism. Communist China became an ideological monolith but many of the strategies that they use within the system are not very different from the systems that capitalism uses. It is the same thing. For example, wage slavery. How these states came to be – their initial ideological things could be different but eventually it doesn’t matter who puts you in a labour camp. You can’t say Guantanamo Bay is wrong but Uighur detention camps are not so bad. You have to make the connection between what’s happened in Guantanamo, what’s happening in India, what’s happening to Uighur communities. The project of fighting for people’s freedom and dignity is ongoing and it will remain ongoing. Once we are done, the generations after us will have to fight it in a different way.

SC: Coming back to your journey, it is mostly along borders, but there are places that are not near borders, for example, Nellie and Guwahati. What was the logic for including these non-border places?

SV: September 2019 was when my manuscript was due. 2019 was an important year in many ways. Modi comes back to power, RTI Act is amended, you have the Babri decision, Article 370 revocation, CAA-NRC…and many of the people I had spoken to years before no longer wanted to be part of this book. It was only fair to let it go. Secondly, initially the Nellie chapter was not supposed to be in the book, but even as I travelled among these communities, often seeing people’s anxieties about documents…everybody mentioned Nellie, everybody mentioned this violence that was happening to them. They no longer felt safe living in these places. It was very much a part of lived collective memory. People were constantly evoking this moment both as a way of remembering and as a way of saying you have to understand, this could happen to us again.

SC: What is the connection with borders?

SV: Many of the people I spoke to no longer wanted to be in these centres of violence. Two things happened…many of the people I spoke to in the border communities either had lived around it, were directly affected by it and moved away, or they knew families and it was still part of the collective memory, so they knew they were coming. Also, by the time I finished the book, I realised borders were not just borders, borders were everywhere. Nellie is the one we remember the most even though it is called the forgotten massacre. It is not as forgotten as many other massacres and violence that people went through. Not being able to tell the story of the other little massacres and violence that people went through…I had to find a way to tell the story. By this time my own idea of the border had changed. Sometimes for those who live in these communities the border is literally around their villages.

One of the other stories people regularly spoke about was the death of the young girl Felani Khatun when she was trying to cross the border. Certain events become milestones through which you understand your own community’s history and that is one of the reasons why this chapter became part of the book.

SC: You’ve mentioned that like Myanmar, India is manufacturing foreigners out of Indian citizens in the context of NRC. The curious thing is this is happening in India’s Northeast which is adjacent to Myanmar. The only place this has happened is Assam which has close historical links with Myanmar. We tend to think of it in terms of religious nationalism, but is it religious nationalism or ethnic nationalism?

SV: There are many things at play and yes, religion is an essential thing at play. This is my discomfort…I have found the word “ethnic” used in India to be very problematic given the history of the subcontinent. In a country like India, you have, say, the Bohri Muslims in Gujarat who are very different from the Deccan or Tamil Muslims…how does one think of this in ethnic terms?

What I think ‘they’ want is the annihilation of anyone who is not a perfect Hindu. For them there has to be one kind of Hindu, and that Hindu is probably modelled after the Gujarati Hindu. I am also born to Hindu parents of two different castes. They have very different religious practices. For my mother’s family eating meat on the morning of Diwali is very common. A couple of generations back, sacrificing a goat or lamb to the local deity was very common. So where does that then leave us? Given that India has always been a federation of the very different, I can’t say even the two people who came together to give birth to me have similar religious practices. How does one account for a billion people who come from such diverse ways of practice, worship, faith, food, articulations of love, marriage, desire, into one? I am not a political scientist but what for me is more important is the idea that they want to manufacture a certain kind of India where a very small section of people would fit the definition…they want to make all of us into cookie-cutter models of one person.

SC: Does it seem, when you travel along the borders, that Partition is still an ongoing process?

SV: Everybody that I spoke to said that those materially affected by it spoke of a continuous and never-ending Partition. It plays out in ways many of us don’t understand, I don’t think I understood. I grew up in the south of India where Partition has very different kind of echoes. You have to understand that 17.8 million people changed homes. Just imagine the number! And their descendants. And it is not even a hundred years. We are very much living through the trauma of what it meant to lose your nation, lose your home, lose your language, the sexual and other violence that was part of it. Manan Ahmed has a new book, The Loss of Hindustan…people lost something they felt was far more expansive. There is a beautiful line in the book where Mr. Sood says we have become narrow-minded people. The Partition has ghettoised us. Even our language is ghettoed. I don’t think we have still found the language to talk about it, but yes, the Partition is very much alive, ongoing, never-ending for at least a few more generations to come.

SC: You mentioned the echoes of Partition in the south of India. I wonder, what for you in Madras, did Partition mean? Did it ever enter the imagination at all?

SV: You know, growing up, it didn’t. Growing up, I felt the history of Partition was an alien history to me. I think it’s also because of the refusal to speak about it. You have to understand that the Madras Regiment was in Calcutta when the worst of the violence happened. Second, you can’t forget the Burmese Tamils who had to leave and come back. People fled. People have memories of the Partition. Of course, we were not at the receiving end of the kind of expansive violence families like yours went through. I think the reason it felt so alien growing up was also that the education around Partition was also so limited. Second…for example, there are stories I hear now about what happened during the Second World War. That is seen as a part of Second World War history but never a part of the larger history of the subcontinent. I think one part is ambivalence but a lot of the alienation comes from the local histories not being connected to the larger narrative of the grand history of the subcontinent. It is also about how Indian history is constructed and taught. Partition happens, and it’s the north that suffers, and the south is often seen as a static bystander. I don’t think that was the case. I think there’s a lot of history to be excavated and understood.

SC. After all the travels along all the borders, any generic thoughts about borders?

SV: We should abolish them! Covid has shown us, along with climate change, that it is impossible for humanity to exist as we exist now, and a big part of our survival is going to depend on how we plan for the future. What borders will you protect when the ocean swallows the earth? We already see this in the Bangladesh borderlands where, depending on who’s counting you already have somewhere between 18 million and 50 million climate change refugees. The ocean is already swallowing the land. What BSF or army will you put along the borders? Second, I think we have to challenge the notion that citizenship guarantees rights in the nation-state. The idea that the nation-state becomes the final arbiter who gets to legislate on your and my body…can I have the right to an abortion? From that to the right to dissent to whether Muslim girls can wear headscarves. The idea of a social contract has to be destroyed and we have to go back to the idea that we have certain fundamental, inalienable rights because we are human, and that right cannot be tied to the nation-state or any state authority. Whatever future we envision should be one where whoever becomes the community that governs us is actually responsible for making sure that those rights are guarded, not taken away. Not policy, not WTO, we have to imagine ourselves afresh.

We have to abolish the idea of citizenship rights connected to a state.

Suchitra Vijayan

Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, and Foreign Policy. A Barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is an award-winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. She lives in New York.

The Art of Remembering

Sohini — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 08:25:37 +0000

Affected by the work of the German artist, Gunter Demnig (b. 1947), who initiated the Stolpersteine project on a quest to memorialise individual victims of the Nazis, Sohini wonders why India prefers to brush its traumas into the dustpan of history. She discusses her family who moved to India from Bangladesh before Partition, and escaped its frenzy, and states, “Yes, not every refugee is the same. But every refugee, privileged or not, leaves a house behind.”

*This essay was published in the April-June 2018 issue of The Indian Quarterly magazine. The theme of the issue was “Black and White.”

Stolperstein for Max and Olga Mayer in Heidelberg, Germany. The Profitcy CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

On a blazing hot afternoon in Munich, the sort that dries you to a state of light-headedness, I watched the German artist Gunter Demnig on his knees digging a street, and thought of a house I had never seen. At the close of 1946, my grandfather left behind his home in Bangladesh and came away to Calcutta in India with five brothers, two sisters and his mother. My great grandfather was a sub-inspector in the colonial British force, he was given advance notice of the developments and opted to live in India. My grandfather, then 15, studied philosophy and law in university in India and later in London under the philosopher Karl Popper. A gifted student and speaker, he taught philosophy at university and, later, became a politician. Like most academics and politicians, he enjoyed speaking, he did it well and he did a lot of it. At family dinners, the rice on our hands would dry to a crust as we heard his stories. We didn’t realise that he never spoke of the home he left behind. The life he lived there.

A small audience had gathered around Demnig but he worked on unaffected, occasionally fetching tools from his red van. Even in his working man’s denim clothes and canvas hat, he made for a striking presence. At the time, I did not know how his work would come to affect me, but I was struck by his single-mindedness. He was like an ant with a cargo, nothing could distract him. He dug out a section of the pavement, installed 12 brass-plated cobblestones in a neat line, and swept away the rubble with a broom and dust pan. And then left.

Gunter Demnig, Photo Credit: Die Linke on Flickr, June 9, 2015, CC BY 2.0.

Each of the 12 stones bore the name of an individual, their years of birth, deportation and (probable) murder in the Holocaust. They are the Stolpersteine—German for stumbling stones—installed outside the last known residence of a Holocaust victim. The idea is that you stumble on them, and stop and read. The Nazis killed an estimated 15 million civilians, six million of them Jews of course.

The words on the stone are spare and stark:

“Here lived Amalie Malka Rosner
born 1877
deported 1941
murdered 25 November 1941.”

Rosner’s grand-daughters Ayala Mendelson and her sister Ilana Orin had travelled from San Francisco for the installation of their grandparents’ stones. It was the first time they had seen the house their mother Erna grew up in. Their grandfather, Juda Baruch Rosner, was a linen merchant, who managed to send all his children away to a kibbutz in present-day Israel. But his wife Amalie and he didn’t make it. Juda Baruch and Amalie Malka were deported separately, to Kaunas and Buchenwald, and murdered within months of each other. This was the sisters’ first time in Germany. Their mother Erna was 20 when she was sent away from Munich to the kibbutz. She never returned to Germany. Ayala first heard of the Stolpersteine from her cousins, Emi and Tilly, who put up stones for their paternal grandparents in England in 2012. Was it really possible that they could put it out in public, set it in stone that their grandparents were taken and murdered by their own government?

The sisters had brought a folder of digital prints of family photographs: their grandfather, grandmother, mother and aunts. Ayala’s mother Erna has a nice easy comfort before the camera. Her cheer is infectious, making you smile back reflexively. “Mama had such happy memories of growing up here,” Ayala said. “Helping out at the shop in the afternoons, swimming on summer evenings with her sisters. She never seemed to remember the bad things.”

Stolpersteine for Berek and Pesah Swiatlowski in Brussels, photographed by a family member. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

The Munich chapter of the Stolpersteine had arranged for a rabbi for the occasion. He led the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Then the congregation broke into the song “O Shalom”, clapping to keep rhythm. The heat was white and enervating, yet the voices were energetic. It was both moving and joyous. For those whose families were killed in the Holocaust, this is the closest thing to a funeral. No bodies were returned for last rites. No bodies, no remains, nothing was returned.

The Stolpersteine are now in hundreds of cities across 23 countries in Europe, an indication of the terrifying scale of the Holocaust. Demnig, who calls himself a sculptor and conceptual artist, has been working on this project for more than 25 years. In 1990, he painted a white line through the streets of Cologne to mark 50 years of the deportation of 1,000 ethnic Sinti and Roma people from the city. When the paint faded, Demnig installed brass plates with the words “Mai 1940—1000 Roma and Sinti” at 21 sites across the city.

The first Stolpersteine emerged out of a conversation with a Cologne resident who told Demnig that she had lived through the war, and knew there were no Sinti or Roma who lived in the city. It was this “unseeing” that gave Demnig the idea to imbed these memorial stones in front of the last-known place of residence of a Holocaust victim. (He defines victim broadly—anyone who was taken/deported, including those who survived.) It was his way of returning them to the neighbourhoods they had lived in, re-inserting them into the community they were ejected from.

“Nobody in my family served the Nazi government,” Demnig told me. “As far as I have looked it up, nobody in my family was deported either. I am neither a culprit, nor a victim. I am a citizen.”

There are several reminders of the Holocaust in Germany. The Germans have a word for it: Erinnerungskultur, the culture of remembrance. It goes beyond acknowledging the Holocaust. The headquarters of the Stasi, the notorious secret police in the erstwhile East Germany, has been turned into a terrific museum in Berlin. A team of very patient government employees is tasked with piecing together 16,000 bags of files shredded by the Stasi, so that citizens are able to access the records kept on them and their families.

School history books go into detail about what the Nazis did; German public television is full of World War II and Holocaust documentaries. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is an affecting installation comprising 2,711 unmarked grey coffin-like slabs. There is also the Topography of Terror, a permanent set of information panels on the Holocaust. A number of concentration camps, such as Dachau and Buchenwald, have been preserved through the country. Nearly every major German city has a Nazi museum or a Holocaust museum.

It is fair to assume that a project like the Stolpersteine arises from this culture of remembrance, that it shapes a certain kind of citizen, to use Demnig’s word. (For some, it also induces a sense of fatigue—the fatigue of saying sorry). But the Stolpersteine is different from other kinds of remembering. For one, every museum and memorial is site-based: you have to make the effort to visit them. The stones are the opposite of this—there is no telling where you will stumble on one. Second, museums and memorials are impersonal, except when they commemorate a famous individual.

Each stone carries the outlines of individual lives that fell to the Holocaust: name, birth, death, the house they lived in before they were deported. It’s strange what these little details can do: you see a name, a house, a street and the person that inhabited them takes shape too. Perhaps she was returning with groceries when she was taken away, perhaps he was taking a nap when there was a knock on the door.

What was my grandfather doing when he heard the family had to leave? Was there time for final exams and final goodbyes? For marksheets and certificates to set up a new life?

Stolpersteine in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Photo Credit: Sergey Chemkaev, CC BY -SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

In her essay “A Stone for my Great Grandmother”, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about placing a Stolpersteine for her grandfather’s mother, who was murdered in Auschwitz. In the main, Kolbert writes about the failure of post war-Germany in bringing Nazis to justice. Barring the initial phase of highly-publicised trials like the first Nuremberg trial, most Nazis were not convicted because there was, in the end, just not enough evidence to convict them. In fact, most Nazis were absorbed in government jobs. This is why she imagines that an art project like the Stolpersteine has been able to offer more succour than the justice system.

Kolbert knows little about her great grandmother’s life. “My grandparents seldom talked about the war, though they talked about everything else,” she writes. Like her father, and Ayala Mendelsohn’s mother, my grandfather too rarely spoke of the Partition. Of the bad things that happened.

In August 1947, the British colony of India was partitioned into India and Pakistan. My grandfather’s home became East Pakistan and later, in 1971, Bangladesh. In our school textbooks, Partition was a minor detail in the climax of the rousing story of the Indian National Movement. Some riots were mentioned. Overall, the impression it left was of an administrative event: I imagined some files being exchanged, people queuing neatly on either side of the border, choosing their homeland.

But 15 million people were displaced by the birth of the two nations, and between one and two million died in the process, Nisid Hajari estimates in his book Midnight’s Furies. My schoolbooks had omitted these numbers. When a professor in university said Partition caused the second largest displacement of people in modern history, I was surprised. More than the figure, it was the verb that surprised me—displaced. Annoyed me, actually. We were not displaced, I thought. We moved. My grandfather was among the 15 million people who moved.

In India, we don’t have a culture of remembering our traumas. We choose only to remind people of our achievements. We have memorials to individual heroes. A thousand M.K. Gandhis stand on the intersections of our streets. Small blue busts of Bhimrao Ambedkar perch on small platforms in alleys. The largest statue in the world, of national leader Sardar Patel, is currently under construction. There is a political movement to mark the birthplace of Ram, the mythical hero of the Ramayana. We mark “national” heroes in the collective too: the India Gate in Delhi is to honour the Indian soldiers who fought and died in World War I and other foreign wars. The Shaheed Minar, in Kolkata, memorialises the martyrs of the Indian Freedom Movement. Our national holidays, aside from religious festivals, also mark birthdays of heroic dead men (I couldn’t think of one to remember a woman), and moments of national reckoning like Independence and Republic Day.

We have no memorials to Partition. Nor the Bengal famine that killed three million during World War II. Nor the riots of 1984, 1993 and 2002. Nor the horrific industrial gas accident in Bhopal. Nothing to remember our collective traumas. Instead, we move on, get on with the business of living. It’s the Indian way. When a society doesn’t acknowledge its shared nightmares, does it teach its citizens to bury their private memories? Does that attitude erase other wounds too?

Even with Partition, some things are more unremembered than others. When India was cleaved into two, it was divided along two separate geographical boundaries. On the west was the partition of Punjab and, on the east, Bengal. Although it was two countries, India and Pakistan, it was three separated territories—West Pakistan, India and East Pakistan. Much of what we know of Partition—through the Urdu short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto and Hindi fiction of Bhisham Sahni, through Hindi popular cinema, through the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Margaret Bourke-White—is about the partition of Punjab. The only nods the Indian government has made toward Partition is the production of two projects for the state-funded television channel Doordarshan in the 1980s—the serial Buniyaad and the made-for-TV film Tamas. Both were stories of Punjab.

Gandhi in Noakhali, 1946. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

About Bengal, there is nearly nothing. The politics of North India dominated the National Movement, and the charisma of Gandhi and Nehru drew the world to Delhi. So, this is perhaps a natural fallout. But we Bengalis have mostly kept quiet too. There is some Bengali literature and cinema on the subject, but the corpus is slight. What explains this reticence? Was it the spirit of the age? The spirit of nation-building pitched so authentically by Nehru—to make sacrifices for the nation, to not complain too much, to get on with things?

Over the past seven years, a couple of citizens’ projects have tried to correct this: in 2010, the 1947 Partition Archive was set up online to record memories of that time. The Partition Museum opened in 2016 in the city of Amritsar. The Remember Bhopal Museum opened in 2014 on the 30th anniversary of the devastating gas leak. Each of these projects makes it clear that it has no government funding. All are small. All acknowledge inspiration from the concept of Errinnerungskultur.

The scholar Ravinder Kaur has noted that our citizen memorials come several years after the event, and in the case of Partition more than 60 years. They likely take inspiration from her own work in gathering survivors’ memories in Delhi, and the work of writers such as Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin and Gyanendra Pandey before her. This line of research itself emerged 50 years after the events of Partition. What took us so long? Does the silence of states censor our private memories?

The German government was made to apologise after World War II; a central policy of post-War German administration by Britain, France, America and Russia was to tell Germany how monstrous it was. These countries themselves have never apologised for the crimes of colonialism and racism. There has been a fierce recent public debate about removing Confederacy monuments in America. Monuments in honour of racists. Very recently, the Stopping Stones project and the Witness Stones project, both inspired by the Stolpersteine, have been started to remember individual victims of slavery.

For most of my life, I had no idea that we left behind a home in Bangladesh. My grandfather’s memory is unpredictable now. It comes and goes. When I ask him about his life in Bangladesh, he speaks of a dog that swam after them, long after their boat had left the shore. What colour was our house? How many rooms? How many people lived there together? I’ve thought about going back. It is, after all, the most mythic of journeys—the return to paradise lost. But I don’t know what we left behind, and I don’t know where to look. Not every refugee is the same, Kaur has written. And she is right. My grandfather’s family had advance notice. They decided months ahead to move to India. They could avoid the frenzy of the Partition. They were privileged.

But every refugee, privileged or not, leaves a house behind. A set of imprecise things hard to list, hard to articulate. A dog that trails after the boat.

How would it be if we had a stone for every person who left their home behind at Partition? For every person who didn’t make it to the other side? For everyone who starved to death in the famine? Would we know ourselves a bit better then?

The Red Line: Where is the Border?

Sanjoy Chakraborty — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 07:18:43 +0000

This essay presents the artworks of Sanjoy Chakraborty, an artist from Chittagong, Bangladesh, who engages with the identity politics of this port city and cross-border constructions of lines and nationalistic imaginations. He offers us a utopian and poetic worldview through the use of the colour ‘red’ that narrates social and political issues in the hope that viewers and spectators will discover new expansive realizations around identity. Traversing geographies across Bangladesh, Northeast India and West Bengal, these selected works from his oeuvre make us think of the critical question: Where is the Border?

Citation

Sanjoy Chakraborty, An Ordinary Story, Performance (Detail), Dhaka, 2013. Photo Credit: The Artist.

Chittagong, or Chattogram in Bangla, is the site of one of the finest ports in the Indian subcontinent. Like many an old port city, it has long been at crossroads, a place where people of various communities from different parts of the world passed through, and often lived in, fought over, and died. It was a prize for possessing which many powers, from the rulers of Arakan and Tripura to the Bengal Nawabs, Portuguese merchants and pirates, and the East India Company vied over the centuries. Those imperial contests of centuries past have given way in more recent times to political contests of a new kind, based on relatively recent political identities that emerged in this part of the world from the map, Census and the printing press in the 19^th century. The boundaries between hills and plains, and the communities that inhabit them, hardened. New borders divided connected geographies, as first East Pakistan and then Bangladesh appeared. Tensions of a new kind came into existence, with the cartographic anxieties leading to polarized political identities: ‘Bengali’ versus ‘Bangladeshi’, ‘Bengali’ versus ‘Muslim’ and several other ethnic minority identities.^[1] The enunciation of nationalistic imaginations of communities by the hegemonic enclosures of the State and the political resistance against such conscriptions is a complex one.^[2]

Sanjoy Chakraborty, an artist from Chittagong, and an assistant professor at the Department of History of Art, University of Dhaka, has engaged with this history of identity politics in his work. Graduating from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, in 2009, his practice has spanned across painting, performance art, site-specific practices, illustrations, art historical research and writing, and teaching. Sanjoy’s inquiries into his own identity crisis began from a young age when he was forced to experience the micro-aggressions that minorities face in our society. He was often called the derogatory term ‘dandi’ (Hindu) in Bangladesh, and when he travelled to India for his art program, he thought such feelings of being an ‘outsider’ would work themselves out in a ‘Hindu’ majority country. Here, he encountered being called a ‘Bangal’ or ‘Bangladeshi’ and thus essentialized as the ‘Muslim’ simply because he was from the neighbouring country. Such existentialist questions forced him to think about how borders are established in society and about identity politics in the local, national, and global contexts. Sanjoy started re-reading the story of the subcontinent, particularly since Partition, as well as the identity politics between Blacks and Whites in the West, among the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese in Asia, Muslims and Christians, and the races and castes that try to coexist in India. In the Indian context, such readings led to realizing that “Indian modernity, before being transnational, is but trans-regional. The underlying fact is that India, before Partition, was also Bangladesh and Pakistan. And apart from being trans-regional, India is also trans-local in the exchange of practices between many localities.”^[3]

Eastern Lower Bengal and Chittagong with Arakan, “Magni Mogolis Imperium,” from Novus Atlas (Amsterdam, 1638) by Willem Blaeu, based on Sir Thomas Roe’s journey. (Wikimedia Commons.)

Sanjoy is deeply affected by the rifts of Partition, and upon his return to Bangladesh in 2009, he was particularly moved by the narratives of the “the Shahbagh Movement, the trials of the liberation war revolutionaries, and the way the lives of artists and writers was lost to religious fundamentalism.”^[4] In Bangladesh, a visit to the Liberation War Museum (inaugurated in 1966) enunciates how art contributed to the revolution back then.^[5] Also, the Mongol Shobhajatra (procession of wellbeing, Bengali: মঙ্গল শোভাযাত্রা; 1989-till date) was “conceived with the intent of challenging autocracy by combining the voices of the masses on one artistic platform.”^[6] A mass procession that takes place at dawn on the first day of the Bengali New Year in Bangladesh, this is organized by the teachers and students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Dhaka.^[7] The festival is considered an expression of the secular identity of the Bangladeshi people and as a way to promote unity.^[8] Declared as an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2016, Mongol Shobhajatra is categorised on the representative list as a heritage of humanity.^[9]

Sanjoy says, “With such cross-cultural readings in constructions of identity and its falsehoods, I realised that languages, cultures, food habits, even the colour of skin can be different among people, but what remains the same is the colour of our blood. Hence, I started painting with red. Until now, almost all of my work has been in red. It tells a story of unity and equality, through the conflicted lens of art and politics.”^[10] In this issue, PSQ Journal presents the artworks of the artist that has traversed the geographies of Bangladesh, Northeast India and West Bengal. The use of red in his works demand a relationship between aesthetics and politics, and he says, “Red is therefore not just a colour, it becomes a narrator of social and political issues, in the hope that viewers and spectators will discover new realizations around identity, and question their understanding of colour in their dealings with the world.”^[11]

This piece is presented through Sanjoy Chakraborty’s own voice narrating his artworks, the conflations of maps, borders, and nationalisms, the structural and intimate use of red in his work, and offering us a poetic worldview through the critical question: Where is the Border?

(Introduction Text: Amrita Gupta and Samrat Choudhury – Executive Editors, PSQ).

SELECTED ARTWORKS

BHARADESH

Bharadesh, Acrylic on Canvas, 2008. Photo Credit: The Artist.

“When my stay in India between the years 2002-2009 (my education at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata) had started drawing to a close, I would often record my experiences by writing or by painting them. During the final phase of my stay (2007-’08), I chose deliberately to execute my paintings in the small format so I could express my feelings using as few words as possible.

This forms the backdrop of Pater Katha (the story of the scrolls) – a series of my paintings, which explores themes of segregation and solitude, intrinsic to my life away from Chattogram in Bangladesh to Kolkata in India.

Enmeshed in an abysmal darkness and a loss of the self, my paintings would most often take the form of a patchwork of my feet and palms stencilled against a dark background as though to say “this is the mark”. Thus, my existence began to make its presence felt – etched on an uncharted geography – which appeared in the series. In others, I would often paint an imaginary country, to which I had given the name of ‘Bharadesh’ and made by morphing the maps of Bangladesh and India (Bharatbarsha). This emerged as a utopian space, into which I would try and identify myself. These were painted in different times rendering a multitude of experiences.

The folk-art form of patachitras in these parts of the world exhibit an indigenous form – events from a continuous narrative are delineated on individual panels on scrolls, retaining their continuity. It is this strange and yet astonishing form of narration – disjunctive and yet continuous that had impacted me deeply. I found the form suited to my own way of narrating a personal story. Subsequently, I produced these paintings at different times and amalgamated them to create ‘Pater Katha’.”

RED BORDER LINE

Red Border Line, Street Performance, Guwahati, Assam, July 2008. Photo Credit: The Artist.

“The day man discovered power, he wanted establish authority over others. He drew lines on the earth and built walls to exert power, moving against nature. He finally discovers himself caught in the labyrinth of borders that he has produced for himself. Borders that thwart him from moving freely or to return to his people whom he had left ages ago.

In 2008, I travelled to Guwahati, one of the most significant cities in Northeast India, to attend a residency programme at the Desire Machine Collective. I fell in love for the city at first sight owing to its surprising similarity with my hometown, Chattogram. Very soon I realized to my dismay the city’s extremely complicated political situation. A multitude of various ethnic groups remain in conflict with each other. Apart from these ethnic groups, people from West Bengal, Bihar, from other parts of India, and even from Bangladesh become embroiled in these conflicts. I have always felt that such distrust and hatred stems from not knowing each other well enough.

Witnessing such a scenario, I decided to execute a work at Zoo Road, Guwahati, titled, Red Border Line. I drew a red line across this street in Guwahati, imagining that I had created two different lands. Whenever a pedestrian crossed it, I asked him/her about the aspect of the country, people, politics, and migration – among other issues – and specifically contemporary political problems of Assam. This was an attempt to trace the sources of discrimination and hatred between people, and relay the voices of both indigenous and migrant people, and what they think about their land, governance, and life.”

MEMORIES WITH TERRORISM

Memories with Terrorism, Acrylic on Canvas, 2009. Image Credit: The Artist.

“The country has always been there since its inception; it is only the people that have changed. And in this transformation, people have ripped, dissected and fractured the country too, altering it irretrievably. Sometimes the piecing began from the right; at other times it began from the left; often the line of dissection started from the very centre of the land. History tells me that this land, the earth had been divided a million of times; it is getting divided further; perhaps it will be split yet again. The people on this land are born within these splits. And over these fractures, they die lamenting.

Which city was he born? Where did he die? These questions soon vanish from our minds. In the war of divisions, our countries bleed. And the stain dries up and vanishes as soon as it touches the grounds. And on these grounds, still smeared with such stains perhaps grow countless flowering plants and trees. Some might take flowers from those flowering trees and spread them over the land and forget hundreds of stories of separation. History cannot record all of our stories. But does that mean our stories must vanish in the darkness? Does that mean they will not travel over the lands and into the people’s hearts to make their eyes fill with tears? Will no one ever be able to discern the dry and brown stains on the dusty grey land?”

WORDS ON ME

Words on Me, Etching on Digital Print, 2009. Photo Credit: The Artist.

“My neighbourhood created many selves: Hindu, Dandi, Bangal, Bangladeshi, Muslim, Asian, Bengali, Terrorist. Many of us have never protested against such constructions, nor even wanting to know their meanings. Many of us journey in search of new identities, giving up old ones. Some are exhausted while others have accepted defeat. Still others are pursuing unknown destinations, unwilling to accept defeat. When we look back at what we have achieved and realize that we are left in a vacuum – a lonely world without the dear ones – all become meaningless in the end. Identity has only a single colour – red. This realization remains a true knowledge of civilization.”

STORY OF NO PEOPLE’S LAND

Story of No People’s Land, Watercolour on Paper, 2009. Photo Credit: The Artist.

“The map must remain by the window of my room. Within the closest reach, right where my pillow is placed on my bed. A dream map, one in which I can easily enter and exit; a map where two countries are interlaced; where visas and passports would be redundant and one is not compelled to occupy a specific portion of a land, for one is never at peace if one has to choose between one’s mother and lover. I would like a map that can easily be folded and hidden behind the curtains in order to avert the evil eye. Now listen to me quietly. Hold a fragment of this map safe in your heart and I shall wait for you holding the other, till we are bonded by affection.”

RED MAP

Red Map, Etching, 2009. Photo Credit: The Artist.

“Gazes. Countless gazes. It is impossible to avert from them and hide away. Hundreds of eyes through the windows and walls, the skies and grounds gaze at me impassively. They pervade everything and usurp even personal and intimate space. They thwart me from sharing my deepest secrets; a terrible invasion of privacy that relentlessly enjoys and censor’s identity, relationships, and even lovemaking. These gazes can read the mind, as though they want to exert control on my thoughts before they move out and beyond. I go insane under their torturous surveillance and oppression; I see everything turning red within me. In this meaningless wait for nothingness, I discover myself naked and locked inside a map, along with a naked you.”

BODY WITH BARBED WIRE

Body with Barbed Wire, Photographs and Watercolour on Paper, 2010. Photo Credit: The Artist.

“A fence of barbed wires was suddenly built, abrading the walls of the house. No one could be found to answer the question—why was it erected? The only fact that I could discern was that the house next to mine now belonged to another country. So were my friends, kin, the childhood pond, playground and even the two palm trees that stood on the east of our courtyard, now belonged to the neighboring land. It seemed that suddenly my body was now dissected into countless pieces and left nailed on the barbed wire fencing along its entire course.

I have heard hundreds of similar anecdotes from Bangladeshi immigrants in Kolkata who had arrived in the city following the Partition of 1947 and who had befriended me tracing common roots and history. My next-door neighbor, an old lady, used to inquire often if I had to carry a passport while visiting the city and if she had to do the same if she were to visit Dhaka. She told me that she had arrived in the city of Kolkata with her father in search of work and in no time received the sudden news of Dhaka being in a different country. She never saw her childhood friend afterwards. My old neighbor could never reconcile to the fact that Bangladesh is another country. She remains distrusting about carrying a passport to Dhaka.”

AN ORDINARY STORY

An Ordinary Story, Performance, Dhaka, 2013. Image Courtesy: The Artist.

“This work orbits around identity politics. Charting a livelihood as a minority in Bangladesh, my experiences of travelling to India from Bangladesh and subsequently discovering the history of Partition, regional politics, religious fanaticism, racial discrimination, et al are some of the themes that have been explored in this performance.

The performance begins with a figure spotted standing among the audience, bandaged in a broad red strip of cloth. One of the spectators starts undoing the red strip and passes the process on to the next spectator after a while. The process is repeated by spectators till they reach the end of the cloth.

While the bandage was undone, bits of cloth pieces were seen to be dropping on the ground, each of which had the words: Hindu, Muslim, Bengali, Dandi, Asian, Bangladeshi, Chittagongian, Bangal written on them – identities that I had been conferred upon in various stages of my life.

Two narrators in the background tell the following story during the performance:

This child was born in a strange world. A world in which the sky did not appear to be blue, the earth did not seem brown, and the trees were the least likely to be green. A queer red glow engulfed this world, which seemed abysmally dark to the child. As he grew up, he began to notice the people around him somewhat reddened. Red is the colour of their words; their hair, too, seemed to be dyed in red; and so are their tongues. The child wants to discover the source of this strange shade. But a great quiet seems to have descended the earth. He could hear nothing. A stony silence prevailed.

On this red planet the child gradually notices his skin— speckled with red dots. Like the others on this planet. He detests it so much. He wants to resist it. He keeps thinking of ways of getting rid of them. Unfortunately, the dots keep getting bigger as days pass by. Agonized by the sight he desperately runs to his parents, he runs to his uncle and to his grandfather, seeking help. But they express their dismay and wonder why he wants a remedy. They try and reassure him saying that he looks great in the very shade. They try to convince him that it is natural. But he seems reluctant.

Failing to make the others understand about his non-compliance, he rushes out of his room. And standing under the vast sky and on the extensive land he sheds his tears in isolation. Standing under the firmament he hears a voice speak from nowhere — “Do not lament, child. Your wish will be granted. Do not fall asleep tonight; just pretend to do so.” The boy inquires to find a reason. But to no avail. The boy stays up as instructed. At midnight he watched a group of men enter his room carrying pots filled with red paint. They smear his body with coats of the red paint. Early morning the boy ran up to the river— its clear waters seemed to be unadulterated. Perhaps the only thing still untouched by red hues. He walked into its pure waters. The streaming waters washed away every trace of the taint from over his bare skin. He is no longer red. The world looks at him in wonder.”

(Narration of Artworks: Sanjoy Chakraborty)

Acknowledgement: The artist’s notes has been translated from Bangla by Oindrilla Maity, Kolkata.

References

Bokhtiar Ahmed, Beyond checkpoints: Identity and Developmental Politics in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. PDF, 2017. URL: https://www.academia.edu/75137252/Beyond_checkpoints_Identity_and_developmental_politics_in_the_Chittagong_Hill_Tracts_Bangladesh. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Catherine David in Art Matters, Raza Foundation. URL: https://www.indulgexpress.com/culture/art/2019/feb/11/before-being-transnational-indian-modern-art-is-trans-regional-catherine-david-at-raza-utsavs-art-12777.html ↑
Sarah Anjum Bari, Sanjoy Chakraborty’s Journey with Red, Interview, Daily Star Weekend, July 19, 2019. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Mangal Shobhajatra, Wikipedia. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangal_Shobhajatra ↑
Ibid. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Sarah Anjum Bari, Sanjoy Chakraborty’s Journey with Red, Interview, Star Weekend, July 19, 2019. ↑
Ibid. ↑

Editorial | Issue 05

Partition Studies — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 13:33:52 +0000

Book Cover, Burden of History, Oxford University Press, 2017.

When Partition finally arrived, and with callous suddenness, in 1947, the rages it unleashed sent millions of hapless refugees carrying the meagre remains of their lives on their heads, walking across the new borders that had been drawn in maps. The arrival of these refugees has had a lasting impact on the places they went to. Among the most unforgettable, and most contentious, of such impacts was the change in the demographics of Tripura. The former princely state went from having a tribal majority to having a Bengali majority. The fears of being reduced to minorities in their own lands that this triggered has been a key driver of the politics of the insider versus outsider that can be seen in Northeast India to this day.

In the opening essay of this edition of PSQ, Sam Dalrymple chronicles the fascinating story of Tripura’s journey into the Indian union through the character of Gedu Mian, an elephant mahout turned entrepreneur who mounted an effort at the time of Partition to make the princely state part of East Pakistan. His evocative account of the place and its modern history notes the importance of the refugee crisis in Tripura to understanding the modern fault-lines of South Asia.

The book extract in this edition is on a separate but arguably related subject, that of the Assamese versus Bengali divide that has been a consistent feature of Assam politics since well before Independence. The question of which would be the dominant identity has always been a key factor in this divide. The inclusion, in 1874, of the districts of Sylhet, Goalpara and Cachar from Bengal had triggered anxieties of Bengali domination. The inclusion of all of Assam as a part of the short-lived province of Eastern Bengal and Assam in 1905 added to those anxieties. Eventually, Sylhet returned to East Bengal through a referendum in 1947 that turned the Hindu Sylhetis into refugees. “The separation of Sylhet from Assam has occupied a central position in the discourse of Assamese-Bengali relations in Assam right from the early decades of the twentieth century,” Udayon Misra writes in his pertinent book Burden of History from which this extract is taken.

It remains a subterranean issue in the politics of Assam even now.

In the interview, author of Midnight’s Borders, Suchitra Vijayan, discusses the broad issues of identity and borders, and a “continuous and never-ending Partition” that often plays out in ways many of us don’t understand.

This continuity of memory contrasts with the absence of memorials to Partition and its victims, especially in the East and Northeast India. On a visit to Germany, Sohini was struck by the memorialisation of the Holocaust, and the almost total absence of the culture of remembrance in India. She writes of this in a thoughtful and touching personal essay.

Our final piece of this edition is on the artworks of Bangladeshi artist, Sanjoy Chakraborty. His work focuses on the issue of identity, starting with his own, and the colour that dominates his creations is red. “I realised that languages, cultures, food habits, even the colour of skin can be different among people, but what remains the same is the colour of our blood. Hence, I started painting with red,” he says.

Unfortunately, despite its same redness, a lot of blood has been, and continues to be, spilt over the differences that constitute identity.

PSQ Journal Editors
Binayak Dutta, Samrat Choudhury, Amrita Gupta