Understanding Women’s Experiences of Displacement

Literature, Culture and Society in South Asia

Suranjana Choudhury, Nabanita Sengupta, Suranjana Choudhury, Nabanita Sengupta

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032332529
• eBook ISBN: 9781000508895
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The South Asian region has been especially prone to mass displacement and relocations owing to its varied geographical settings as well as socio-political factors. This book examines the women's perspective on issues related to displacement, loss, conflict, and rehabilitation.

It maps the diverse engagements with women's experiences of displacement in the South Asian region through a nuanced examination of unexplored literary narratives, life writing and memoirs, cultural discourses, and social practices. The book explores themes like sexuality and the female body, women and the national identity, violence against women in Indian Partition narratives, and stories of exile in real life and fairy tales. It also offers an understanding of the ruptures created by dislocation and exile in memory, identity, and culture by analyzing the spaces occupied by displaced women and their lived experiences. The volume looks at the multiplicity of reasons behind women's displacement and offers a wider perspective on the intersections between gender, migration, and marginalization.

This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, literature, gender studies, conflict studies, development studies, South Asian studies, refugee studies, diaspora studies, and sociology.

PART I

Critical essays

1
INTERCONNECTED LIVES, DISRUPTED REALITIESRevisiting gendered narratives from India’s northeastern Partition, 1947

Binayak Dutta

DOI: 10.4324/9781003045717-3

Contrary to its real meanings, the gender history of the Partition of India has on most occasions become one with the history of women’s experiences. The interconnected experiences of men and women have received scant attention. This is not only an imbalance of representation but a crisis in Partition and gender history itself. Despite the fact that both men and women have been symbolic representatives of community and the nation, these symbiotic narratives of men and women have not attracted much scholarship in any of the three theatres of Indian Partition studies—Punjab, Bengal, and Assam. In Assam, which traditionally has been one of the least researched theatres of Indian Partition history—the third world of Indian Partition experience, as I call it—the crisis can be construed to be even more complex. This is probably a result of two factors, taken as self-axiomatic and enmeshed. As in the other two sites, in the first case, men have been inbuilt as the unconscious presence in women’s narratives of violence and violation as perpetrators, and in the other, there is a broad consensus that men require no separate treatment within the gendered narratives of patriarchal society, both community and the nation being equally patriarchal. But Gyanendra Pandey and Peter Geschiere’s observation that “[T]he story of the struggle to realize nationhood and sovereign statehood has also been a story of how to deprive certain groups and citizens” ¹ could be an interesting point to enter into an interrogation of the subvertedconnected story of men and women who were domiciled at Sylhet, within the social unit of family when India became independent through Partition and who found themselves adversely affected by the Partition of Assam. The core engagement of this essay is with five women protagonists of the bhadralok or the gentry class and their patriarchs who sustained themselves through either professional or government service in Sylhet. The purpose of the narrative is to assert the interconnectedness of the lives of these women with the lives, fate, decisions, and judgements of the patriarchs of their respective families. All the protagonists in this narrative essentially belonging to the upper class, but who had to dislocate themselves from home and hearth after the Partition of India and the creation of East Pakistan in 1947 as their menfolk found their lives and careers in doldrums as a result of post-Partition upheavals. While in recent years, there is an attempt to, “ account of men’s experiences of Partition violence” most gender narratives of the Partition of India have been located predominantly within the story of female martyrs and fugitives of Partition within post-colonial statist studies obsessed by discourses on “suffering citizens and resisting subjects” ² often oblivious to the fact that the fate of men and women located within the familiar familial and social fabric are mostly intertwined and interdependent.

The birth of the Indian state, over the years, has become synonymous with acts of violence and violation which have undoubtedly affected various groups within the society. This is all the more critical in areas of marginal focus such as Assam where such anecdotes are still awaiting recovery. This is in contrast to most other contexts of gender history in Punjab and Bengal where overwhelming amounts of narratives have surfaced in the last seven decades. But few studiesoffer combined accounts of women and men engaging together with a stressful communal situation within the domain of community and family. In most texts on the gender history of the Partition, menfolk figure as the omnipresent “other gender” in women’s stories, as an agency that conditioned the position of women. This story is hardly any different in colonial and post-colonial Assam. This essay attempts to engage with it. In the few male narratives connected to Partition and post-Partition experiences that have now surfaced, women are conspicuously absent from the accounts. There is no denying that narratives of violence and violation of both women and men need to form an overwhelming part of this revisionist gendered history of the colonial and post-colonial state. It hardly needs to be emphasized that the lives of both women and men are closely intertwined in society. Therefore, violation of the rights of men, especially earning members, adversely affected the lives of women as well. These could well form an important part of gender narratives of post-Partition Assam. This essay engages with the experiences of violence in Sylhet and how the men and women in the five families in question tried to respond to it. While the narratives in the essay are recovered from women who survived to share their experiences, the reference to their fathers and husbands who decided their dislocation and their life in their adopted homes repeatedly inform us, among others, that these women and thousands like them were guided by the menfolk and their assessment of the political situation and over which the women in question had little say. Therefore, this narrative is as much the story of the women protagonists as it is of their patriarchs who controlled their lives and locations about which both the nation-state and the community remained conspicuously silent.

Private memories as public histories

But beyond the political class who were engaged with anti-colonial politics, the people at large were generally oblivious to the new turn of politics in Assam over the Partition and its aftermath. So, when Professor Narendra Chandra Deb, a popular teacher at Murari Chand College, decided to exercise the option of service in the Indian Union in response to the Assam Government circular Letters, ³ little did he know what fate had in store for him. As he opted for India, he took a release from his college and came over to Guwahati, only to be told that he had no job at Cotton College, the only other government college in undivided Assam. The life of Professor Deb was so bitter that he would often break into a lament calling himself and his like “the first sacrifice at the altar of Indian Independence” till his last days. Professor Deb’s case was typical of the Sylheti middle-class professional’s experience in post-colonial Assam. A gold medalist in Chemistry from Calcutta University, he had been a professor and the head of the department of Chemistry at Murari Chand College, Sylhet, for 21 long years where he was much loved, feared, and revered. Employment at the college constituted a government service in Assam and the professors were members of the Assam Educational Service. Murari Chand College was one of the two government colleges in Assam, the other being Cotton College at Guwahati. He had, on the eve of Partition, given an option to serve in India in case of Partition and Sylhet becoming a part of Pakistan. When Sylhet became part of East Pakistan post referendum, Professor Deb, as others like him who decided to come to Assam, were rudely told that their services were no longer required and they were discharged from service “in complete disregard of the guarantees for the terms and conditions of service.” ⁴ It was more than evident from the letter which he received from the Secretary, Govt. of Assam, that though the post that he had claimed was available at Cotton College, it would not be given to him. Significantly, Professor Deb was not alone. As he pointed out in his letter dated 17 May 1950 to the Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru, a copy of which was marked to Dr. S. P. Mookerjee, ⁵ there were many others like him: “[a] large number of India-opting permanent Govt. employees of the Assam Govt. from Sylhet have lost their jobs.”

The importance of such narratives is now mostly lost to history.Their significance however lay in their ability to provide the entry point for recovering the beginnings of communal and linguistic politics in post-colonial Assam on the one hand and the impact of this politics on the lives and families of such affected men on the other. In recent times, the discipline of history has travelled across the limits of its conventional meanings to engage with other cognate disciplines in order to develop a better perspective about the history of politics and society in its elite and everyday sense. The interface between history and literature on the one hand and between history and oral narratives on the other are two very useful techniques adopted for this chapter. Anecdotes, as defined by Joel Fineman ⁶ in his interesting essay, is a deeply entrenched literary tradition “as a narration of a singular event” or as “the little story” which gives to history a “referential access to the real” and is a conscious tool to understand and appreciate this interconnected history of men and women affected by the Partition. Anecdotes as they are “one and the same time literary and real,” ⁷ which are sustained by community and individual memory, recovering the “moment of angst” in their struggle to negotiate the ambiguous “history of the present.” ⁸ One of the interesting entry points for this chapter visits critical engagement between memory and history on the one hand and between archives and memory on the other, to construct this complex interconnected gender history of partitioned Assam.

One of the principal protagonists of my story is also therefore Sabita Deb (Choudhury, after marriage), the eldest daughter of Professor Narendra Chandra Deb. Professor Deb had written:

I am one of those India-opting permanent members of the Assam Educational Service (displaced from Sylhet M. C. College) who have been discharged by the government of Assam with effect from April 1, 1948 in complete disregard of the guarantee for the terms and conditions of service. ⁹

While Professor Deb’s story is recovered from archival records, the oral testimony of Sabita Choudhury is important to appreciate the impact of the life and fortunes of Professor Deb on his family, especially the womenfolk. It is narratives such as these that can be used to highlight the complex, subverted, and yet obviously integrative nature of gendered experiences. One cannot escape the complexity of the situation as Sabita Choudhury says,

My father was a professor of Chemistry at the M.C. College, Sylhet and a Class I officer of AES. We had a comfortable life in Sylhet till partition. We had two houses. But when my father lost his job in Pakistan as he had opted to serve in India and then was not given employment at the Cotton College, we faced a lot of hardship. My father was the first one to leave Sylhet in our family and migrate to Karimganj where he joined the Karimganj College as an honorary professor of Chemistry. We followed him. My brothers first and then… me. We all stayed in a small room at a relative’s place at Karimganj where my father stayed since his migration there… We stayed, studied, cooked and slept in the same room. ¹⁰

Her father lost his post of professor of Chemistry at the M.C.College of Sylhet and was forced to move out of his house on the Shillong–Sylhet main road and into another house in another locality of Sylhet known as Mira Bazar, as their house, like most Hindu houses, was requisitioned by the East Pakistan Government. That was Sabita Deb’s first experience of uprooting. She had vivid memories of the shifting of residence:

We packed most of our stuff in gunny bags and gradually sent them from our main house to the new house that we were now about to inhabit. But we were the last to leave. I was in Class IX by then and had a big collection of cats. I still remember some of their names…Dolly, Lily…for the female ones and Push-kumar was the name of the tom cat… They were 11 in all. Like me, they had also grown up in this house that we had on the Shillong–Sylhet main road. I put all the cats in a jute bag, only to open the bag in our new house. But sadly, most of the cats left home…never to return. I had grown up rearing this large cat family of mine. Their dispersal and loss shook me and gave me the first taste of disruption of family life as a result of Partition. My father soon left Sylhet for Karimganj as he was on the lookout for a job. He was an India-optee in East Pakistan and was one of the earliest to lose his livelihood at the stroke of the midnight hour. Karimganj College was planning to open an honours course in many subjects and many of the Hindu professors who were earlier in service at M.C. College and had lost their jobs on the birth of Pakistan decided to seek their fortune. My father was one of them. My father’s shifting to Karimganj left us even more vulnerable and anxious than ever before. There were repeated dacoities in Sylhet town and we were in constant fear as there was a steady exodus of Hindu families from Sylhet since 1947 itself. Our ancestral house at Gangajal, which was a village within the Chapghatpargana, was looted and my paternal aunt fled to India. My own stay at Sylhet was also short-lived as my father, who had by 1949, joined Karimganj College, did my admissions at the Karimganj Girls High School and so I shifted in 1949. ¹¹

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Image
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Displacement: Debates and engagements
• PART I CRITICAL ESSAYS
• PART II LIFE WRITINGS AND MEMOIRS
• Index