The 1947 Partition in The East: Trends and Trajectories

This book explores the experiences of people affected by the Partition of British India and princely states in 1947 through first-person accounts, memoirs, archival material, literature, and cinema. It focuses on the displacement, violence and trauma of the people affected and interrogates the interrelationships between nationalism, temporality, religion, and citizenship. The authors examine the mass migrations triggered by the 1947 Partition, amidst nationalist posturing, religious violence, and debates on crucial issues of refugee rehabilitation and redistribution of land and resources. It focuses on the drawing of the borders and the ruptures in the socio-cultural bonds within regions and communities brought on by demographic changes, violence, and displacement. The volume reflects on the significant mark left by the event on the socio-political sensibilities of various communities, and the questions of identity and citizenship. It also studies the effects of Partition on the politics of Bangladesh and India’s east and northeast states, specifically Bengal, Assam and Tripura. A significant addition to the existing corpus on Partition historiography, this book will be of interest to modern Indian history, partition studies, border studies, sociology, refugee and migration studies, cultural studies, literature, post-colonial studies and South Asian studies, particularly those concerned with Bengal, Northeast India and Bangladesh.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements. 1. Introducing the Text 2. Setting the Context 3. The False Premise of Partition 4. The Protracted Process of Boundary Formation: The Making of the Nadia-Kushtia Border, 1947-1971 5. ‘Surgery’ in Rush and Affected Lives in Borderland: East Bengal Experiences of Partition 6. Displacement, Integration and Identity in the Post-Colonial World 7. Redeeming the Partitioned ‘Refugee’: Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 and the citizenship imbroglio in post-colonial Assam 8. Friends turned Foreigner-Foes: Fissures in the East/West Bengali Ethos in the Post-Partition Era 9. Displacement, Rehabilitation and Dominant Press Discourse in West Bengal: Perspective from Calcutta Based Newspapers 10. The Buzz and the Bazaar: Refugee Markets in Post-Partition Bengal 11. The ‘New Home’ as a Symbolic Register in Ghatak’s Subarnarekha 12. The (un)braiding of time in the 1947 partition of British India 13. Memoirs and Memories: Tribal and Refugee Concerns in Tripura (1947-71) 14. Questions to Ask Ourselves and Lessons to Learn: A Comparative Study of Short Stories on the Bengal Partition. Index.

About the Author :
Subhasri Ghosh received her PhD in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University. After a two year stint as a post-doctoral fellow at Rabindranath Tagore Centre for Human Development Studies, she is at present engaged as Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Asutosh College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta. Her research interests include exploring the interface of gender, migration, colonial and post-colonial society.