Memories of a land divided

Memories of a land divided

A historian reflects on the challenges of reconstructing the lesser-known history of the Sylhet Partition many decades after the event.

Anindita Dasgupta teaches at the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Taylor's University, Malaysia.

… invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time.

~ Salman Rushdie in Shame

Historian Peter Geyl famously stated that history is a never-ending argument. This is particularly true of oral history, where the historian examines the testimony of living people, and not just archival documents, in order to reconstruct and interpret a specific historical event or personality on the basis of memories and perceptions.

Since the 1980s, this methodology has been used increasingly in the study of the 1947 Partition of the Indian Subcontinent. Historians are beginning to put on "stouter boots" – as the English historian R H Tawney put it – entering the field to collect and document testimonies from eyewitnesses and survivors in order to understand the impact of Partition on the everyday lives of ordinary people from the Punjab, Bengal, and more recently, Sylhet. Given the dearth of published historical works on Sylhet, it is not entirely surprising that a large chunk of the current knowledge about Partition there should come from an array of oral sources. Like many oral history projects, the story of Sylhet's Patition is also evolving, emerging and incomplete. Some may ask: does this kind of memory have the ability to produce a narrative that is authentic, dependable and verifiable?

Several factors add to the complexities involved in reconstructing the experience of Partition in Sylhet after a hurriedly organised referendum on 6 and 7 July 1947. The oral historian studying those events more than 60 years later faces huge difficulty in finding eyewitnesses, most of whom are now in their late seventies or early eighties. Also, like all diasporas, discussions about the root cause of their dispersal understandably provokes sentimental reactions from those old enough to remember, who still nurse the pain and powerlessness of being evicted from their ancestral homeland.

Though some memoirs and other deeply personal pieces are available in the vernacular, the oral historian must begin almost from scratch. There is also a difference in the way Assam's two valleys – the largely Assamese-speaking Brahmaputra Valley and the Bengali-speaking Barak Valley – retrospectively interpret the cession of almost the entire district of Sylhet to East Pakistan. This is due to the different ways in which the postcolonial histories of the two valleys have evolved, particularly in relation to the Assamese language and culture. Then, there is the historian's own perspective, particularly if he or she is of Sylheti origin, which is equally invaluable in providing insights through the lived experiences of his or her own family members and friends. With all these factors in mind, I read historian Binayak Dutta's critique of my August 2012 piece in this magazine on memories of Sylhet Partition with interest.

Finding memories
In his November 2012 article, Dutta rightly points out that "…thousands of testimonies of the Sylhet Referendum were never recorded." I realised this fact about ten years ago when I started my own research on the subject. Trained in anthropological fieldwork during my doctoral studies, my principal concern was to document as many Sylheti eyewitness accounts as I could find in my then-immediate neighbourhood – Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, West Bengal – as well as overseas, via the Internet. By this time, historians elsewhere in northern India were already publishing richly documented studies of Partition memories from the perspectives of women, migrants, workers and many other such groups who until then had been marginalised in Partition history. However, the same was not being done for Sylhetis. With the passing of the generation that witnessed the Partition of Sylhet, there was a real risk that this rich source of oral history might be lost forever.

 Locating respondents for interviews, however, was not easy. Most people with memories of the Sylhet Referendum and Partition were aged, and beset either by fading memories, ill health or both. Secondly, it was difficult to identify eyewitnesses even when I had leads, because some had by then moved away from their old residences in Northeast India. However, I did eventually meet several respondents who were generous enough to spare a lot of time resurrecting long-forgotten memories of 1947. I recollect with gratitude the generous hospitality and fascinating conversations with people who had themselves played significant roles during the Sylhet Referendum and Partition, particularly with the eminent historian Sujit Choudhury, then living in Karimganj, Assam. In retrospect, two of my biggest advantages were that I was myself an Indian of Sylheti origin, with roots in both the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys, and that during this period I was able to spend time with many older friends and members of my extended family, who often provided detailed accounts of those times.

This research, perhaps the first time that oral histories were collected for a study of the Sylhet Referendum and Partition, produced my article 'Denial and resistance: Sylheti Partition 'refugees' in Assam' (Contemporary South Asia, 2001). This was also the laboratory in which my first understanding of a people's perspective of Sylhet Partition began to take shape. I found that the Sylheti bhadralok – the middle and upper classes – were resistant to the idea that they were Partition ' refugees'; that the lives of educated, middle-class Sylhetis already straddled both Assamese valleys since the pre-Partition days, cushioning their post-Partition transition to life in Indian Assam, where many of them already had jobs and property; that the Sylhetis helped each other, and the new arrivals settled in the same areas of Assam where earlier Sylheti economic migrants resided; that rumours and stories filtering in from other parts of India made the Sylheti bhadralok fearful about staying in East Pakistan, and many of them fled out of fear of anticipated violence and not because of actual violence. I realised that the Sylheti experience of Partition is unique and nuanced, and differs considerably from the narratives of Punjabis and Bengalis in other parts of the country. This work was only the beginning of my journey into the complexities of the Sylheti experience.

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