Born in a family that originally belonged to the Chittagong district of undivided Bengal, I was conscious of my roots and my other ‘desh’ (country) since my childhood days. The Ghosh-s were residents of Dhalghat, a place that prominently figured in the nationalist movement of Bengal, as it was one of the centres of the revolutionary activities carried out by ‘Master-da’, Surya Sen. Sen, the renowned freedom fighter, was the key figure behind the Chittagong Armoury Raid or the Chittagong Uprising in 1930. The Ghosh…Continue Reading “‘Desh’-er Ranna: On Inheriting the Cuisine of Chittagong”
Ten years ago I met Gazi in Bangladesh’s Satkhira region, in a small island called Koikhali. He had come with his immediate family about 60 years back, at the stroke of midnight, with nothing but the clothes on his back. Although in the beginning he had been able to keep in touch with the rest of his family in India, he had not heard from them in many years. The Indian government had started building a wall and anyone trying to travel to the other…Continue Reading “The tears that still bind – by Annu Jalais”
WHY – There are many theories about Partition: relating to the fundamental questions of ‘Why?’ ‘Who?’ and ‘When?”. Official histories of Pakistan subscribe to the ‘two nations’ theory and argue that the Pakistani nation was the inevitable crystallization of the desire of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent to remain a distinctive community, separate from the Hindu population around them. A characteristic and particularly passionate articulation of this theory is to be found in Aitzaz Ahsan’s The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan. According…Continue Reading “THEORIES OF PARTITION”
Director-duo Leena Gangopadhyay and Saibal Banerjee’s Maati is about a young Bengali woman’s search for her roots in Bangladesh. Meghla Chowdhury (Paoli Dam), a lecturer of History, has a deep engagement with Partition — not the least because her own family was forced to migrate in 1947 from their ancestral village Kutubdiya in East Bengal, and her paternal grandmother (who stayed put) was killed by a Muslim retainer. Meghla inherits a resulting sense of betrayal from this episode, but also simultaneously, a great desire to…Continue Reading “MAATI: A Plea for Renewed Trust & Understanding Between a Divided People”
~ By Rituparna Roy; originally published in The Wire ~ I visited the Amritsar Partition Museum just a few months after it opened its doors in December 2017. Though I was very impressed with the museum, it convinced me – more than ever before – of the need for having a museum dedicated to the Partition experience of Bengal. In a Report written for The Wire that was published on 15 August 2018, I explained the reason why. I am reproducing that article in this blog post, as…Continue Reading “Report on the Amritsar Partition Museum”