Gender Studies
Untold stories
RANJITA BISWAS
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Coming out of Partition is a significant addition to the lean corpus of analytical studies on the Partition vis-à-vis the eastern border.
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Coming Out of Partition : Refugee Women of Bengal, Gargi Chakravartty, Bluejay Books, Rs. 295.
IT does not need elaborating that the emergence of the subcontinent from colonial rule and subsequent division into two entities were at a great human cost. There is a considerable corpus of books examining the Partition from different angles, political, historical, sociological, etc. But only recently, during the golden jubilee celebration of Indian Independence in fact, that attention was drawn to the "other" voice: the voice of the women who suffered greatly in the bloody aftermath. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin's Borders & Boundaries: Women in India's Partition revealed the shearing tales of women who lived through that traumatic phase in the western border. Then there was Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India focusing on the experiences of women who survived the convulsive division.
Unexplored space
But, even though the eastern front was divided too into West Bengal and East Pakistan, and even here large-scale displacement happened, the story of Bengali women remained unexplored, except perhaps in creative writing, particularly by women writers.
Gargi Chakravartty's Coming Out of Partition : Refugee Women of Bengal painstakingly chronicles those times through the eyes of Bengali women when the very fabric of the society was shaken with the impact of the birth pangs of the twin countries. What inspired the author to explore those dark recesses of memory and social history was her own longing to find her roots as she listened to the stories of Opar Bangla (the other side of Bengal) told by older members of her family who, like many others, were uprooted from their homeland. Living in the proximity of a refugee colony peopled with displaced families from the erstwhile East Pakistan also raised her curiosity to delve deeper because, "The stories of these women do not feature in any Partition account, which either narrates the political bifurcation of a nation state or documents incidences of sexual violence in the context of the Partition-related communal mayhem".
There is, however, an important distinction between the western and eastern fronts, as historian Tanika Sarkar points out in the Foreword to the book: "Unlike Punjab, Bengal did not experience a single, compressed moment of massive violence... Partition here was a very long term process. It is, in fact, difficult to put a definite closure on the process". This was also argued by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta in Voices of Women in Bengal Partition, as they tried to look at the continuous process from 1947 to as late as 1971, when the Bangladesh war led to a fresh exodus to Bengal
While trying to construct a picture of women in those times of upheaval, Chakravartty draws extensively from oral narratives and published material. But what is more important is that she goes beyond to examine the impact of the change on the status of Bengali women, as also the impact these women have had acting as catalysts for that change.
Chakravartty begins with the chapter "Abandoned Ancestral Home" to furnish a background of the exodus to the Indian side. However, many Bengalis thought that "it was a temporary affair. Hence, despite the violence, 1,33,00,000 Hindus initially stayed back in East Pakistan". But once it became a reality, these women from refugee colonies showed tremendous grit to cope and make a new beginning like Nita's character in Ritwik Ghatak's heart-rending film "Meghe Dhaka Tara". This was also the beginning of political activism among Bengali women though the seeds of Communism were sown earlier during the great Bengal famine in 1943 when 3.5 million people died of starvation and which had tremendous impact on the women as it "killed the ideas of social morality and promoted trading in immoral traffic".
The other story
The following chapter, "The Crossover", showcases the growing presence of women in the new social and cultural milieu of the state. As Chakravartty rightly says, "Crossing the border was not a simple stepping into West Bengal from East Bengal. The new migrants were faced suddenly with situations alien to their culture". To the outside world, this would seem somewhat puzzling since the language and general lifestyle of both the regions are perceived as the same but East Bengal's social ambience, food habits, even dialects were different from West Bengal. It also meant that more women joined the workforce struggling to make a living and that was "an end of andarmahal, the segregation of women from the outside world". The author importantly points out that while the gender dimension of Partition stories evokes images of violence, rape etc., there is also an "other story" — the silent metamorphosis of a woman's life. Sharing economic burden of the family was a "new phenomenon in the trajectory of women's search for identity in Bengal". Not that it was a smooth transition. Conservative values and the new realities often put the woman in an unenviable position but that there could also be an acceptance of the new reality was beautifully portrayed in Satyajit Ray's "Mahanagar".
Chakravartty also makes a vital point by adding a chapter on the Bengali Muslim women, their position in the Hindu majority India and their migration to East Pakistan which also made a difference to the society there, particularly by educated Muslim women.
Full of anecdotes, nuggets from oral history, as also official documents, Chakravartty's book sometimes seems burdened by repetitions while making a point, but it is a significant addition to the lean corpus of analytical studies on the Partition vis-à-vis the eastern border. And, the importance is not confined to gender studies alone but to social history of the country as a whole.
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