Sylhet
-Memories of a land divided 04 october 2013By Mridul Nandy
A historian
reflects on the challenges of reconstructing the lesser-known history of the
Sylhet Partition many decades after the event.
…
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.
A couple
of years later, I launched my second major research project on the topic. The
methodology was much the same, except that I had broadened the base of
respondents to include Sylheti Muslims as well. Again, my research assistant
and I looked within our respective communities in the early stages of our
fieldwork. My assistant dug deep into the histories of the Muslim population in
Barak Valley, while I focused on Sylheti Hindus settled in the both the Barak
and Brahmaputra valleys, and also in West Bengal and overseas. After the
publication of a short article in Economic and Political Weekly in 2008,
I received several emails from Sylhetis resettled around the world who shared
with me their nostalgia, their sense of loss, and their memories of Partition.
Some of them even sent me little-known booklets and pamphlets which they had
carefully preserved for years. My respondent base had begun to grow in
unexpected ways.
In this
phase of my research the objective was to re-imagine the popular mood in Sylhet
from just after the announcement of the Referendum in July 1947 till the actual
Partition on 14 August 1947 and immediately afterwards. It became necessary to
explore the differences in the way the Hindus and Muslims remembered those
times, and the reasons for these differences. At the conclusion of the
research, it emerged that although there were major differences in the two
communities’ hopes and expectations from the Referendum, in the ultimate
analysis they were equal victims of the Referendum and Partition. In the words
of one Muslim respondent, “Ganovote to hoilo manusher ichcha janar lagia,
kintu manushe to janlo na kene amrare agla kara hoilo. The Referendum was
organised to know what the people’s wish was, but the people never got to know
why they were separated.”
In this
history there were no winners, only losers; the Partition was a people’s
tragedy. Everyone, whether Hindu or Muslim, suffered and lost tremendously.
Many farmers who had voted to join East Pakistan were forced to stay back
because their lands had unexpectedly fallen on the Indian side of the border;
others who had voted to stay in India found themselves equally unexpectedly
located on the Pakistani side, and decided to leave. Fear, tension and rumours
filled the air, and created panic. Families were separated, land was divided
between brothers and relatives, jobs were lost, homes were abandoned and
countries were left behind. Neither community was emotionally, financially or
physically prepared to deal with the unexpected outcomes of Partition. While it
was widely hoped that the Referendum would lead to a considered, unanimous and
clear decision on which new country to join, the vivisection of Sylhet based on
religious composition and geography led to confusion, disappointment and
large-scale displacement for both Hindus and Muslims.
Was the
story of my family as happy and exceptional as Dutta seems to suggest in his
critique? In spite of his comparatively affluent socio-economic background and
British education, my father carried painful memories of loss throughout his
life, even though he was only ten years old in 1947. From this pain would
spring his thousand-and-one stories about the desher bari he had left as
a child, one fateful morning in August 1947. My greatest inheritance from him
was his nostalgia. Did my grandfather not grieve the loss of his home in
Sylhet, though he was successfully reinstated to his position in the civil
service by the Assam government as promised? I quote from an article my friend
Neeta Singh and I wrote in 2010:
Bidding
farewell to the land of his forefathers was perhaps the most painful and difficult
decision that he [my grandfather] had had to make in his entire life. But he
had little time for tears or goodbyes, as he drove his family from his
provincial posting to their ancestral home along the Sylhet-Shillong highway.
It was the last night that he would spend in the ancestral home that his
grandfather had so lovingly built some eighty-five years earlier.
Addressing the critique
Dutta
makes three arguments in his critique of my article. First, while referring to
my account of my grandfather’s experience of Partition, he writes that
“biographies can sometimes cloud larger community experiences, especially if
they build broad generalisations based on the details of, at most, a few
lives.” Second, he takes issue with my contention that the educated Sylhetis
did not suffer as much as their Punjabi or Bengali counterparts in the
re-settlement process. He recounts the unfortunate experiences of Sylheti
Partition migrants and argues that such accounts “run counter to the relatively
happy tale of the Dasgupta family, and strike at the root of Dasgupta’s
suggestion that educated Sylhetis were able to build decent lives for
themselves after Partition despite the loss of land and property.” Thirdly, he
suggests that in the Sylheti case the word ‘displacees’ may be more appropriate
than the term ‘diaspora’, which I used to refer to the resettled Sylheti
population.
First, the
article in question – co-authored with Neeta Singh – was a purely personal
piece, and not a research paper published in an academic journal. In the
introduction to the article, we clarified that we would explore the experiences
of the Partition diaspora through the histories of our own family members, who
were eyewitnesses to the region’s division. The entire piece was written in the
first person and accompanied by old photographs of Neeta’s father and my
grandfather, around whose lives the article was fashioned. It was not a record
of general history, but just a short account of these two persons’ experiences
against the larger backdrop of India’s Partition and how we related to it so
many years later. Almost at the start of the article I proposed that “my
grandfather had an easier time than many others [Sylhetis] in relocating his
family after 1947”. Far from presenting him as the archetype of the Sylheti
Partition migrant, I instead implied just the opposite. His testimony was
highlighted simply because the purpose of the article was to highlight our
respective family histories, on the eve of the Partition’s 65th anniversary.
Neeta and I also represented the Partition diaspora in Southeast Asia which,
like us, carried the pain of a lost homeland.
I also
stated explicitly in my article that,
during the
last ten years of documenting Sylheti eyewitness accounts of Partition and the
referendum, many Sylhetis told me that despite the promises, not all government
employees had been successfully reinstated in Assam. I met several Sylhetis
whose parents or relatives fought lengthy legal battles to regain their former
positions. However, for my grandfather, life took a more optimistic turn.
I don’t
deny that such traumatic events caused agony to those concerned, and agree with
Dutta that the Assam government perhaps did not have the intention of keeping
its promise to reinstate civil servants from Sylhet. I also highlight the
diverse Partition experience of the Sylhetis who were separated by several
socio-economic factors. But just as Dutta argues for the stories of the
sufferers, their hardship certainly does not diminish the significance of my
grandfather’s experience, which in fact adds to the same complexity of the
Sylheti experience that he refers to.
Second,
Dutta claims that I discount “…the violence and trauma experienced by Sylhetis
displaced from their ancestral homes”, quoting Meghna Guhathakurta to remind us
“that violence is not to be measured only by ‘external’ acts of murder, loot or
abduction; fear itself can be a physical and psychological violation.” Here,
Dutta surprisingly misses my comment in a 2001 paper, which he refers to in his
piece, where I wrote that the primary factor for out-migration among displaced
Sylhetis was a “psychological pressure, a fear of what could happen if they
stayed back, rather than what had actually happened or was happening to them at
that time.” I went on to note that “every new instance of violence against
Hindus elsewhere in India gave a push to fresh out-migration [from Sylhet] into
Assam.” Nowhere in my writings do I deny the psychological factors which led
many Sylhetis to flee. I suggest only that there were “no major instances of
physical violence or violent expulsions” in Sylhet, as compared to the
Partition experience elsewhere on India’s western border. In fact, he seems to
agree with one of my major points in the same 2001 paper that not all Sylhetis
were refugees because their lives had historically straddled both valleys of
Assam, and that though many of them lost their homes and properties in Sylhet,
the desher baari, their jobs and properties in Assam, the towner
baari, remained relatively untouched.
Finally,
Dutta suggests that I should have used the word ‘displacement’ and not
‘diaspora’ when referring to the Sylhet Partition migrants. The etymology of
the word ‘diaspora’ comes from the Jewish ‘dispersal’, most often due to persecution,
or the fear of the same. Diaspora is about dispersal, memory, belonging, and
home, while ‘displacement’ focuses on the event of dispersal. In its essence, a
diaspora is characterised by its sense of yearning for the homeland, and a
curious attachment to its traditions, religions and languages. V S Naipaul once
wrote that his grandfather, a labourer from the erstwhile United Provinces,
“carried his village with him” to Trinidad . Naipaul’s grandfather’s journey to
Trinidad “had been final”, but “a few reassuring relationships, a strip of
land, and he could satisfyingly recreate an eastern Uttar Pradesh village in
central Trinidad.” Salman Rushdie, in his novel Shame, adds that the
longing for the homeland is countered by the desire to belong to a new home, so
the migrant remains a creature of the edge, “the peripheral man”. These are
feelings and tensions all too familiar to those who left Sylhet after
Partition, and by that broader measure theirs is a diaspora and not a single
displacement.
After relocation to the valleys of Assam, and elsewhere in the world, the Sylhetis remain caught somewhere between reality, imagination and nostalgia. Contemporary Sylheti identity, writes Sukalpa Bhattacharjee, has been constructed through reclaiming ‘Sylhetiness’ via folk songs, popular culture, historical and social narratives. Hemanga Biswas, one of Sylhet’s best-known poets, freedom fighters and leftist intellectuals, expressed the lingering sorrow of Partition in his soulful poetry. Biswas had a great talent for incorporating patriotism into the many genres of East Bengali folk songs. “Aamar mon kande-re Padma-r chorer laigya. My heart cries for the islands on the river Padma,” he sings. “Aamar obhagya-r ontor kande-re pora desher laigya. My unlucky heart cries out for my poor country.”
Sylhet did
not have a Saadat Hasan Manto like the Punjab did, but in the works of Hemanga
Biswas, still popular among Sylhetis, the heartrending sadness of Partition is
put into simple, straightforward, everyday Sylheti language. Biswas focused on
intensely personal stories that sometimes diverged from historical narratives,
yet still managed to highlight the bigger picture. Community history and
personal narrative are not necessarily separate, and if there is such a gap in
Partition studies, it is in urgent need of exploration.
~ Mridul
Nandy ,Convenor of Sylheti Youth Welfare Association.
