স্বাধীনতার অন্য মুখ ঃ বাংলা কবিতা ও গানে দেশভাগ

ভারতের জাতীয়তাবাদী ইতিহাসচর্চায় স্বাধীনতা একটি মহান ও পবিত্র বিজয়ফলক হিসাবে স্বীকৃত। জাতীয়তাবাদী আন্দোলন তার কাঙ্ক্ষিত পরিণতি লাভ করে স্বাধীনতা অর্জনের মধ্য দিয়ে। আরও সুস্পষ্ট রূপে বললে একটি জাতিরাষ্ট্র প্রতিষ্ঠার মধ্য দিয়ে। সেই স্বাধীনতা অর্জনের জন্য জাতীয়তাবাদী নেতৃবর্গ দেশভাগের সিদ্ধান্ত মেনে নিতেও পিছপা হননি। জাতীয়তাবাদী ইতিহাসের প্রকল্পে দেশভাগ ও তদ্‌জ্জনিত দুর্ভোগ ছিল নেহাৎই একটি মহান লক্ষ্য পূরণের জন্য কিছু মানুষের সামান্য আত্মত্যাগ। স্বাভাবিকভাবেই দেশভাগ বহু বছর ভারতের ইতিহাস চর্চায় উপেক্ষিত থেকে যায়। স্বাধীনতা উদ্‌যাপনের আনন্দোৎসবে ঢাকা পড়ে যায় দেশভাগের ফলে উৎখাত হওয়া মানুষের স্বজন ও স্বদেশ হারানোর হাহাকার। বিগত সহস্রাব্দের শেষ দশক থেকে দেশভাগের অভিজ্ঞতা নিয়ে এক নতুন ধরনের ইতিহাসচর্চা শুরু হয় মূলতঃ উত্তরভারতে, বিশেষ করে পাঞ্জাবে। এর রেশ এসে পড়ে পশ্চিমবঙ্গেও। সম্প্রতিকালে পশ্চিমবঙ্গে দেশভাগ নিয়ে ব্যাপক গবেষণা ও আলোচনা হচ্ছে। এর অনেকটাই স্মৃতিনির্ভর। এই ধরণের ইতিহাসচর্চার মধ্য দিয়ে স্মৃতি, সাহিত্য ও ইতিহাসের লক্ষ্মণরেখা ক্রমশঃ লুপ্ত হয়ে যাচ্ছে, যা বিশেষভাবে লক্ষ্যনীয়। ইতিহাসের এই পদ্ধতিগত অভিযোজন নিয়ে যে বিতর্ক আছে তার মধ্যে না গিয়ে এই প্রবন্ধে তুলে ধরার চেষ্টা করব স্বাধীনতা ও দেশভাগের সমসায়িক বাংলার সৃষ্টিশীল মানুষরা কি ভাবে দেশভাগকে দেখেছিলেন। বাংলা কবিতা ও গানে তার প্রতিফলন কেমন হয়েছিল।

Marichjhapi – Uncovering the Veil of Silence

(Continued from Part 1 : The Silence of Marichjhapi)

Thus a population of approximately 30,000 settled in Marichjhapi and carried on their business, trade and occupation unaided by Government and solely relying on their enterprising skills to sustain themselves. They gave themselves food, clothes, shelter, education, health and other cultural and recreational pursuits ever since April 1978. It was said that they built up smithies for production of agricultural implements, pottery manufacturing units for household units, handlooms for weaving cloth, making of mats from indigenous fibre plants, centres for building of country boats, biri manufacturing, bakeries, manufacture of sweetmeats and condiments, handicrafts for manufacture of bamboo baskets and carpenters woodcrafts, fisheries and bheries, kitchen garden’s etc. They built two local marts (bazaars), schools employing local teachers and a private hospital; four dispensaries were also set up. Manufacturing fishing nets was a regular occupation. In this way, a sizeable population of thirty thousand attempted to rehabilitate themselves by setting up a home away from home. Indeed, Marichjhapi could have perhaps served as an ideal model for refugee rehabilitation in the ages to come.

The Waiting Rooms of History

Do you remember, Kolkata
That green passport, my dark green shirt;
Arriving, drenched, at Sealdah Main
That day on the train from the border
I saw a shoeshine boy for the first time in my life.
It was a thrill, my dream city,
My first tram-car, my earliest first-class,

Partition Experiences of the East Bengali Refugee Women

Women’s experience of the Partition is marked by large scale rape, abduction and forced marriage. It has received special attention of several scholars over the last few years, particularly since the 1990s. They have tried to understand the women’s experience of the Partition in terms of gender and patriarchy. Patriarchy constructs women in a peculiar way—her respectability is confirmed to the degree to which she is able to retain her sexual purity, her sexuality is a threat to her; her body is not her own, and it is not only the question of her own honour, but also that of her family and community. She is the repository of her community’s honour. Therefore, in a situation of conflict rape becomes a symbolic form of dishonouring the community. And it was so at the time of Partition too. It is interesting that both the rival communities shared the same patriarchal conception of rape. The honour paradigm of the rape culture was no less harmful to the women than the actual physical violence. Rapes were accompanied with large scale abduction and forced marriage. It was on the bodies of women that the new national border was marked out; the edifices of the two nation states in South Asia were constructed.

In 1993, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Urbashi Butalia and Karuna Channa initiated a new kind of research on Partition experience from the perspective of gender. Their focus was primarily on the sufferings of the Punjabi women in the aftermath of Partition.¹ Later Urbashi Butalia rightly pointed out a serious gap in the historiography of Partition – the omission of the experiences in Bengal and East Pakistan (Bangladesh), which, in her opinion, required detailed attention in their own right.² Thereafter, initiatives were taken to reconstruct the Partition experience of the Bengali women, particularly the Bengali Hindu women.³

The Silence of Marichjhapi

“Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go”

—Allen Ginsberg (September on Jessore Road)

Transnational migration is experienced as a double loss — of origin and of reality; a ‘hyperreality’, as it were.  The representation of identity is, therefore, an ongoing process because immigrant identities are continually being transformed by the journey, their subjectivities being recomposed in ‘different practices and sites of experience’. Thus ‘home’ itself may be experienced in movement and has come to be conceptualized in fluid terms. The immigrants’ experience of the present is coloured with a persistent desire for return, a sense of deep nostalgia for their homeland.[1] Therefore, when thirty thousand migrants from Dandakaranya reached the small island of Marichjhapi to the south of Kumirmari of Sundarbans in April 1978, their primary desire was to settle down to conceptualize carefully what could be called ‘home’ in an altered reality.  The otherwise self-sufficient community life that took birth without the cooperation of the midwife named State could not, however, survive the rage of the establishment post 1979. It was then that Marichjhapi was successfully annihilated; silenced beyond a murmur.  This piece of semi-academic work shall try its best to document that voice of Marichjhapi before the silence. Marichjhapi, unfortunately has not been as well documented as Nandigram or if we look beyond national boundary, the Nazi Holocaust. However in recent times, owing to the persistent efforts of a fraction of the academia and intelligentsia like Ross Mallick, Annu Jalais, Tushar Bhattacharjee, Mahasweta Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Jagadish Chandra Mandal, Marichjhapi has received a voice. Needless to say I have heavily relied on the available materials and documents to ponder why Marichjhapi Massacre happened and why Marichjhapi is still shrouded in silence.