Post Partition Identity and Memory of the Enclave in Short Stories from the Two Bengals

Post Partition Identity and Memory of the Enclave in Short Stories from the Two Bengals

Mausumi Sen Bhattacharjee

Abstract

Whether in Bengal or Punjab, partition has been a raw wound that has never healed. Walter Benjamin’s comment in the historical context of the holocaust Germany and its texts, “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” is equally valid for the 1947 partition of India; its aftermath possibly lingers. This article aims to analyse how the partition of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and the post-partition event of pawning enclave land masses within the land, a nation within a nation is geopolitical the trope that is intricately connected to memory and, subsequently, both affect and effect an identity formation of the people subject to these events. I aim to explore by studying selected short stories about the “chitmahal or enclaves of the two Bengals that as memory is a live wire it only provokes, instigates, and generates “abjection,” and identity is perpetually in a state of being beckoned by uncertainty, anxiety, and a sustained sense of pain.