by GARGA CHATTERJEE
In defence of the ‘West’
In the last few weeks, the state of the West Bengal underwent a dramatic process of being renamed. When a state goes through such a process, it evokes various hues of emotion: intense disappointment, anti-climax and, for folks like me, relief. For nations and national identities might be transient entities, entities that might be imagined, but what is real is the feeling of belonging – no amount of ontological information about how it came to be the way it is can take away that feeling. Meanings of life, community, love are built upon this feeling. Add to this a set of directly experienced or indirectly felt scenarios, held in common, and the result is communal memory. To dismiss this memory, however irrelevant it might be to some sectors of the present populace, is to deny a community a way of expressing its identity. It is to treat the present as if it were detached from the past.
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Supporters for renaming West Bengal as only Bengal have pointed out that the other great casualty-province of Partition, Punjab, has no direction affixed to it on either side of the border, but is simply called Punjab (state or province). What they overlook is that West Punjab and East Punjab did arise right after Partition in Pakistan and India respectively. The latter even carried itself into the formation of Patiala and East Punjab State’s Union (PEPSU). In certain unfortunate respects, the Punjabs are less amenable to crossborder engagements. First, the ‘cleansing’ of populations, in terms of the Muslim/non-Muslim divide, on either side of the international border is almost complete. West Punjab now has less than three percent non-Muslims; the figure in the other side is equally dismal, especially when one keeps in mind the very different pre-Partition demographic mix in these areas.
Second, with increasing proportions of the two Punjabi populations getting literate in Shahmukhi in the west and Gurmukhi in the east, their cultural productions are no longer mutually comprehensible in print. The Bengals, on the other hand, in spite of mass migrations (mostly from the East to the West), retain relatively large number of the ‘other’ community within their divisions, thereby restricting the process of ‘othering’. Unlike Punjab today, the two Bengals continue to have richer bonds of exchange and engagement, albeit not to the extent that a geographically continuous, politically united, cultural space would have allowed. Borders of the state do make their presence felt as borders in the mind.
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