by NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Every time I am in Kolkata for work, something very specific happens at dinner. My host takes me aside, wanting to tell me about their family home in pre-1947 East Bengal. Often that home is in Chittagong, Comilla, Sylhet or Faridpur district, but it can be many other places as well. They will invariably talk about what was left behind- a well-ordered, bucolic life. Sensing both longing and reproach in these encounters, I always hesitate in my response.
What story should I offer in exchange? Of my grandfather walking onstage at his school to receive the gold medal in Sanskrit, overhearing one teacher whisper, “Must be a mistake, it’s a Muslim boy!”
What would be the point of such a retelling anyway? Just as East Bengal (later East Pakistan and then Bangladesh) is frozen in my hosts’ memories as a lost home, my grandparents’ generation memorialized West Bengal through a list of grievances. In the Indian grand narrative, partition should never have happened, and grief and longing are embedded into their stories. On the Pakistan side, 1947 was cast as a successful secession, and the emphasis on grievances served a clear utility.
In the 1950s, when the borders were still fluid and needing to be crystallized, stories would be brought out to establish that in united India, “Muslims would never have been able to rise up.” In recent times I hear these stories less frequently, perhaps because of counterfactual elites like India’s Chief Justice Altamas Kabir (with roots in Faridpur district, also home to Bangladesh’s founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman), or because the daily reality, two partitions later, make it harder for origin fables to have emotive purchase.
For the post-1971 generation in Bangladesh, growing up in a country where Muslim Bengalis imposed majoritarian pressure on Hindu Bengalis, as well as on Jumma indigenous people in the hills, it becomes willful obstinacy to hold on to grievance narratives (although, every time an Ayodhya or Gujarat conflagration happens, old stories flare up).
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)