Pavements change at midnight On my way home, houses within houses, feet within feet, heart within heart Nothing more. Shakti Chattopadhyay, translated by Nandini Gupta 1 As I jot down my thoughts, a particular moment from the past comes to mind. It was not exactly an event, just a few utterings, and happened back in 2005. I had gone to the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, for the first time. A friend had lent me his car to visit the locality where my parents once lived. I had heard so much about it from childhood. As the driver and I were meandering through the narrow lanes of Gandaria in old Dhaka, I told him, soliloquy-like: ‘Do you know, had the country not been partitioned, I would have grown up here?’ Out came his sharp response: ‘What?’ I said: ‘Partition’. ‘What is that?’ Baffled, I explained impatiently. He said: ‘Now that you tell me, it reminds me that my mother had said something similar. She used to say, at one time, these places would be teeming with Hindus. So, why did you all leave?’ Exasperated, I asked him whether he had heard of the war, the 1971 war. For the rest of the journey, his endless narration of the stories of the war he was brought up with accompanied our ride. He was a man in his mid-thirties. I realized that for the man on the street at least, the Bangladesh War had erased the Partition, or perhaps the Partition resides within the war. I Nations have their own ways of dealing with memories of trauma. For the newly independent India, an endeavour of silence seemed necessary for the project of the nation-state. After the initial disoriented years, the Partition of 1947 which accompanied independence was assigned to near oblivion in the public arena. From my childhood memories of the early sixties, it seems to me that the Independence Day celebration referred more to the new nation than the severed nation. Of course, it would be wrong to say that the Partition died out from popular memory. Communal flare-ups were above all sore reminders of an unresolved past – till, of course, they became the organized, calculated pogroms of contemporary India. In recent decades, the more the national narrative of stability, growth, and statist secularism has proved untenable, the more has been the interest in the Partition, taking it as, if not the originary point, then at least the dividing line of our national life, as if it holds the secret of much of our present misery. This is not to say that Partition became part of academic discourse only from the 1990s. Big fat tomes were regularly being churned out, probing into who was responsible, how it could have been avoided, the big actors, the big story, the big picture of the big nation. The scholarship that emerged in the 1990s started asking new kinds of questions, questions that came with new epistemological assignments in history writing, literary studies, and cultural anthropology: How did people undergo the experience of Partition – as groups, as families, as individuals? How did Partition become part of ourselves? What does it mean to suffer? What is it to witness? What does it mean to be violated and raped and 2 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbac036/7074491 by guest on 10 March 2023

then to have to live with those poisonous memories that cannot be shared even with very intimate relations? In short, the afterlife of pain and trauma. This scholarship paralleled, tied up with and at times drew intellectual sustenance from the emergence of a self-conscious emphasis on memory in history writing, developing out of a convergence of Holocaust discourse, the emergence of cultural studies, and new trends in philosophy loosely clubbed under the rubric of post-structuralism. Over the past three decades, this new scholarship on the Partition has grown in bulk as well as prestige, attracting some of the best writing in history, cultural studies, and cultural anthropology as well as other branches of social and human studies. 2 If history as a disciplinary project is an attempt to reduce a plurality of experience to sameness, the counter-posture of memory is to keep this plurality alive, to bring to life the small voices of history. Memory thus is framed as a counter to the unifying mode of history. Hence also the interest in oral histories, vernacular memories, counter-memories, all of which capture the fragmented, interiorized experience that the traditionally practised protocols of history writing miss out. While the Partition in Punjab in the west produced literary and academic accounts concentrating on violence, trauma and living with agony, the Partition literature of Bengal in the east began mostly as upper caste Hindu Bengali nostalgia about a lost land depicted as a pastoral idyll – the lush green meadows of rural East Bengal, a bucolic plenitude of food, rivers and other waterways, the vibrant blue sky of autumn, quotidian religiosity with each household having its family deity placed in a thakur dalan, the numerous religious rituals, bratakatha, the village fairs, doljatra, rashpurnima and such other joyous Hindu festivities. 3 Hindu Bengali sentimentality obscured the fact that upper caste Hindus behaved towards Bengali Muslim peasants and also Dalits in a manner no better than apartheid. A collective, popular recollection can unobtrusively become a national recollection. The numerous memoirs – written or oral – in recent times by Hindu refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan seem to have already adopted standard generic protocols: the villages of plenty where Hindus and Muslims lived harmoniously; the sudden eruption of the Partition due to the connivance of the British rulers along with some misguided and opportunist leaders; the enormous hardship and bravery in the initial decades of resettlement, aiding, paradoxically, the formation of a new solidarity among the refugees; and, finally, the gradual upward journey on the economic and social curve. 4 Palpably biased, this version narrates only a part of the story of Bengal’s Partition. For Bengali Muslims, the Partition of 1947 was half the victory. The other half would be enacted in East Pakistan and result in the liberation of Bangladesh from the clutches of West Pakistan in 1971. The struggle for self-esteem of the Bengali Muslims could not stop merely with ceasing to be part of united India, but continued till the Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis were ousted from the land. 1947 and 1971 are part of the same conjoined processes of the historical search for self-esteem. 3 The Volatile Seventies Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbac036/7074491 by guest on 10 March 2023

come). I was eager to see Shankhari Bazar and its labyrinthine lanes. I stood at the entrance of one of those lanes and looked, perhaps with eyes that had consumed too many stories from ancestors. Suddenly I noticed an old man staring at me. He was wrapped in a white than (or dhoti), with a long, neat marking of white sandalwood on his forehead. He said nothing, but, step-by-step, came closer. When he was about twenty feet away, he said in a hushed voice of disapproval: ‘Amagore dekhoner kichunai. Bipadey porshen buijha nijer ma-re chaira palaiya gyachen. Jadi dekhoner hoi, nijego dekhen’. (There’s nothing to see in us. Knowing that we were in peril, you left your own mother and ran away. If there is anyone to look at, look at yourself). He maintained that mortifying gaze. I left the place. X Does the memory of a past land, a mode of living that once was real, ever die? Doesn’t it get embedded in the body tissues? On the way to the home of my school friend, Chitra – a girl I had a thing about – there used to be a narrow bamboo bridge over a small rivulet. The bridge dipped every time anyone passed over it; it dipped so far, it touched the water. As a result, it was permanently wet. I enjoyed crossing it. The cool sensation on my feet seemed the right finale for all the throbbing and squeezing of my heart I felt as I went past her house. The bamboo structure has long been replaced by a proper concrete bridge. After ages, the other day I took that lane again and crossed the bridge. Strangely, I could feel the wet sensation in my feet once again. Blood dries – yet leaves a wet feel- ing behind. Charu Majumdar, who issued the Naxals’ clarion call for armed class struggle, was not simply an icon but gave his name to a generation of turbulent, restless youth of the late 1960s and early 70s. His advocacy of the annihilation of class enemies and the functionaries of the state ultimately took the form of the killing of ill-paid traffic police and perhaps a score or so of large farmers and jotedars (wealthy peasants). But the rampant violence it unleashed was exploited to the hilt by the very state apparatus it was targetting and its sponsored goons, the so-called ‘young turks’ of the Youth Congress, making Calcutta’s streets and Bengal’s politics bloody. That trend still continues. No one can question the integrity of Comrade Majumdar, but in retrospect it seems his longing for revolution turned the state more venomous, made politics more violent, and took away the lives of many gullible young dreamers. What took root instead in and around the city in coming decades was an aestheticized revolutionary persona, a nokshu-nokshu image, to use the rather mocking term used of city-bred, middle- class Naxalites. The real thing disappeared, but the affectation remained and was perfect for consuming gallons of tea in the college or university canteens; it was an advantage too, needless to say, in the arena of romance. But for those of us who spent their late teens and early twenties in the early 1970s, that wasted, crumpled, scrawny part of life now looks like our fortune coin. Looking back, I wonder whether the 1970s youth uprising had something more to it, a kind of geological explosion. Otherwise, why did it find expression in every 25 The Volatile Seventies Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbac036/7074491 by guest on 10 March 2023

part of the globe, albeit in different forms? In Australia, it was time to cast asunder the long-held colonial cloak and turn to indigenous histories, to local flora and fauna; in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Berkeley and New York, it took the form of celebrating sexuality in all its splendour and also fighting for change in gender roles; while in Africa and large parts of the colonized world, people engaged full- swing in decolonizing movements. For Bangladesh, it was time to announce independence from its Pakistani rulers and the sovereignty of the Bengali Muslim self, a process that started with the Partition of Bengal in 1947. In the western part of Bengal, we dreamt of armed peasant insurgency drawing on the borrowed philosophy of Chinese Maoism. We all were fighting our past, right, left and centre. Action first, philosophy to follow. In retrospect, I wonder whether one common underlying theme to these various forms of protest could be the liberation of our erotic lives from the shackles of tradition, reminding ourselves never to forget that the middle of the road was a very dead end. Sunil Gangopadhyay in a prose poem imagines caressing the naked breasts of the goddess Saraswati, hugging her, kissing her, a trope that would recur at several places in his work. The goddess of learning, music and poesy is also endowed with a marvellously shaped body. All these attributes together have worked magic for the Bengali, nay Indian, male imagination. Today such gestures will no doubt invite the fatwa of the Hindutva brigade, but in our times such poems were the staple of our youth, characterizing, one may like to say, a certain kind of bhadralok Hinduism gone valiant. 11 Back in 2002, in my autobiographical essay ‘Growing Up Refugee’, I observed: ‘So often in our high school days, we had gushed out in a team ignoring the scornful looks of older teachers, shouting in unison slogans of gigantic simplicity: ‘Amar naam, tomar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam’ (My name, your name, Vietnam, Vietnam). I didn’t exactly know where Vietnam was on the map. It didn’t matter, for Vietnam was everywhere, a libidinal expanse, a name-place where blood flowed to announce the death of a world order.’ 12 Looking back, it seems that it is this ‘libidinal expanse’ which brought the different uprisings of that period together, made us look for new ways of relating to the self, strive for new cartographies, sing songs, march in processions demanding new modes of belonging, a new communion with fellow humans and with nature. I dream of witnessing a procession of young men and women passing by, singing Joan Baez’s immortal, metonymic song: ‘How long since I’ve spent a whole night in a twin bed with a stranger/ His warm arms all around me?’ 13 Let the 1970s come back again! Let us be talking of adequate procurement prices for peasants and equal citizenship rights for LGBTQ members of society in the same breath. Let revolutionaries be convinced that repression is the soul of reaction. This is particularly true in our era of neo- liberal rights. I am a rag-picker of the past, a collagist in a world of waste::: This essay is dedicated to my college friend, Ranajay Gupta, who fell to COVID-19 in the summer of 2020, unsung and virtually unnursed. 26 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbac036/7074491 by guest on 10 March 2023

Manas Ray is a Professor at the School of Liberal Studies, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES), Dehradun. Formerly, he was a Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). As the coordinator of the Cultural Studies Workshop hosted by the CSSSC for the largest part of its life of twenty years, he has played a key role in the spread and dissemination of cultural studies in India and the global South. His earlier memoir published in History Workshop Journal, ‘Growing Up Refugee’, has been widely cited and republished. Among his recent publications are two edited books on contemporary Indian democracy published towards the end of 2021: Crisis of Liberal Deliberation: Facets of Indian Democracy and State of Democracy in India: Essays on Life and Politics in Contemporary Times. NOTES AND REFERENCES I thank Bijoy Chowdhury for taking time out to take photographs of Presidency College (now Presidency University), Hindu Hostel and College Street Coffee House at my request. I am grateful to Mousumi Mandal, my former student and now a faculty member of Presidency University, for securing the necessary permissions to photograph university premises. Thanks are due to Abhijit Bhattacharya, Documentation Officer, and his colleague Gopal Adak of Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) for permitting me to use selected digital images of 1970s Calcutta for this essay. I also thank the Chitrabani Society, the custodian of print copies. Names of specific photographers have been mentioned in the text. I thank Nandini Gupta for allowing me to reproduce her translation of a poem by Shakti Chattopadhyay. Warm greetings are extended to Andrew Whitehead and Kate Hodgkin of HWJ for their meticulous editing. Acknowledgements are due to Regina Ganter and Shawkat Hossain for suggesting revisions and my former student A. Al-Mamun for providing useful reading materials for future research. I am grateful to Ian Hunter, Pratha Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, Joyeeta Banerjee, Jawhar Sircar, Animesh Ray, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Samik Banerjee, Kirsty Gunn, Sumanta Banerjee, Sangbida Lahiri, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Debjani Sengupta, Debjani Mazumdar, Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, Richa Gupta, and Meher Ali for their gracious comments. 1 ‘No time for cheer, not a happy time this’ (Se baRo shukher samay noi, se baRo anander samay noi), a poem by Shakti Chattopadhyay translated by Nandini Gupta. The translation first appeared in Parabas webzine (https://www.parabaas.com/shakti/articles/shakti_notimeforcheer.shtml, accessed 25 March 2021). The original Bangla poem was included in Sonar maachhi khun korechhi published in 1967. 2 To cite a few: Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Delhi, 1998; Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Oakland, CA, 2006; Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, Cambridge and Delhi, 2001; Nonica Dutta, Violence, Martyrdom and Partition in India, Delhi, 2012; Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York 2007; Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, Cambridge and Delhi, 2007. 3 Thakur dalan is a public courtyard where traditionally the idols are placed on a platform. Bratakatha are the stories of the lives of various Hindu gods and goddesses, read out by the women of the house. Doljatra, also known as Holi, is a major festival of eastern India. Rashpurnima is a festive, and somewhat erotically charged, game enjoyed by devotees of Krishna on a full moon autumn night. 4 The experience of East Bengal / Pakistan refugees in the Indian state of West Bengal is reflected in what is in essence a companion piece of this article, Manas Ray, ‘Growing Up Refugee’, History Workshop Journal 53, 2002, pp.149–179. 5 The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) later split into several feuding Naxalite groups. It was separate from and contemptuous of India’s two constitutional Communist parties, the Communist Party of India or CPI and the larger Communist Party of India (Marxist) also known as the CPI(M) or CPM. This latter party was the dominant political force in West Bengal from 1977 to 2011, heading the Left Front state government. 6 Kaka is the family name for an uncle and kakima for auntie. 7 Marwaris are a trading community with their roots in the Indian state of Rajasthan. 8 Raghab Bandyopadhyay, Journal 70, Kolkata, 2000, pp. 50–51. 27 The Volatile Seventies Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbac036/7074491 by guest on 10 March 2023

9 This is the ninth day of Durga Puja, Hindu Bengali’s main religio-cultural festivity. Mythology has it that on the ninth night, goddess Durga slays the demon-king, Asura. In reality, Asura is a tribe of eastern India. On Nabami, the Asura people observe complete blackout as a sign of mourning for their heroic king. 10 Here is Jawhar Sircar recounting those days of violence in the autumn of 1971: ‘We had no idea that S.S. Ray’s government [in West Bengal] had decided to use some army regiments to assist civil police in “exterminating the Naxalite menace”. As General J. F. R. Jacob of the Eastern Command confessed later on, sections of the army joined hands with the local police to hunt down Naxalites – in what was branded Operation Steeple Chase. In Kolkata, the extremists were cornered and holed up in their last “red bastions” like Baranagar and Chanditala. The commandos and armed police cordoned off entire areas with the help of anti-socials, many of whom would become Congress leaders later on. The extremists were then shot in cold blood, often tied to lampposts, or at their very own doorsteps. Some were arrested and taken in police vans and many never seen ever again.’ Jawhar Sircar, ‘In a Calcutta Gripped With Naxal Violence and Police Brutality, People Lost Sons, Brothers and Friends’, The Wire, 11 March 2021, https://thewire.in/history/calcutta-naxal-violence-police-bru tality-1971, accessed 23 March 2021. 11 Gangopadhyay’s poem, it’s interesting to note, did not cause much consternation in the wider reading public, and what controversy there was soon died out. It may be noted that in the muntra chanted during the Devi’s worship, the words used to celebrate her beauty include ‘Kuchajugashovita Mukhtahare’ (the two breasts adorned in pearl necklace. Acknowledgement: Biswajit Chatterjee). Bhadralok are Bengal’s literate elite, mostly bilingual (Bengali and English) and having roots in landholding during the Raj. It is a capacious social group that ranges from ordinary pen-pushers to top professionals and intellectuals. 12 Ray, ‘Growing Up Refugee’, pp. 169–70. 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzxjjJYWmrs.