Reconstructing the Bengal Partition: The Psyche under a Different Violence

289 Pages·2011·7.616 MB·English

by  Jayanti Basu

RECONSTRUCTING
THE-BENGAL PART.ITION
The Psyche under a Different Violence
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Jayanti Basu
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Reconstructing the Bengal Partition:
The Psyche under a Different Violence
was first published in 2013 by SAMYA ,
an imprint of Bhatkal and Sen,
16 Southern Avenue, Kolkata 700 026.
© 2013 Jayanti Basu
ISBN 978-81-906760-9-0
Rs650.00
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any means
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Design by SAMYA and Krishna Gopal Das,
typesetting by Krishna Gopal Das,
74T Sultan Alam Road, Kolkata 700 033,
and printed at Bengal Phototype Co.
46/l Raja Rammohan Roy Sarani, Kolkata 700 009.
Published by Mandira Sen for SAMYA,
An imprint ofBhatkal and Sen,
16 Southern Avenue, Kolkata 700 026.
To my parents

Foreword
THE PROJECT
At long last! This is the second book t9 emerge after the first
one entitled Aftermath: An Oral History of Violence by Meenakshi
Verma in 2004 from the project that Ashis Nandy, then Director
of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi,
initiated in 1997 with limited funding from a number of sources
and then with larger support from the Ford Foundation. It was in
collaboration with a number of organizations and scholars,
including some from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The project was
to study the violence and uprooting that took place during the
partitioning of British India, mainly through interviews with the
victims, perpetrators and other witnesses who went through the
experiences of the events of 1946-48. Nandy believed that much
of the present,day dissensions and altercations between India
and Pakistan have resulted from the bloodshed and mass
dislocations of Partition. Further, that although reams have been
written about Partition from political, economic, sociological,
and othe'r viewpoints, there has not been any systematic
psychological study of how the trauma of the violence and
uprooting of Partition· has affected those involved.
In a broader perspective, this is not so unusual. The psycho,
logical effects of the Holocaust were not initially explored until
some twenty years later. The emotional effects of such trauma
are usually papered over with a wall of silence, while their legacy
lives on in current-day life. Nandy, himself, as a child witnessed
the violent riots of Calcutta, which left a lasting impression.
Foreword
V111
The project included interviewers, often social scientists, social
workers, psychologists, even journalists and others from India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh who interviewed over 2,000 persons,
not only victims but also perpetrators. Verma's book concentrates
on the western border. While occasional papers have been
published from those who participated in the project, no
comprehensive book especially on the ·Bengal border has emerged
until now. While some novels and films depict the violence of
Partition, to my knowledge the only psychological book published
on this subject prior to the project was by Urvashi Butalia from
interviews of women in the early 1990s of those who crossed the
Punjab border.1
The numbers affected by _Partition are over':"'helming. The
estimates of those who died range from a minimal number of
200,000 by the British to the official Indian government figure of
1,000,000. More recently, Ashis Nancly from his research puts
the figure as over 2,000,000, and Jayanti Basu cites a figure as
much as 3,500,000.2 Added to this are the refugees, or those
uprooted, with estimates by Ashis Nandy of 16,000,000 and
Jayanti Basu for as much as 18,000,000. This is by far the largest
refugee flow in world history. Moreover, most of these people
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs-who were uprooted had lived in their
areas for multiple generations.
Then there were the attacks on women to dishonour their
families and communal groups, a figure of 100,000 or more rapes
and some 30,000 women abducted from their families and taken
by the other side, whether Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh. 3
Compounding this trauma two years after Partition, the
governments of India and Pakistan decided this was unfair booty
and demanded they be returned to their original families. Many
already had children and all were considered dishonoured. At
one of the meetings of the project, a young Pakistani journalist
reported that he had gained access to an aunt who seemed highly
secretive about her background. He gradually learned that she had
been abducted by a Hindu family, married into it and had a child.
On her journey to Pakistan, the child died, and she was then married
Foreword
IX
to his uncle. All of this was kept completely secret over the years.
Partition has often been written about as genocide. Certainly
the numbers killed would seem to justify calling it genocide.
However, I question this. I see it as being uniquely different
from genocide. In the usual recorded major genocides of the
twentieth century-for example, the Turkish army killing
Armenians, the Holocaust where the Nazis tried to exterminate
Jews and Gypsies, Rwanda where the government encouraged
the Hutus to exterminate the Tutsis, and in Cambodia where
. the government tried to eliminate the educated classes-the
government played a central and decisive role, there was an
ideology that fuelled the killings, and there was no ambiguity
over the effort to eliminate one or another group.
In Partition, however, the Br.itish government did not try to
exterminate anyone. Nor did they have. any overarching ideology
that would fuel the violence and uprooting. Rather, their decisive
role before and after Partition was not to provide any protection
against the communal riots and assaults. If anything~ it was a sin
of omission, not comn1ission. In contrast to the British, the rulers
of the princely states of India immediately called out the troops
to quell any riots or attacks, thus preventing violence. They, in
contrast to the British, exercised proper, protective governmental
control. No wonder Jayanti Basu cites a number of sources as
seeing partition violence and uprooting as an enigma or a riddle.
An enigma compounded by the ambiguity that each group had
up to that time rather close relationships with the other, and
were often helped by some from the other group to safety.
I shouid briefly mention my own involvement in .the partition
project. Ii1 early 1999, I was invited by Ashis Nandy to join a
small group of interviewers in May in Kathmandu as an outside
commentator to discuss interviews with partition victims and
perpetrators. The meeting was held. in Nepal as at that time
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis could not get visas to India, and
Nandy wanted persons from all three countries to get involve&
I subsequently went to two other meetings in New Delhi in 2001
and 2003. I then reflected on my own psychoanalytic treatment
x Foreword
with a number of Indian patients both in India and in New York
to see if any were affected by Partition. I found that the family
dynamics of a Hindu man I had seen some years ago in long,
term psychoanalysis in New York could have been much better
understood, as well as how their trauma affected him, if I knew
about Partition then. In addition, before one of the meetings in
New Delhi, I had the unusual occasion to interview a Hindu
family twice in Long Island, New York, where the husbands as ·
boys were in a train massacre leaving Pakistan. One of the wives
who is a psychologist could recount how this trauma affected
the entire family in different ways over three generations. 4
THE BOOK
It is significant that this first book on the eastern border to emerge
from the project is written by a psychoanalyst, one who, herself,
comes from a family who· had to flee East Bengal. This cannot
simply be a neutral subject for Jayanti Basu. It is ·rather one she
must have struggled to understand for years, to penetrate the
silence of what was not said but emotionally communicated
within her family and by their relatives and friends amongst those
who fled from East Bengal. As a psychoanalyst she is eminently
suited to explore the effects of the emotional trauma both in her
family and those others who were refugees, as well as the effects
on herself.
Also as a psychoanalyst, she is extremely well suited to
undertake interviews of those who were dislocated from the towns
and lands of East Bengal to Kolkata. I should emphasize that the
hallmark of a psychoanalyst is that of a highly trained, sensitive
and astute listener. Similar to other psychoanalysts, she is adept
at drawing a person out, creating a safe space for a person to
·express thoughts and especially feelings that are not usually
communicated. She is sensitive to what is not said as well as
what is said, and can understand innuendos and all kinds of
defensive manoeuvres. She is particularly sensitive to emotions
and defenses against them, and to the play of the unconsdous.
Foreword
Xl
She also listens to herself and her own emotions as well as to the
person being interviewed as a further way of knowing the other.
Moreover, she is extremely sensitive and reflective on the nature
of memory, how it is affected by the age of the person and the
particular experiences he or she has undergone since Partition,
as well as by their personality. It is a truth about the nature of
the person, less so than on actual events. that happened. Thus,
she takes into account the particular self of each person and the
age at which he or she left East Bengal, as it affects their memory
of Partition, the trauma undergone, and how they dealt with it.
Thus, Jayanti Basu assesses the rich complexity of the human.
psyche in response to the trauma of Partition, and has as it were,
a postmodern sensibdity thaE<the memory of past events is to a
great extent psychologically determined. This study is therefore
a highly qualitative and contextual one. The validity of her
relatively small sample is bolstered by the depth of her
interviewing and her psychological understanding of each person.
$he is then able to delineate how these personal variations in
response to the .trauma of Partition can merge into a collective
self, and in so doing, she describes major aspects of Bengali
culture.
At the core of the book, Jayanti Basu makes a highly important
distinction between what she terms the 'soft violence' of Partition
in Bengal, where there were relatively few violent attacks and
killings, with the 'hard violence' of the Punjab where there were
multiple deaths. In soft violence there is the prolonged threat of
violence and a terrifying fear for one's life, with little if any sense
of personal control, resulting in people fleeing for their lives and
living with fear and insecurity within themselves for years.
Undoubtedly, there was· also soft violence in the Punjab as
evidenced by my Hindu patient whose family fled well before the
major violence. And a patient of a few years ago was also affected
by the reactions of her father and grandfather to the trauma of
Partition in Sind, although none in the family was affected by
actual violence. Their trying to maintain strict control over
themselves and their children· had surfaced as a major
Foreword
XU
problem in her own life when she tried to do the same. When I
related this to a friend, a social scientist, who fled as a child from
Austria just before the Holocaust began, she mentioned having
to maintain a similar tight control over herself and her children
years later as a reaction to the trauma of dislocation, which she
eventually dealt with in her own psychoanalysis.
There is another contrast between the soft and hard violence
of Bengal and the Punjab, respectively. One gets the impression ·
that those being interviewed in this book were able to ·speak
sporadically about their trauma and experiences over the years
although much emotionally has been silenced. Not so with most
of the interviewees in the project from the western part of India
and what is now Pakistan. Interview after interview started with
the person saying more than fifty years after Partition, 'This is
the first time I have ever spoken about this.' A dramatic example
of this came with the appearance at a meeting of the project in
New Delhi by Dr. Ravi Kapur, the late renowned psychiatrist.
He had refused to come to previous meetings but said he would
come to this one. The night before, he called that he would not
come, but then unexpectedly showed up. He would only speak
of his own experiences as a child: seeing the killing of Hindus in
Lahore by a Muslim mob as his family were leaving, then of the
train he was on refusing to stop to let on board Hindus fleeing
from Muslim attackers, of coming to New Delhi and witnessing
:a well,to,do Muslim man coming out of a bank in an upscale
·neighbourhood, who was then confronted by Hindu soldiers and
soon after bayoneted. He said he has never spoken about any of
this to anyone since he was a child, not even to his wife, a well,
known psychologist, nor to his two children. Thus, Jayanti Basu's
distinction of the reactions to the tralima of soft and hard violence
is a very important one. Her spelling out the nature of soft
violence with its repercussions is a major contribution.
This book not only presents extremely sensitively done
interviews but is also replete with references, endnotes and
scholarly comments, anchoring it theoretically in relevant
psychological traditions. It is in effect a very good balance between
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