Politics of Memory: Reclaiming 'Out-of-Date' East Pakistan

Economic & Political Weekly
August 2, 2014

Politics of Memory: Reclaiming ‘Out-of-Date’ East Pakistan
BYLINE: Rita Manchanda
LENGTH: 3371 words

Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia by Ananya Jahanara Kabir (New Delhi: Women Unlim-ited) 2013; pp 216, Rs 400.

Rita Manchanda (ritamanchanda2003@yahoo.co.in) works on a rights-based analysis of confl icts and peace-building with special attention to the role of women.

Forty long years after the 1971 Liberation War, the secession of East Pakistan and its recasting as Bangladesh, the rul-ing Awami League initiated a war crimes tribunal that unleashed a fury of sociopolitical contestations. It brought back banished memories of not only the civil war between West and East Pakistan, but multiple conflict lines between Is-lamicist collaborators and Bengali nationalists, the India and Pakistan war, and ethnic confrontation between Biharis and Bengalis. In the now disappeared space of East Pakistan, there were constituencies which were invested in that first stage of the Bengal delta’s state formation process ideologically driven by theological nationalism. From 1947 to 1971, densely textured interconnections (personal, institutional and pedagogic) had developed between the western and east-ern wings of Pakistan as well as discomfiting and traumatic experiences. Post-1971, a mix of psychological trauma and the political imperative of national belonging made for a loss of those attachments and memories in that second stage of the state’s formation mobilised this time by Bengal’s ethnocultural nationalism. It in turn, spurred Pakistan’s reimag-ining as a “state of Islam”.

In the new national narrative, discordant forces left over from the lived coexistence of nearly 20 years were excluded (the Biharis) or marginalised and ideologically rejected (the Islamicists), and the memory of east-west linkages air-brushed away. But four decades after the “Liberation War”, the war crimes tribunal catalysed widening circles of pop-ular agitations, exposing the persistence of deep layers of unreconciled groups and competing ideologies. For the now thrice removed post-Partition generation, it jolted back to memory the entanglement of East Pakistan with Bangladesh. It prised open 1971 which has been memorialised as a sealed moment and paved the way for the re-entry of 1947 Par-tition as the processual link to 1971.

Post-Amnesia Excavation
In a more creative “non narrative” engagement with the significance of East Pakistan in south Asia, Ananya Jahanara Kabir excavates the politics of memory and the poetics of place to reconcile within a single frame the historical rup-tures of 1947 and 1971, re-entangling the determinedly disentangled memory of East Pakistan from Bangladesh. She innovatively demonstrates that the Partition of India and the Bangladesh Liberation War remain profoundly intercon-nected in the collective imaginary of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Her study is an ambitious and imaginative ex-cavation of the complex layering of national belonging deriving from premodern ecological and cultural histories of south Asia, of pained estrangement from the common home and the affective longing of the contemporary post-Partition subject.

In the cultural products examined, the book goes beyond a reading of the narrative elements structured around the temporal cause and effect logic and dwells upon their “lyric” and cultural elements to retrieve places “lost” to the post-1947 and 1971 generations. Ananya teases out the affective reconnection of memory, persons and lost spaces, consciously forgotten by the post-Partition generations of her “grandfathers” and “parents”, which now returns to nos-talgically haunt the present generation of cultural producers and intellectuals in south Asia, who are “homesick for a place we never had”. For her generation, the burden of post-amnesia excavation demands connecting the dots in the space between two amnesias, national and familial.

The author places her own subjectivity and personal influences at the centre of this scholarly task arguing that there is no Archimedian position from which to leverage a discussion on Partition. More importantly, such a perspective ena-bles her to depart from a fixation on religion as the main axis of post-Partition self-fashioning to foreground instead “modernity” as an analytical category through which to explicate religion’s affective and political persistence. In this, she takes her cue from diverse cultural producers of south Asia’s post-memorial generation whose creative thinking tends to displace religion as an axis of identity formation. Driving this romance with excavating memory for “out-of-date” spaces, times and lives of others are political and affective impulses. As Ananya reiterates,

“Even as forgetting was important for the post-1947 and 1971 generation, remembering is important for the current generation of intellectuals to move beyond divisive memory politics as well as national and sub-continental boundaries (p 27).”

Away from Indo-Centric Axis
The redefining of the post-Partition subject transcending borders and boundaries has been the motive force driving the remarkable renaissance in partition studies sparked by the 50th and 60th partition anniversaries. What makes Anan-ya’s work singular is the shift away from the conventional Indo-centric axis to recuperating East Pakistan as the emo-tional centre of partition’s post-amnesias. Also she decentres the obsession with “nation” to bring into the frame local places of belonging – province, city, village and archaeological sites as dialogic sites for post-Partition memory. The author stakes claim to the study being the first comparative examination of memory politics in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is one south Asian study in which the imaginative engagement with India is minimal. It may be re-lated to the occlusion of the Muslim Bengali in the post-Partition sociocultural space of West Bengal, a marginalisation that Ananya, a West Bengali Muslim compensates as her imagination is fired by the lives of uncles and aunts dispersed across south Asian borders.

The author distinguishes her work from what she magisterially decries as the increasingly “predictable” trend in partition studies because of the over-reliance on the narrative form of memory (oral histories rather than songs) and unidirec-tional perspectives that predictably are at odds with the standard nationalist assumptions of our security states. Cer-tainly, Ananya’s book is not predictable and there is an exciting freshness of discovery both in material and methodol-ogy as she explores what visual art, music and craft, the focus on a relic, non-narrative elements in film or literature and the vernacular language of longing expressed in food, accents and smells have to tell us about partition’s amnesias and post-amnesias. She subtly unpacks the complex textures of the works of cultural producers and public intellectuals who strive to create spaces of dialogue across conflicted identities by imaginatively invoking shared cultural and natu-ral resources.

Partition created a mindset that rationalised multiple alienations – the division of families and cultures, the self and the world. To forge a viable present, the new nation required forgetting and remembering but the “fugitive self” and the fragmented world seeped back through the sensorium or as poignantly expressed in the words of Qurratulain Hyder in The Exiles,

“a conviction born of that love that some even call treason. This treason or treachery is nothing more but a longing for the scent of jasmine blossoms (p 116).”

Ananya’s close textual reading of the work of cultural producers reveals that while the post-partition memorial terrain is the space were collective hegemonic fantasies get played out, they can also enable reparation within and between na-tions and between generations. Belonging is narrated as contingent longing is pressed out as the emotion that will not go away.

‘Phantom Map’
Ananya’s excavations are structured around four segments which have as book ends, the author’s own participation in memory work as one of the contemporary post-Partition generation of cultural producers and public intellectuals. She puzzles over her own subjectivity as she puts to a “close reading” the family archives – oral histories, photo albums and memoirs – which assemble a dispersed family and partition’s repercussions. Significance and meaning is transmitted through social media. It is an experiment that opens up emotive and intellectual possibilities, but the lovingly tracked will-o’-wisps of memory trails (through the snatches of a Dean Martin song invoked through an entry in Facebook or the mention of the lost film of an aunt on the historic East Pakistan Mainamati archaeological digs) fails to yield the emotional charge of “longing” and an alternative way of rethinking the partitioned self. For that we have to turn to the author’s teasing out of memory and affective relationships in “Phantom Map” and “Terracotta Memories”.

These two chapters contour the space of East Pakistan of 1947-71 and juxtapose two generations of cultural producers – one, contemporary and the other, the generation of their grandfathers – bringing together that which post-amnesia tries to retrieve and articulating that which initially has to be forgotten. “Phantom Map” focuses on the literary oeuvres of three authors of Ananya’s generation of post-amnesia transnational south Asians who did not directly experience parti-tion – “nothing to do with my life” as Huma Mulji, a Pakistani visual artist is quoted as saying – but as Ananya reveals, all are profoundly affected by it. Reading against the grain of the narrative logic of the novels of Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh), Kamla Shamsie (Pakistan) and Siddharth Deb (India), she retrieves the texture of longing that seeps through for “places, times and lives other than our own” forgotten for reasons of psychological trauma and for fear of betraying the nation state (p 27).

Anam’s A Golden Age invokes the cartographic conundrum of “East Pakistan” a page dropped out of an atlas (as ob-served by writer Amitav Ghosh) and juxtaposes depiction against description of two maps, positing a competitive and ideological relationship reflective of partition’s trauma. There is the paratextual inclusion of a visually bold pre-1971 East Pakistan map denoting the return of the protagonist’s children from West to East Pakistan. Its counterpoint is the description of the map of Bangladesh a country just emerging, its contours doubly mediated. In a narrative focused on the family’s involvement in the liberation war, Ananya puzzles over the need of the novelist to bring in an event (the children’s return) that much precedes the narrative action. What drives Anam to dredge up occluded facts in her en-gagement with the phantom map particularly as her novel re-inscribes a conventional narrative of the origin of the Bangladesh nation? Is that affected longing for an “out-of-date place”, echoed in Rehana’s forbidden liaison with the major and the subliminal possibility of what could have been but tragically must not be.

It is the cinematic journey of Tareque and Catherine Masud which most evocatively encapsulates the politics of memory and the poetics of place. Nostalgia seeps through the complexity of layered belonging and the conflicting at-tachments of a generation that saluted the Pakistan flag, participated as a mukti joddha in dissolving East Pakistan and established Bangladesh. As Ananya indicates the movement is from the celebratory in mukti gain to the contradic-tions of Noroshunder (The Barber Shop). Noroshunder brings back into the national narrative the excluded Bihari sub-jectivity. The redemptive portrayal of the Bihari barber who saves the mukti joddha overturns national stereotypes. But Ananya’s fine scalpel penetrates below the narrative logic of a desirable Bihari-Bengali reconciliation and draws attention to the film-makers loving and detailed recreation of the sights, sounds and memories of that lost time and space mobilised by details such as snatches of Urdu ghazals, newspapers, accents, and radio broadcasts.

“What drives this nostalgic re-creation is the attempted reconciliation of the post-1971 self with East Pakistan so that memory itself might essay a return, suggests Ananya (p 51).”
Masud’s generation is implicated in the contradictory process of opting in (Pakistan) and opting out (Bangladesh).

In Kamla Shamise’s Kartography, Ananya’s imagination is fired by the multiple intergenerational confrontation around 1971 within the novel and the wider dialogue between fictional characters and a cultural producer who represents the post-memorial generation. For both Pakistan and Bangladesh, the experience of collective violence led to amnesia and Shamsie and Anam are driven to excavate the connections with East Pakistan. The Indian novel in the triptych Sid-dharth Deb’s Point of No Return turns on partition’s repercussions in the north-east region tenuously linked to India the successor state through the chicken’s neck and organically to East Pakistan for which it is the natural hinterland for Bengali migration. Ananya’s close reading of Deb’s novel (and Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss) fails to evoke the rich-ness of emotional texture of her engagement with the work of cultural producers in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

‘Terracotta Memories’
It is in “Terracotta Memories” that Ananya’s romantic imagination takes flight as she puzzles together the significance invested in the terracotta object by key artists and cultural institution-builders who were young adults in the early dec-ades after partition. National belonging made contingent forgetting the immediate past as manifest in multiple aliena-tions from pre-partition attachments. But they found their way back in their discursive relationship with the terracotta object. Ananya excavates their modes of psychic compensation for partition’s losses (p 85). The terracotta object, and clay in general enabled artists and public intellectuals working across the post-Partition terrain to perform a return to the soil through the invocation of “folk”; simultaneously, the pedagogic engagement between “ancient” and new inspired by the terracotta object connected the past and the post-independence present. Forging a viable present meant recu-perating an ancient tradition of the “deep” nation brought to the surface by the labours of archaeologists deployed for modern nation-building.

The search was for a narrative of origins beyond Islam that would additionally unite the east and western wings. Ananya’s study blazes a fresh trail in recuperating the non-Islamic aspects of culture uniting Pakistan’s east and west, and the ancient and the modern, through her excavation of the work of two Pakistani citizens from East Pakistan de-ployed by the Pakistan government to set up a national humanities infrastructure in Peshawar. This routine inter-wing transfer of civil servants in the 1950s and 1960s points to the long and deep connection to East Pakistan elided in most socio-historical narratives. Ahmed Hasan Dani, the archaeologist came to Peshawar to set up the Department of Ar-chaeology, and Zainul Abedin the eminent Bengali artist set up the Department of Fine Arts. These two institu-tion-builders served as conduits to connect the past- and post-independence present, and the east and west wings. Sig-nificantly, it was at the critical time of the language movement and the unravelling of the bond between the two wings.

Dani succumbed to the charm of the valley of the voluptuous Indus, as lyrically evoked in his account of the historic findings of the pre-Buddhist Sanghao caves in the inaugural issue of “Ancient Pakistan” with its terracotta frontispiece. Not only did it give a place to Pakistan in the onward march of humanity, pre-dating the Indo-Gangetic civilisational heritage of undivided India, but through these academic activities it retrieved the ancient cosmopolitanism of Pesha-war, Pakistan’s oldest living city. Meanwhile, Abedin’s paintings of the rural denizens of Bengal exemplified the coex-istence of the cosmopolitan and the organic, as interpreted by Pakistani art anthologists. It was the very characteristic for which Dani praises Peshawar. The ancient Indus civilisation’s openness to the north-west and the sweeping presence of Gandhara art was complemented by the spontaneity of East Bengal obstinately provincial rusticity.

In 1955, archaeological excavations in the eastern wing uncovered the Mainamati findings in East Pakistan which ev-idenced the east-west’s cultural integrity based on a shared Buddhist heritage. Terracotta findings in Mainamati, clay objects still being made in East Pakistan and the techniques similar to the figurines found in Mohenjo-daro – converged towards the use of material that has remained in continuous use. Through the 1960s Pakistan saw an amplified presentation of terracottas as a genealogical sign connecting past and present, east and west. Its corollary was the col-lective investment in the Gandhara past. However, 1971 produced a break in that investment as articulated in the 16-year hiatus in the publication of Ancient Pakistan. Ananya warns against any linear reading of the movement of forgetting of Gandhara and the positioning of Pakistan as an Islamic state. In the chapter “Deep Topographies” she plots the shift towards the lower Indus valley and the recovery of the Indus man. However, competing intra-national interests prevented the emergence of a cohesive national narrative based on a pre-Islamic past.

Conclusions
Like Ananya, and so many of the “parents’ generation”, I too read the school texts on Ancient India and the signifi-cance of the sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, not realising and never reminded that Partition had removed them to a foreign land. That forgetting was sought to be compensated post-partition by the determined pursuit of locating ar-chaeological findings that would displace the archaeo-geographic significance of that physical loss. Ananya’s post-amnesia excavations from a Pakistan-centric axis reveal an alternative meaning of the repercussions of the rejec-tion and forgetting of that pre-Islamic past beyond the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

In line with the displacement of the Indo-centric axis in partition studies, Ananya notes that while contemporary Paki-stan cultural producers such as Kamla Shamsie, Aslam Khan and Nazia Khan struggle against a narrowness of imagi-nation contingent on the monolithic equation of Pakistan and Islam, these artists do not turn towards India to combat this consequence of post-Partition geopolitics:

“Instead consolidating the disparate archaeo-geographics of their parental generation and the terracotta memories of the generation of their grandfathers, they realign evidence from history, prehistory and geography with the search for authentic Pakistani sources of desire and belonging (p 153).”

Ananya Kabir’s exciting and innovative exploration of the dialectics of forgetting and memory retrieves an important alternative narrative of south Asia and post-Partition south Asian subjectivities. It revitalises the field of partition stud-ies by the interpellation of multidirectional perspectives, counter intuitive ways of reading, and most importantly, draws attention to resource materials and non-narrative modes of representing experience that have rarely been tapped. By developing conversations across generations and different modes of remembering shaped by different nation-al-building impulses, Ananya expands the scope for challenging prejudices, stereotypes and overturning narrow nation-al assumptions. The pressing need for reconciliation and the return of memory is the cumulative burden of partition’s amnesias. She demonstrates the possibility and value of developing cross-national discourses around shared watershed moments and dialogic sites.

This is an important book which amply rewards the reader’s at times of difficult journey through a dense thicket of references, likely to be familiar to students of postmodern cultural studies, but a little overwhelming to others who should be attracted to the book’s power in reorienting the axis of partition studies, challenging divisive memory politics and exclusionary national narratives.

LOAD-DATE: August 12, 2014
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Magazine