![]() Ananya Kabir coins her exploration of this double erasure and of the cultural productions it led to “Partition post-amnesias” (2013). More recent criticism thus explores together the legacy of the 19 Partitions to mitigate the “amnesias” which marked the Bengal region in the aftermath of the two national fractures, owing to psychological and political imperatives. However, over the last two decades it has been increasingly observed that assessing the long-term consequences of 1947 on today’s South Asia requires further analysis of the history of Bengal, in particular Eastern Bengal and Bangladesh. India was also a central focus, while Pakistan remained marginal and Bangladesh was almost neglected. Firstly, it focused more on Punjab, due in part to the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. ![]() Looking back to the past appeared as a requirement to reassess the achievements and limitations of independence, and move forward.Ĥ Yet, the field of Partition studies had its own blind spots. Instead, they supported a recovery of traces of the past to help South Asian populations face present and future cultural, social and political challenges. ![]() Partition studies showed that the birth of India and Pakistan was not a neat departure from the past. As for feminist scholars, they focused on silenced minorities such as women, lower castes, children (Das 1990 Menon and Bhasin 1998 Butalia 1998). Subaltern historian Gyanendra Pandey argued that national historiography was characterised by a form of “collective amnesia” and called for a recuperation of neglected fragments of history (1992, 33). Independence was defined as a break from former colonial oppression accompanied by new political and social gains (Sarkar 2009, 11).ģ But Partition studies, which developed in South Asia in the early 1990s under the influence of the Subaltern Studies’ revisionist historiography and feminist work, undermined grand national narratives by showing how they focused on elite and bourgeois figures, downplayed the role of the masses, and marginalised the traumatic violence of Partition to consolidate the Indian secular nation-state. In the four decades following the birth of India, Indian national historiography mostly offered such a vision. Yet these terms also suggest that new possibilities are given that can not only make up for or, at least, counterbalance previous loss, but also delineate a less negative view of the past. In fact, the concepts of “rebirth”/ “renaissance” presuppose some form of prior death – which in the present case meant human casualties as well as cultural, social, linguistic, political and economic loss. Owing to the lingering traumatic impacts of the bloody 19 Partitions on today’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, one might question whether the positive, at times even celebratory, term “rebirth” really fits the transformation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh. ![]() However, like “renewal,” it also evokes an improvement in the condition and strength of something. It can be synonymous with “revival” and “renewal.” The word “revival,” in some instances, might simply define an attempt at restoring a prior state-of-being or at making something fashionable again. Their novels show how and why the creation of Bangladesh was spurred on by a resurgence and a questioning of nineteenth-century Renaissance movements in Bengal.Ģ The notion of “rebirth” refers to a second birth or a new life and is positively connoted. To do so, I focus on two novels by women who write, several decades apart, on the transformation of East Pakistan, which till the 1947 Partition formed part of the Bengal province of undivided British India and became the independent nation of Bangladesh in 1971. I demonstrate how the teleological view that usually underpins our understanding of these concepts is redefined in the cultural history of modern and postcolonial Bengal. 1 This article discusses the ambivalence of the concepts of “Renaissance” and “rebirth” in the context of the history of Bengal.
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