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Partition Through A Woman's Eye Ranjita Biswas Ranjita Biswas is a Freelance writer from Bengal. She promotes education, specially for girl child through her writings and social activity.

"I want to live," Nita's cry ricochets through the pine trees of the hill station as her brother looks on helplessly. Ravaged by TB (when the disease was still to find an antidote), her wish to cling on is a cry in the wilderness. Nita (actress Supriya Choudhury) in Meghe Dhaka Tara by Bengal's fiercely independent director Ritwik Ghatak's is perhaps the best celluloid representation of the struggle to survive by a people uprooted from their homeland in a politically decided Partition.

More often than not, the woman's voice in times of conflict like the 1947 tragedy remains submerged as scholars and historians concentrate more on analytical studies of the cause and effect. Whether in the Balkans or the Indian subcontinent, the story is the same. Recently though, in the resurgence of interest during the golden jubilee celebration of Indian Independence, the Partition story through the woman's eyes has also found an expression. Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India and Borders & Boundaries: Women in India's Partition by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin are eye-openers to events that threw women of both the countries into a no-man's land of anguish and suffering in the western frontier.

However, though documentation and stray publications have chronicled it, the other front, Bengal, has largely been left unexplored. Voices of Women in Bengal Partition, an ongoing research project by honorary researcher Jasodhara Bagchi, a well-known scholar of women studies, and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, senior visiting Fellow, is a unique attempt at filling that void. Funded by Oxfam, this project of the School of Women Studies, Jadavpur University attempts to chronicle the voice of women, oral and written, and their role in the "heroic struggle of Bengal's refugees." Bagchi's independent research on the girl-child and rehabilitation, and Dasgupta's on the literature of pre- and post-Partition Bengal have merged together in what is, essentially, an exploration of Partition vis-a-vis Bengal's women.

Octogenarian Nalini Mitra, former director of the women's refugee rehabilitation programme of West Bengal, recalls those days "when I became a refugee, though I did try to cling on till 1950." She taught mathematics in a Dhaka college and was witness to communal riots since 1921 in erstwhile East Pakistan. Later, she was in charge of the Chunar camp known as the "Industrial home for Displaced Women of East Pakistan", set up by the government for the rehabilitation of "unattached women" through vocational training. "These women headed the families in absence of males. Left to fend for themselves, it was a lesson to see how they relocated themselves in the plains of north India," Mitra recalls.

In the struggle for existence and thrown into the role of breadwinners, Bengali refugee women helped to alter the whole socio-economic scenario of West Bengal, these researchers say. For one thing, as an earning member of the family she changed the woman's role in the family, albeit not without inherent tensions. For another, the higher educational status of Hindu women from East Bengal had a salubrious effect on the existing educational standard.

Though Punjab and Bengal both had to tackle the refugee problem, there were certain differences, aside from the anomaly in the compensation package between the two. For example, the atrocities on the women, their physical mutilation and rape as a show of power, or killing in the name of "honour", as the case may be, as happened on the western border, were much less in evidence in the East. Bengal also did not have to bear the brunt of the ill-conceived idea of "restitution of women" which uprooted women for the second time by plucking them from homes they willingly or unwillingly had accepted after Partition.

Dasgupta's perspective is to examine how creativity about the Partition challenges the accepted notion of history. Jyotirmoyee Devi's novel Epar Bangla, Opar Bangla is a case in point. In fact, Dasgupta says, Ritwik Ghatak's entire creative output--films, plays, short stories--question and challenge the platitude of mainstream history.

The oral interviews are divided into parts--women who have suffered /protagonists and those who have worked in the relief and rehabilitation operation.

For the researchers, however, Partition "is a continuing process". "Comparisons have often been made between Bengal and Punjab and how the latter has coped much better and the people rehabilitated fully. But the fact remains that in Punjab it was a one-time exchange of population whereas in Bengal, this was not the case. The war in 1971, when Bangladesh was created and a huge population shifted to India, was a kind of reminder of something happening 30 years back. The study "aims to take a critical look at '47 through the prism of '71," Dasgupta says.

Credits

• Editing : Reeta Sinha
• Graphic Editor : Kamini Singh