Key Points
In all the hype over literature on the Punjab Partition, Banglas articulation of loss especially its poetry hasnt got enough national attention...
It has been incorrectly argued that the partition of Bengal wasnt as bloody as the partition of Punjab on the contrary, it was equally traumatic, violent, and devastating..
Another reason why Bengali Partition literature remains distinctly different from its counterpart in Punjab, is that writers spoke about death, destruction, and loss as not just an outcome of the territorial split but also starvation and poverty..
Saha, points this out and says however, as Chattopadhyay ruminates, these young poets could not relish the pleasures of dreaming, living in a country which has endured a series of adversities in the years after Tagores demise[the] famous Bengal famine and partition atrocities in the pre-independence period He writes in the latter half of the poem:..
Dipesh Chakrabarty in 1995 hadwritten memory, then, is far more complicated than what historians can recover and it poses ethical challenges to the investigator-historian who approaches the past with one injunction: tell me all . This is exactly what Bengals poets many of whom found their homes reduced to just memories on the other side of the border could capture in their verses of loss, displacement, and memory distilling Bengals unique partition experience...
