বাংলা উপন্যাস : কাটা দেশে অক্ষরের খোঁজে/ Bengali Novels: Search of Words in a Divided Land

Abstract

Partition of the undivided Bengal in 1947 brought a catastrophic disaster in the lives of a huge number of Bengali middle-class and poor population, who were neither a part of the colonial British rulers-Indian upper-class politicians’ selfish strategy-nexus to secure power, privilege, hegemony and business facilities of only their own interest, nor it served their regular life-necessities. On contrary it totally destroyed their everyday life-fabric and an exodus of homeless refugees were compelled to come to West Bengal leaving their all belongings left in East-Pakistan. It devastated lakhs of ordinary peoples’ life and they had to find shelter here in the Rail stations, camps, wastelands and other places. They suffered a lot, built colonies and had to fight an uneven battle to survive in a completely hostile, unknown situation. Bengali novels and short stories portrayed a vivid picture of their struggles, obstacles and united fight against all atrocities. Communal tensions were pictured by many writers who were eye-witnesses of riots. simultaneously a big number of incidents also registered where both the communities of Hindu and Muslims were able to maintain communal harmony and century-long bondage among them. In this small article a few number of Bengali novels and short stories have been discussed where those uprooted peoples’ day-to-day struggles, their waves of life, their pathos and ecstasy are portrayed in subtle creative ways. The approach of this article is to discuss the mixed pictures of the deluge of that time-frame and to reconsider the most horrific tragedy of Bengali society, which is, perhaps one of the darkest historical human-calamities happened in the whole South-East Asian post-second world war-spectrum. It tried to grip the different shades of those unfortunate people who lost their known ancestral life and gone through an ordeal of cruel time-frame. Bengali partition-literature is too rich and this article is a little effort to sketch an outline of that vast archive.