On 23 March 2020, a day before a 21-day lockdown was announced to control the Covid-19 pandemic, I lost my 88-year-old paternal uncle in Kolkata. Given the restrictions on travel, none of us, including my father, his only surviving brother, could see him one last time or participate in his funeral rites.
Besides the personal pain, his death came as a blow, especially as I had begun interrogating the historical event that had changed the destinies of my father’s family and my own: the Sylhet Referendum of 1947. ‘Jethu’, as I fondly called him, was 15 during the referendum and 18 when his family decided to cross the border, while my father was still a toddler. His first-hand account of what had happened would have been invaluable for understanding this history.What remains not well known about India’s Partition is that, along with Punjab and Bengal, Assam was also partitioned. And this ‘forgotten partition’ led to the displacement of millions of people in subsequent decades.
History and memories
Soon after the referendum, my father’s family, who lived in Sylhet, found themselves on the ‘other’ side of the border and, within a few years, increasingly experienced hostility. Anticipating that things might take a turn for the worse, one day my grandfather declared that they would leave for India. My grandmother packed some puffed rice and jaggery for what was to become a 15-hour journey for the family of nine. The only valuable things they carried with them were 12 bell-metal plates and glasses, which my grandfather, in a fit of rage, is said to have thrown into the Dawki river after security guards at the border checkpoint objected to such ‘heavy’ things being transported by a refugee family.What became of them as they moved from one refugee camp to another, and how they eventually rebuilt their lives in Shillong, is not entirely known to me. As children, during annual family gatherings in Shillong, we would gather around an angeethi to listen to Jethu’s fascinating stories about East Pakistan, which had by then become Bangladesh. He had an elephantine memory; an extraordinary ability to remember people, places, and things, and could conjure up images of mountains, rivers, forests, and entire villages. Jethu loved superlatives; his stories were always about the ‘biggest’ mountains, ‘longest’ rivers, and ‘fastest’ leopards. We would ask, “As tall as the ceiling?’, or “as tall as that pine tree in Ward’s Lake?” His response was invariably, “No, no, much bigger” or “much taller!”With his death, the last window to the world my father had left behind was permanently closed.His death also made me realise how much of Partition’s history survives not in archives alone, but in memories passed down within families, and how quickly those memories can disappear with each generation. We remember Partition as an event that happened to our grandparents, but its enduring legacy may lie in the memories, fears, and identities transmitted to people who never experienced it themselves.
