Reflecting Displaced Identities: Testimonials of the Partition Survivors from West Bengal

Abstract

This paper attempts to understand the nature of complex negotiation with displaced identities revealed through the memoirs of four partition survivors who migrated from various places of West Bengal, India, and relocated in Khulna division in erstwhile East Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh, over a period of two decades since 1946. These testimonials were collected through on-site interviews in the districts of Jhenidah, Kushtia, Meherpur, and Chuadanga during 2017-2018 as part of a one-year project titled “Mapping Partition Memory, Amnesia and Literature in Middle and Southern Bengal: An Indo-Bangladesh Perspective” jointly carried out by English Discipline, Khulna University, and Netaji Shubhas Open University, Kolkata. The oral testimonies of Partition survivors from Bangladesh make visible how displacement is not contained within the historical moment of migration but reverberates through everyday life, kinship, and speech. Memory here does not function as a passive archive; it actively reconstitutes identity, mediates loss, and negotiates belonging. The paper asks how Muslim refugee testimonies from southern Bangladesh make visible the lived processes through which displaced individuals reconstruct their sense of belonging, negotiate their identity, and make sense of home within shifting political and emotional contexts. Three central findings emerge from the analysis of the narratives. First, displacement appears as an embodied condition in which sensory memory of food, weather, landscape, and sound structures the articulation of loss and longing. Second, memory takes shape within the context of political and historical pressures that influence how individuals interpret their past. Third, belonging emerges as gradual and negotiated rather than immediate, and depends on incorporation into community narratives and social worlds. The paper argues that the Partition of Bengal is not a closed historical event but an ongoing presence that continues to shape memory, speech, and the slow formation of home for Muslim refugees in post-Partition Bangladesh.