A panel discussion on "Pages of Partition: Literary Legacies."

 

English Literary Association, Department Of English, Jamia Millia Islamia University organized Lexicon'24, the annual literary fest. They conducted a panel discussion on the topic "Pages of Partition: Literary Legacies" on dated 27th Feb 2024. Among the panelists who were present included Sukrita Paul Kumar, Gurmehar Kaur and Professor Debjani Sengupta. Some points highlighted by the speakers which I would like to share are:

-Sukrita Paul Kumar

1. Once a refugee is always a refugee.

2. Memories are not static. If you do diachronic study, you will find how memory changes with time and how the same can work in many ways & this tool of diachronic study will help us to study partition stories. So, when you do the study on this very subject, don’t forget to contextualize and locate your study of memories in terms of time and space.

3. I’ll tell you a story of a woman who, at the age of 95 years, before two hours of her death, revealed a dark memory from her past before her daughter that she had been a victim of rape during partition. By doing so, she re-lived the time again by memorizing those dark times & freed her mind. Also, in a way, she carried the memory forward to her daughter that might have impacted the latter in different ways.

4. There is a PRE-MEMORY, MEMORY, POST-MEMORY & BEYOND MEMORY and its nature might change in every stage.

-Professor Debjani Sengupta

1. Violence during the times of partition has multifarious dimensions. We often make a mistake thinking that partition in the area of Punjab was more violent than that of Bengal (which faced three partitions) and ignore its forms that occurred in the latter that was there in a different way. Authors and literary writers help in bringing out the stories of important incidents. My teacher used to say that we, in Bengal, did not have such people like Sa’adat Hasan Manto who without any fear wrote about the horrors of those times but that doesn’t mean this area (Bengal) was devoid of stories. After all, it is always about the way we remember and the way we choose to remember things.

2. Memories play an important role in human lives. When we talk about memories, what we need to emphasize upon and not forget is that it is important to highlight that the way you remember the memories associated with any particular incident, partition for that matter, also makes a difference. We’ve villages, cities & relationships as well filled with a lot of memories that differ from one to the other.

3. Once Ashish Nandy said that the more we repress our memories the more it comes back to haunt us. Do we realize how people who’ve lived together for hundreds of years turned into enemies for each other during partition? These are like the mysteries that turned and made us perpetrators.

-Gurmehar Kaur

1. Now, there are ideological borders apart from geographical ones. Have you ever imagined a situation of connection between two individuals having two extreme ideological polarized thoughts (maybe such thoughts have been imposed from above on these two personalities), have you ever thought? We have so many unheard stories which tell us that situations of difficulties and the needs of a person see no such polarized contradictions.

Sukrita Paul Kumar is an Indian poet and critic.

Debjani Sengupta is a Professor in the Department of English, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi.

Gurmehar Kaur is an Indian activist and author.