Review of My Recent Watercolours in the Times of India

Review of My Recent Watercolours in the Times of India

Struggle between memory and forgetting–MURALI SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

 Partitions Post-Amnesias books and literature— Book Review in the Hindu, 4th February 2014 by Murali Sivaramakrishnan

A backward glance at the intertwined Partition-impacted history of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh

A people without history, as the poet TS Eliot wrote, are not redeemed in time; for history is a pattern of timeless moments. And as historians very well know, beneath the surface texture of regions forced into existence as separate nations there are these deep traces of extreme traumatic events marked by violence, displacement, and multiple alienations. In the context of celebrating India’s 65th Republic day the time and temperament are equally well set for us to cast a backward glance at the intertwined history of the three nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Weaving through personal memory, family history, lesser known texts, and narratives of the regions of South Asia that were historically constituted into these three nations, Ananya Jahanara Kabir has documented a text of post-traumatic recollections cutting across regions, communities and languages. Partition’s Post-Amnesias, as her title implicates, locates itself within the frames of 1947 and 1971 (when Bangladesh came into being dislocating itself from Pakistan), and endeavours to trace the dialectic of memory and forgetting. It is a narrative that seeks to retrace the fragile webs of kinship and memory in which individuals remain suspended long after the political and personal events have sent them in different directions across, as the Bengali rhyme goes, “seven oceans and thirteen rivers.” The author now located away from her original home in Cambridge listens to the voice of a Pakistani singer: “Traveller, wipe your tears; return with yourself intact…” Those post-partition’s resonances ferry her across generations and regions, when displacements and dislocations mix into memory, hope and enchantment. The book reads like a memoir, despite its rich texture of quotations and erudite commentaries.

Collective past

Jahanara Kabir dedicates the book to her grandfather born in 1910, Faridpur, East Bengal, who died in 1981 in Calcutta, West Bengal; to her father, Zugul Kabir, born in 1941, Faridpur, East Bengal, who died in Calcutta, West Bengal; to her nephew born in Wales, 2011… “Imbued with the perfume of lime blossoms!” (Kazi Nazrul Islam) The core of the book divided into two parts — with a Prologue and a theoretically dense Introduction leading up to it, and a Conclusion entitled “Darjeeling Tea” endeavouring to provide a connectivity to the forever messy map of a region and people — reveals the heart of two nations which later became three whose histories and destinies were shared. As Jahanara Kabir notes: what my generation share — lie in East Bengal, we do not know; and what we know — life in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India — we do not share.

There are among many things that we in present-day India hold as dear to us as part of our memory of a collective past — the great heritage of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, the fabled learning centre of Taxila (Takaœilâ) and the now destroyed monumental Buddhas of the Bamiyan territory; the list of such treasures of our national memory could be rather long. But these are but the remnants that are tattered and disinherited amidst the vicissitudes of political events which are beyond us. They belong to us and at the same time do not belong to us. In a similar way as Jahanara Kabir shows, thrice partitioned Bengal, together with the partition of Assam, has given rise to a most peculiar kind of cartographic irresolution, and “othered the space” of memory. She wades through Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, Moni Mohsin‘s The End of Innocence (Pakistani novels in English) and Point of Return by Siddhartha Deb (located in East Pakistan) attempting to piece together a phantom map of regions now cast in different points of history. Partition, as the author claims, was experienced as the wound of the mind for those who experienced it and also for those who escaped it. The breach occurred in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world.

Blurred boundaries

Whether it is through the politics of memory or the poetic of space, on the map or out of place, the narratives of these regions albeit intact are fragmentary just as the author’s own affective energies are dispelled and displaced from her map of three nations. “Through this book I enact my conviction that the boundary between investigation and imagination, between research and creative writing, and between objectivity and subjectivity is as blurred as that fuzzy boundary, now widely acknowledged, between historiography and fiction.” Violence, rape and destruction of entire ways of living are truths that bind the three nations together—the epistemological burdens of narrative memories also trace the broken curve of this spectrum.

In the chapter “Terracotta Memories,” Jahanara unearths the palpable evocations transferred through the variations of red clay as it moves from solid earth through memories and desires. Her contextual references are to MF Husain and KG Subramanyan. The strange and nameless uneasiness that the south-India born Subramanyan (who lived long in Bengal) feels at the sight of monsoon clouds or the song of the koel or the smell of the mango blossoms returns us to a viraha-inflected Fruedian uncanny, as much as when Husain signifies that the earthen pot is an oracular survivor of the destruction of tradition. The struggle of the modern to enervate narrative traditions seizes the vernacular and the seasonal, and terracotta, also a part of this sensorium, as both Husain and Subramanyan recognises, stands out as ephemeral and eternal, resilient and responsive.

The chapter “Archaeography” signals that forgetting is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation but reminds us that regions are contained in remembering. The chapter “The Enchanted Delta” is an excellent reading of Ritwik Ghatak and the fragmented traces of East Bengal.

Throughout her book, Jahanara Kabir, sustains the reader’s interest through her erudition by knitting together insights drawn from a wealth of creative scholarship. The text that she weaves opens up new terrains for the work of memory and narrative. She ends: Darjeeling, Faridpur, Calcutta, Karachi, and Dhaka, will remain forever places on another messy map: that of memories, forgettings, post-memories and post-amnesias. Logically her book does not end there. Because memory believes before knowing remembers! An excellent reading of modern South Asiatic heritage and its traumatic underpinnings.

Keywords: Partition’s Post-Amnesias, book review, history of India, Pak, Bangladesh, Ananya Jahanara Kabir