•Partition as a memory is still problematic. Few talk about the enormous incidents of rape that took place. Memories linger in numerous ways and haunt society, while history seems less problematic. One senses a whole generation haunted not by displacement and violence but the thousands of everyday choices it forced on them. The questions they ask is about their choices, not of the decisions of politicians. In many ways, Lord Mountbatten appears in their heads in the role of an extra. Their autobiographies are full of village events and the poignancy of everydayness. That memory haunts in India and even wraps its character. I remember a similar incident at IIT Delhi, where a professor was recalling 2002 with distress, till a student said, “At last 500 years of Mughal misrule has been settled.” Warped memory, silence, the despair of choices made – Ersatz histories haunt India, reminding us that the narrative of Partition can never be linear.
•As people had to choose between one nation and the other during and after the Partition of 1947, homes were lost and lives were altered forever. India’s northeast, despite continuously bearing the consequences of this historical experience, remains largely an unacknowledged area in Partition studies. Any cursory exploration of Partition scholarship would reveal that Punjab and Bengal remain the primary sites of investigation. Where does one locate specificities of Partition experience of India’s northeast? Creative writers and artists in this region have also engaged with Partition and its seminal impact on the society and culture of India’s northeast. Through a study of select Partition writings from India’s northeast, this paper will examine the different registers of public and personal memories of Partition and its afterlife in the literary imagination of the displaced Sylhetis to bring forth a better understanding of the perpetuity of dislocation, loss and anxiety in the spheres of everydayness. Drawing upon Memory Studies and discourses concerning home and identity, this paper aims to explore how literature becomes important vehicle for representing inscription and transmission of Partition memories and connected idea of a lost home.
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