The Haunting of the Uprooting: On the Functionality of Revisiting Chinnamul
Aparajita De “Zaam na, zaam na; kisu teyi zaam naa” (“I won’t leave, I won’t; not for anything else, I won’t leave), forty-three minutes into the first film made on the Partition, Chinnamul (The Uprooted, 1950) rings out close to our collective histories of the anguish that many share from Bengal during the Partition of India (1947). Director Nemai Ghosh (not to be mistaken with his namesake, the legendary Ray photographer) uses the nuance of the expert and the poignance of the storyteller of an epoch, much before Garm Hawa (Hot Winds, M S Sathyu, 1974) or much later, in Supriyo Sen’s documentary Way Back Home (2002). The details that Chinnamul captures are hard to ignore in the context of the then and the now. Pivoted on the travails of Srikanta and Laxmi from Naldanga, Dhaka, as the country is overnight divided and entire communities, lands, and identities vanish as if they never were, the film ultimately becomes metonymic of a country in transition, divided against itself. The local greed of Madhu Ganguly and Muzaffar Khan, one signifying an upper-caste Bengali brahmin and the latter a Bengali Muslim, become symbols of a predatory gentry that cashed on people’s helplessness; and acquired homes at throwaway prices to consolidate their hold over agricultural land and ancestral property. Such a motif of greed and dispossession was beyond caste or religion in the homelessness of a Prasanna, Srikanta, or a nameless sharecropper and Muslim neighbor. There is only one intersecting truth here: a community’s displacement is synonymous with others’ prosperity. There is no greater or lesser violence there except for those affected, their irreconcilable loss, and their inability to believe that known worlds were changing overnight into perilously new ones. But the film does not go into the violence and gore of 1947 and its aftermath, the eventful consequences of which we continue to pay over with more blood, tears, dispossession, and division. It pivots instead on the anguish of people unable to fathom homelessness. It is as if the community literally sleepwalks into an inexplicable apocalypse that makes them refugees within a matter of days, making them occupants of shoddy, makeshift colonies hastily formed of once-landed peasants with homes and addresses. In the faded reels of the unpreserved version on YouTube, the Naldanga refugees in Calcutta (now Kolkata) represent a minor group, amongst many during the time, formed consequent to a complacently drawn line symbolic of the Empire’s regular nonchalance in the fate of the millions it displaced and annihilated. Nevertheless, the film’s closing frame alludes to the hopes and aspirations of ‘going back’ of a return to the homeland that is, at once real and existing, and at the same time, vanished and becoming the stuff of myths. In the tenuous grey of that promise of ‘return,’ India too, began–its “tryst with destiny.” While daunting, the aspirations of a people stepping out of the Empire and its shadows were not flawless, and neither charted along a predetermined path. In experimenting and liberally flirting with a different kind of crisis after Partition, there was a special hostage: memory and its recalibration in Partition conversations. In the film, the country is at once a lived reality and an imaginative remnant which beckons the displaced to a ‘return.’ While the trauma of the Partition is not the focal point in Ghosh, in a broader context, an erasure of collective trauma around the Partition became dominant. What became increasingly amplified was the displacement and oppression of a particular group by another group. In narratives of trauma and loss, shared and transmitted, generational stories of displacement and anger, binarization and a competitive calibration of anguish and loss were normalized. In the afterlife of the seven decades following the largest displacement of humankind in modern history, the depiction, narration, and the retelling of the Partition have also become synonymous with a narrative sustaining hate, Islamophobia, and the demonizing of an antagonist, for the glory of a grand motherland, for the idea of Desh (country) cannot exist without an amorphous other. If not for reimagining, the horror of the terrifying other is commingled with a dangerous pandering to the illusion of the single grand enemy. This results in an idea that metaphorically connects us to the title of the film I began with—it uproots us from who we are, the uprooting of our memories we never reconciled with, the local histories of loss and solidarity we never quite highlighted in the bigger, single grand narrative that eclipsed our shared losses, shared traumas, and shared displacements along with the anguish of a generation that faithfully believed we would be the guardians of the dream they delivered us, their idea of India. Unfortunately, the lack of retrospective understanding that there is no comparative paradigm to reflect on who suffered more or less is colossal in its myopia in sustaining erasure and grand delusion. In revisiting the trauma associated with the Partition, one may start to construct aporetic events between what happened and how/who is affected and to what extent we choose to remember and transmit, and what we choose to forget or erase from collective discursive spaces, that stem from collective, and independent private ruminations. In revisiting the single most eventful historical event, spartan language may not be reserved for even the faint-hearted; for, the density of trauma and displacement needs emotive articulation as much as documentary evidence to record it factually. Significantly, a sense of critical reflection and an eternal vigil should be most dear to our essence of belonging. A continual, critical, reflective, comprehensive, and honest conversation around 1947 and its private memory needs to be revived from the elite corridors of history and brought into public discursive spaces. Stories of resilience, rebuilding, support, and solidarity need to be retold with renewed enthusiasm. Our private traumas are rooted in hatred and misunderstandings for so long that it has dangerously simplified our stories into a single one, with a single enemy and a single moral compass. Consequently, the overwhelming burden of totalitarian realities and selective erasure collapses any possibilities of reconciliation and closure. The