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Feminist interruptions
Shelley Feldman
Published online: 12 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Shelley Feldman (1999) Feminist interruptions, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial
Studies, 1:2, 167-182, DOI: 10.1080/13698019900510291
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articles
FEMINIST INTERRUPTIONS
The Silence of East Bengal in the Story of Partition

..............Shelley Feldman
Partition
feminist

historiography
gender

Bengal/
Bangladesh

Using a feminist episteme I examine the exclusion of the East Bengal/East

Pakistan experience in constructions of contemporary narratives of Partition. Including the double colonialism of East Bengal, its particular location
in the ethnic and religious hierarchies of the region, and the simultaneity of
separation and violence as well as freedom and social mobility challenges
the emergent meta-narrative of violence by contributing a contradictory
interpretation of the Partition experience. This more complicated, contradictory interpretation extends the important rethinking that accompanies
the critique of elitist, state-centred histories of the period and the inclusion
of women's voices in Partition analyses. Particular attention is given to bow
extant circumstances in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh contribute to the
erasure of the East Bengal voice from contemporary debates.

We cannot find an historically nuanced answer to (any) question

unless we think of the field of discourse as one of contention, peopled
by several subjects, several consciousnesses.

Chatterjee 1993:137
The varied idioms - political, social, testimonial, literary, documentary - used
for uncovering, accessing, and representing the past suggest as much about the
myriad expressions, interests and points of view that shape current debates on
the 1947 Partition as they do about the diverse methodological approaches
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interventions Vol. 1(2) 167-182 (1369-801X)

Copyright 1999 Routledge

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1 I employ Das's
(1996a: 6)
understanding of
Partition which
juxtaposed in itself a
series of
heterogeneous
moments that
together made up
the larger political
event called
Partition.
2 H e r e I draw on
the insight of
Appadurai (1996):
The production of
locality, as a
dimension of social
life, as a structure of
feeling and in its
material expression
in lived co-presence
is a social practice
and as such can be
associated with a
physical
environment. As
Balibar similarly
suggests, national
formations, the
imaginary which
inscribes itself in the
real in this way is
that of the people. It
is that of a
community which
recognizes itself in
advance in the
institution of the
state (and w h i c h ) . . .
inscribes its political
struggles within the
horizon of that state
(or place) (Balibar
1991: 93). While
Appadurai stresses
the current
reorganization of
place, a
recrudescence of the
modern nation state,
it is none the less
clear that these new
transnational spaces
represent social
processes of
identification and

1:2
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168

e e o e e

deployed to explore this period in subcontinental history. Over the past fifteen
years, debates, particularly about gender, violence and memory, have generated important re-presentations of Partition, 1 focused predominantly on
explaining the relationship between nationalism and communalism (Pandey
1990, 1992, 1996; Das 1992, 1996a; Menon and Bhasin 1993, 1996, 1998;
Butalia 1993, 1998), and on interpreting the correspondence or intersections
of gender and nation (Chatterjee 1989, 1993; Sangari and Vaid 1989).
Whether debate focuses on the period leading up to the Partition and its
immediate aftermath, the experiences of the division for those displaced by
establishing borders between East and West Pakistan and India, or on the thousands of women separated from their kin, raped, drawn into suicide or even
murdered by family members to maintain family honour, what is striking is
the absence of the voices of East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh from these
discussions. I invoke the spatial imaginary to suggest neither a territorial determinism nor an homogenization of perspective associated with place. Rather, I
want to acknowledge that place, territory, and processes of reterritorialization
are representations of particular social histories and practices that are constituted by culturally marked populations. Striking, as well, are the connections
between resurgent interest in Partition and contemporary Indian politics, and
an increased appreciation for the salience of historically specific interpretations
of all experiences and social processes.
I contend that contemporary interpretations of 1 9 4 7 from the point of view
of East Bengal(is) 2 contribute to analyses of the experiences of Partition by
examining what some might consider a double colonialism, a particular
location in the ethnic/religious hierarchies of the region, and a bloody struggle
for independence twenty-five years later. Thus, a perspective from East
Bengal(is), 3 or one that includes East Bengal as a particular site, adds to Partition analyses an appreciation of the contradictions posed by the events of
1947 and its aftermath. In contrast to nationalist interpretations, such a perspective also interprets Partition as a contestatory process of state formation, 4
an opportunity to examine loss and dismemberment, while simultaneously
appreciating that for some Muslim Bengalis, Partition was also a way to
emerge from Hindu domination and to experience cultural autonomy as a
Muslim and as a Bengali (Ahmed 1988; Anisuzzaman 1993). As well, a view
from East Bengal incorporates the meanings and consequences of a less
violent and slower process of migration and a shared, even if contradictory,
linguistic and literary tradition with West Bengal (Anisuzzaman 1993). s
In this brief essay, I seek to extend the scope of current debates by arguing
that understanding representations of the past requires engaging contemporary political interests, including constructions of communalism, difference,
and critiques of the national narrative using feminist and subaltern historiography as alternative modes of interpretation. 6 My purpose is primarily a
conceptual one, to acknowledge the exclusion and silence of the East Bengali
voice in order to suggest how it has occurred and identify the epistemic

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INTERRUPTIONS
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Shelley Feldman
identity (cL Fuss
1995; Appadurai
1990; Yaeger 1996).
3 I am not arguing
for a relativism
which requires all
voices to be heard,
although surely it is
important to
recognize the diverse
constituents who are
excluded from view
in state and elite
representations of
the Partition.
Instead, I suggest
that the absence of
the East Bengal
voice, as a separate
state in the present,
adds a dimension to
the state-making
project of the
Partition which may
differ from the
contributions of the
voices and
perspectives of such
constituencies as
ethnic groups or
regional histories
and experiences.
4 I share with
Alonso (1994: 380)
the view that the
state is a historically
constructed and
contested exercise in
legitimation and
moral regulation.
This focus draws
attention to the
building of a
national character
and national identity
as well as the process
of individualizing
social actors who are
differentiated along
the axes of class,
occupation, gender,
age, ethnicity and
locality.
5 The essay by Aijaz
Ahmad, 'In the
Mirror of Urdu:
Recompositions of

foundations of the contemporary critique of the nationalist narrative. Until

this exclusion of and silence from East Bengal is fully recognized for what it
portends for the construction of the national narrative, whether of India,
Pakistan or Bangladesh, it will be impossible to adequately recast the contemporary discourse on Partition. By exclusion I refer to the absence of the
experiences of East Bengal in constructing the Indian and Pakistani narrative
of Partition; by silence I mean the limited attention Bengalis and Bangladeshis
pay to the Partition experience in building a nationalist consciousness and
interpreting the struggle for Independence.
Drawing on feminist insights which clarify the salience of the particular,
the emasculated other, and the silencing that attend this construction, I will
explore how we might extend the critical contributions of recent debates on
gender, nationalism and communalism (cL Sarkar and Butalia 1996; Sangari
and Vaid 1989; Menon and Bhasin 1998; Das 1992, 1996a, 1996b). Of
special concern are the extraordinary contributions of Butalia (1993, 1997,
1998), Menon (1998) and Menon and Bhasin (1993, 1996, 1998) who disentangle the many experiences of Partition for women and their kin who lived
through the various events that combine to construct the dramatic changes
of the period surrounding 1947.
My premise is that East Bengal serves as a metaphor for a place that, like
women, is constructed as other, invisible, different, and silenced in the real
politics of the time. As in discussions of women and nationalism, histories
(and truths) of the particular are documented and conveyed as if they account
for the myriad experiences that constitute social events. A meta-narrative
which locates the experiences of East Bengal outside the discursive boundary,
whether constructed about nationalism or about Partition, constitutes the
framework for efforts to forge a hegemonic reference for all that lies within
its bounds. This framework organizes how we think about social processes,
sets the physical and social parameters of the exchange, offers an explanation
for any oppositional interpretation, and organizes movements of challenge.
Such an authorization is asserted, however differently, in the Indian as well
as in the Pakistani Partition literature by the erasure, or at best limited presence, of the East Bengal voice. 7 To challenge this is to raise questions such as:
how has its exclusion or silencing altered the national narratives produced to
represent the subcontinental experience - the production of a homogeneous,
universal, disembodied subject and ideology that authorizes the discrimination of those integrated within or excluded from this symbolic frame (Pease
1992)? s How do constructions of the East Bengal(i) other shape what we
know about the range and meanings of Partition experiences? How might
situating a discussion of East Bengal, in a relation similar to that which
explores the position of women in feminist debates on nationalism, or on the
relationship between gender and violence, recast discussions of Partition and
draw attention to the contradictions and ambivalences that frame our understanding of this period?

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Nation and
Community,

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1947-65' (1996),

addresses the
significance of
language
communities that
cross borders and
contest the fixity of
political events as
determinant. This is
not to say that such
events do not alter,
and perhaps even
transform, in the
long term, both
relations among
members of the
community and the
place of language as
a political/national
marke~ Rather it is
to highlight the
significance of
language
communities and to
suggest that Bengali
appears to play a
different role in the
history of place than
does Urdu.
6 These theoretical
interventions are by
no means
autonomous, as
debates within and
among these
traditions have
exposed a rich
terrain ripe for
further discussion
and critique (Sarkar
1997).
7 An equally salient
theme for further

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Before proceeding, it is useful to note that contemporary interest in Partition has been shaped by three historical contingencies. First, communal politics in India in the 1980s rekindled interest in a prior period similarly
characterized by communal distrust and violence. Second, in the past twenty
years, intellectual debates have addressed the limitations of nationalist and
state narratives of struggle and change and drawn attention to the importance of histories from below, and from those far removed from the centres of
power and control. Third, the people who lived through and directly experienced the events of 1947 are all in the latter years of life. To capture their
stories it is critical to begin documenting their experiences immediately. 9 A
rethinking of state and elite histories of Partition is thus being attempted in
light of these contingencies.
Using these historical contingencies to organize the discussion, I begin with
a brief reading of the political context that has given rise to renewed interest
in Partition. This is important for two reasons. First, renewed interest in the
Partition is a political project rather than one that originated in the academy.
As I will suggest for the Indian case, interest in Partition signals, for both the
political Left and Right, opportunities to create an alternative nationalist
narrative with important consequences for relations on the subcontinent
generally. Silence about Partition among Bangladeshi scholars may reflect the
view that 1947 is not worthy of comment given the more important 1971
struggles between East and West Pakistan. In this context, interest in the language movement that helped to realize Independence is evident, while a focus
on Partition, which might expose what some experienced as the contradiction of supporting Pakistan and subsequently struggling for an independent
Bangladesh, is avoided.
But why, you might ask, be concerned about India at all if one is attempting to understand the silence on these themes in Bangladesh? This brings me
to the second reason for examining the political context; we are concerned
because discussions of Partition emerged in India where the intellectual community is appreciated for generating theoretical and empirical, i.e., historical,
debates that are important for India, the subcontinent, and for intellectual
inquiry globally. In other words, debates on nationalism in Delhi or Calcutta
contribute to rethinking these concerns elsewhere (cf. postcolonial and subaltern analyses). Moreove~ despite varying contexts, the South Asian intellectual elite continue to engage in debate across national borders. 1

The contemporary past

study is the rationale
behind the silence of
this voice, viewing
silence as an active

Resurgent interest in the Partition has been promoted, in large measure, by

efforts to understand the communal riots in India since 1984. As Pandey
notes:

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INTERRUPTIONS

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Shelley F e l d m a n
choice rather than
an effect made on
the basis of
forgetting or not
noticing its presence.
8 For Pease (1992),
gender, class and
race have similar
valences of inclusion
and exclusion.
9 This was the
rationale behind the
desire to develop a
Partition archive in
Dhaka proposed by
Ahmed Kamal who,
in working with
Gyan Pandey,
highlighted the
importance of
interviewing those
who directly
the
Partition.
10 See note 5 for a
parallelwith respect
to the Urdu literary
community.
exl~rienced

11 I make this claim

to highlight the
porosity as well as
reclaiming of
national borders, a
point which
undoubtedly has
ramifications for
interpreting
responses to the
writing of Taslima
Nasreen as well as
for understanding
popular discourses
describing the
Indian, Pakistani, or
Bangladeshi other
from either inside or
outside their
national border
12 While there is
considerable debate
and disagreement
among right-wing
parties over political
strategy and tactical
positions, there is
general agreement

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we, the secular, democratic, Left-leaning Indians have not written the history of Partition... [yet, it is] a central symbol or motif in the propaganda of the Hindu Right
in the last few years [and, in some ways], a central motif in the politics of India since
1947 . . . . It is our history from that time till today... [and] after Ayodhya, we all
know that it is not so far removed as we once thought. (Pandey 1996: 2-3)

Motivated to make sense of contemporary Indian elite and everyday politics,

it is hardly surprising that the last decade has witnessed a voluminous
exchange on Partition that is sustained, in part, because of the continuing
threat and dramatic increase in communal violence, the reshaping of nationalist sentiments, and a critical awareness of the salience of gender, patriarchy
and women to these discussions. The chilling political climate of today recalls,
as Menon and Bhasin note, the effects of Partition that have lingered in collective memory: 'Each new eruption of hostility or expression of difference
swiftly recalls that bitter and divisive erosion of social relations between
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and each episode of brutality is measured against
what was experienced then' (Menon and Bhasin 1998: 1). Indeed, many contemporary writers reflect this sense of the fundamental place of the Partition
in the Indian conscience and in (re)constructions of the nationalist narrative.
Samaddar (1997:7), for instance, makes this point plainly evident: 'the given
history of Partition has left very little space for its political neutering'. What
is interesting here is that both the political Left and Right deploy this insight
to depict relations within India as well as between India and her bordering
states.
Without calling into question the significance and critical importance of
violence to the nationalist narrative, it is this connection that gives a retelling
of Partition its current salience. It is consequential to note as well that the
urgency for a retelling of Partition today both establishes discourses of communalism and nationalism as hegemonic, and provides a political context for
establishing communalism and retheorizations of nationalism as primary loci
of debate, n For example, the rise of the Hindu Right 12 has been accompanied
and, it must be added, enabled by a commitment to recast religious and
gender relations and to move away from the secular discourse that is embodied in the Nehruvian tradition (Sarkar and Butalia 1996). This is exemplified
by the dramatic debates over the Uniform Civil Code, the Shah Ban case,
and explanations for demolishing the Babri Masjid, debates which contribute
to the varied ways in which 'difference' is encountered as well as reproduced
in public discourse (Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996; Sarkar and Butalia
1996). My intention here is not to mark the single event ~3 that led to altering the ways in which people constructed understandings of community by
drawing attention to the past; rather it is to stress how characterizations of

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on the broad
question of
secularism,
nationalism and
commitments to
how religious and
ethnic differences
are to be
understood.
Similarly, debate
may highlight
divergence among
left parties and
groups, but there is
a shared
commitment to the
broad principles of
the secularization of
politics.
13 Others, for
example, stress the
assassination of
Indira Gandhi and
the 1984 riots.
14 On this point see
van der Veer's
(1993) critique of
Louis Dumont,
where he argues that
the orientalist
discourse on the
essential difference
between Hindus and
Muslims is a
product of, rather
than explanation for,
particular relations
among difference.
15 Here it is useful
to distinguish
between the political
project offered by
the subaltern
perspective and the
ways in which such
a perspective has
been theorized and
deployed in
analyses. See, for
example, Sumit
Sarkar's compelling
critique (1997).
16 An underlying
theme in much of
this work, especially
Chatteriee, is the

the present reconstitute interest in the past, offer a particular rendering of that
past and, perhaps most significantly, employ this rendering to build an
alternative hegemonic discourse of the present. As Das (1996a: 14-15)
cautions us in her discussion in another context, the state's assertion and
arrogation of authority created a space for social scientists, as well as politicians, to raise powerful voices in support of tradition, making it difficult to
overcome the seductive nostalgia which informs concepts of community and
redefines relations between self and other. For Das (1996c" 121), this reconstruction of communal difference is constituted in language which 'functions
more to produce a particular reality than to represent it. 14 This means recasting relations between communities and reorganizing institutional practices,
including altering the history curriculum, to tell a different story, to enable a
growing Hindu Right to transform the popular discourse on religion, ethnicity and difference. The result is the establishment of a new rationale - based
on a naturalized and essentialized view of religious difference to legitimate
communal tensions that are simultaneously intra-national and international,
shaping relations between India and her Muslim neighbours, Bangladesh and
Pakistan.
The interests of the Indian Left, by contrast, are to sustain, and perhaps
push further, discussions of secularism to include a better understanding of
the relationship between religious identification and the state. In these efforts,
there is recognition that 'models of secularism and equality alone cannot displace the growing influence of the discourse of Hindu communalists'. But, as
Kapur and Cossman ( 1 9 9 6 : 110) argue, 'We must then struggle to displace
Hindutva, and to establish alternative visions of secularism and equality as
dominant.' Thus, both the Right and the Left are committed to addressing
issues within communalist and nationalist discourses, even if they do so for
different reasons. Such a framing might indeed be necessary given the immediacy of the concern, but, as a consequence, this framing tends to limit, if not
foreclose, opportunities to explore other issues and interests or address the
concerns of marginal constituencies for whom the frame of communalism
may be less salient. By so doing, popular discourse centres on the question of
difference and reshapes the nationalist narrative in this image.
The link between feminist and subaltern interests and those of the Indian
Left is clear: to recover the meanings offered by and draw attention to women
and members of dalit, tribal, and ethnic communities is whose voices have
been silenced or marginalized in contemporary political debates. Feminists
and a broad constituency of the Left have sought a more complex reading of
(religious) difference in order to better understand the ways in which the
Hindu Right institutionalizes new processes of identity formation in their
efforts to mediate symbolic and structural relations, while simultaneously
generating contradictory opportunities for women. It does so by combining
contradictory appeals to both traditional notions of community obligation

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INTERRUPTIONS
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Shelley Feldman

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sustained challenge
to colonialism and
the west with
women's bodies
sanctified by the
purity of being
untouched, spiritual,
the essence of India.

17 For an exception
from the Hindu
bbadralok point of
view and a concern
with differentiating
what are generally
assumed to be
homogeneous social
groups, see Chatterji
(1995) especially
Chapter 4.

and liberatory messages that are often associated with increased labour
market participation and public participation in the political arena (Sarkar
and Butalia 1996; Chatterjee 1993: 116-34). 16 These initiatives parallel
relations between East and West Pakistan where the liberatory potential of a
Muslim brotherhood and shared cultural/religious identity is offered in the
context of a colonial relation of unequal representation, suppressed voices
and exclusion from the administrative and institutional hierarchies of government, the military and the academy.
In contrast to the political climate in India, contemporary political interests in Bangladesh can be viewed in relation to how they seek to position
Bangladesh within South Asia. One principle upon which this process is
organized combines appeals to notions of community obligation and liberation from Hindu domination, with the liberatory message of a shared
Muslim identity and opportunities for social mobility. Pakistan's failure to
deliver opportunities for mobility and self-realization was the basis for the
liberation struggle twenty-five years ago, and one that continues to draw
youth into religious political parties and movements. A second feature around
which the interests of Bangladesh emerge is the rape and mutilation of women
and their kin, as well as the systematic murder of the country's intellectual
elite during the liberation struggle. Indeed, the destruction and pain wrought
on Bangladeshis during 1971 parallels the violence wrought on so many in
Punjab during Partition. Moreover, the proximity of the liberation war
experience, its horror and the belief that Partition and the language movement were natural precursors to independence is supported by the finding that
most social and political histories of Bangladesh offer only scant mention of
the anti-colonial struggle and the Partition in the 1940s (cf. Harun-or-Rashid
1987; Islam 1992; Kabir 1994). w Even Ahmed (1988), who, in examining
Islamic identity formation during the long duree, suggests that Islamic movements in the nineteenth century are significant for contemporary Bangladesh,
none the less skips over the meaning of Islam in the period of Partition. Like
other scholars, Ahmed reads the past by directly referencing 1971 rather than
by examining the processes that led to Independence as historically contingent. In so doing, these scholars suggest that the struggle for Independence
was the inevitable and logical consequence of the events that are believed to
have made it possible. By referring to Partition only in passing and focusing
instead on the struggles which shaped relations with Pakistan - the question
of legislative parity and representation and the demand for Bengali as a
national language (Gordon 1978; Oldenburg 1985) - other scholars make
even more direct claims to the inevitability of Bangladesh. For these reasons,
interest in the Partition is superseded by renewed attention to the issues surrounding the 1971 struggle for Independence.
Concurrent with the rise of communal violence in India in the early 1980s
has been the struggle against the military regimes of Zia Rahman and General

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18 The fatwa
against Taslima
Nasreen for her
heretical writings
continues to have
salience today as
exemplified by
contestations over
her return to
Bangladesh for her
mother's illness and
subsequent death.
The consequence of
her return for the
government of Sheik
Hasina and for
relations between
the Awami League
and the Jamaat
remains an open
question.
19 It would be a
mistake to assume
that communal strife
does not
characterize
contemporary
relations in
Bangladesh, that the
relationship between
gender and
nationalism or
fundamentalism is
unimportant, or that
anxiety among
Hindus in the
country is
insignificant,

especially when the

appearance of
Taslima Nasreen's
novel could call for
the issuance of a
fatwa by a vocal
Muslim extreme, the
Jamaat-i-Islami.
Important too are
the religious/
communal
differences that have

beenhighlighted
with the passage of
the 1988 declaration
of a Muslim state
and of fatwas
against non-

174

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Ershad in Bangladesh, including challenges to the passage of the 8th Amendment in 1988 which redefined Bangladesh as an Islamic state. This Amendment, passed under General Ershad, was the culmination of an alliance
formed between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, of Zia Rahman and the
Islamist Party, Jamaat-e-Islam. Constructing political legitimacy under Zia
included moving away from Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's commitment to a
secular state and lifting the sanctions on extremist religious parties with the
passage of the 1 9 7 7 constitutional amendment that substituted this commitment with the words, 'absolute trust in Allah'. Under both military regimes
there was an increasing representation of religious political parties with a
recognized voice in political decision making under Ershad.
The political rhetoric of the Jamaat during this period embraced a critique
of western donor assistance and opposition to the growing representation and
involvement of women in a rapidly growing non-governmental sector and,
by the early 1980s, as participants in a rapidly expanding export garment
enclave in Dhaka and Chittagong. These were responses to women's
increased visibility while walking between work and home, using public
transportation, and frequenting the markets and bazaars. Women from urban
as well as rural communities and from all social strata were also increasingly
involved in making demands on government and were active participants in
oppositional movements, including in the broad-based movement for democratic elections and a democratic state in 1990. These efforts made women
both the metaphor for western change and secularism, as well as a
constituency to be targeted by the extremist religious Right (Feldman forthcoming).
Neither women's involvement in bringing down the Ershad regime; nor the
demand by vocal members of the NGO community for electoral democracy;
nor even Khaleda Zia's coming to power in 1991 led to a significant decline
in Jamaat influence. For example, Khaleda Zia failed to censure the Jamaate-Islam for harassing NGO staff and beneficiaries and for their attacks on
international donor and NGO support for women's education and selfemployment. As Jahan (1995) points out, the Jamaat also promoted a
rhetoric against Indian Hindus that was exacerbated by the communal riots
following the destruction of the Babri mosque in December 1992 and
revealed in their response to the publication of Taslima Nasreen's 1994 novel,
Lajja. 18 Contestations over the appropriate response to charges against
Taslima Nasreen and to demands for redress for those seeking a trial for war
criminals mark not only internal political alignments and alliances between
secular and religious parties, but also the Bangladesh state's ambivalent
relationship with Pakistan, particularly under the leadership of Zia and
Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party and under Ershad's Jatiyo Party.
The 1 9 9 6 electoral victory of Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman who is the father of independent Bangladesh, has given a

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175

INTERRUPTIONS

governmental
organizations that
support women's
programmes and
threaten the security
of Hindu families.
20 The complex
and contradictory
feelings of
embarrassment and
pride are difficult to
fully explore here
since, at the thne,
support for Pakistan
was seen as support
for a state that gave
East Bengal a chance
to emerge from
Hindu domination
and wield power as
the majority in their
own land . . . .
[Domination
included economic
domination] as
tenants and
labourers under
Hindu zamindars or
as artisans exploited
by Hindu
businessmen.
Intellectually it
included tensions
over the fact that
Hindus ruled
educational
institutions and
politically it was
Bengali Hindu
leaden that drew on
all-India political
allies to exercise
their hegemony from
the anti-partition
movement of
1905-1911 onward
(Oldenburg 1985:
723). For a

contrasting view of
the zamindars that
suggests a more
complex picture of
Hindu-Muslim
agrarian relations in
East Bengal see
Ahmed (1997).

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privileged place to memorializing the 1971 struggle as a bloody victory over

Pakistan. The recent appearance of a number of films such as Muktir Gaan
(Freedom Songs) to commemorate the popular initiatives of the war and the
opening of a new museum with memorabilia and artefacts exhibiting the
violence wrought on the Bangladeshi people by the Pakistanis in 1971, are
indications that Partition and the 1947 anti-colonial struggle are understood
as a very brief moment leadingup to independent Bangladesh. Indeed, there
is only one reference to Partition in the entire museum collection. This may
be because Partition experiences in Bangladesh do not carry the scars and
struggle that characterize those in West Punjab. Not surprisingly, then, with
the return of the Awami League to power after a hiatus of more than twenty
years, research on the 1971 movement for independence now, more than
ever, claims centre stage, further marginalizing interest in the Partition
period. 19
The choices that first led to acceptance of the two-nation decision and the
initial allegiance to the authority of the Muslim League appear today, at least
for some, to be a source of embarrassment, given the exploitative relations
that sustained the Pakistani state between 1947 arid 1971. 20 The subsequent
position of those challenging the Ershad regime and Zia government's
leniency toward those regarded as war criminals, now living either in Pakistan or England, sustains this sense of awkward initial support for Pakistan. 21
The popular struggles led by Jahanara Imam in Dhaka to bring to trial those
defined as war criminals during the 1971 war; further underline the contemporary significance of the Independence movement as the critical moment in
Bangladesh history. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the economic and political tensions between East and West Pakistan have attracted research interest,
as has the 1952 language movement, positioning the events surrounding Partition as marginal. 22 Encouraged by the victory of the Awami League and a
twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, most progressive scholars devote their
attention to documenting the history of the past twenty-five years and support
efforts to reinstitutionalize a secularist state. With only marginal interest, it
is perhaps not surprising that outsiders rather than Bangladeshi nationals,
have begun to focus attention on the Partition period.
Finally, it is important to note that I am not suggesting that exploring the
experiences of Partition in East Pakistan should be the responsibility of any
particular intellectual community, or that questions of nationalism and the
Partition struggle should necessarily be significant for anyone on the subcontinent. I am simply noting that the failure to examine the significance of
an East Bengal/East Pakistan perspective in discussions of Partition results in
missed opportunities for research, the consequences of which include a view
of Partition that either sustains an elitist history focused on state decision
makers, or highlights the torture, violence and pain wrought on both Muslims
and Hindus in the building of a nationalist (communalist) identity. I stress

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21 British support
for the documentary
film, War Crimes,
was an initiative that
sought to hold
accountable those
who murdered
journalists,
intellectuals, and
academics during
the w a r .

22 For an exception

1:2

oeoo

oe

176
o o o e e o

this point because this locale, as territory, state and nation, and as a place
with a specific history of state-building and national identity construction,
offers an opportunity to examine a more complex history of the post-1947
period by adding a perspective on experiences that were, by and large, less
traumatic, violent and immediate than those from the borders of Punjab. I
make this claim because contemporary debates and writing, especially outside
of Bangladesh, occlude or create the Bengal experience as the other. 23 As I
will argue in the next section, excluding these voices generates problems
similar to those so well documented by scholars who have challenged the
silencing of women in Partition histories.

The nationalist framing

see Guhathakurta
(1997) on migration
histories of Hindu
and Muslim families
dislocated by the
Partition in Bengal.
Also emerging work
on relations between
the Bengali majority
community and
ethnic minority
communities. The
latter focus is less
driven by the desire
to understand a
horrific and violent
communal past than
it is by a long
history of grassroots
efforts of the border
communities in the
Chittagong Hill
Tracts to challenge
the development
projects,
resettlement
schemes, and the
militarization
policies initiated
under Zia Rahman
(1976-81)
(Bhaumik,
Guhathakurta and
Chaudhury 1997).
See, also, the recent
contribution of
Chatterji (1995),
especially Chapter 6.

Constructing a nationalist order framed by concepts of insiders and outsiders

indicates both how notions of difference are constituted within particular
social spaces and how they are symbolically reproduced to legitimate an
already existing territorial boundary. Like gender, nationality is a relational
term whose identity derives from its inherence in a system of differences [and]
is determined not on the basis of its own intrinsic properties but as a function of what it (presumably) is not. 24
But do particular narratives, whether of nationalism or Partition, achieve
the ideological effect of an inclusive and putatively macropolitical discourse?
Meta-narratives, as explanations are asserted to be all inclusive and depend
on their ability to alter, transform, or incorporate other prevailing, oppositional narratives. Thus, in order to secure representation of its hegemonic
interests, the nationalist narrative depends for its success on its ability to
transform emergent counter-narratives while simultaneously retaining its
imaginings in the 'larger' struggle. This political project of 'making [the
nationalist] conscience genuinely collective is always an accomplishment, a
struggle against other ways of seeing, other moralities, which express the historical experiences of the dominated' (Alonso 1994: 380).
Partha Chatterjee (1986, 1989) is among the clearest exponents of the
rationale for a rearticulation of a reformist gender politics in the context of
a nationalist struggle. He shows how the social practices that sought to realize
national sovereignty were part of a process characterized by a set of institutional and normative practices that would train the new, 'non-colonized'
woman. These normative practices conflated women with tradition, situated
in the inner domain of sovereignty (Chatterjee 1993: 107); the home whose
essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world
(ibid.: 120). It is a view that marks women's bodies as weak, soft, emotional
and in need of regulation, protection and control - the typically bourgeois
virtues characteristic of the new social forms of disciplining - (while simultaneously constructing the woman) as a sign for the nation, namely, the

177

FEMINIST INTERRUPTIONS
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Shelley Feldman

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23 For a recent

exception see
Samaddar (1997).
24 Implying 'some
element of alterity
for its definition', a
nation is 'ineluctably
shaped by what it
o p p o s e s . . . [and is
characterized by anl
insatiable need to
administer difference
through violent acts
of segregation,
censorship,
economic coercion,
physical torture,
police brutality'
(Parker et al. 1992:
5). Nationalism both
as an ideology and a
political movement,
'holds the nation
and the sovereign
nation-state to be
crucial indwelling
values.., which
mobilize the political
will of a people'
(Kramer 1997).
Chatterjee argues,
for example, that the
ideology of
nationalist politics
provides the
normative mode of
what is defined as
the political, and the
imagined
community of
nationalism
authorizes that
which is the most
authentic unit or
form of collectivity
(Chatterjee 1986). It
is, according to
Kramer (1997: 526),
a discourse of
gender and ethnicity
that shapes
individual identities
and also expresses
anxieties about
sexuality, culture
and respectability.
25 These

spiritual qualities of self-sacrifice, benevolence, devotion, (and) religiosity

(Chatterjee 1993: 129). This view paints postcolonial nationalism in South
Asia (with) a chauvinist hue, tinged with misogyny (Jayawardena and de
Alwis 1996: xii), where patriarchy is seen to regulate a freedom given and
allowed, but never autonomous and owned.
We know too from feminist analyses of Partition (Butalia 1993, 1994,
1997, 1998; Menon 1998; Menon and Bhasin 1993, 1996, 1998) that one
consequence of these practices has been the systematic silencing of certain
issues and interests; for example, the kin and communal violence and rape
that was masked by the nationalist project. The need to draw this distinction
helps to explain why the nationalist project is usually linked to analyses of
Independence and less so to analyses of Partition. In Bangladesh, however,
this separation is impossible since it is the 1971 struggle that is marked by
violence and rape, the culprit being members of the Muslim brotherhood.
Analyses of Partition outside of Bangladesh, however, systematically silence
issues that suggest that for East Bengalis the events represent a sense of
coming into one's own, a freedom in the potential of greater representation
and belonging, rather than the violence of pain constructed on the basis of
communal hatred.
Thus we move from the 'generality of Partition... as it exists publicly in
books' (Butalia 1997: 14) to an exploration of both the horrific assaults on
human life and the rupturing of communities. These understandings offer two
critical opportunities. One, to situate and comprehend that a shared sense of
belonging need not depend on a homogeneous understanding of community,
safe from conflict nor indifferent to difference, but that people in difference
can share a common space. A better understanding of relations in East Bengal
might offer important clues to this as a possibility. Two, to understand the
processes by which this proximity turns to communal hatred, violence and
rape (Das 1996c), to something so incomprehensible that it was only through
literature, rather than history, that the stories of Partition could be recounted
and the pain expressed (Ahmad 1996). To the credit of the women in the work
of Butalia (1998) and Menon and Bhasin (1998) - and to the authors 2s - this
political project has enabled the next generation to learn from the past and
to increase the likelihood that the 'act of [non-fiction] writing (about Partition) itself [might] exorcize the ghostly memories of what had been seen far
too vividly and suffered much too viscerally' (Ahmad 1996: 194). But, what
does a new imaginary of the relationship between nationalism and feminist
inquiry offer to our understanding of Partition and how can feminist analyses26 help us understand both the absence of and the benefits to be gathered
by adding the East Pakistani voice to debates on Partition and its aftermath? 27
One can readily see the need to historicize and problematize the distinction
between feminist struggles and nationalist ones or the othering of place in the
construction of a national border. This hegemonic process of constructing a
nationalist ideology depends upon distinguishing between self and other, us

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o * , #

contributions
nuance the meaning
of human agency
and find expression
in behavioursthat
had been hidden by
the discourses
offeredby elitemen
constructingtheir
Partition story(ies).
26 Feministinquiry,
as distinct from
gender analyses,
contributesto
drawing attentionto
the processesof
constructing
hegemonyembodied
in relationsthat
continually
reproduce
identificationand
difference,silence
and voice,and a
particular presence
in effortsthat seek
its veryexclusion.
27 Here I draw
again on the critical
insights offeredby
Sangari and Vaid
(1989) who
repudiate the notion
of gender-neutrality
and demand a
gendered
understandingof
everyaspectof
explanation, a
processthat makesit
impossibleto offer
an historicalaccount
that would include
the perspectiveof
women but would
excludethe waysin
which gender
relations are
imbricatedin
everydaylife.
Exemplifyingthis
are the contradictory
ways in which
women are
incorporatedyet
marginalizedin

178

1:2

ee

and them, in the creation of a c o m m o n (shared) identity; women as symbol,

men as agents of the nation; colonized space as feminine, colonial power as
masculine. It is in relation to a feminist episteme that we can see a similar
process in the creation of the East Bengali other as a counterpoint to the
powerful Indian or West Pakistani.
The process of othering, however, is not fixed; rather, it is a process that
continually reproduces how members of different communities are constructed and viewed. It is, to borrow a phrase used earlier, always an
accomplishment, the specifics of which are always in motion. Using often
coercive practices, history is both drawn upon and rewritten so as to authorize the other as enemy, powerful and feared, yet weak, effeminate and impure,
while the self is constructed and reproduced as the legitimate arbiter or right.
This contradictory process of enacting the power of difference depends on
recognizing that relations are always situated. Thus, as H a r a w a y (1988) and
hooks (1984) argue, there is always a view from somewhere, a place or
location that matters, since as historically embodied subjects, we are always
in a particular, if contradictory, relation to this process.
Here I wish to argue that the distinctions drawn between self and other,
woman and man, Muslim and Hindu, Hindu and Sikh can also be drawn
between 'places', since social location, or social and personal geographies are
actually embodiments of particular histories and experiences, contested
relations of power and domination. Exemplified by the projects of state building as well as nation building, each depends on constructing difference so as
to enable the drawing of boundaries, of mapping place. This means that the
exclusion of East Pakistan/Bangladesh from the Indian or Pakistani nationalist narrative is actually an inclusion of place as difference, a transformation,
as it were, of its meaning and signification. Complicating this is the particularity of the East Bengal case, where there is a re-identification between people
and territory/state 2s 'naturalized through the visual device of the map, which
represents the world of nations as a discrete spatial partitioning of territory',
always contentious and usually with 'bleeding borders' (Alonso 1994: 382).
The building of the nationalist project and of the Partition story, in other
words, is a social practice that incorporates difference in a particular way, as
an exclusion. Said this way, the exclusion is a presence, its very invisibility a
constituent part of the Partition story that is told.
Stressing differences between Hindu and Muslim Bengalis, for instance, is
first and foremost a contribution to building a distinctive view of the self. This
parallels the way in which West Pakistanis distinguished among the Muslims
in East Pakistan during the independence struggle:
ee

e o l

lee

e e o a e

This is a war between the pure and the impure . . . . The people may have Muslim
names and call themselves Muslims. But they are Hindu at heart . . . . We are now

179

FEMINIST INTERRUPTIONS

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Shelley Feldman
nationalist

sorting t h e m o u t . . . .

l'novements~

e n b u r g 1985: 729)

including in the
Rashtra Sevika
Samiti and the
Rashtriya
Swayamsevak
Sangh. Bacchetta
(1996) argues that
because of preexisting feminine
solidarities (in India)
. . . (and a wide)
range of
representations of
femininity in the
Hindu symbolic...
the gendered
fractionalization of
Hindu nationalist
discourse is
ultimately a function
of its unifying
praxis. The
contradictions that
emerge because of
women's
autonomous
activities as agents
rather than victims
or followers is
critical to
understanding
opposition to and
movements for
change. Such a
proposition
highlights the need
to examine gender
relations as aspects
of complex cultural
processes that do

T h o s e w h o are left will be real Muslims. ( M a s c a r e n h a s in Old-

eooo

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oe ooooooooe

Understanding how East Bengalis actually saw themselves in the community

of Bengalis, and how they have been marked as the Muslim other by Pakistanis during the struggle for Independence, and by Pakistanis and Indians
during the Partition, would enrich our understanding of the presence and
absence of voice, othering, and the salience of the subaltern in interpretations
of the Partition. Opening the discussion in a way that focuses on these contestations would also draw attention to how Bengali, rather than Muslim,
identity represented a dynamic process of identity formation and the building of nationalism (whether in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh).
A project to explore the constitutive constructions of self and other on both
sides of the border would encourage further the shift in analytic focus from
institutionalized politics to the building of nationalism as a social project that
depends on the specificity of relations and cultural meanings on both sides of
the border Such a view, in the Gramscian tradition of constructing or realizing
a hegemonic project, would interpret forms of inequality or difference, whether
concerning women or minority constituencies, not as effects of nationalist
efforts, but central to enabling its realization. Moreove~ it would query the
nation-state as given and reveal more transparently, how activities on either side
of a (national) border are part of the process of constructing the nation.
These cartographies of identity, gender and landscape (Nash 1993) are
actually processes which make the division of place possible and establish the
conditions under which it can occur. As Nash (1993) argues, the act of
naming and mapping assert the power of representation and, as such, suggest
why the East Bengal perspective has been silenced in colonial efforts to
control the weaker, feminine, backward, ignorant and yet feared Muslim
from the East Wing. The experiences from East Bengal, then, offer us a particular view that would help to extend the view from the centre (Calcutta,
Delhi, Lahore or of the elite), in some cases opposing it, in other cases identifying contradictory consequences of specific practices, but in all cases offering us a more textured and complex interpretation than is presently available
on the experiences and meanings of Partition.

Concluding remarks

not simply
incorporate or affect
women but are
enabled and realized
through the ways in

Accepting the feminist critique of othering of binary oppositions enables us

to more readily appreciate the importance of questioning both the distinction
drawn between the hinterland of East Bengal and the urbane centres of high
politics (about which a focus on the Muslim League is perhaps the only place
where there is significant voice given to a few East Bengalis). We should also

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oooooooooeoooe,looooeoooeee,leee

whichgender
relationsare
enacted.
28 As earlyas
December1948, the
Bengalischolar,Dr
Muhammad
Shahidulla,himselfa
devoutMuslim,had,
in a speechdelivered
at the EastPakistan
LiteraryConference
held in Dhaka,
boldlyasserted:It is
a factthat we are
either Hindusor
Muslims,but [the]
more importantfact
is that we are all
Bengalis(quotedin
Ahmed1997a: 34).

be able to question the significance of the notion of difference and its consequences, to make visible the place of the subaltern, the Muslim, the East
Bengali. My point in this essay is simple, if perhaps in need of restatement:
despite mention of the Noakhali riots, the role of Fazlul Huq in the politics
of the Muslim League, and the migration of Hindus from East Bengal to West,
and of Muslims from West to East, there is little discussion of these events
and relations in the new histories and debates that are emerging about the
1947 Partition. Such an interpretation leads one to assume either that Partition is insignificant for East Bengal or that the East Bengal experience is
insignificant for understanding Partition in India and Pakistan; an interpretation that is troubling for two important reasons.
First, the stories of Partition - of the pain, horror, and rape - need to be
counterposed to other experiences of Partition, to the hope and opportunity
promised by the creation of a Muslim state. The second reason resides in the
notion that the stories from East Bengal would likely complicate the search
for a grand explanation or narrative of the past. It would highlight the contradictions posed by such events, the many different layers of intention that
lie behind defining oneself in relation to the changes wrought by the decree
of Partition, and the events which unfold in its wake. It would also lend
support to the argument against ahistorical narratives embodied in a (dominant male) universal subject, supporting instead a complex and contradictory
unfolding of events in history.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Linda Shaw, David Lelyveld, Maria Maria Grosz-Ngat~,
Itty Abraham and especially Ritu Menon, for their valuable input, encouragement and support. Ritu Menon's critical contribution to understanding the
Partition has been especially useful in elaborating my own focus. The Social
Science Research Council has been generous with its support of this initiative.

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