One Who Stayed Back: Sunanda Shikdar's Partition Memoir Dayamoyeer Katha

This paper looks at a Bangla memory text by Sunanda Shikdar, Dayamoyeer Katha, published in 2008 to critical acclaim. The narrative centres on the writer's first ten years she spent in East Pakistan with an aunt (between 1951-61) while her family lived in West Bengal. Set in a remote village called Dighpait in East Pakistan, the text is intensely nostalgic in tone; it allows the writer to create a world of affect that is personal yet imbued with aspects of memory and identity of two communities, Hindus and Muslims. Living as a minority in East Pakistan, the writer raises several questions regarding religion and caste that critique the new nation's formation. Firmly attached to the land and the people around her, including the lower castes and Muslim field hands who work for her family, the child/narrator is able to question and critique the taboos of her society through the intricate acts of love and compassion that she learns from the people around her. Shikdar portrays a gallery of people from her childhood who form an integral part of the village economy, buffeted by the Partition. The narrative unfolds a warm, intimate, agriculturally sustained world of harvests, village fairs, voyages by boats, pathshalas and playmates that the precocious girl is a part of, just as it exposes the fissures within such a society. The memoir goes against the canonical Partition narratives of exile, resettlement and rehabilitation; instead, it can be seen as a project of recovery of a way of life now irrevocably lost, yet whose memories have strong resonances and influence on issues of identity and belonging. Keywords: Autobiography, Partition of India, landscape, memory, history writing, Hindu-Muslim relation in undivided Bengal