Amitabha Dev Choudhury traces the angst of
marginalisation that reflects in the literature emanating from Barak Valley
Bengali literature of Barak Valley always remains out of the
limelight. The practitioners of mainstream Bengali literature are reluctant to
recognise it, just as the centre of political power does not seem to even
consider it as being on its periphery. Perhaps the region’s geographical
location has largely contributed to this perception. To the outer world, and
even to its culturally nearest neighbour Kolkata, the Valley is still a murky
underdeveloped borderland between India and Bangladesh, as Dilip Kanti Laskar
(1949- ) writes in a poem:
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| For writers of the 1960s and ’70s, partition narrative was not a psychological necessity as they already shared cultural practices with Surma Valley |
stating ‘Karimganj,
Assam’, he was thrilled
and quite happily he
exclaimed — ‘That’s nice,
you speak quite fluent
Bangla!’...
I tried to clarify his
doubts about the location of my home —
I said, ‘I come from
the land of the fifteen martyrs
who sacrificed their
lives for the Bangla language.
He literally stumped
me with his next words
when he straightaway
said —
‘Oh, you mean Bangladesh?
You should have said
so!’
(‘Locatings’, bordering
poetry p62)
It was this question of geographical location that kept one
of the Valley’s districts, Karimganj, wide awake for at least two days and
nights during the Sylhet Referendum (1947) when political indecision arose
about which side of the Radcliff map the fate of Karimganj would lie on.
Subrata Kumar Roy (1966- ) was the only writer of the Valley to pen a short
story, ‘Swadhinatar Mrityu: Ekti Sakshatkar’ (The Death of Freedom: An
Interview, 1997), based on this incident.
Cachar was annexed by the British in 1832 (unofficially in
1830, after the assassination of the last Dimasa King, Gobindachandra), while
Karimganj remained with the erstwhile Sylhet. Tea plantation began in Cachar in
1855 and Silchar came to be known as a planters’ town. The railroad, which came
in 1899, not only broke the solitude of the Valley but also brought innumerable
human resources from various parts of eastern India. On 12 September 1874,
Sylhet was severed from the erstwhile Bengal Presidency and annexed to Assam on
the pretext of a shortfall in tax revenue. Earlier, in the same year, Cachar
had also been annexed to Assam. And again in 1947, Sylhet was surgically
removed from the political topography of Assam. So, it is quite evident that
Barak Valley has, for its Bengali-speaking population, always been a cultural
extension of the erstwhile Surma Valley. In this sense, partition of Barak
Valley from the Surma Valley was a case of geographical displacement, not
cultural migration. When partition became a reality, Barak Valley had to
shelter a good number of displaced families from the erstwhile East Pakistan.
Earlier, before the Partition, what was produced in the name
of literature in the erstwhile Barak Valley was scanty and aesthetically
insignificant. For example, during the 1940s some political activists wrote
poems and stories which, however revolutionary in style and spirit, were really
anachronistic as they failed to follow the track of the contemporary Bengali
mainstream literature. But during the same decade a group of poets also emerged
whose works have largely been underrated, perhaps due to the hubbub of their
modernist successors of the 1960s. These poets came with a strong sense of
aesthetic collation with mainstream literature, but their point of departure
from the mainstream was still more significant. They were mostly poets of
nature, but their search for a marginal identity often made them conscious of
their location together with its historicity and of their geographical
neighbours — so much so that sometimes they became poets of geography. Nature
poets like Debendra Kumar Paul Choudhury (1907-2003), Sudhir Sen (1916-1993)
and Ashokbijoy Raha (1910-1990) seemed engrossed in a search for a new homeland
and definition of its geographical historicity. They showed a keen sense of
consciousness of a non-Bengali neighbourhood, thereby discovering a new
homeland with heterogeneous ethnicity and cultural pluralism. A different
facade of the same search could be found years later, in the 1990s, in one of
the best known stories of Arijit Choudhury, ‘Pu Ghosh’ (Mr. Ghosh, 2008), in
which job-hunting by a young man of Barak Valley compels him to embrace the
life of an exile in Mizoram. The story of ‘Pu Ghosh’ stands unique because it
is a journey into the multiculturalism that surrounds the northeastern milieu.
The first little magazine of modernist poetry, Swapnil which appeared in 1957, however,
diluted the search of the earlier poets for a homeland in multi-cultural
surroundings. It became a proto-mainstream magazine, invoking an essentially
Bengali reality. Though Karunasindhu Dey’s (1942-2005) ‘Kanthe Pariparswiker
Mala’ (1963) was a leap forward with its social content, it never upholds the
convention of the earlier school of Bengali poetry of a multi-cultural Bengali
identity. But Karunasindhu’s journey was primarily an aesthetic one. A similar
aesthetic journey marked the works of the next generation of poets whose
emergence perhaps heralded a new dawn in the history of Bengali literature of
Barak Valley.They assembled under the aegis of a so-called literary movement
influenced by the little magazine they were attached to, Atandra (1963-1968). Shantanu Ghosh (1946- ), the young Turk among
the Atandra poets, was eager to place
his marginal identity in a concocted global association. The same colonial
discourse with modernity continued throughout the next decade (the 1970s). In
the meantime, two more significant magazines, both related mainly to short
stories, came into existence – Anish
(1969-1972-73) and Shatakratu
(1974-1982). The writers were all modernists imbued with a strong affinity with
the mainstream, though some of them in later years wrote in a completely
different style.
The following years saw a metamorphosis of the writing of
most of the poets and story writers of Atandra,
Shatakratu and Anish. Some of them became more nostalgic than aesthetic, while
some others grew much more tolerant of the hope and frustration, anguish and
desperation of the common man. Poet Udayan Ghosh (1940- ) even seemed to be
desperately exploring the geographical diversity of the whole world in order to
locate his own home. Again it was during the 1980s that some of the rookie
poets revived the convention of the poets of the 1940s. It was a spontaneous,
almost an unwitting revival of the past in search of the identity of the
marginal man amidst geographical and topographical diversity, amidst signs and
cultural icons of a neighbourhood which was essentially a non-Bengali one, as
Debashis Tarafdar (1958- ) writes:
Like Harangajao. A
minor settlement it is, surrounded by green hills,
with small river,
there people are Sylheti in origin, or Assamese,
or Dimasa, or Nepali,
or they speak Hindi — there are many such.
(‘Of Nation’, bordering
poetry p73)
The question that arises here is why this search for a new
homeland amidst alien surroundings was left unheeded during the 1960s and
throughout the 1970s? Why did this search give way to an aesthetic journey
following the trends of the mainstream? Why were the writers and poets of the
1960s and the 1970s so reluctant to create a poetic or a fictional partition
narrative of their own, though most of them hailed from the erstwhile East
Pakistan? There is no ready-made answer to this question.
Barak Valley has always been a target for economic
deprivation. The region’s underdevelopment can be attributed to its
marginalised position and politics after the country’s independence. While
politics in the Valley meant endorsing the hegemony of its state capital, the
mental framework of its middle-class Bengali population almost reversed the
existing structure of its centre-periphery, substituting Calcutta for Guwahati.
This subconscious rejection or mental reversal was almost like losing a
homeland which told on the literary works produced during the 1960s and 1970s.
So, for the writers of the 1960s and 1970s, partition narrative -- of displacement
-- was not a psychological necessity at all because they were already sharing
cultural practices with Surma Valley. But when the Language Movement of 1961
knocked on their door, most of them realised for the first time that they were
living in an alien land. As Calcutta had all along been their imaginary buffer
against every stress over the years, they failed to decipher the message of the
Language Movement which had a hidden political agenda: to enhance human
development in Barak Valley. Everybody ignored it — right from politicians to
writers.
There was, however, a solitary figure, Badarujjaman
Choudhury (1946- ), who wrote about his own people even during those modernist
upheavals in Barak Valley’s Bengali literature. Choudhury, together with Moloy
Kanti Dey and Arijit Choudhury, wove stories about the people of the Valley.
Their successors were the second generation of poets and writers born after the
partition. To them, partition was no more a reality, but rather a Pandora’s
box. The 1980s was a decade of real homecoming for writers of Barak Valley.
They started regaining a lost homeland because they were no more obsessed with
Calcutta. It was during this period that the common man and the dispossessed
became the subject-matter for the Valley’s story writers and playwrights.
In this post-modern, globalised era, Barak Valley has
produced human resources and sent them to different corners of the country or
abroad. Who knows? Those who have left the region in search of better
opportunities may write their own narratives about the Valley, while those who
are at home are already writing their own narratives. If ever these two
narratives converge, perhaps our forefathers’ search for a new homeland and the
nostalgia for a lost homeland may find a new a new dimension.
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