Remembering the Bengal Partition: Trauma and the “slow violence” of refugee existence

Abstract

I read Jyotirmoyee Devi's 1967 Bengali novel The River Churning as a trauma narrative by focusing on the female protagonist Sutara's experience of a “social death” in the aftermath of an attack on her village. The text is a function of memory, depicting Sutara's failure to remember while serving as a point of entry into how the Partition was collectively re-memoried in the 1960s in Bengal. The novel, in its focus on how the Partition was assimilated into the everyday, depicts the “slow violence” of udbastu (refugee) experience as a perpetual homelessness as identities are coercively nationalized.