Partition in Bangla Little Magazines: Visualising History through Literature

Abstract

The partition of India in 1947 that transgressed both the geographical and cultural boundaries left millions of people homeless and victims of communal violence. Like other media that presented the horror of partition, little magazines, too, responded to the postpartition socio-cultural upheaval. Despite being the “Other” to mainstream printing practices, little magazines became socially pungent and attentive critique of the socio-political milieu of the state. Bangla little magazines promoted a body of partition literature which was often side-lined by the mainstream magazines and academia. These “non-commercial” magazines circulated and popularised “subaltern” voices of the refugees and other vulnerable sections of the society. They contemporised the history of partition through critiquing the burning issues such as citizenship, vulnerability, and development of the minority even after seventy-five years of independence. They aimed to rewrite the history of “independence” as the history of “partition” which was replete with suffering, agony, death, and massacre to discontinue with the tradition of glorifying “independence” in the contemporary printing culture. This paper explores the trajectories of politics and culture in which these small presses conceptualised “partition” both as a historical event and literary representation that revived the cultural amnesia to reproduce an alternative storehouse of counter narratives. Moreover, focusing on the paratexts, it decodes the aesthetic paradigms of these “advance guard” magazines to understand their representational politics. In short, this paper relocates “partition” within the network of Bangla little magazines and its alternative printing cultures