And partly, one suspects, because Bengal’s literary establishment was itself dominated by the bhadralok classes who had generally weathered displacement with greater resource and resilience than the Namasudra and Rajbanshi cultivators who filled the squatter colonies. That meant the community that suffered Partition’s harshest material consequences was, for decades, the least equipped to write its own account of them.
Memories of before and regrets of after lived on, in miniature, in Bengali literature and cinema, but never assumed the dimension and depth necessary for a prolonged and persistent national reckoning.
If the literature never quite closed this gap, the material history is unambiguous, and it begins not in 1947 but decades earlier. Calcutta’s decline as the subcontinent’s premier city predates Partition by 36 years—the 1911 transfer of the imperial capital to Delhi was, as Bengali contemporaries understood immediately, a calculated diminishment of a city whose Swadeshi-era politics had grown too troublesome for the Raj. World War II compounded this: Calcutta became a frontline logistics city for the Burma campaign, its economy destabilised by wartime requisitioning, its streets by early 1943 filling with the rural destitute fleeing a famine that would eventually claim some three million lives. Janam Mukherjee’s Hungry Bengal (2015) makes the case, empirically, that the famine cannot be separated from what followed it. At “the frayed end of each and every lead” into the violence of 1946, the trail led back to hunger. The older argument, however, has not been wholly invalidated by the newer academic drive to connect 1943 with 1946. While hunger might be the universal casus belli, the bloodbath of 1946 would not have happened without the Muslim League.
Nevertheless, what happened on August 16, 1946—Direct Action Day, or the Great Calcutta Killing—was, in one historian’s careful phrasing, something “exceeding anything the city of Calcutta has ever seen.” Suranjan Das, the subject’s foundational scholar, has insisted the1946 violence was categorically distinct from Bengal’s earlier communal disturbances: organised, urban, mass-participatory in a way that earlier riots, largely agrarian and class-inflected, had never been (Communal Riots in Bengal: 1905-47, 1991). Estimates of the dead over three days range from 4,000 to 10,000; besides, 100,000 were left homeless. And this was merely the overture.