• Md. Ataul Karim
• Md. Rakibul Alam

In the recorded human history, since the Second World War, the partition of 1947 can be deemed as one of the largest displacements of people. About one million people died by the resultant violence and some twenty million people were brutally displaced. However, in 1971, Pakistan’s East wing was again separated as Bangladesh. Sadly there is very few critical examinations of the politics of national identity formation in the light of partition memory. Hence, this paper critically examines the dynamics/politics of the relationship between the official narrative and the collective memory of the partition. It is primarily interested in not what happened in history but how we remember it. This paper is largely concentrated on different relevant theoretical premises instead of any singular text. To do so, it elaborates on Anderson’s proposition of how the construction of collective memory legitimizes the process that creates, sustains and reproduces an “imagined community” by providing them with a “sense of history, place and belonging”. It also takes into account the notions like ‘’selective tradition’’ and “structure of feeling’’ from Raymond Williams’ seminal essay namely “The Analysis of Culture” to illustrate that the shared memory of the past or the rejection of the past provides groups with a kind of sense of community. In this way history of a period has always been a gradual composition where there is an essential invention of later/ different periods or generations. Power relations are tacitly at play in constructing this sense among citizens. Thus, the politics of memory engages, to borrow Confino’s phrase, the questions of “who wants whom to remember what and why”. Finally, this paper submits that in the absence of official commemoration, memories of the partition projected in fictional works rather create a counter-narrative as these fictional works have facilitated, altered or challenged the collective identity meta-narrative. As people’s future social and political actions are guided by the way they envision their past; so this paper aspires to give voice to the spiral of silences around the 1947 partition by delving deep into the dynamics of remembering and forgetting in forging the national identities in this part of the globe, specially, in the light of postcolonial discourses.

Partition, Nation, Postcolonialism, Memory, Trauma, History

"The Agonies of Nationhood: Perceiving Partition in a Postcolonial Context", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.7, Issue 10, page no.673-680, October-2020, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2010081.pdf

"The Agonies of Nationhood: Perceiving Partition in a Postcolonial Context", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.7, Issue 10, page no. pp673-680, October-2020, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2010081.pdf