Author: Gargi Chakravartty
Publisher: Blue Jay Books
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188575453
Description
Partition has by and large come to mean the vivisection of Punjab as well as the holocaust accompanying it. Bengal suffers from a relative neglect, although of late some studies have focused on the trauma that Bengal underwent during and after 1947.
This book portrays the hardships experienced by women in the aftermath of the Bengal Partition and how they were able to emerge as a distinct category of refugee women in due course. Their struggles for shelter, food and jobs became part of the wider women’s movement. Facing the tremendous challenge of rebuilding their lives in a different environment, these uprooted women gradually turned into activists.
An interesting aspect is the author’s attempt to initiate a comparative study of the Muslim women of the two Bengals in the post-Partition period.
REVIEW
Refugee women was a new social category that owed its very painful birth to the shattering events of partition. At the same time forced into new public and political roles and identities they also came to possess spaces that had been denied to them in more secure and sheltered times. The complex dialectic of such a turbulent history is defined and explored in this book with remarkable deftness.
-Tanika Sarkar
Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Contents
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
Abandoned Ancestral Home
Political Activism of Refugee Women
The Crossover: Towards a New Social and Cultural Milieu
Partition in the Lives of Bengali Muslim Women
The 1964 Calcutta Riots through the eyes of a Teenager
APPENDIX 1
Voices of Women
APPENDIX 2
The Foundation of Viveknagar Colony: Musings of a Veteran
APPENDIX 3
The Foundation of Shahidnagar Colony
APPENDIX 4
The Camps
Bibliography