Photography may not fix the traumas of Partition but it has been a prism the subcontinent’s artists have looked through to understand brokenness—as idea, an art object, and a nightmare. Among the three nations birthed by Partition, Bangladesh’s birth has been the most complicated.
Considering it experienced freedom and fracture twice, its self-image is tied to the dispossession and violence of 1947, when India split into two. And this, in turn, is often seen and judged together with 1971, when it separated from Pakistan.
“Bengal’s once-twinned peoples no longer share a common set of memory references as to what constitutes conjuncture–this process starts with which photographs are preserved as singular event memories,” says Naeem Mohaiemen, artist, author, and associate professor, Columbia University, who recently gave a thought-provoking talk in Delhi at the IIC.
At the talk, introduced by Rahaab Allana, curator/publisher at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, Mohaiemen also read from his upcoming book Bengal Photography’s Reality Quest (in Bengali), published by Nokta (Dhaka). It will be available in India through Offset (Delhi) and Atlas Enterprise (Kolkata) by February. Excerpts from a conversation with the author:
What got you interested in photography and its study to understand your nation’s history vis-à-vis India before and during Partition, and also with Pakistan?
We lived inside moments when borders shifted and new claims were made on behalf of people sitting inside a geography. Through the uneven learning of language, I was out of time and place–slightly off-sync from where I was supposed to be. I had this sense, always, of belonging and not belonging. A defining moment for me was realising that most of my father’s 30 years of photograph negatives had been lost, destroyed, and damaged in the turbulence of the 1960s, where personal arcs crashed into national struggles.
Projects like Rankin Street (2013) and Baksho Rohoshyo (2019) are an attempt to reconstruct my father’s missing photographs through recreations that only remind you of the vastness of the loss. It shaped my desire to put down as much of the history of visual topographies as possible before the storytellers are gone. In the absence of the actual objects, the memory keepers are the last thread, and many are in their close-to-final years.
You mentioned Chittagong Hill Tracts as an internal other, but as we know, the logic of nation-states does not allow patience with any kind of demand for autonomy.
The context of that remark was that there is so much photography now about Rohingya refugees, funded and rewarded by the Aid-NGO nexus that has set up massive, highly capitalised operations in Chittagong. However, in the absence of any donor interest, there is only a minuscule trickle of photography about our internal refugees from the long-running autonomy struggle of the Adivasi (Jumma or Pahari) peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Chittagong Hill Tracts are the blind spot at the heart of Bengali (and Bangladeshi) nationalism. The bloody history of the hills delineates a continuing contradiction between our history of liberation from Pakistan and our replication of a similar hegemony (language, security, and regional autonomy) on our Jumma citizens.
Why, and who were the other ‘others’ who have come into the sights of your camera? Why do you pursue this interest? How does that help your understanding of Bangladesh’s origin story, if I may put it that way?
The desire to take by force from vulnerable populations what belongs to them exists in all people, and after rupture events, that is what stays in our memory as a collective stain, while the moments of courage and community get forgotten. Bengali Hindus, Adivasi Paharis or plainland indigenous dwellers, Urdu speakers, Ahmadiyya, and Shi’a—all vulnerable communities have faced our wrath, always twinned with a gimlet eye on their land. Underneath are laws with a 75-year-old legacy that facilitate “distress” transfer and theft of land.
If India and Pakistan are Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Bangladesh emerged as what I called in my book (Nokta, 2023) Midnight’s Third Child. This independent nation-state has survived and grown despite setbacks and interference, but we are yet to escape the forever poison tree of 1947.
In the talk, you joined two photographs – the 1946 photo of the Noakhali riots and the photo of Rehearsal of War, 1971 – under the heading Bengal (Photography) Divided. Yet they are not similar in setting and time, though the cause (Partition and independence) may, in a way, be common.
Partition literature, from ‘Toba Tek Singh’ (Saadat Hasan Manto, 1955) and Jhootha Sach: Vatan Aur Desh (Yashpal Singh, 1960) to Kalo Borof (Mahmudul Haque, 1977), has circumnavigated dramatic changes in family fortunes during rupture and collapse. In our encircled geography of intense land scarcity, it has been the property under your neighbour’s feet, not the rituals in their temples or mosques, that have been the target of sudden acquisition.
In 1953, my grandfather Maulvi Emdad Ali made it a point to tell visitors to our Rankin Street home that it was not acquired through a “distress sale”. A small dhvaja-stambha structure in the garden marked the home’s pre-1947 provenance as a Hindu household. There was a residual stigma for new Muslim elites of East Pakistan about gaining property through the despair of departing Hindus. Our family patriarch wanted to mark himself as a fair purchaser of property.
Based on the work of Jahangirnagar University anthropologist Sayeed Ferdous, I argue that in order to make 1971 legible as the singular event that creates Bangladesh, 1947 has to disappear as a significant moment. The 1946 Kolkata riots are enshrined in a particular way in Nirad Chaudhuri’s narrative, as are the Noakhali riots in other works of Partition literature. They become the rationale of a narrative of “oder shathe ar ghor kora jaaye na” (we cannot live in the same home as them anymore) for the Bengali bhadralok in West Bengal. But for the Bangladesh narrative, 1947 has to recede in the face of the greater violence of 1971.
A strand in your talk was the in-between figures, people who crossed over from India to West Pakistan (like author Saadat Hasan Manto) or East Pakistan (like painter Zainul Abedin), or who crossed over later (like historian Badruddin Umar), or perhaps never made the switch (like poet Kazi Nazrul Islam)….
People shift for work and love and life, but they also move thinking it may be temporary, and then the borders become rigid. As for Kazi Nazrul Islam, he ends up spanning all three countries. After Partition, he refuses to leave India for Pakistan. Or, to be precise, his family decides for him; Nazrul has already lost the ability to speak.
The mysterious disease that enveloped him is already in its second year. In this manner he becomes an uneasy new icon: the Muslim poet who refuses Pakistan, or rather resists the way territory is being redrawn. India embraces this decision and structures a secular narrative: Muslims have a home in India. During the Pakistan state’s attempts to cohere East and West Pakistan, Nazrul is rebranded as an exclusively Muslim poet to be used as a counterpoint to the dominance of Bengali literary icon Rabindranath Tagore.
Finally, after 1971, when Pakistan was broken and Bangladesh emerged, Nazrul became a third icon, a symbol of independent Bangladesh. But because he contracted a neurological disorder that rendered him mute for the last 30 years of his life, Nazrul never articulates what he thinks of all these motions and movements and new moments. We are left to make sense of his silent period from his earlier poems.