Negotiating Memory and Displacement in Dibyendu Palit’s ‘Alam’s Won House’

In his seminal essay, “Imaginary Homelands”, Salman Rushdie observes that the ideals of home for the displaced subject are never confined and limited to
the sacrosanct spatial paradigm called home. Instead, the consideration of home often extends beyond the finitudes of the domestic to include the nostalgic
evocations of a past which survives in ‘fragments’, the mnemonics which do not necessarily allude and authenticate the limited and confined architectural
habitus called home. The remembered home, Rushdie claims, sublimates into a more fertile province called homeland, where the remembered is
complemented with the surplus of imagined, where the topological is complemented by the displaced (Rushdie 1991: 10). It is this fantasy of excess that is
characteristic of homeland, which, in the words of Vijay Mishra, tends to occupy a “surplus meaning” (2007: 3). Home thus extends within the
consciousness of past in the essence of a beyondness; it is the cloud of remembrance which becomes home, as Rushdie observes: “the past is a home, albeit a
lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time” (1991: 9).

For the displaced subject, the remembered is also often a problematic juxtaposition of nostalgia and trauma. The memory of home that sublimates
into a greater paradigm called homeland is often poised within a chequered and contradictory economy, where the urge to mourn and remember
the lost homeland is counterbalanced by the ensuing trauma which the loss of homeland evokes. Hence, trauma for the displaced subject becomes the
correlative of home and homeland and conceives a predicament of mourning to which the displaced self is subjected to. Vijay Mishra observes, “The
traumatic moment may be seen as crystallizing that loss, as a sign around which memory gives itself to the past” (Mishra 2007: 8). With the persistence of
trauma, survives the disjunctured self of the displaced subject which, along with its being in the spatio-temporal, is also conditioned by the loss. Hence, the
displaced subject owes its agency to a moment in past, its quest of home and homeland is a quintessential quest of loss. Home, thus exists for a subject, not
in now but in the outside of now. It is in a state of disjointness and displacement that a subject can conceive his/her home.

Developing Victor Burgin’s conviction of the two-dimensional authenticities of urban spaces – the geographical and the representational and in coherence
with postmodern geographies, James Donald substantiates that spaces are not just geographical realities; they are imaginatively conceived truths which are
spatio-temporally governed and yet not limited to space and time. Instead, as fictive truths, spaces are often sanctified as ideals, thereby fermenting the
perceived space into a trans-material ideal of conceived space. Fog, citing Lefebvre, argues that this idealization of space occurs in the lethal zone of
“language, signs and abstractions” (Donald 1970: 13). This abstracted ideal of space becomes the constant companion of the spatial subject and for the
displaced subject, it is this ideal of abstraction which becomes the lost homeland. The abstraction is a living absence, never really managing to escape the
sensibility and consciousness of loss which is constantly fed and sustained by the lost abstraction of home. This abstraction called the home and homeland
become the elene vitale for the displaced self, it is the sustaining fulcrum to the agency of the displaced subject. Vijay Mishra points out, “There is no
immediate cure for the condition because the loss remains abstract; it is not compensated for by happiness in the new nation-state and is therefore
internalized as the absence of ego itself” (2007: 10).

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent prompted an epoch of history which was founded on the prerogatives of displacement. Multitudes were subjected to
spatial shifts, fracturing the homeland from the sovereign state to which they subsequently owed their citizenship. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin observe:
“By the time the migrations were finally over, about eight million people had crossed the newly-created boundaries of Punjab and Bengal, carrying with
them memories of a kind of violence … unmatched in scale, brutality and intensity” (Menon 1993: 3).

The ideal of citizenship in these newly founded Nations were thus haunted by the irreproachable gap that existed between the persona of the citizen and the
displaced self, pining for a lost homeland. The displaced subject is a political subject in an alien, defamiliarized space, which isn’t necessarily his homeland,
thereby initiating a conflict between, to use Agamben’s phrase, ‘nativity’ and ‘Nationality’ (1995: 131).

This is the longstanding implication of Indian Partition, whereby the displaced subject is rendered in a state of perpetual mourning for a loss. The loss can be
reconciled with, only within the fictive possibility of the impossible. To cherish this possibility is, however, as has been argued before, to engage in the
nostalgic invocations of a trauma. Hence, every possibility of reconciliation with the loss is also an invocation of the moment of trauma, the moment of
rupture which, is resubjectified and restructured by the remembering subject with every practice of remembrance (Rauch 1998: 113). It is this constant
ramifications of remembrance which brings the absent in relevance within the topos of memory and thereby provokes the essence of mourning in the
displaced subject. Mourning is thus consolidated by the performatives of memory, where the very act of remembrance From home to homeland 113 ushers
the remembering subject into a liminal state of mourning. This mourning deeply consolidates the ideal of the lost homeland, one which is as much conceived
as it is perceived. Vijay Mishra, citing Derrida at length, classifies this state of mourning, that the displaced subject is often subjected to, as “true mourning”
(Mishra 2007: 8), which is a conscious valorization of absence.

The answer seeks to illustrate the impossibility of reconciliation between the displaced subject and the lost homeland and
the consequent persistence of mourning in the displaced consciousness by referring to Dibyendu Palit’s short story
“Alam’s Own House”. Palit’s short story explores the paradigm of return from diverse perspectives and subsequently
seeks to substantiate return as an empty performative, which the displaced subject can only rehearse, thereby cherishing
only a possibility of return, a return which ultimately remains unmaterialized. In other words, returning in the story is
conceived as an endeavor without essence, where the telos of the desired return is never arrived at, consequently
prompting an ennui of dystopia in the displaced subject.

Alam is the chief character in the story; a once resident of Calcutta, now living in Bangladesh. The story is shaped by the
two epochs of displacement which occurred in the Indian subcontinent, one following the Partition of India in 1947 and
the other during the Bangladesh war of Liberation in 1971. The politico-cultural world that Alam inhabits is founded on
the politics of exclusion and inclusion, divided by narrow domestic walls which segregate the ‘us’ from ‘them’. This
systematic division, however, as the story explores, isn’t necessarily limited to the juridico-political, to which it owes its
origin historically. Instead, the political lines of rupture have produced longstanding effects on the cultural, social and
personal, subjugating and conditioning the subject and creating the climate of xenophobia for the religio-political other.
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