Choudhary 1

Nirjhar Choudhary

Professor Ray

BA English Honours

7 April 2024

The trauma of partition in the final solution

Partition in India has been a very tumultuous and hapless event in the history of

India. A considerable part of history and literature has been born both in India and Pakistan

out of this catastrophic event. India longed freedom from British Rule for centuries, but the

independence came along with the division of nation on the basis of community and religion.

Leaders played a very bad game in this irrecuperable match with a poor foresight. The history

of gaining independence was so glorified that another side of suffering, loss and pain has

remained outside the purview of the national leaders and the dominant ideologies prevalent at

that time. Partition may have happened 70 years ago, but the impact of British legacy and

colonialism and the division of subcontinent remains a significant force till date. It has

shaped the lives of the survivors, their children, grand-children, who dispersed all over the

world. Anindita Ghoshal describes this journey of thousands of people ‘from uncertainty to

certainty, chiefly to be a part of the majority community in a foreign land, for not remaining

as ‘others’ or minorities in their respective birthplaces . . . both the nationstates were

comfortable to categorize them just as ‘refugees.’ Manik Bandopadhyay is one of the

prominent Bengali authors who felt profoundly the subtleties of sufferings of the poor and the

dislodged. Born in 1908, he has composed numerous extraordinary books and brief tales

during his life course. The final solution is one of the acclaimed works of Manik

Bandopadhyay. Translated by Rani Ray from its original Bengali version and it captures the
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disturbed world of the refugees during the partition. This article is intended to articulate the

negative and traumatizing impact of partition on human life especially women.

Alok Bhalla, in his introduction to “stories about the partition of India” writes, “The

Partition of Indian subcontinent was the single most traumatic experience in our recent

history.” Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin consider it as a “metaphor for irreparable loss.”

These views hold the mirror up to what partition was in Indian history. The number of

persons beaten, maimed, tortured, raped, abducted, exposed to disease and exhaustion, and

otherwise physically brutalized remains measureless. The emotional pain of severance from

home, family, and friends is immeasurable. People were confronted by the trauma of memory

and temptation of forgetting.

Trauma is closely associated with the partition theme. When people are compelled to

abandon or dissociate themselves from their motherlands, their cultures, traditions and

languages, they become traumatized. Trauma is defined as a wound or external bodily injury

in general. Psychical trauma is a morbid nervous condition, which not only the sufferers but

also their inheritors persistently experience the traumatic incidents. The painful and traumatic

memory- both at individual and at collective level- generates a good amount of literature

covering most of the areas of intellectual activities- creative and critical, so to say.

"One could see the destitute dispossessed people, spending their days and nights,

huddled together like herds of cattle and goats in the shelter of a railway platform," says

Manik Bandopadhyay. (36) Saying that they lived like livestock dehumanizes their situation.

The narrative features just one family on the platform out of many. The kingdom (space) of

the four-member family is one little mattress. Carefully named are the members: Khokan, a

2.5-year-old, Asha, Bhushan, and Mallika. The world, as if, stares like a bird of prey to the

women like Mallika. She is susceptible to several traps and seductions since she is a woman.
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As a result, the tiny world is portrayed as nasty and dismal. Here, even the light from the sun

is appropriate. Their circumstances are only suitable for the night. The sun would not rise to

reveal daylight to these individuals if it had the choice to do otherwise. The homeless

population suffers from severe hunger as a result of the lack of available areas. The mothers'

and the young children's conditions are the worse. In Mallika, the mother watches her young

kid suffer without food and endures excruciating sorrow. The child never stops whining for

food. She gets frantic to locate food so she can feed the kid.

‘Mallika’s family had nothing to eat.’ They were about to go without food. The

child's situation is much more tragic. He ‘had been whimpering since early morning.’ He

occasionally dropped and howled. (36). She becomes desperate to save her child. One of the

most valuable aspects of human self- the ‘motherly self’ becomes deeply traumatised in such

situation. God is referred as ‘disgraceful being’ by Mallika when Pramatha says that God is

responsible for making them so poor.

Partition has affected the sanity levels of men. Mallika’s husband Bhushan remains

unactive throughout the story, because of his illness and partly because of the mental

disturbance due to the tumultuous partition. Bandopadhyay in his description of Bhushan

writes, “the world, his own existence, had turned remote, upside down, everything has

become muddled in his mind” (40). Saadat Hasan Manto recalled his own predicament after

being exiled from his city Bombay following the Partition: “For three months, I could not

decide anything”. The psychosomatic effect of the Partition trauma adversely affected

Manto’s writing: “I prepared myself for writing, but when I actually sat down to write, I

found myself divided. In spite of trying hard, I could not separate India from Pakistan and

Pakistan from India”

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Many astute people like Pramatha took advantage of such hapless families feigning

to be a social worker. Partition created such atmosphere where such people were in

abundance who dominated women and their bodies were taken as a profitable and exploitable

space. The combination of physical violation with physical dislocation during partition means

that not just the body, but also the body’s place in the world, became a site of trauma. The

psychological repercussions of partition were thus registered on the cultural as well as

personal level: to be more specific, they were registered within the space where the personal

meets the cultural. From this perspective, it seems most appropriate to describe partition as

cultural trauma.

Kolkata indeed became a suffering city for the refugees who were afflicted with

countless ordeals in their new life. For instance, many of these refugee families from the

station and the camps were later cramped into shanties (which became their new home)

within extremely limited space in already overcrowded cities and their adjoining hinterlands

where “services were already stretched to their limits” (Chakrabarti 116).

So, the story ‘The Final Solution’ highlights the violent, exploitative atmosphere that

partition brought to the people of divided Bengal. It ushered in the growth of capitalism at the

cost of human values, respect and dignity of women in the society. People lost the meaning of

life with extreme situations of homeless, foodless, health hazards and consequent mental

anguish. Women could not protect their honour, self-respect and dignity.

WORKS CITED

Bandopadhyay, Manik. “The Final Solution”. Translated by Rani Ray. Partition

Literature: An Anthology, edited by Debjani Sengupta, Worldview, 2018, pp. 36-46

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Bhalla, Alok. Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 2006.

Ghoshal, Anindita. “Carrying on an ‘Imaginary Rooting’ in the Journeys of

‘Uprooted-ness’: Refugee Women and Bengal.” May.2018, cafedissensus.com.