ABSTRACT
While there is little doubt that the Partition of Indiacaused extreme violence, displacement and agony, very little space has been given until recent times to the study of suffering during Partition and after in Eastern India. While most texts on Partition experiences have singularly focussed on Punjab and those from Bengal, the narratives from Assam in particular remain an unexplored. Though some more recent scholarship has tried to fillthis gap, Partition experiences of Assam have been limited only to theirpolitical dimensions, exclusively built byofficial archival inputs. But these exercises in historiography lack the cultural dimensions of Partition and the ongoing social experiences that Partition really was. Partition as divorced from the transfer of power was a story of anxiety and pain. The sudden transformation of a familiar space into an unfamiliar terrain was traumatic. It is important to recover these experiences of trauma and anxiety through the creative act of delving into popular memory and through the creative re-reading of contemporary printed texts. This chapter attempts to emphasise the cardinal role of memory studies and oral information in the reconstruction of decolonisation and displacement histories from Assam, which, I argue, can transform the way Partition history is understood. The chapter also seeks to explore the idea of continuity and disruption through gendered narratives of partition in North-East India.
