ABSTRACT
Srikumar Bandyopadhyay's definition of Partition literature as a genre focuses, in other words, wholly on writings on the struggles and privations of refugees. Again, definitional inadequacy unnecessarily constrains the approach to the literary archive on the Bengal Partition. No novelist wrote about the heartbreaking human disaster that occurred in the aftermath of Partition. Asrukumar Sikdar raises the question of Bengali literary representations of violence and, like other critics, he finds it lacking because it fails to illuminate the centrality of violence in the Partition. The communal ferocities in 1950 and again in 1964, ripples of the unfinished business of the Bengal Partition, go unaddressed in criticism though not in literature. In the essay, Hasan Azizul Huq, speaking of the agony of members of the underclasses uprooted by Partition complains that "no one has written about that colossal pain and suffering in the contemporary history".
