ABSTRACT
When partition happened, it was preceded and followed by unprecedented bloodshed that left millions dead or homeless. The process is more complicated in the eastern sector of the Indian subcontinent, including Bengal and north-east India, where there has been very little focus on the same. While the first generation of partition scholars predominantly focused on elite politics, violence figured in such history as justification for the decisions that these elite leadership took. In the second generation of scholarship, if partition was finally rescued from oblivion, the focus was on Punjab and then Bengal. This trajectory of partition historiography failed to note the existence of Assam as the other site of partition of India. This process of subversion of Assam and Sylhet Referendum experience, the actual site of partition within Assam, has led scholars to either forget Assam or ignore her partition experience of violent parting and xenophobia. But in recent times, as the process gets corrected, a more ominous trend within the new generation of partition scholars on Assam is the denial of Sylhet’s experience of violence during or after partition and along with it the effect of partition on north-east India. It is also problematic as this subversion also ignored the post-partition experiences of the indigenous communities such as the Khasi, Garo, Jaintia, Hajongs, to name a few. This absence of the voice of north-east India, the third world of Indian partition studies, as one may call it, even 74 years after partition, from partition history and the history of partition violence, needs to be interrogated.
With the gradual historical shift from causal to experiential history, memory has come to play an important role in the reconstruction of historical narratives. Historical imagination has thus become integrated with memorial consciousness as the hiatus has enlarged between the nation and the popular (in the Gramscian sense) and between history and memory. As modern nation state systematically engaged in the project of subversion of uncomfortable history, of which violence is an obvious part, memory with its tool of historical imagination remains as the only viable method of creating a counter history of the subordinated. This process of recovering violence, terror, and narratives of uprooting is also relevant in the context of post-colonial citizenship claims. This chapter seeks to enter into the study of this partition history through Sylhet into the history of partition of north-east India, recognizing the fact that this forgotten area and its violent experiences and xenophobia have deep connections with the politics of the north-eastern region of India till the present.
