ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the Great Calcutta Killings (August 1946) and the subsequent unrest in the city not just as events but as long shadows on the lives of its people. As communal conflagration enveloped the city streets, it brought in its wake many other kinds of upheavals within the middle-class Hindu family. Richly captured in two novels set in the backdrop of the rioting city, Ashapurna Devi's Mittirbari and Manik Bandopadhyay's Swadhinatar Swad explore public violence through fictional private lives. Both the texts go beyond the experience of chaos and disorder to investigate issues of freedom within the 'modern' family and of citizenship in the new nation. One notable exception to the common accusation that Bangla writers of the 1940s were mute about the impending independence is Ashapurna Devi's novel Mittirbari. The advent of the coming independence of the country creates ripples in the social and economic fabric of society.
