ABSTRACT
This chapter will deal with both the immediate and the prolonged aftermaths of the Partition on the lives of people, subsumed under different social categories in present-day Bangladesh: non-Bangalee Muslims, Bangalee non-Muslims, and Bangalee Muslims. One may assume that people within a single category should have similarities among themselves against the people from another category, with whom they have differences. My preference, nevertheless, would be to look at the similar experiences of different peoples at different phases of the unfolding process of the Partition. Such an attempt will help to comprehend that these categories are all but discursive constructs at specific moments in history and undergo constant changes. These often fail to contain peoples’ experiences under their inadequate labels. For example, the operational categories of the Partition were Muslim and non-Muslim. But the Muslims who migrated to East Bengal and the co-religious people they encountered there had very different experiences. Conversely, if we stretch the time frame connecting 1947 to 1971 to look at the prolonged aftermath of the Partition in East Bengal, we would find that people who belonged to different groups had similar experiences through the different turns of history. One can draw similarities between the minority experience of Bangalee non-Muslims after 1947 and that of the non-Bangalee Muslims after 1971. The two constituting identities of post-Partition nationhood, Muslim and non-Muslim, in East Bengal in the following decades encountered the newly emerged identities of Bangalee and non-Bangalee.
