Remembering, forgetting and memorialising: 1947, 1971 and the state of memory studies in South Asia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The “cultural turn” in memory studies acknowledges that collective memory has a distinctive social aspect reflected in the manner in which it is communicated orally from one individual or generation to another. However, the point of departure is the emphasis on the need to account for the fact that memory is, in equal measure, shaped and mediated by tangible channels such as texts, images, objects, rituals, buildings and so on. The interactions and intersections between these two strands of approaching collective memory have been employed to write the most human and engaging histories of trauma and displacement – especially in the context of the Holocaust. This article takes this discussion forward by critically looking at the scope of the field of memory studies – with its largely Western frames of reference – to facilitate a deeper understanding of similar engagements and entanglements between communicative and culturally tangible forms of collective memory in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which the dominant discourse of nationalism is constructed and contested through the politics inherent in memorialization and memory in the South Asian context by comparing the partition of 1947 that resulted in the creation of Pakistan and the Liberation War of 1971 which gave birth to Bangladesh. Through a review of some important recent works of scholarship on the long, complex and intertwined afterlife of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, this article shows how the processes of the construction and contestation of a dominant discourse of nationalism and nationhood are fraught with their own forms of remembrance and forgetting. And yet they speak in a language of exceptionalism that mirrors a somewhat universal template for remembering “difficult pasts” characteristic of the memorial landscape of the Holocaust. Finally, it is argued that the interstices of “national memory” contain voices that unsettle or counter it. Acknowledging these voices while also recognizing their own memory politics shall broaden and nuance the dominant modes of memorializing the partition and the Liberation War in a way that better reflects the specificities and complexities of their context.