“That Little Boy”

Abstract

The existing historiography on the partition of Bengal in 1947 locates the experience of trauma almost exclusively in the loss of homelands, the resultant migration and refugee dilemmas, and the dispossession of property. Except for a few token references in Bengali fiction, the experience of specifically gendered violence has been largely unaddressed. Jyotirmoyee Devi (1894-1988), a distinguished Bengali feminist writer, addresses in her fiction this representational deficiency in the social and cultural historiography of Partition. Unlike Bengali udbastu (refugee) fiction that focuses on nostalgia and the ensuing economic struggle of refugees, Jyotirmoyee studies the society-wide repression of memory of the transactions of national borders performed on the bodies of women. The critique of the absence of gendered histories was radical at the time her partition writings were published in the 1960s. But more radical was the embedding of the histories of women's bodily experiences of violence in the context of the national struggle at a time when the euphoria of Independence had not faded. The republication of her writings under the aegis of the Jadavpur University School of Women's Studies, Calcutta, in 1991, and subsequent English translations from feminist presses like Kali for Women and Stree attest to the pivotal position of her work to feminist scholarship in India. It also coincides with the rising curiosity regarding South Asian women's writings, and a renewed interest in Partition since the 1980s.