“The Story of Our Shame”: Confronting the Silenced ‘Bihari’ Other in Mahmud Rahman’s “Kerosene”

Abstract

The plight and experiences of the Urdu-speaking ‘Bihari’ Muslims of East Pakistan/Bangladesh—those who had migrated from Bihar and other parts of India to East Pakistan during the partition of 1947, but were rendered refugees in their new homeland after the partition of 1971 owing to their ethno-linguistic difference from the majoritarian Bengalis—continue to remain a marginalized chapter in the field of Partition Studies. Disowned by the three nation-states and reduced into statelessness by the two partitions until recently, their liminality is a testament to the ongoing legacies of South Asian partitions. This paper evaluates the silence that haunts South Asian literature and nationalist discourses when it comes to the ‘Biharis,’ especially in Bangladesh. The paper probes into reasons behind the reductionist demonization of the ‘Biharis’ as ‘collaborators’ and hence the ‘enemy’ of the Bangladeshi ethno-nationalist self. By doing a close-reading of Mahmud Rahman’s recent short story “Kerosene”—the first Bangladeshi literary work in English to acknowledge this dehumanized national Other—the paper celebrates the humanizing power of partition literature. The paper evaluates the redemptive potential and limitations of Rahman’s symbolic, postmodern work that evaluates the self-Other dynamics, and dares to tell “the story of our shame.”