Material Objects as Portable Homelands: Locating an ‘Affective Archive’ in Select Bengali Partition Stories

Abstract

One of the recent trends in the field of Partition Studies is to focus on the material history of objects carried across the border by the Partition refugees and migrants. Material objects such as personal items, family heirlooms, cultural artefacts, and religious symbols, far from being inert objects, have mnemonic associations, and they act as repositories of deep-rooted memory, fractured identity and cataclysmic experiences of Partition. These material objects can be considered ‘portable homelands’ as they evoke and often embody emotional and cultural landscapes of lost homelands, serving as tangible anchors to intangible memories. This paper aims to explore such representations of homelands in select Bengali Partition stories like “Soil” (Mati) by Anil Ghosh, “Photograph” (Chhobi) by Adhir Biswas and “The River’s Homeland” (Nadir Swadesh) by Trishna Basak. As material objects, a bill of photographs in “Photograph”, and ‘soil’ in “Soil” and “The River’s Homeland” are closely associated with ancestral roots and imply a sense of belonging to the pre-partition homeland. Drawing upon the theories of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), Ann Cvetkovich’s ‘Archive of Feelings’, and Aanchal Malhotra’s ‘material memory’, this paper examines how in Bengali Partition fiction material objects often serve as an ‘affective archive’ of Partition at the individual as well as at the collective level, and speak of an ardent yearning for desh and a fixed identity.