Singing in silence: kitchen, shongshaar, and women’s memory-making after Partition

Abstract

This paper examines the kitchen as a vital yet overlooked space for preserving intangible memories of Partition, particularly through women’s embodied practices and their silent erasure within patrilocal South Asian households. Using shongshaar—a Bengali cultural construct encompassing domesticity, relationships, and emotional economies—as a framework, it explores how women’s memories travel and are re-enacted through music and dance as intangible “remains” of displacement. While the 1947 Partition fractured both public and private spheres, women’s experiences remain obscured, despite their role in sustaining cultural continuity through songs, dance, and poetry.Through oral histories, songs, and ethnographic accounts—including a personal case study of my late maternal grandmother’s forced migration from Bangladesh to India—this paper argues that the kitchen functioned both as a site of erasure and a vessel for memory-making. My grandmother’s insistence on continuing dance, music, and creative expression became an act of defiance against moral policing and the erasure of women’s artistic contributions post-Partition. These acts forged a sisterhood, voicing collective silences and preserving traditions otherwise threatened by displacement and patriarchal control.Drawing on my doctoral research on maternal memories and embodied nostalgia, this study reframes silence, absence, and sisterhood as integral to memory-making, offering a deeper understanding of how women reclaimed agency and negotiated patriarchal structures amidst a generational loss.