Strangers ‘‘here and everywhere’’: the Social Discourse in the Literature of Partition

Abstract

The paper aims to focus how in a literary text, (here Sunil Ganguli’s East West) in contrast to any historical record, that is perceived to be distorted at times, through the subjective experiences of East Bengali refugees in West Bengal, a truthful account of dislocation and the consequent human tragedy caused by partition is created. How on part of the refugees, nostalgia for lost homeland causes inhibitions in developing the sense of belongingness to the new land is examined here in detail. To what extent the resettlement becomes a terribly problematic issue because of some crucial socio-political causes like Central Government’s discrimination against them, the hostile and unwelcoming attitude of the locals towards them, is relevantly discussed here. Furthermore, the refugees’ changing attitudes to their lost homeland and the place of migration over generations are captured here alongside their struggles to establish new identities at the foreign soil. More importantly, the author has tried to find out whether the displacement creates more challenges for the refugees in attaining new cultural identities in a new land or not, that is in other words, whether the displaced East Bengali community has to undergo the journey through the ‘in-between space’ of cultural hybridity or not (it happens to be a related crisis of dislocation), is the other major concern of the present paper.