Placing Nostalgia and Agony: Bioregionalism, Space and Meaningful Non-human Objects in Bengal Partition Narratives

Abstract

The Indian Partition, a saga of human displacement, loss of identity and mass evacuation with the drawing of a boundary (Radcliffe line) resulting in the anthropocentric creation of two nation-states (India and East Pakistan), has ecocritical connotations. The sense of “place-attachment” as espoused by Lawrence Buell in The Future of Environmental Criticism, (63) is strongly embedded in the minds of individuals who have been deterritorialized and reterritorialized because of partition. The proposed paper seeks to analyze this notion of “place”, “space” and “non-place” (Buell, 63) emerging out of both lived experience and imagination of the natural environment by different characters in selected short stories of Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (2008). Applying the idea of ‘bioregionalism’ this paper attempts to show how characters in the mentioned text challenge the anthropocentric boundary of partition and unveil the agony of loss emanating from place-based sensibility. This paper also employs Martin Heidegger’s notion of “gathering” as discussed in his essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking” (343) to show how non-human objects become a site of nostalgia, formation of self in terms of loss and a critique of anthropocentric border.