Contesting the Nation-State: Spatial Negotiation of the Persecuted Bengalis in Select Short Stories from the Barak Valley of Assam

Abstract

This paper aims to be a part of the study of region and regionalism, which is upheld by the contemporary social scientists as an alternative way to deal with polity and its inadequacies and contradictions at a sociological level. This recent vogue of the study of region and regionalism is contingent upon the collapse of the category called nation-state as a superior form of harmonious polity at the national level. The mindless homogenization tendencies of this system exposed the discomforts and dissatisfactions of various ethno-cultural-regional communities, giving rise to insurgent movements and ideologies, theories of uneven development, structural and institutional discriminations and even of internal colonialism. By taking the case of persecuted Bengalis of the Barak Valley of Assam in the post-partition era, and the spatialization of the segregationist policies of the hegemonic forces against them, this paper will show how the figure of the refugee causes a rupture in the unities of time and space and the idea of nationhood through their everyday negotiations with space. Apart from dealing with institutional racism against Bengali communities, the paper intends to engage with its communal turn, which is targeting Muslims through hate speech, religious profiling and all sorts of negative stereotypes. By focusing on four distinct types of refugee subjects from four different short stories - Amitabha Dev Choudhury’s “Wake Up Call”, Amalendu Bhattacharya’s “The Chronicle of Vyomkesh Kavyatirtha”, Moloy Kanti Dey’s “Ashraf Ali’s Homeland”, and Arijit Choudhury’s “Fire” - and their spatial negotiations in the atmosphere of institutional racism and structural violence, the paper will reflect on the inadequacy of the category called nation-state to accommodate the aspirations and imaginaries of them. The scope of the paper would also try to accommodate the potential of the “minor literature” in subverting the grand narratives of the nation by closely scrutinizing the select texts.