Beyond the Mapmaking Gaze: Colonies, Narratives, and the ‘Nation’ in Making

Abstract

The beginning of India’s journey into the idea of ‘nationhood’ correlated with its tryst with colonial modernity. The idea coalesced and transformed through historical exigencies after the Independence to embody a fixity of space and its conjoint identities that enumerated a definable cartographic entity, often foregrounding some aspects of identity formation, while others operated mostly as an undercurrent in this journey of the nation-space and its historiography of self-determination. Part of this writing of spatial history, though recounting the vivisections and geo-political transitions that have characterised the sub-continent, the spectre of Partition, particularly in the seventy-fifth year of its remembrance accords a unique opportunity to delve a necessary glance beyond the macroscopic history and tread into the spaces of ‘impalpable’ realities that characterised the experience of a post-partition refugee. So, while, on the one hand, in the nascent period of the journey of Independent India, the nation-space was signposted with fixated metaphors of nationalistic terms, on the other the realities of partition would incorporate through the experience of the post-partition refugee and their spatial negotiation, identities of different terms, where the space would be marked by its very absence. The journey into creating this spatial identity operates by realizing the ‘unremembered histories’ through the trauma of violence and its interconnections with memory. The paper focuses on Bhaswati Ghosh’s Victory Colony (1950) which, as a novel, offers an interesting scope to trace the experiential realities of the refugee situation in the camps and later, the colonies in post-partition Bengal, and attempts to trace the process of nation formation viewed through the lens of a ‘refugee’, fashioned by memory, nostalgia, and the legacy of loss.