Contours of Community Identity: Native Place on the Other Side of the Border

Abstract

The long, festering afterlife of the Partition of India (1947) witnessed histories of identity formation—of the Partition-displaced and that of the hosts. In each community’s perception of the other, this strain of otherness, we suggest, became an organizing template in their respective identities—a template that has survived through the historical transformations of the respective identities over time. So in the place of their resettlement, the Partition-displaced people are largely identified by the hosts as a community who trace their nativity, their sense of belonging, to a place located on the other side of the border. On the other hand, for the Partition displaced, the reinvention of the community in a new place is not always easily accomplished. This is because the history of everyday life in the place of resettlement creates new contingencies that challenge and transmute the agenda of preserving the tradition of the “desh” (native place) left behind. Still, these people would create a community of remembrances. For them this act of remembering is an emotional one, as well as a sincere one, if not a terribly intense one. With fellow Partition-displaced every reiteration-discussion about the left-behind ‘desh’ or native place, every memorialization, socializing—all would further promote the formation and consolidation of the community identity and creation of boundary(ies). As a result, the community of “desher barir lok”—people of my native land—continued to exist in the place of resettlement. In this paper, with the help of oral narratives of the Partition-displaced people, the present author will try to locate how the memories situated in a different space-time facilitated community identity formation in the place of their resettlement.