Chand’s Tea House from the novel O Yasmeen…
While doing my PhD, I have read hundreds of novels and articles on the Bengal Partition. But none of them struck me existentially—except, perhaps, Tagore’s Ghare Baire , which deals with the inception of what we today know as the Partition of Bengal. In essence, the Partition isn’t the “plot” per se, but it’s the catalyst—Tagore’s novel wouldn’t exist without it. In 1905, the British colonial government, under Viceroy Lord Curzon, partitioned the province of Bengal into two parts: a Muslim-majority East Bengal and Assam, and a Hindu-majority West Bengal. This was ostensibly for administrative efficiency but was widely seen as a “divide and rule” tactic to weaken the growing Bengali nationalist movement and foster the eventual Partition on religious lines. Rajiv Mudgal’s O Yasmeen… (A Cartography of Grief) is a poetic, hybrid novel that reimagines the 1947 Partition of India through a lens of intimate sorrow and metaphysical wandering. Both novels are rooted in Bengal’s fractured hi...
