The Unbroken Chain of Communal Bonding Under the Ashes Of Partition: Its Retrospective Exploration in Sunanda Sikdar’s Memoir A Life Long Ago

Abstract

India was partitioned into two political units - India and Pakistan in 1947. The people of both communities, Hindus and Muslims, were made the objects, in the words of Hamid Naficy, of “tragic paws in the power game” (Home, Exile, Homeland-Film, Media, and the Politics of Place 8) of politics. In both geopolitical fragments, the minority sector was disallowed and marked them as “others”, “forgotten or repressed”, according to Ania Loomba’s, notion of the role of a nation propounded in her Colonialism/Post Colonialism (169). The Partition, therefore, caused the horrific communal atrocities, mass slaughter of both Hindus and Muslims, and a massive exodus of minorities in both units. This explicit sociological impact of Partition is focused in almost all Partition literature rather than the dream of unity and the emotional fusion of minds of the people of both communities. The paper, therefore, attempts to dig out the suppressed area of love and faith to each other that is reflected in the literary work of Sunanda Sikdar’s A Life Long Ago. This area of communal bondage is revealed in this memoir by explaining Lalon Fokir’s philosophy of universal brotherhood and John Locke and David Hume’s theories of memory that unravel the eternal nexus through memory.