Abstract
Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s book is a riveting tour de force. Placed in a unique position, with family spread out in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (as well as further), Kabir sets out to find what ‘untied’ her father’s close-knit generation. In other words, what made the Kabir brothers choose different countries?
The book starts with a Prologue called ‘The Last Glue’. In it, the author remembers the questions she had asked the Dhaka-living, recently deceased great-uncle Akber Kabir, as a teenager. Why had he—being the son of a man who had built ‘Kabir Bhaban’, a place whose architecture, with Indo-Saracenic arches, Corinthian columns and Sanskrit Swastikas, was a testimony to the Kabir clan’s deep rootedness in (the South Asian kind) ‘secularism’—not come to India with his brothers? ‘Why, when you were so like them, did you choose Pakistan?’, she asks in search for an answer. After a long silence, the man had simply replied that he had chosen Pakistan because that was where this ancestral home of ‘Kabir Bhaban’ lay. It was in Faridpur, and ‘Where Faridpur would go, so would I’ (p. xii). What appears perplexing is why he had chosen ‘local’ Faridpur and a country that built its primary identity on religion, when the family was so ‘global’, so ‘syncretic’?
The book starts with family and ends with family and in between we have a dizzying overview of the cultural nourishment that has sustained the Kabir family—the mental maps with which they have straddled nation-states and continents, the songs and books that have provided succour, the paradoxes of geographical sites, ignored in a country, reclaimed as the nation’s lost birthplace in another. In her search to understand answers to this Partition—a scission that was experienced as ‘the wound of the mind: the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world’ (Caruth 1996: 3–4)—Kabir, as a ‘grandchild of Partition’, seeks to find out how the other children and grandchildren of Partition, artists, writers, singers, archaeologists, had made and still make sense of the violence, displacement and alienation their parents and grandparents had encountered.
Kabir’s own grandfather, Jehangir Kabir, had fled for what he called the ‘secular sanctuary’ of Indian Bengal. What were, across the three countries, the ‘secular sanctuaries’ that allow the grandchildren of Partition to cross the boundaries of politics and religion and find their common, so to speak, ‘sacred heritage’. Kabir finds the sacred heritage shared by all three nations in poems, songs, novels, literary texts, terracotta statues, archaeological sites, photographs, maps, blog pieces and Facebook comments. The provenance, the context, the pathos, beauty, joy and tears behind these ‘artefacts’ of art are the refuge for today’s thinking grandchildren and the book could well become a travel guide for the erudite and inspired wanderer through these three South Asian ‘sibling’ countries.
Academics have underscored how the partitioning of India into the new nation-states of India and Pakistan, and subsequently the splitting of Pakistan and the conversion of its Eastern wing into Bangladesh have scarred all three South Asian countries with the poignant recollections of viciousness, dislocation and estrangement. What they have not done is look at these two scissions, ‘1947’ and ‘1971’, in the light of each other. They have, therefore, neglected to glance over the new borders to find out how the now ‘other’ was making sense of their new territories or how they were dealing with their own haunting memories of dark times and old homes in now alien lands.
In the introduction, the ‘Politics of Memory, Poetics of Place’, Kabir reminds us of the necessity of understanding 1971 in relation to 1947 and points to how these two epochal events are linked together. After that the book is divided into two main sections: Part One, which deals with two chapters called ‘The Phantom Map’ and ‘Terracotta Memories’, looks at events between the two ‘partitions’ and is called ‘Between 1947 and 1971’; Part Two, titled ‘Deep Topographies’, deals with two chapters: ‘Archaeogeography’ and ‘The Enchanted Delta’. The book concludes with the family coming back together again in two deeply stirring chapters: ‘The Enchanted Delta’ and in the delightfully titled conclusion ‘Darjeeling Chai’. However, to understand our partitions, the author could have provided a genealogical map of her family and photographs of the various members as well as art pieces and artefacts she uses to further her quest.
If her father’s generation ‘unknotted’ the family clan from Faridpur and each other, her return to the past has, in effect, ‘entwined’ the new generation to the old and in so doing has also ‘tied’ together cousins living in distant lands who grew up without knowing each other. This new generation, by choosing the ‘safe space’ of post-partition sense-making of art and literature, connects back to the older generation and the trauma they shared. Kabir’s urgency to make sense of her family, both across generations as well as countries, can be read as a powerful metaphor for a pan South Asian cross-border engagement between the ‘others’ we have become. By going beyond the tragedy that was partition, this book infuses life into artefacts and materials that have been left unstudied by scholars of partition; and in doing so, it redeems this past and allows us, both scholars as well as individual South Asians, to go beyond the confining nationalistic histories that keep us unhappily bounded within our increasingly jingoistic nation-states. This very important book is a landmark through its celebration of our rich and varied South Asian cultural heritage.
Throughout the breathtaking book—a book that is captivating in its erudition as well as in its metaphorical language which suggests a kind of Proustian recollection of ‘secular’ souvenirs and celebratory moments of a family’s ‘modernity’—one can strangely both understand as well as feel the need to ask why religion is the abstraction Kabir refuses to engage with. It is after all what has unashamedly constantly distanced us from our neighbours. In a way, it is the elephant of this mesmerising book.