Towards a Poetic Memory of Bengal Partition
The Bengal Partition of 1947, being one of the largest mass migration in history, has created a collective experience of refugeehood that manifests in a negotiation with self-identity, home, and memory. The counter-archive of literature on the subject captures the human dimension of the event and its imagination by reckoning with the trauma and displacement faced by its victims.Though a critical examination on the lesser studied region and the comparative approaches of the narrative versus poetic memory in Bengal Partition literature in English, this book "Towards a Poetic Memory of Bengal Partition' aims to produce a new theory on diasporic conciousness that emphasizes imperfect and poetic memory as the only way to capture fragmentation to produce futurity. As a bilingual publication, this book includes its Bengali translation Banglaar Deshvaager Smritikaabyo'. So, the book is a unique expression of a sociopolitical concept in both languages.
198 pages // December 2023
everything is always leaving
Across over the ocean and a blended identity find itself assimilating into these words. They prove that poetry, in its essence, is above boundaries, it has no country. It doesn’t exist solely in America or India, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There is no singular language – poetry is even above that. Instead these words can translate from one language to another, one mother tongue to an acquired one. Much like this poetry, prose can inhabit a middle space that blurs the boundaries of genre or thought. Prose and poetry may be the flip sides of the same coin : words assembled to make sense of time and place. Time, being a byproduct of memory, reminds of the past, of nostalgic homes, of scattered and various movements. This book is an account of such arrivals and such departures, to our shelters, to our selves, to our places, to our people, all translating, all longing for the same coexistence within time.
76 pages // ISBN: 978-81-937588-4-7
this is our war
In this is our war, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay employs a mature eye and versatile voice to render her personal and cultural crossroads, yet with her considerable power, this specific experience becomes a much more universal intersection. “Aren’t we all people?” she asks. Sometimes with a huge, bold voice, she calls us to “breathe in respect, breathe out neglect.” In other stanzas, with the sharpness of an X-Acto knife, as in “Tangerines,” she sets in relief “chewed up orange stars strewn across the rusted metal,” leading the reader to a revelation that one is “grown out of yourself, made out of your own ghosts.” The collection is a lovely achievement from a young woman whose “heartscape” is sparkling with a future in arts and letters”
86 pages // ISBN: 0997043008, 9780997043006