Bhadraloks and Enmity in Selected Bengal Partition Narratives

After 1947, the Indian nation-state often sought to explain the brutality during Partition as an uncivilised throwback to mediaeval barbarity.Another stream of Partition history writing focuses on stories of Hindu victimhood, offloading the entire responsibility for the savagery upon the Islamic 'others'.However, neither of these versions addresses what Joya Chatterji calls a 'gaping void': one still 'does not know' why and how such ferocious riots took place at all, overriding the unity among the communities.The proposed study will partially bridge this void by analysing the communal role played by upper-caste Hindu Bhadraloks in the riots on the country's eastern border.The study reveals that beginning with rationalising the Partition of Bengal and the exchange of population as logical solutions, Bhadraloks wove insidious narratives to homogenise the intra-group caste differences to scapegoat lower castes in the Partition riots, wilfully inserted an 'enemy image' in the quotidian experience of the Hindu community, and aroused fear of Muslim tyranny by manufacturing 'trustworthy' disinformation regarding Hindu victimhood.These covert orchestrations, this paper argues, have irrevocably altered the ways of remembering the harmonious past of undivided India, imposing a forceful post-Partition identity over the Hindus based on enmity towards 'others' in India.