77 Years of the Partition of Bengal in the Liquid Mirrors of Jibanananda Das and Taslima Nasreen

Abstract

This article comparatively studies the images of the Indian Partition of 1947 through several poems by two authors very different from each other in their aesthetics and chronology, but who share several points in common: Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) and Taslima Nasreen (1962 -). Thus, the images of a divided Bengal will be studied, focusing on the sense of place and belonging, the vindicating perception of the territory and, above all, the love for the inhabited landscape. The texts, in this way, make up a specific imaginary that can be analyzed –from the tangible physicality of the new Ecological Materialisms– as a lived, lost and dreamed space, in which epigenetic trauma finds continuous diachronic intertextual dialogues. In a specular and rhizomatic way, the aesthetic discourse of Das and that of Nasreen’s activism draw holistic situations in which Bengal and its inhabitants form a single biological body facing the capricious human cartography that produced the physical Partition of the territory. In this way, both the cumulative porosity of Das’s poetics and the viscosity of Nasreen’s political resistance serve as material filters for the unique description of the anthropogenic breakdown with the biome they inhabit.