Having been a homeless wanderer for nearly a decade, or perhaps the entire span of my life, a question most often asked to one such as me is where are you from? There starts the dilemma of a homeless wanderer, especially one who doesn’t really look like belonging to any particular ethnic group, if looks can be stereotyped. Do you mean what my ethnic background is? Or do you mean my most current residence before I arrived? Do you want to know where I was born or where I was bred? Do you mean where my parents live? Do you want to ask where my foremothers started their bit of cultivation from? Or is it enough for me to tell you where my grandmother ‘is from’? That’s right, it’s not that difficult a question but some of us are just more entangled in the ball of confusion than others. What most people are asking when they enquire about your frommation is really quite simple if you break it down. They want to know where your home is. A pertinent point marks this severe confusion of identity in me: I have no home.
Rather, there is lack of a common space I identify with, or whose co-inhabitants have a similar set of values as me. Which brings me to the actual topic of this piece, what is ‘home’? If home is a space that evokes nostalgia and warmth, then Delhi is my home. If home is where my grandparents reside, then Kolkata is my home. If home is where my parents live, Bombay it is. If home is where I am most delighted to live in, Kathmandu beckons. And if home is the land of my foremothers, I’d have to pick Dhaka and Kushtia, in Bangladesh (East Bengal, East Pakistan, call it what former names you may, it’s still Bangladesh). Is home where we are most, and comfortably so, ourselves or is it something that exiles us from the individual, leading us to voluntarily or forcibly occupy a shared space, a common identity, which then stirs up all the associated metaphors of what we call home? Perhaps home is that which we dream of when every muscle in our body aches, and the mind can only focus its attention on that which is always far away, the warmth of the bed at home and the contours around it. Following the most outdated adage ever, home is probably a mental construction of promises that equate the bed to a sense of security, shelter, togetherness, identity and freedom, all mashed up in a cauldron.
But why do I lack this sense? There are others who homeless wanderers but have a clear understanding of what ‘home’ is. I have never thought of any of the places mentioned above as home. As a child, during vacation, we would visit our grandparents in Delhi and Nagpur respectively till they moved to Kolkata. I suppose that’s the closest they thought they could get to ‘home’. My maternal grandma belongs to a family of zamindars in Dhaka. And after a major bout of communal massacres her family witnessed, and nearly fell prey to in their neighbourhood, during partition (1947), her family packed up very systematically and left for Kolkata (Calcutta at the time). With the riches, they settled down safely in a large house in Dhakuria, a locality in the south of Kolkata. They were some of the few fortunate remnants of partition. Her husband (just another man then), on the other hand, remained in the hill districts of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) till 1950, working for the agriculture ministry of the central government till he was made to move to Kolkata when Indian operations there were finally wrapped up. After they got married, this set of grandparents moved to what was then called East Pakistan Displaced Persons’ (EPDP) colony in Delhi, made as a refugee camp of sorts for you can guess who. The colony expanded itself over the years to be renamed Chittaranjan Park, as opposed to that which held a racist slur, EPDP. No one welcomes migrants into their territory. This is where they brought their 3 children up in middle class comfort. This is where I was born, Chittaranjan Park, just another colony of big housing in South Delhi. Everyone ate fish and celebrated Durga Pujo. By everyone I mean even the Marathis, Punjabis, Sindhis, Bahais and all else who could afford to buy a house in the cosmopolitan integrated space EPDP had become. East Pakistan was, as was EPDP, a forgotten tale.
The story of another grandfather is even stranger. His family was from the border district of Kushtia. It used to be a part of Nadia district of undivided India, and the place has a resonating history of its own. For the sake of popular imagery, that’s where Lalon Fokir’s shrine is. My grandfather jumps his 80-year-old-jump whenever he sees or hears any Lalon imagery. We were watching a recent Bengali film that documents (and dramatizes) the life of Lalon, and captures Kushtia in much detail. He could not contain himself when images of, what I believe, is the Padma River came up. “That’s where we lived! That’s home!” Grandfather is a child in that moment. Obviously he didn’t know Lalon personally, nor has he seen Kushtia since his family was unexpectedly thrown into the other side of the border, into India. But these ideas create a picture of home, and indeed belonging, for him. Being a border area, his family didn’t see the partition coming. They were left as poor ordnance factory workers in Kolkata. Grandfather later ran away from home to become a film star in Bombay. That didn’t quite work out, and he later found himself a job with the Indian railways, posted in a small town in Nagpur called Gondia. His wife, my paternal grandma, is from the west of Bengal. They brought up their 3 children in considerable poverty in Gondia, but Kushtia was mentioned often.
My maternal grandma and paternal grandpa still enjoy great companionship, sharing jokes and essays in Sylheti, about seeing Gandhi at some rally or other. Their children also indulge in friendly mongering about being Bangal (Bengalis from Bangladesh) or Ghoti (Bengalis from West Bengal), most starkly seen when East Bengal plays football against Mohun Bagan. As for us, third generation partition children, we laugh and play along without really relating, quickly turning back to our homogenous globalised space (that some of us call Facebook).
Beyond the deaths and physical destruction, partition meant the loss of home, of place, of identity. But it also meant putting the children of zamindars and factory workers on an equal footing, through destruction of each of their identity, to begin again. From scratch, on equal ground, at times creating homeless wanderers.
Makes you think about borders, homelands and other such creations, doesn’t it?
Aheli Moitra is an independent researcher. She travels to document conflict in personal and collective spaces. Her write-up will be featured on the Saturday issue of The Morung Express. (Contact: aheli.moitra@gmail.com)
Rather, there is lack of a common space I identify with, or whose co-inhabitants have a similar set of values as me. Which brings me to the actual topic of this piece, what is ‘home’? If home is a space that evokes nostalgia and warmth, then Delhi is my home. If home is where my grandparents reside, then Kolkata is my home. If home is where my parents live, Bombay it is. If home is where I am most delighted to live in, Kathmandu beckons. And if home is the land of my foremothers, I’d have to pick Dhaka and Kushtia, in Bangladesh (East Bengal, East Pakistan, call it what former names you may, it’s still Bangladesh). Is home where we are most, and comfortably so, ourselves or is it something that exiles us from the individual, leading us to voluntarily or forcibly occupy a shared space, a common identity, which then stirs up all the associated metaphors of what we call home? Perhaps home is that which we dream of when every muscle in our body aches, and the mind can only focus its attention on that which is always far away, the warmth of the bed at home and the contours around it. Following the most outdated adage ever, home is probably a mental construction of promises that equate the bed to a sense of security, shelter, togetherness, identity and freedom, all mashed up in a cauldron.
But why do I lack this sense? There are others who homeless wanderers but have a clear understanding of what ‘home’ is. I have never thought of any of the places mentioned above as home. As a child, during vacation, we would visit our grandparents in Delhi and Nagpur respectively till they moved to Kolkata. I suppose that’s the closest they thought they could get to ‘home’. My maternal grandma belongs to a family of zamindars in Dhaka. And after a major bout of communal massacres her family witnessed, and nearly fell prey to in their neighbourhood, during partition (1947), her family packed up very systematically and left for Kolkata (Calcutta at the time). With the riches, they settled down safely in a large house in Dhakuria, a locality in the south of Kolkata. They were some of the few fortunate remnants of partition. Her husband (just another man then), on the other hand, remained in the hill districts of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) till 1950, working for the agriculture ministry of the central government till he was made to move to Kolkata when Indian operations there were finally wrapped up. After they got married, this set of grandparents moved to what was then called East Pakistan Displaced Persons’ (EPDP) colony in Delhi, made as a refugee camp of sorts for you can guess who. The colony expanded itself over the years to be renamed Chittaranjan Park, as opposed to that which held a racist slur, EPDP. No one welcomes migrants into their territory. This is where they brought their 3 children up in middle class comfort. This is where I was born, Chittaranjan Park, just another colony of big housing in South Delhi. Everyone ate fish and celebrated Durga Pujo. By everyone I mean even the Marathis, Punjabis, Sindhis, Bahais and all else who could afford to buy a house in the cosmopolitan integrated space EPDP had become. East Pakistan was, as was EPDP, a forgotten tale.
The story of another grandfather is even stranger. His family was from the border district of Kushtia. It used to be a part of Nadia district of undivided India, and the place has a resonating history of its own. For the sake of popular imagery, that’s where Lalon Fokir’s shrine is. My grandfather jumps his 80-year-old-jump whenever he sees or hears any Lalon imagery. We were watching a recent Bengali film that documents (and dramatizes) the life of Lalon, and captures Kushtia in much detail. He could not contain himself when images of, what I believe, is the Padma River came up. “That’s where we lived! That’s home!” Grandfather is a child in that moment. Obviously he didn’t know Lalon personally, nor has he seen Kushtia since his family was unexpectedly thrown into the other side of the border, into India. But these ideas create a picture of home, and indeed belonging, for him. Being a border area, his family didn’t see the partition coming. They were left as poor ordnance factory workers in Kolkata. Grandfather later ran away from home to become a film star in Bombay. That didn’t quite work out, and he later found himself a job with the Indian railways, posted in a small town in Nagpur called Gondia. His wife, my paternal grandma, is from the west of Bengal. They brought up their 3 children in considerable poverty in Gondia, but Kushtia was mentioned often.
My maternal grandma and paternal grandpa still enjoy great companionship, sharing jokes and essays in Sylheti, about seeing Gandhi at some rally or other. Their children also indulge in friendly mongering about being Bangal (Bengalis from Bangladesh) or Ghoti (Bengalis from West Bengal), most starkly seen when East Bengal plays football against Mohun Bagan. As for us, third generation partition children, we laugh and play along without really relating, quickly turning back to our homogenous globalised space (that some of us call Facebook).
Beyond the deaths and physical destruction, partition meant the loss of home, of place, of identity. But it also meant putting the children of zamindars and factory workers on an equal footing, through destruction of each of their identity, to begin again. From scratch, on equal ground, at times creating homeless wanderers.
Makes you think about borders, homelands and other such creations, doesn’t it?
Aheli Moitra is an independent researcher. She travels to document conflict in personal and collective spaces. Her write-up will be featured on the Saturday issue of The Morung Express. (Contact: aheli.moitra@gmail.com)
