This refugee colony had built everything they needed schools, markets, temples, and now a post office without any help from the government... the refugees were increasing in numbers and growing in strength. This rang alarm bells and the official response was the Refugee Eviction Bill.'
Such troubles were part of the lives of refugees. Set in turbulent post-Partition Bengal, Sabitri Roy's epic novel, Bawdwip, translated into English for the first time, tells the story of people uprooted ruthlessly from their homeland, fighting for a new life in an alien land. It relates multiple stories: of the idealistic communists and their optimism, Dhiman and his family of friends who share the struggle, and of violent opponents who have their own plans for the same land. Sabitri Roy sensitively paints the student and labour movements of the 1950s, the communal tensions and the lives of a displaced community.
Sabitri Roy (1918-85) was a sympathizer but not a member of the Communist Party, which censored her novel, Swaralipi. Another translation, Harvest Song (Paka Dhaner Gan), was published in 2006 (Stree). Adrita Mukherjee, a gifted translator, lives and works in New Zealand.
Sabitri Roy (1918-1985) wrote short fiction, poetry and children's literature, but novels were her preferred genre. Most were built on an epic scale, two being trilogies: Paka Dhaner Gan and Meghna Padma. Rarely noticed in the Bengali literary world in her lifetime even though there were Malayalam translations of most of her novels-feminist scholars have recently recovered a sense of her importance. They, however, classify her as primarily a partition novelist, or as a women author, focusing on women's lives.
While she certainly possessed important and new perspectives on women's worlds and on partition, what is generally forgotten is that communist protagonists constitute the spine of every one of her novels. Despite that, and in spite of her profound commitment to the Party and its values, she is not seen as a communist author, writing communist lives. It seems that the political understanding that infused her literary work is yet to be acknowledged, even by sympathetic and admiring leftist and feminist readers. This novel-her last one, first published in 1972-is an especially strong reminder of her political preoccupations.
The Bangla name of Nowhere People is Badwip which literally means an estuary. The novel is, indeed, constructed like a piece of land, cast adrift among unruly waters. It begins with terrorized Hindus uprooted from East Pakistan in the early 1950s. They build up a refugee colony on the southern suburbs of Calcutta, with little support from the government. The heart of the novel is a communist family: Dhiman, a teacher-activist, Khana, his artist wife who has abandoned her art in their new shrunken circumstances, and their young son, Jishu, increasingly drawn to his parent's worldview. High-spirited young Dhruba is Dhiman's sister and a Party activist.
As the family settles down and strikes roots, they develop relations of respectful intimacy with local Muslim residents who receive them with warm hospitality. The family network expands as an Algerian student joins their circle with tidings from their war of independence, as Seemanta, a neighbour, works together with Dhiman, and as local unemployed and deeply frustrated youths-Bandhan and Sagar-find release and meaning in Party work. The maid who serves the family expands its horizon in a different way. She narrates the raw experiences of subaltern refugees, who clear jungles and face wild boars in order to construct their meagre hutments.
While local peasants organize themselves under Seemanta to avoid turning into sharecroppers with no titles to the land they till, strikes sweep across social classes: among factory workers, refugees, students, teachers. Much of the novel is animated by strike after strike. They constitute a world in themselves, propelling novelistic action. The rest of the novel is, surprisingly, driven by intense romanticism: sometimes in mystical dialogues, sometimes in prolonged musings.
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