The Bengal Files

OVER THE PAST few days, there has been a minor flurry of excitement over the world premiere of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Bengal Files centred on the horrible killings in the province in the year preceding Partition and the creation of Pakistan. I haven’t yet watched the film—it is scheduled for release in India on September 5—and am therefore unable to comment on its merits or otherwise. However, having watched The Kashmir Files and the storm it created all over India, I am reasonably sure that we are about to experience something similar in the coming months.

There are, of course, many ways of assessing Vivek’s films. That they are invariably controversial and a bit in-your-face is undeniable. Others will no doubt quibble over his political orientation, the assumption being that only left-inclined filmmakers ought to be discussed seriously. By that yardstick, the right should be content with producing mega-serials such as the Ramayan or films on Santoshi Ma. The chattering classes are visibly upset if People Like Us start going to the movie halls and telling neighbours that the way the Kashmiri Pandits were hounded out of the Valley was horrible. It is not that such people didn’t read the newspapers in 1990 and were unaware of, say, the attacks by secularists on the state’s Governor Jagmohan. But one thing we have learnt to despair over India is the fickleness of its collective memory. Hindus have never acquired a sense of history. The Arab traveller Alberuni observed this in the 11th century and a thousand years later, the phenomenon persists.

Analysing why this is so should be the subject of a serious seminar from which people with closed minds should be kept out. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that The Kashmir Files stirred a hornet’s nest because it was sufficiently clear that it portrayed events that weren’t a part of some novelist’s imagination. They happened, including the decapitation of a Hindu lady with a mechanised saw. What is also based on reality is the film’s depiction of the way leftist intellectuals quietly promoted the agenda of the separatists.

I don’t know if Vivek has been able to unearth such useful idiots in the Bengal of 1946-47. The conditions were different. What his research would have unearthed was the systematic way in which Direct Action Day in Kolkata and the subsequent butchery in Noakhali have been erased from public memory. The fault does not lie only with successive ‘secular’ governments in West Bengal that developed a vested interest in pandering to an ever-growing Muslim electorate that included a significant number of non-citizens. The large number of traumatised Hindu refugees that crossed into India from East Pakistan/ Bangladesh in successive waves from 1947 to 2025 lived in complete denial. They completely blotted out these horrible experiences from the nation’s collective memory.

I grew up with stray conversational references to Direct Action Day that began on August 16, 1946. Whenever we would cross certain parts of North and Central Kolkata by car, my mother would point out certain houses where all the inhabitants were massacred. In time, around the 1990s, the name of one Gopal Mukherjee (better known as Gopal Pantha) began to be whispered as the man who had led the Hindu retaliation after three days of one-sided butchery by Muslim League activists. I believe that it was the tireless efforts of Hindu activist Tapan Ghosh that helped keep facets of the killings alive among the more politically conscious at least.

Yet, the awareness is very patchy and a large number of youngsters in Bengal and elsewhere are probably unaware that Partition in the East was every bit as bloody as the one in the West. In Delhi and Amritsar, there are museums established through the efforts of public-spirited individuals, keeping the memory of what happened in Punjab, Sind and the NWFP intact. Alas, the poor victims who were chased out of East Pakistan are still crying out for a semblance of acknowledgement. They weren’t chased out because they were poor or rich, landlords or tenants. They couldn’t find a place in Jinnah’s land of the pure because they were Hindus and wanted to remain so. The secularists denied them this nominal recognition of their identity. Maybe, Vivek’s new film will showcase what they experienced and inform today’s Bengalis why it shouldn’t happen again.

BengalIndia’s partitionThe Bengal FilesVivek Agnihotri