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"More Or Less" Refugee?: Bengal Partition In Literature And Cinema, Sarbani Banerjee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, I problematize the dominance of East Bengali bhadralok immigrant’s memory in the context of literary-cultural discourses on the Partition of Bengal (1947). By studying post-Partition Bengali literature and cinema produced by upper-caste upper/middle-class East Bengali immigrant artists, such as Jyotirmoyee Devi’s novel The River Churning (Epar Ganga Opar Ganga 1967, Bengali) and Ritwik Ghatak’s film The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara 1960, Bengali), I show how canonical artworks have propounded elitist truisms to the detriment of the non-bhadra refugees’ representations. To challenge these works, I compare them with perspectives available in Other refugee writers’ …