Review of Bhaswati Ghosh’s Novel Victory Colony 1950: Discovering the Transformed Role and Identity of the Migrated Bengali Women and its Impact on the Migrated Place

Abstract

Partition of India has left a permanent wound in the lives of the migrated people who had to leave their homeland to find themselves in a new place: geographically, socially and culturally. The scar has been transmitted directly and or indirectly from one generation to the next through personal accounts of the family members and or through memories in the form of objects. Partition of India has its different magnitude of outcome on the three pre independence states of India: Punjab, Sind and Bengal. Sind as a province remained in the newly formed Pakistan and the Hindu Sindhis migrated to India. The part of Punjab which was included in the Indian Territory only welcomed the Non-Muslim residents of Punjab. The partition of Bengal caused massive continuous arrival of migrated Bengalis from East Pakistan who were Hindus and unlike their counterparts of western border; they did not receive the assurance of rehabilitation. Bhaswati Ghosh’s novel Victory Colony 1950 is based on the aftermath of the partition of India on Bengal and Bengalis: It narrates the heart-breaking incidents that occurred in the lives of the migrated Hindu Bengalis which forced them to leave their homeland in East Pakistan. The novel describes the effects of their influx that had rattled the social-economic-cultural-political set up of West Bengal and while depicting that picture, it highlights specifically the role which the penniless refugee women played along with the men to achieve victory in setting up their own colony as well as in attaining their own path of independence. Simultaneously, it portrays another type of partition which existed in West Bengal in the form of we and they and gradually the manner through which very slowly the intermingling started to minimise this kind of differentiation though with severe resistance in certain areas of life.

Keywords

• refugee camp
• permanent liability
• partition
• women and victory colony