Remembering Displacement in The Making of Everyday Life in Kolkata: A Sociological Study

Abstract

Scholars have argued that the process of remembering takes place in a social context, and not in social vacuum (Misztal 2003). There exists a long history of the role of memory in the processes of inheritance, appropriation, and recognition that an individual or a family attach to a house. In this research paper, I focus on how house/home as space/site for memory making is not static, rather a fluid process. Through sociological approaches to memory, my work argues that the Partition (of British India and of provinces of Bengal) and migration of people thereafter has shaped the everyday life of displaced individuals who moved to the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and contributed to their sense of home and belonging. Moving from one house to another not only reflected the significance of associational memory but also the forms of social remembrance. Therefore, the meanings and values that individuals attached to their “new home” were conditional to the memory of their “old home”. The data presented here was collected through two rounds of qualitative fieldwork in Kolkata between September 2017 and July 2018, where remembering displacement happened among the middle-class at both the individual and community levels.

Keywords

• social remembrance
• middle-class
• partition