When Memory is Traumatic: A Critical Study of Bangla Autobiography Dandakaranyer Dinguli

Abstract

Autobiography is a valuable repository of memory, both personal and collective. It encompasses familial accounts of happiness and suffering; and at the same time its narrative remains a faithful representation of a whole community. Besides, it covers up social and political timeline as well. In this respect, an autobiography is not simply a family saga; rather its narrative accounts for understanding contemporary social situations. Partition of Bengal into East Pakistan and West Bengal in 1947 was such a cataclysmic event in modern South East Asian history that its deadly aftermath is still being felt by the victims. To contextualize it, political cataclysm creates an identity crisis among its victims that the victimhood leads to formation of traumatic memory. Dandakāranyer Dinguli (Days of Dandakāranya) is one of the many Bangla autobiographies written down by Sudhir Ranjan Haldar. It is a valuable repository of traumatic memory. The present paper focuses primarily on theoretical dimension of traumatic memory; and examines two important issues in the selected text: traumatic memory of Namo community being refugee in India; and traumatic memory of Namo community within a vicious circle of caste-based discrimination in their migrated life in refugee camps.  An individual’s personal narrative by the virtue of its representational dimension for entire community becomes a collective utterance; it brings out a common ethnic identity and commonly felt ethnic trauma running through the individual author and other community members in an unmistakable manner.

Key words: Partition, Trauma, Memory, Refugee, Caste discrimination, Autobiography