Food Trails of the Bengal Partition: Studying Gastro-Politics in Bhaswati Ghosh's Victory Colony 1950

The Partition of Bengal, a part of the great divide brought in through the larger Partition of
India in 1947 along with the independence from the colonial British rule dividing the land into
two nation-states i.e., India and Pakistan led to the bifurcation of the two territories resulting
in the divide of the shared spaces, histories and culture. Such memories were brought in by
the waves of migrants with unfathomable experiences of people being killed, raped, mutilated
and disposed of, along with the process of displacement. Here the comfort of food which
acted along with the grasp of memories of one’s belonging to stabilize an aching soul, as it was
among the minimal items these people could bring. The current paper will mainly focus on
the different methods to equate food and try to look at the bond between food and partition
and the several actions associated with the changes in these everyday practices through critically
approaching the novel Victory Colony 1950 (2020) by Bhaswati Ghosh. After years of
colonization and a fixed cultural legacy, the sudden shift imposed a state of trauma and utter
discomfort of rootlessness. How does food stabilize a refugee soul by locating one to their
region through nostalgia and also irritate through the longing for the native space of past existence?
How does the material existence of food help to give life to an imaginary space? How
does food act politically to help maintain one’s subjective identity even after drastic changes and
movements in livelihood, belonging and national identity and thus also empower the resistance
against generalization? These are among the questions intended to be dealt with. This paper
hypothesizes that food acts as an active force through its changes and adaptations that bring
forward a cultural space through the assimilation of the past within the present along with the
narratives of resilience.