Historical moments evince more about the present than the past. Rarely are they just moments or cut off from the drifts of the present. Memory is contemporary. So it is with 1947: a colonial legacy, the partition in its wake, struggles for self-determination, the dissonance of migration, dispersal, belonging murmur across generations. They are in jagged conversations with what constitutes home, sense of place, and identity, each of them acquired, destabilized, imposed and accommodated, cherished in a myriad of ways.

Longing and Belonging is another phase of Goethe-Institut’s Inherited Memories project. It assembles narratives of 1947 partition by those who experienced or were affected by that course of history. More than recollections, these are openings which offer an understanding of negotiations and attachments, their deepening or dissolution, from the cleaved circumstances of partition into the present. Participants in Longing and Belonging were from Dhaka’s – particularly Mirpur and Mohammadpur – Indian émigré communities. The project presents a collection of interviews and visual materials to trace the contours of those negotiations and attachments and to establish, in their fluid state, how a place makes subjects and subjects make a place.

The accounts presented here evoke those jagged conversations. They are more in morsels than encyclopedic, but not abbreviated: an absorptive contemplativeness suffuses their tenor. There are reflections on home, family, friends, things seen and heard, journeys, looking back, ahead, and askance. With the presentation of composite narratives and materials, the project hopes to contribute to the critical, cultural, social questions around the 1947 partition that carries into the present.

A note on term: In Bangladesh, the terms of reference are ‘Urdu speakers,’ ‘stranded Pakistanis,’ ‘Biharis,’ ‘non-Bengalis,’ – each partial, inaccurate, and often disparaging – but following the poet Ahmed Ilias, ‘Indian émigré’ which is a more precise characterization, is used here.

Longing and Belonging is supported by Goethe-Institut Bangladesh.