Articles by Sumanta Banerjee

There is no end to the variety of vulnerable sentiments that our politicians and administrators suffer from - religious, cultural, national, regional, etc, etc. At the slightest scratch on any of them, the government clamps down a ban on, or tries by other means to stifle, works of literature and art that touch upon these sacrosanct subjects.

The autonomy resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir assembly has revived the opportunity for the much-needed debate on an issue that has both historical roots and future implications.

There is a feeling of deja vu in the political air. The unwavering sameness of the contradictory signals on Kashmir forebodes another round of official goof-ups and lies as in the past.

Looking back at the epidemic of Clintonmania that gripped the country during the US president's visit, one is left with the suspicion that the Indian people - both the urban elite and the rural poor - suffer from, along with other ailments, a severe spinal disease of servility to the west.

THIS is a book which should be thrown open to the readers, without the mediation of any reviewer. It is a slice of what has come to be known as the' worm's eye view of history'. The author has collected meticulously, reproduced verbatim and analysed theoretically the voices of those survivors of the holocaust of 1947 (mainly Sikh and Hindu refugees in India) who had till now remained invisible and unheard. The central episode is a movingly recounted story of the author's own discovery of a long lost uncle of hers across the border who had become a Muslim. His story remains the pivot around which her narrative takes its birth, develops, and attempts to reach out towards an understanding of the trauma suffered by those victims of the partition who are now living in Pakistan, But the author is honest enough to acknowledge that her work is incomplete in two respects first, she 'had no access to information, interviews or anything else from Pakistan' (which deprives the readers of what could have been an equally important narrative of reminis- cences of Muslim survivors of the 1947 holocaust who are now settled in Pakistan); and secondly, she has left out the victims of the partition in the east, in Bengal, mainly, as she states frankly, "because I do not have the language", and as "the partition of Bengal was so very different from that of Punjab".