The Scars Inked in Pages

🖊️Jayeeta Das

While most stalls at the International Kolkata Book Fair sell entertainment, a few are selling history that still hurts. Their shelves carried titles on 'Deshbhag', and 'Udbastu' lives; stories of refugees, uprooting and survival. Stall owners said their work began from personal history, families who were victims of 'Partition' and felt a gap in documented narratives. Their primary readers are still middle-aged and elderly people with direct or inherited memories, though younger visitors are increasingly stopping to browse.

 

One reader explained that she came not just for information but 'to feel it'. Her parents had carried the sorrow of leaving Bangladesh, repeating stories of the village home that once had everything. Today, when news shows people crossing over again, the pain feels familiar. Her mother cries while watching television. The reader searched for a book she could give her mother, believing a well-written account might hold that grief more gently than news headlines.

Another visitor focused on why these books matter now. He said these kinds of  stall felt different because the writing moved from history to politics, placing real incidents in recognizable settings. Partition books show how people suffered and how they survived, helping a new generation understand what happened.

 

A third respondent traced her roots to Comilla. Her grandparents built a life in a 'foreign land' after being forced to leave. Hearing those stories she called Partition undesirable yet unavoidable. What mattered to her was that the country should never break again. For her, books were the only route back to a lost time. 'If I want my origin' she said, 'I must return through the letters on the page.'

she rejected the idea that young readers choose such books casually.

 

 At a fair overflowing with ghost stories and fiction, anyone who picks up reality-based titles is searching seriously for history and the future. Youth interest is a hopeful sign because they carry culture forward.

Publishers at these stalls said readers often hesitate. The content is heavy, trains of refugees, empty villages, women and children torn from homes. People know they will gain information yet fear the emotional weight. They fear what was done to ordinary lives.

What unites owners and readers is the belief that Partition writing is not only about history.

 

It speaks to migrations, to television images of borders and crowds and to inherited sorrow that resurfaces in family conversations. The books work as memory tools, turning oral stories into recorded history.

 

In the crowded fairgrounds, these stalls perform a task. They preserve pain, explain resilience and insist that history be felt, not skimmed. Among the noise of trends and hashtags, Partition books remain enough to give goosebumps and necessary enough to be read.