Opinion | Partition Horrors Remembrance Day: India Must Remember The Right People

Remembrance cannot be reduced to mourning the dead; it must also compel us to decide whose legacies deserve to be preserved in our public memory

Today, India observes Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, a solemn occasion to remember the millions who lost their lives, homes, families and ancestral lands during the cataclysmic Partition of 1947. But remembrance has meaning only when it goes beyond ritual mourning. A nation remembers not merely to grieve, but to understand. It must ask difficult questions about what happened, who enabled it, who resisted it, and why certain memories were preserved while others were deliberately or conveniently forgotten.

That is why the recent controversy surrounding the Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s decision to rename Suhrawardy Avenue deserves more attention than it received. The road was renamed in honour of Gopal Chandra Mukherjee, popularly known as Gopal Patha, who became associated with resistance to the violence that engulfed Kolkata during the turbulent years surrounding Partition.

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Opposition to the decision argued that Suhrawardy Avenue was not named after HS Suhrawardy, the controversial Muslim League leader associated with the political circumstances surrounding the Noakhali violence and the Great Calcutta Killings, but after his uncle, Hassan Suhrawardy, an eminent academic and former Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University. The distinction may be historically relevant. But it does not answer the larger question.

Why should a major road in an Indian city have continued, for decades after Independence, to carry the name of a family so closely associated in public memory with the politics of the Muslim League and the turbulent history of Partition?

That question is far more consequential than the dispute over which Suhrawardy the road commemorated.

India has long struggled with the politics of historical memory. We have often attempted to build a harmonious post-colonial society by suppressing uncomfortable questions rather than confronting them. Reconciliation, however, cannot be achieved through selective amnesia. A mature civilisation does not fear its history. It examines it, debates it and learns from it.

Partition was not simply an unfortunate administrative rearrangement........

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