• ISBN13: 9780199475032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: Sociology and Anthropology
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: June 17, 2018
• Pages: 320
• Original Price: INR 1195.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 520 grams

The Refugee Woman examines the Partition of 1947 by engaging with the cultural imagination of the ‘refugee woman’ in West Bengal, particularly in three significant texts of the Partition of Bengal—Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara; and two novels, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga and Sabitri Roy’s Swaralipi. It shows that the figure of the refugee woman, animated by the history of the political left and refugee movements and shaped by powerful cultural narratives, can contest and reconstitute the very political imagination of ‘woman’ that emerged through the long history of dominant cultural nationalisms. The reading it offers elucidates some of the complexities of nationalist, communal and communist gender-politics of a key period in post-independence Bengal.

Paulomi Chakraborty is a faculty member at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.