Little magazine conference strays into informally forbidden subject, partition woes and agony of Bengalis in Assam

By Our Correspondent

Agartala, December 29, 2025

The Hindu holocaust in East Pakistan- turned- Bangladesh in the pre and post partition days has remained a more or less informally forbidden subject even to the victims, concerned more about political correctness and sanctimonious posturing than the ghastly reality. Many eminent Hindu poets, authors , intellectuals and politicians have made the subject a no-go area and the list is long and it includes such stalwarts as late Jyoti Basu, Ila Mitra, Prashanta Sur, nobel-laureate Amartya Sen, Sunil Ganguly, Prafulla Roy and a host of others. These venerated stalwarts never spared a word on the woes and agonies of Hindus driven out of their homes and hearths in East Pakistan in the wake of the outbreak of communal politics leading to partition of Bengal in 1947. Apart from this, the agony of Bengalis in post-partition Assam on the sensitive issues of language and culture and racial identity also remain a taboo even for Bengali writers and authors.

Late Debi Prasad Singha of Assam who had retired as an assistant general manager of State Bank of India (SBI) was an exception in this regard as he freely articulated the agony of Hindu Bengalis who had been forced to flee their homeland in East Pakistan and then Bangladesh. In most of his novels and short stories , specially in his novels ‘Desh’ (homeland) and Rupkathar Pratyabartan (return of mythology) Debi Prasad had poignantly penned the agony of the uprooted Hindu Bengalis as well as the woes of Bengalis living in Assam.

In the ongoing Northeast Little Magazine conference being held in the Rabindra Shata Varshiki Bhawan, Saturday was dedicated to a discussion on the literary output of Debi Prasasd Singha and his contribution to the special genre of Bengali literature in Northeast. The eminent writers of Tripura such as Usha Ranjan Bhattacharjee, Sanjay Chakraborty, Shubha Brata Deb, Prasun Barman, Tanmay Beer and Gautam Bhattacharjee threw light on the spirit of Debi Prasad Singha’s writings, his style and technique. All the speakers urged upon the audience to properly read the creative works of Debi Prasad Singha. The Saturday programme also saw recitation of self-composed poetry by the gathering of poets over and above the discussion session on Debi Prasad Singha.

Among the indigenous speakers from Tripura, Bodhroy Debbarma, Ushazen Mog and Uttara Chakma highlighted the decline of the indigenous languages and writings in the in the face of the onslaught of English . “English is now a global language and it should be learned , spoken and written on but the original mother languages should also be preserved and there should be more writings in them; we can not let our languages be extinct for advancement just as we can not barter our soul for material gains” said the three eminent writers of ‘Kokborok’, ‘Mog’ and ‘Chakma’ languages.

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