Moving memories: Remembering, and forgetting, the Partition of Bengal between South Asia and the United Kingdom

In this chapter, we explore the transnational movement of the memories of the 1947 Bengal Partition and discuss the ways in which these memories are remembered in everyday life both in South Asia and the United Kingdom. While focusing on how such memories relate to memories of British colonialism, the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and associated migration to the UK, we examine how the articulation of collective memories of the division of Bengal nurtures (to varying degrees) a sense of affiliation to a cross-border Bengali identity through a shared past and symbolic ties (Ghosh 2007, 228-229) across national, religious, socio-economic and generational backgrounds. This chapter is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted as part of the Migrant Memory and the Post-colonial Imagination (MMPI) research project. [...]