Re-Visiting Partition in Selected Short-Stories of Bangladesh

Bangladesh faced partition twice, first in 1947 than in 1971. But still the Bangladeshi partition short stories do not speak much about bloodshed, train massacre and violence as compared to Pakistan and Indian Partition short stories. In most of the Bangladeshi stories, whether written after 1947 or 1971, the protagonists are Muslims. But the writers always endorsed the point that violence affects all equally, it has no religion and it tarnishes the face of humanity for centuries to come. Human suffering speaks in one voice. The partition and displacement caused people of both the communities to be uprooted from places of their birth and work and hence they faced existential and identity crisis which deeply affected their psyche. The stories of partition speak volumes about those trouble torn days but even during those degraded times there are some stories which suggest that in spite of so much darkness and communal frenzythere existed a common human bond between peopleof different religions. Humanity was still not lost completely, though man became emotionally and physically bankrupt. This paper aims at venturing two such stories written by Bangladeshi writers Aluddin Al Azad's The Knife and Syed Waliullah's The Escape.