Post-partition traumatic suffering, Displacement, and Violence: An analysis of Kapil Krishna Thakur's "The Other Jew"

Through a close textual analysis of Kapil Krishna Thakur’s notable short story “The Other Jew” this research article attempts to analyze how the traumatic displacement from the native land has shaped the lives of the Bengali Dalit refugees in post-partition West Bengal. In a noteworthy manner, Thakur’s narrative shifts from the point of view of Bengali upper-caste elite refugee experiences and provides a counter-narrative of it. Centering the argument on Thakur’s short fiction “The Other Jew” this article tries to inquire the effects of the loss of a familiar space, the notion of traumatic displacement, painful suffering situations in the host nation, and the sexual violence imposed on the Bengali Dalit women refugees from the purview of trauma theory and Johan Galtung’s conceptualization of violence. It demonstrates the multidimensional aspects of the refugees’ experience from a Dalit’s point of view, the idea of traumatic suffering, displacement, pain, violence, and its representation in Thakur’s fiction which severely contradicts the upper caste refugee experience in the post-partition West Bengal.