In Bangladesh, Stranded on the Borders of Two Bengals Every time I am in Kolkata for work, something very specific happens at dinner. My host takes me aside, wanting to tell me about their family home in pre-1947 East Bengal. Often that home is in Chittagong, Comilla, Sylhet or Faridpur district, but it can be many other places as well. They will invariably talk about what was left behind- a well-ordered, bucolic life. Sensing both longing and reproach in these encounters, I always hesitate in my response. What story should I offer in exchange? Of my grandfather walking onstage at his school to receive the gold medal in Sanskrit, overhearing one teacher whisper, "Must be a mistake, it's a Muslim boy!" What would be the point of such a retelling anyway? Just as East Bengal (later East Pakistan and then Bangladesh) is frozen in my hosts' memories as a lost home, my grandparents' generation memorialized West Bengal through a list of grievances. In the Indian grand narrative, partition should never have happened, and grief and longing are embedded into their stories. On the Pakistan side, 1947 was cast as a successful secession, and the emphasis on grievances served a clear utility. In the 1950s, when the borders were still fluid and needing to be crystallized, stories would be brought out to establish that in united India, "Muslims would never have been able to rise up." In recent times I hear these stories less frequently, perhaps because of counterfactual elites like India's Chief Justice Altamas Kabir (with roots in Faridpur district, also home to Bangladesh's founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman), or because the daily reality, two partitions later, make it harder for origin fables to have emotive purchase. For the post-1971 generation in Bangladesh, growing up in a country where Muslim Bengalis imposed majoritarian pressure on Hindu Bengalis, as well as on Jumma indigenous people in the hills, it becomes willful obstinacy to hold on to grievance narratives (although, every time an Ayodhya or Gujarat conflagration happens, old stories flare up). For me, other demographic, cultural, and utopian political possibilities float, ghostlike, over partition. Until recently, West Bengal had the world's longest-serving democratically elected Communist government. By contrast, the red flag never flew over Bangladesh- our left forces have been history's orphans, always missing that "inevitable" rendezvous. Without partition, could a different left politics have been birthed in a united Bengal? After 1947, an important core of Bengal's left - Hindu leaders and Muslim and Hindu subaltern members - stayed in West Bengal. The few who were in East Bengal - Moni Singh (Communist Party) or Binod Bihari Chowdhury (of Chittagong armory raid fame) - were not enough to form a strong political base. Instead, East Bengal had a Muslim, and then a Bengali Muslim leadership. If, instead, equally proportioned Muslim and Hindu communities had worked together, what other political equations might have been generated? In the 1990s, I enthusiastically submitted articles to a magazine called Juktakkhor (Bengali for "joint alphabet letter"), published from Kolkata and Dhaka. After publishing a few issues, the magazine closed because of structural constraints, like the unofficial blocks on cultural transactions across borders and tensions inside the editorial team. The poet Joy Goswami's involvement from the West Bengal side had reassured me that it would be an equal project, but it did not soothe everyone. At Juktakkhor, one complaint I heard was that West Bengal still treated Bangladesh as the lesser partner in cultural production. Something of the colonial-era binaries of cosmopolitan "Calcutta" and earthy "Dacca" carry over into this nonreciprocity. West Bengal writers like Sunil Ganguly and Samaresh Majumdar are popular in Dhaka, but far less reciprocal space has been created in Kolkata for bestselling Bangladeshi novelists like Humayun Ahmed and Imdadul Haq Milon. Realistic Kolkata watchers will tell you that their Bengali-language readership is not large enough to support books from both Bengals. West Bengal's Bengali-reading audience has been continuously shrinking under the pressures of English and Hindi (in Kolkata's Oxford Bookstore I noted that the English-language translations of Rabindranath Tagore were prominent best sellers). In fact, when Bangladesh's government banned the West Bengali magazine Desh in retaliation for a Nirad Chaudhuri article that used the sardonic phrase "so-called Bangladesh," the magazine's circulation dropped dramatically. The incident revealed that West Bengal's publishing houses depended heavily on Bangladeshi readers. When the Bengali filmmaker Aparna Sen visited Dhaka for a film festival in the 1980s, a newspaper reported on her emotional reaction to the unusual sight (for her) of car license plates in Bengali. But such surface sentiments obscure the fact that the two Bengals are far apart on cultural collaboration. After Ritwik Ghatak's film "Titash Ekti Nodir Naam" (1973), 20 years passed before the next significant cross-Bengal collaboration, "Padma Nadir Majhi." Popular Bangladeshi box office smashes like "Beder Meye Josna" have to be reshot for the Indian market, to bypass unofficial restrictions on cultural exchanges. The director Mrinal Sen, another West Bengali originally from East Bengal, was asked why he had never shot a film in Bangladesh. He replied that the governments on both sides of the border always make it impossible. At the political level, cultural collaboration is often deliberately misinterpreted as a sovereignty threat, and there is a particular history to this. In 1972, immediately after Bangladesh became independent, wall slogans appeared in Dhaka saying, "Dui Bangla'r checkpost uriye dao" ("blow up the checkposts between the two Bengals"). Those slogans and the possibility of cross-border alliances between Maoists in West Bengal and Bangladesh frightened Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujib equally. The security apparatus of both countries joined forces to crush the insurgencies, and in the process removed a possible path for class politics-based linkages between Bengals. Forty years after independence, Bangladesh continues to have an uneasy relationship with its national identity and the presence of its neighbor. West Bengal is only one part of that equation, as Bangladeshi migrant related instability in northeastern India now looms large as well. Still, relationships with West Bengal are the crucial prism for India-Bangladesh relationships. In 1971, Kolkata's deep empathy for millions of Bengali war refugees streaming across the border from East Pakistan pressured the Indira Gandhi government to intervene in the war. But in 2011, when the body of a refugee girl, Felani, hangs on a border fence after being shot by Indian border security, the figure of the "illegal Bangladeshi migrant" is too dehumanized for West Bengal to pay attention. As West Bengal's attitudes toward Bangladesh shifts from nostalgia to suspicion, so too does that of India. The next time there is a dinner in Kolkata, I may try to nudge my hosts in a different direction. Instead of loop memories of a river cottage, perhaps it is better for us to think of ways to revive experiments like Juktakkhor. Once-twinned, now tragically separated, people cannot hope to now, after all this time, reverse midnight's trajectory. But they can, at least, begin to work together as equals. Naeem Mohaiemen is a Bangladeshi writer and visual artist. His work is represented in India by Gallery Experimenter in Kolkata.