Remembering Sylhet: Hindu and Muslim Voices from a Nearly Forgotten Story of India’s Partition

Partition, the break-up of colonial India in 1947, has been thesubject of substantial research, but the focus has been almostexclusively on the best-known dividing of Punjab and Bengal. Thiswork presents the little-known story of the district of Sylhet incolonial Assam, partitioned and ceded to East Pakistan following areferendum in July 1947. Unique in Partition historiography, thisresearch presents memories of the 1947 Sylhet Referendum andPartition, using oral narratives of both Sylheti Hindu and Muslimswho migrated to Assam/India in the period 1947-50. The studydocuments the memories of Sylheti Hindus who voted in favour ofSylhets retention within India but had to migrate after theReferendum decided in favour of Pakistan; it also presents thevoice of Sylheti Muslims, many of whom had voted in favour ofjoining Pakistan, but found themselves to be part of India due totheir inability to move to the newly-created country. Oraltestimonies of these two groups of Sylhetis are used to reconstructand analyse the Sylhet Referendum and Partition, especially interms of the impact on the lives of lay citizens, as alsoremembered six decades later. This book adds a significantgeographical area – Sylhet – to the growing corpus ofhistory-writing on the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent.