The large-scale movement of people between Burma and Bengal in the early twentieth century has been explored recently by authors such as Sugata Bose and Sunil Amrith who locate Burma within the wider migratory culture of the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia. This article argues that the long and historical connections between Bengalis and Burmese were transformed by the British colonisation of the region. Through an analysis of selected literary texts in Bengali, some by well-known and others by obscure writers, this article shows that, for Indians, Burma constituted an elsewhere where the fantastic and superhuman were within reach, and caste and religious constraints could be circumvented and radical possibilities enabled by masquerade and disguise.
Introduction
Burma is a spectre that haunts the story of the east coast of India. Its geographical placement as one of India’s closest neighbours, sharing a thousand kilometres of common borders, is in contradiction to the elusive shadow that it intermittently casts on the emotional cartography of eastern India and, for the purposes of this paper, particularly Bengal. This lacuna in the shared and layered histories of the Eastern Indian Ocean has as much to do with shared colonial pasts as with the tendency of modern nation-states to treat relatively recent borders as sacred and inviolable, thereby denying all of the flows, movements, connections, fluidities and uncertainties that are the very stuff of human history and the imbrication of social, cultural and emotional worlds.
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