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. @SharanyaHK wanted me to write about the public library of my childhood, but there was one problem: I can only have mixed feelings about it. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kalyani-public-library-community-spaces_in_5f5316c9c5b6578026ce45b1
The small town I grew up in was a 'planned township', celebrated as a story of West Bengal's success after the devastation of Partition. In the story of the planned town we grew up hearing and never questioning, the land was simply 'acquired'. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kalyani-public-library-community-spaces_in_5f5316c9c5b6578026ce45b1
Sometimes one heard of the soldier's camp, named after Roosevelt. There's an old well with a plaque that commemorates King George V - I cycled up to it once, it was not particularly impressive. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kalyani-public-library-community-spaces_in_5f5316c9c5b6578026ce45b1
Names like Chandmari, Charsarati, Ghoshpara existed in my lexicon only when referring to the fringes of the town, never quite about the 45 evicted villages (with little or no compensation) or the Chandmari Refugee Camp. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kalyani-public-library-community-spaces_in_5f5316c9c5b6578026ce45b1
The Partition narrative of West Bengal is so overdetermined by narratives of Calcutta that townships like ours, with their brand of planned segregation, is seldom recognized, let alone addressed. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kalyani-public-library-community-spaces_in_5f5316c9c5b6578026ce45b1
Thinking about the library, so carefully located within the planned town - a part of the urban amenities that were supposed to lure genteel folks away from Calcutta - made me realize that I can't tell the library's story without the story of the town. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kalyani-public-library-community-spaces_in_5f5316c9c5b6578026ce45b1
The deep history of the land is one marked by dispossession and migration - the famine, the War and the American soldiers, the Partition - and the new town, for all its sanitized urban legends, is a part of that story. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kalyani-public-library-community-spaces_in_5f5316c9c5b6578026ce45b1
The land is also marked by another history of co-existence - evident every year at Dol Purnima, when the devotees of Aulchand flock the Sati Ma'r Mela. With the rising tensions in the area, esp. with the NRC, I fear for its co-option and erasure. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kalyani-public-library-community-spaces_in_5f5316c9c5b6578026ce45b1
Also, very grateful to @SharanyaHK for being a wonderful editor and to her colleague Akshita for her all her work. Thank you!
