Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and weep…. either one counts the cadavers, or one tells the story of the victims.’ Paul Ricouer.

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I was born in a refugee colony on Calcutta’s northern edge, where loss and exile were everyday weather. My parents fled East Pakistan during waves of religious persecution after Partition in 1947 and later upheavals, exchanging abundance for cramped survival. Their migration taught me that borders may redraw maps but fracture lives.

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In 2014, I returned to Bangladesh for a documentary photography course—the first in my family to go back since my parents left. At immigration, a Hindu official, Montu Saha (name changed), told me, “You are a foreigner now to the land that birthed your parents.” Tracing my lineage to Jhalokhati in Barisal, I found a weathered ancestral home and a deeper urgency to document what was lost. Diving into the Partition archives, I noticed a striking absence of visual narratives that show how a shared Bengali language and culture endured despite political division.

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My camera focused on the border fence as a symbol—cutting not only land but identities, turning linguistic kinship into nationalist separation. That work became The Border that Bleeds and The X-Ray, projects that probe inherited trauma and the violence of division. The 2015 Land Boundary Agreement, which resolved many stateless claims, inspired another strand: the People of Nowhere, stories of reclaimed territory and fragile belonging.

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Sons of the Soil documented Bengali Hindus and Muslims marginalized in Assam by policies that labeled them “illegal immigrants.”

 

Women of Assam grew from encounters with Bengali women—across faiths—who carry the same anxieties and resilience. These portraits showed how state power and exclusion shape intimate lives.

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My engagement with the Matua community began in 2013 after meeting Jagdish Halder, a Matua elder and refugee. I traced their history to an egalitarian, anti-caste movement born in present-day Bangladesh 215 years ago. Their hymns and struggle deepened my project into The Songs of the Caged Birds—The Story of Matuas, an ongoing work about spiritual rebellion and belonging.

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In Search Of is a personal journey of mine to trace the roots of my family in Bangladesh - Barisal and Faridpur, the story of painful separation with friends and families, never united and not seen each other forever.

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Over years of photography, archival research, and oral histories, I’ve tried to render the Partition’s human contours: economic loss, cultural hybridity, spiritual insurgency, and stubborn continuity. This body of work aims to add a visual, empathetic layer to post-colonial discourse—turning maps and politics into lived faces and voices. As global migration fuels rising nationalism, my photographic practice links macro histories to micro lives, insisting that the Bengali pulse—despite borders—remains unbroken.

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'Partition is a never-ending story…, a messy, long-drawn-out process that remains 'still unfinished today'' The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts by Smita Tewari Jassal & Eyal Ben-Ari