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Rai Saheb Nagendra Kumar Sur was a leading lawyer of Noakhali in East Bengal in 1946. When the pro-Pakistan riots broke out that year, he was kidnapped by a Muslim League gang, taken to a lonely spot and asked to dig his own grave. Sur told his abductors that since he was going to be killed in any case, there was no reason why he should oblige them. He was bluntly told that if he obeyed he would die swiftly, otherwise death would be slow and painful. Sur is said to have obliged. He was then beheaded.

MY PEOPLE, UPROOTED By Tathagata Roy Ratna Prakashan Price: Rs 500 Page: 470

Sur's son is Prasanta Sur who fled to India, joined the Communist Party, became a stalwart of the refugee movement and was even mayor of Calcutta. When Tathagata Roy met him on a number of occasions to talk about the refugee experience, he preferred to be silent about his father's brutal murder.

A refusal to reopen a family trauma could be a reason for this silence. However, assessed in terms of how at least two generations of Hindus from erstwhile East Pakistan reacted to Partition, a different conclusion is inescapable. An entire community, it would seem, went into a state of denial about its collective misfortune. It was almost as if the victims were desperate to pretend that a horrible ethnic cleansing hadn't taken place in East Pakistan. A community that was in the forefront of militant nationalism during the freedom struggle was cornered into forgetting the assaults on its dignity.

Roy's polemic on the post-Partition trauma in Bengal attempts to grapple with this phenomenon. He goes over the history of the exodus of some six million Hindus from East Pakistan-it didn't happen at one go in 1947 but was spread over 25 years-and locates the wilful denial of the past in a spurious reconstruction of the state's Hindu-Muslim relations. He narrates a forgotten story of how intimidation, rape, murder and religious terror contributed in the dispossession of Hindus after 1947.

Roy is not a professional historian and his work is often marred by an imperfect handling of evidence and shoddy editing. Despite these shortcomings, this is an important book. Whereas the horrors of Partition have become a trendy theme to beat the Indo-Pak peace drum in north India, its fallout in the east has been greeted with squeamishness. Roy's book not only explains why but also offers sufficient leads for others to take the story further.