The scholarship that partition of India has generated is as varied and contested as the outcome of the event itself. Partition which was viewed as a mode of easy exit by the colonial powers from the Indian subcontinent became synonymous with the violence that broke out with the partition itself. Among the violence victims, women have been most vulnerable. In spite of an avalanche of modern Indian history researches centering around partition of India and decolonization, the tales of women experiences have been recent entries in these narratives. Women who have been the worst victims of the process, suffering in silence, found their voices silenced in most decolonization narratives, which were written by man and for `mankind'. While each of these partition narratives were efforts to informally memorialize the event, women's sufferings found no space in such memorials, till recent times. But, apart from most of these studies being socially non-inclusive, they suffered from geographical myopia as well. Their obsessions with Punjab initially, and then a grudging accommodation of Bengal in the partition has failed to include Assam, which in spite of being the `other' site of `partition of India' remained absent from their scholarly `gaze'. If Assam represented the marginal in partition discourse, its women represented the marginal within the marginal, or twice marginalized. This study is an attempt to highlight the voices of these `twice marginalized' in the Indian partition discourse.

More than 60 years have passed since 1947, when partition of Indian subcontinent was affected, but still the effects of partition continues to evoke emotions and memory of violence, separation and displacement that accompanied it. Its impact can be felt more among the inhabitants of lands who experienced the process itself. In terms of enquiry, `partition' has emerged as one of the most researched subjects of modern Indian history. In North East India, partition of the subcontinent continued to cast its shadow on most writings on social and political history of this region, where most of the problems of the region are related or traced to it. Its pervasive impact not withstanding, most of the studies that dealt with the issue of partition in India suffered from incompleteness. Various narratives and their counters that have emerged, seeking to explain the great divide and study the violence, trauma and displacement of people of that age, suffer from their obsession with Punjab and now Bengal, which are the two most commonly perceived sites of partition and victimization. Assam as the `other' site of India's partition has been completely ignored. While the first generation of partition scholarships have been primarily Punjab centric, the second generation of writings have ensured the gradual discovery of Bengal within the scheme of partition narratives in India. But both these sets of partition writings have overlooked (or probably ignored) the existence of another theater of partition in India, i.e., Assam. It is only after about 50 years that occasional attention through research papers and singular texts are bringing the story of partition of Assam, and its unique experience into the public domain. The Sylhet referendum through which partition of India touched Assam has not been a theme of any mainstream partition discourse. This policy of systematic marginalization has also been the fate of not only Assam, which can be called the third world of partition discourse in India, but also the women who were the worst sufferers in this process.

If Punjabi women found visibility in celebrated writings such as those by Urvashi Butalia, Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon, the Bengali women have received recent rehabilitation through the writings of Anusua Basu Roy Chowdhury, Nilanjana Chatterjee, Joshodhara Bagchi, Subhoranjan Dasgupta, Meghna Guha Thakurta and Bashabi Fraser, to name a few scholars. In spite of an avalanche of writings that has hit the public domain to commemorate the 50^th and the 60^th anniversary of partition of the Indian subcontinent and beyond, women's tales from Assam have been totally invisible. This absence is definitely not an indication of the lack of partition experience in Assam, but of the tragic example of the disinterest that affects mainstream historians for peripheral historical experiences. Their attempts to hierarchising partition experiences, based on their perception of the degree of experienced violence, have probably led the historians to undermine the Sylheti partition experience. Thus, Sylheti women and their experience in the Sylhet referendum, an inseparable and unique element of Assamese decolonization and partition experience, in 1947, has remained hidden from the public discourse on Indian partition historiography. While the 60^th year of Indian decolonization was marked by the publication of a thought-provoking article "Remembering Sylhet: A Forgotten Story of India's 1947 Partition", the Sylheti women failed to make a place in the partition narratives, nonetheless. While the Sylhet Referendum did find sporadic mention in articles and texts, which were written on the colonial experience of Assam, singular studies on it were few and far between. If JB Bhattacharjee's article, "Sylhet: Myth of a Referendum" found print in 1987, the next two articles on this theme through the writings of Anindita Dasgupta and Bidyut Chakrabarty, in "Denial and Resistance" and "The `Hut' and the `Axe'" respectively came only in 2001 and 2002. These articles apart, there is no singular `history' text which is written exclusively on this immensely significant development in Southeast Asian history. Even Bidyut Chakrabarty's study, "The Partition of Bengal and Assam" published in 2004, evidently devoted more space to Bengal, at the cost of Assam, on the ground that literature on Assam is scanty, though Assam found place in the title of the text and gave its unique selling proposition. It is indeed sad that while Chakraborty supplemented archival records with literary texts for Bengal, no such attempt was made for Assam.

History and Culture Journal, Forgotten Land, Forsaken People, Indian Decolonization, Mainstream Historians, Unique Selling Proposition, Muslim League, Muslim Community, Political Movement, League National Guards, Ideational Transformation, Patriarchal Society, Traditional Security Zones.