This paper is an attempt to rethink the connections between the spatiality, visuality, and memory of the Bengal landscape without regarding Partition as an originary moment for contemporary South Asian feminism. In this attempt, the speaker has explored the political
materiality of the Bengal border by revisiting the fateful confusions created by the Radcliffe Line and how the tragedy of Partition overshadowed the collective Bengali experience of the famine of 1943 and the Tebhaga movement of 1946-1948 immediately before Partition or
even during and immediately after Partition. The visual strategies of representing the Bengal landscape, from the early years of Company paintings in the late eighteenth century to the Bengal school and the impact of socialist aesthetics, constitute the principal argument of
this paper. The everyday violence of the Bengal borderlands, the visual and literary strategies of imagining the Bengal landscape and how place, culture, and gender become enmeshed in these visual strategies are framed a long recall of memories of places erased by Partition.

Dr Mallarika Sinha Roy is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her most recent book is Feminist Frames: Gender, Space and Violence in India (2025, Zubaan Books). Her research monograph is titled Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967-1975) (2011, Routledge) and she is the author of Utpal Dutt and Political Theatre in Postcolonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). Her other book publication includes, Displacement and
Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion (co-editor with Papori Bora, Vijaya Rao and Shambhavi Prakash), New Delhi: Tulika, 2020. She has published in peer-reviewed journals like Feminist Review, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Theatre Research International, International Review of Social History, Economic and Political Weekly, South Asian History and Culture and Journal of South Asian Development. She has written book chapters for Theatre, Activism, Subjectivity: Searching for the Left in a Fragmented World, Manchester University Press, 2024; Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India, London: Routledge, Revised 2nd Edition, 2023; Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa, London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2021. She has regularly published reviews of books in European Journal of Theatre and Performance, The Book Review, South Asian History and Culture, and Contributions to Indian Sociology. She has been Co-Principal Investigator in the University Grants Commission funded “Traces of the Global: Displacement, Memory, Cultural
Citizenship” 2014-19; British Academy funded collaborative project ‘Cultures of the Left’ between Warwick University and Jawaharlal Nehru University; and participated in Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Leadership Fellowship, ‘How Women’s Rights Became Human Rights: Gender, Socialism and Postsocialism in Global History, 1917-2017’, 2017-2020. She also received Erasmus Fellowship, University of Cologne, 2023; and Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Denmark; Danish Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation (2008-2010). She regularly writes for popular Bengali and English press.