Sometimes, I wonder if my grandmother still speaks to me.
In 2022, the woman I knew as my grandmother was in her early seventies. She was still “young”, as my mother liked to remind us, when she was forcibly uprooted from her small two-bedroom flat in Kolkata, surrounded by trees, to the grey, lifeless urban sprawl of NCR where my parents lived. “She cannot take care of herself anymore. She cannot live alone,” said my mother. She was brought to her new home. Towards the end of her life, she was strapped to a narrow, hospital-style metal bed in one of our bedrooms, being fed through a silicone tube. What I remember clearly is her voice rising in waves. There were incoherent shrieks, sometimes incessant crying, punctured by vivid descriptions of the landscape in Meghe Dhaka Taara, and hoarse accusations about being followed by strangers in the night.
There was little we could do.
When I returned home, I would nod solemnly, occasionally squeezing her palm to distract her, pretending to agree or disagree. Every day, the voices rose to the surface, stirred the silence, and died down. But she never truly stopped speaking. Her thoughts meandered, her words failed, and new sounds emerged. The person who went to sleep was never quite the same as the one who woke up.
For a long time I didn’t know what to call the way she spoke, didn’t know how to translate it. It was only after her death that I learned she had been diagnosed with both dementia and schizophrenia. But long before the labels had been identified , there were signs: the rambling tone, continued fixation on origami, refusing to set foot in the kitchen, or leave the bed, and so on. One time, she stopped eating entirely for days, and it seeded my father’s often repeated phrase: ‘pagol hoye geche’ (she has gone mad). The phrase, passed down quietly, continued to be used in our house to refer to three generations at once…my grandmother, my mother, and on special occasions, it was used for me…
Even today, the word pagol (mad) holds no clinical significance for my father. But it does draw an invisible thread across several generations, surfacing repeatedly in Bengali literature in forms both tender and terrifying. I think of Tagore’s pagol, embodying spiritual madness. Then there is Sukumar Ray, one of my grandmother’s favourites, who lends the pagla a child-like whimsy. And yet another form emerges in modern poetry, which treats the term as a social critique. If I go even farther, I meet scholars who write about the partition and displacement as if collective madness, embedded in silenced voices, is a separate language of its own.
If the psyche of the displaced could speak, perhaps pagol would take the shape of a living woman. I think pagol would be a woman whose language we were never taught to comprehend or listen to. But silence is never easy to decipher. Among the scholars too, we have variation. We have those who speak of Bengal’s pain being silenced and sidelined, and the kind of ‘refugee existence’ which followed in the aftermath of partition. Then there are those who look to the layered silence of women, specifically, to describe the canon event we term as partition. Looking back, nothing quite captures and conveys the solitary nature of being a woman, silenced.
My grandmother was quiet and reserved by nature. She survived a bloody partition which was inherently masculine, embroiled in lofty ideals and nation-building. Except for her, it also unfolded in kitchens, lingered in lost letters before landlines, or rested in her confusion at the sounds of different languages spoken next door. She never truly spoke of these experiences. But the fear in her eyes when someone knocked too loudly, the way she hoarded food in plastic containers till her final days, and the flicker of emotions in her eyes that followed any mention of home would inadvertently give it away. It took the shape of a new, indescribable language, which I discovered much later. It is the one that scholars like Jayati Dasgupta and Veena Das have also argued for, seeing how the unspeakable often frames its own form of speech. And so it was that the Bengal partition came to be narrated with masculine undertones. But I felt that maybe it was, for women, a much quieter rupture.
Over the decades, the part of Kolkata which my grandmother imagined would be her home till the very end, and where she had still not forgotten to speak in full sentences, was also witnessing changes. But her flat continued to be a revolving door of people, streams rushing in and streams rushing out. Always someone standing at the threshold who needed to be welcomed in, a duty that fell, without question, to the wife of my grandfather. I saw how she disappeared into the kitchen, emerged with a tray of food, contributed two full sentences to the ongoing discussion, and vanished into the kitchen again. Days blurred into routines, mundane and repetitive. Real conversations were minimal. Silence, loud. Perhaps that is when speech unravels…
I reckon that for my grandmother though, even this chaos was better than having to rebuild a home over and over, especially after she had been forced to leave behind everything familiar on multiple occasions—her language, her neighbours, even the smell of the pond near their courtyard. Madness, as I learnt with time, is not just a condition. Sometimes, it is the only language left.
Historically, madness has been associated with the feminine. The Victorian asylum’s counterparts, here in India and in Bengal too, have been the topic of scholarly discussions for some time now. Stripped down, they always seem to reveal the same old patterns: race, gender, power. The asylum, then, is about control. It is as if institutionalisation was founded upon the discomfort associated with the extremities of silence and loud voices. Specifically, women’s silence and loudness.
I learnt that in our home, pagol was the term reserved for inconvenient women. The phrase pagol hoye geche was spoken like a confession, or maybe a warning. As if madness could trickle down through blood or memory.
Maybe it already has.
There are things in me that I cannot name. There is something which feels like a scream lodged in the throat. And it pushed me, in my late teens, towards literature because it gave me metaphors for things I had not yet discovered in existing vocabulary. That something, garnered new forms and meanings with every page I turned. Virginia Woolf referenced it when calling upon the need for “a room of one’s own.” Sylvia Plath weaved it in differently, quietly, into the imagery of fig trees. In the pages of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, it assumed a spectral form. And in Mahasweta Devi’s stories, I found more fictional women who were frenzied, fractured, and dismissed.
By 2019, I had convinced myself that I had outrun the word, the inheritance, and the silence. I returned home to conduct fieldwork for my thesis on caregivers and the health-seeking behaviours of women diagnosed with mental illnesses. Fieldwork, after all, requires distance in a clinical sort of way. Some call it professional detachment. And Delhi is indifferent enough to allow forgetting.
During those long metro rides to psychiatric wards and hospital corridors, and in the countless questions which I passionately asked other women about their lives, I began to hear something familiar. It was fainter here, but unmistakable. Buried under the colloquial, tucked beneath casual phrases, quick dismissals, and the everyday lament of headaches and body pain. Beneath it all lay a deeper kind of sorrow, one I had learnt to recognise in my grandmother’s distant eyes and silent stares too.
The pagol, once a diagnosis, once a whisper, was now shedding its layers in front of me, revealing a truth far more uncomfortable than the satisfaction of clinically dissecting another woman’s life.
But I realised in 2019, that we were not quite there yet. My grandmother, once a little girl eating aloo sheddho bhaat (boiled potato and rice) and hefty servings of freshly prepared sweets to fill her afternoons, had not stopped being that girl. She remembered what her mother was like, tended to her brothers and sisters, and learnt to read and write diligently. Over the years, she even watched her siblings die, one after the other before her eyes. But she lived on. In 2019, she was still a woman capable of cooking for me. She could still spell her own name, recall memories whenever I was bored and wanted to hear a story, and competed with me to make paper boats out of old newspapers. She still held space for laughter.
What marked the beginning of the decline? It is hard to say. But I realise now that time was also the problem…
Time chipped away slowly. One misplaced name. One forgotten pot left burning on the stove. One day, she stopped folding the paper boats. One day, the stories stopped mid-sentence. What began as memory loss became a different kind of speech. It was a language I didn’t yet know how to hear. And now, I wonder if it could be termed madness. What seemed like a sudden unravelling had, in truth, been unfolding for years. One version of her was already gone. Another had begun to emerge, shedding silence and reaching for speech in a language none of us yet understood.
After so many years, I see what she left behind. For instance, I no longer identify as a literature student. But my roots cannot be undone and erased because some stories refuse to be unlearned. The survival etched into my mother’s bones, and her mother’s silence before that, lives in me too. I am also the woman who crossed borders, fled homes, and learned to thrive in silences. Maybe memories and madness are meant to be carried forward by generations. Through speech, writing and remembering, am I not carrying them forward too? Maybe, in time, I will learn to translate this language, as I have already begun to speak differently…
For now, the last paper boat my grandmother and I folded together still sits somewhere in my cupboard. I don’t need a fresh one just yet, and though I could always make one, I don’t have the heart to throw it away. Some languages, like some boats, are meant to stay unfinished.
.
.
.
.
.
- Feldman, S. (1999). Feminist interruptions: The silence of East Bengal in the story of partition. Interventions, 1(2), 167–182.
- Dasgupta, S. (2015). Remembering the Bengal Partition: Trauma and the “slow violence” of refugee existence. South Asian Review, 36(3), 51-64.
- Didur, J. (2000). At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women’s Partition Narratives. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 4, 53-71.
- Chowdhury, D. (2024). Partition’s Women: Inherited Memories of Remarkable Lives and Times. In The Long History of Partition in Bengal (pp. 150-169). Routledge India.
- Das, D. (2018). Gender and insanity: Situating asylums in nineteenth-century Bengal. In Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India (pp. 172-195). Routledge India.
- Ernst, W. (2008). Institutions, people and power: Lunatic asylums in Bengal, c. 1800–1900. In The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India (pp. 129-150). Routledge.
