There is something inexpressibly remarkable about reading a letter long after everyone who wrote it is gone.
The ink has faded, the paper has yellowed, and the handwriting demands patience. Across nearly nine decades, the words retain an extraordinary sense of immediacy. They speak of weddings and illnesses, family obligations and everyday anxieties. There is no mention of borders, passports, visas or nations because, when these letters were written, none of those realities had yet entered the lives of the people who wrote them.
Over the past few months, I have been reading a bundle of old letters preserved by pishi, my father’s elder sister, who safeguarded them for decades. They belonged to my great-grandparents and other family members who lived between Mymensingh, Dhaka and Calcutta during the 1930s and 1940s. What began as a leisurely attempt to learn more about my family history turned into an intimate archive of undivided Bengal, captured not through political events but through the rhythms of ordinary domestic life.
For years, I knew only fragments of this story. My paternal grandmother was born in Mymensingh, in present-day Bangladesh. She came to Calcutta sometime around 1946 and married there, into a family that had lived in the city for generations. She spent the rest of her life in India, while much of her family remained across the border that Partition would soon create.
A father’s letters from Mymensingh
Among the earliest documents in the collection is a letter dated 18 Shrabon 1344 Bangabda, corresponding to August 3, 1937. It was written by my great-grandfather, Taraprasanna Majumdar, a Sanskrit scholar from Mymensingh.
Family memories had always remembered him as a learned man. The letters introduced me to someone else entirely. In one of them, addressed to my grandmother when she was still a little girl, he writes: “Maya maa amar, tumi kandiyo na, ami tomar jonyo haar anibo, chuuri anibo.” (My dear Maya, don’t cry. I shall bring you a necklace and bangles)
What makes the letter special is its simplicity. It doesn’t speak of extraordinary events, only of a father’s everyday love for his daughter. (Photo by Riyanka Roy)What makes the letter special is its simplicity. It doesn’t speak of extraordinary events, only of a father’s everyday love for his daughter. Taraprasanna writes as countless fathers did, reassuring a daughter distressed by his absence with promises of gifts he would bring home.
“Ami jotodin na ashi, totodin tumi lokkhi meye hoiya thakiyo… Bhanu, Diba, Bibha, kaharo shohit jhogra koriyo na. Amar jonyo chinta koriyo na, ami khub taratari firibo” (Until I return, be a good girl… Don’t fight with Bhanu, Diba, Bibha. And don’t worry for me, I’ll be back soon), he writes.
The letters also reveal another side of his life. Although remembered as a scholar, his letters are almost entirely occupied with domestic concerns. They move effortlessly between affection, responsibility, and the practicalities of everyday living. Beyond his public identity, these pages preserve the private man, almost behind the curtains.
Remembering my great-grandmother through food
If Taraprasanna’s personality emerges through his handwriting, my great-grandmother, Shailabala Devi, reveals herself through the memories others left behind. She was a homemaker. Family members remembered her cooking, and her recipes were recorded. In those days, food was an expression of care, especially when families were separated by distance.
Amidst those crinkled letters, I found a tiny notebook containing her recipes. “Fulkopir niramish torkari” (cauliflower curry), “aloo-jhinge posto” (potato and ridge gourd with poppy seeds), and “chaanar dalna” (cottage cheese balls in a curry) are some of the recipes she meticulously wrote down and passed on to my grandmother.
The letters echoed what my pishi had often told me about her grandmother. “There were only a couple of times when Naani came to visit us… She would bring homemade sandesh. And pithe puli.”
Reading an undivided Bengal
Growing up in Kolkata, I often heard people describe themselves as bangal or ghoti. My answer was always uncomplicated. My grandfather was from India, while my grandmother came from Mymensingh. I considered myself both.
Only much later did I realise how recent that distinction really was.
My first visit to Bangladesh, in 2021, was driven in part by a desire to understand my grandmother’s childhood. Since then, I have returned several times, each journey making the same point more forcefully than the last. The places I was visiting had never been foreign to her. They were part of the same Bengal in which she had grown up.
The letters reinforce that understanding with clarity. Family members travelled between Mymensingh, Dhaka, and Calcutta without any suggestion that they were crossing political boundaries. Weddings were organised across cities, relatives visited frequently, and everyday life unfolded with little awareness that these movements would soon be shaped by borders.
Among the papers was a wedding invitation card. Dated 11 Joishthyo 1349 (May 25, 1942), it announced a wedding in Bankura, in present-day West Bengal, and had been sent to Mymensingh. Printed on the card was a short poem reflecting the groom’s family’s anticipation as they prepared to welcome the bride:
“Esho jyotsnar moto choraye shanti, pushper moto heshe,
Esho batasher moto horite klanti, Lokkhir moto beshe.”
(Come, spreading peace like moonlight and smiling like a flower; come, dispelling weariness like the breeze, adorned like Goddess Lakshmi.)
Among the papers was a wedding invitation card. (Photo by Riyanka Roy)
The invitation is more than a record of a marriage. It offers a perspective on Bengal that official archives rarely capture.
Recently, I had a conversation with my grandmother’s cousin, now 89 and among the last members of the family with living memories of those years. Mentioning my great-grandfather immediately transported him back to his childhood.
“Your great-grandfather often travelled to the West. He would return with many things. Once he brought my father a sweater, which I later wore too.”
His recollection left me wondering about a single word: west. What did “the West” mean in the late 1930s and early 1940s? Was he referring to Calcutta, then the principal city of Bengal, or did those journeys take him further into other parts of India? The letters offer no answers, largely because none were needed. For the people writing them, geography was not something to be explained or recorded. It was simply lived.
A letter that belonged to another life
“Kolponar manoshchokhye shundor akta chobee jeidin bheshe uthbe, seidin hobe kolponar shomapti. Seidin jano akta daak pai. Opekkhaye roilam” (The day a beautiful image emerges in the mind’s eye of imagination will be the day imagination reaches its fulfilment. I hope to receive a call/message from you on that day. Until then, I shall wait.)
Among the family papers was one letter unlike the others. Written by a young man to my grandmother, it is dated 11. XII. 54 BS, corresponding to 25 March 1948. By then, the world reflected in the earlier correspondence had already disappeared. Partition had redrawn Bengal.
“Asha kori moner moto akjon ochena sathi peyecho, manbhonjon koranor moton” (I hope you have found a companion as you wished for, someone who can comfort and understand you.)
The letter carries the quiet sadness of a relationship shaped by circumstance. By 1948, my grandmother had begun a new life in India, while he remained in East Pakistan. There is no overt heartbreak in his words, only a gentle acceptance that life had moved on. In wishing her happiness with another companion, he leaves behind a subtle reminder of how Partition altered not only borders, but personal lives as well.
Even though the letter has a lot, what caught my attention was the stationery on which it was written. At the top was a printed letterhead bearing the name Chitta Ranjan Biswas, along with the address: P.O. Rupganj Bazar, Mymensingh. Like so many details scattered across the family archive, it seemed ordinary at first, until I began asking questions.
“Shomoyer khub obhab… Tomar moto bhaab ba kolpona konotai amar nae. Bastob niye kaaj kore cholechi” (“Time is scarce… I do not possess the dreams and imagination that you do. I am occupied with the realities of life.”)
At the top was a printed letterhead bearing the name Chitta Ranjan Biswas, along with the address: P.O. Rupganj Bazar, Mymensingh. (Photo by Riyanka Roy)
On the surface, the letter is a deeply personal exchange between two people whose lives had taken different paths after Partition. Yet read today, it also reveals how swiftly political upheaval entered the private sphere, reshaping relationships and futures in ways that official histories rarely capture.
When I mentioned the letter to my grandmother’s cousin, he immediately recognised the name. Chitta Ranjan Biswas, he recalled, had been a freedom fighter. His recollection gave the letter an unexpected historical dimension. The man whose words I had been painstakingly trying to decipher was no longer just a name on an old sheet of paper, but someone who had lived through and participated in the turbulent years that shaped the subcontinent’s future.
Histories of Partition are often told through lines, borders, and categories, through the language of statistics or metrics of migration and violence. These letters I found, however, tell a different story. They remind us that the consequences of 1947 were also measured in interrupted relationships, unsolicited emotions, and broken hearts, and in parents and children separated by newly drawn borders, where family correspondence through letters gradually became the only thread connecting lives divided between two countries.
Nearly eight decades later, those fragile sheets of paper continue to preserve what official records cannot: the emotional geography of an undivided Bengal.
"What began as a leisurely attempt to learn more about my family history turned into an intimate archive of undivided Bengal, captured not through political events but through the rhythms of ordinary domestic life." (Photo by Riyanka Roy/edited by Abhishek Mitra) 
What makes the letter special is its simplicity. It doesn’t speak of extraordinary events, only of a father’s everyday love for his daughter. (Photo by Riyanka Roy)
Among the papers was a wedding invitation card. (Photo by Riyanka Roy)
At the top was a printed letterhead bearing the name Chitta Ranjan Biswas, along with the address: P.O. Rupganj Bazar, Mymensingh. (Photo by Riyanka Roy)
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