In this extract from an interview with Kavita Puri from 2016, Anindya Raychaudhuri describes the subtle and distinct meanings of two separate words for ‘home’ in Bengali (or Bangla). He explains that while basha is the place where you live at the moment, baari (or Bāŗi) is where you belong – the latter has definite connotations of more permanence. When Anindya used to talk with his grandparents they often discussed their memories of their family home and drew comparisons with what they lost because of Partition.

Both sets of Anindya’s grandparents were from East Bengal, which was absorbed into Pakistan in 1947. They fled the rising tensions and violence in 1947, leaving behind their family homes and moving to West Bengal in India. Although both of Anindya’s parents were born after 1947, the loss of their family homes meant that he grew up with a deep-rooted feeling of displacement and insecurity.

About Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices

In 2017 BBC journalist Kavita Puri led a project to mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India. Through interviews, the Partition Voices team directly documented the experiences of those who lived through this traumatic time and subsequently moved to Britain, as well as stories from their children and grandchildren. The testimonies recall epic journeys and forced migration, violence, partings with friends and family, and the end of Empire, with some speaking about these events for the very first time. The outcome of this project was an award-winning three-part series for BBC Radio 4 titled Partition Voices, and later an acclaimed book of the same name. The full recordings and transcripts from Partition Voices are archived at the British Library Sound Archive, with collection reference C1790.

ANINDYA RAYCHAUDHURI:

There are two separate words in Bangla for home. One is the word Basha and one is the word Bāṛi. Bāṛi has the connotation of permanence. It doesn't matter where you are living at that moment. Bāṛi is where your desh is, where your country is, where you belong. You might never have seen it, but that is where you trace your ancestry back. And Basha just happens to be the place you live in at that moment. So talking to my parents, talking to grandparents, there was always conversations about what the house was like. You know, there was the pond and there were the fields where we had crops. There were all of these sort of tiny insignificant details of stories where the fishing happened and where the washing happened and so on. And it was all compared to the lack or the loss of what we don't have now. You know, we were – by the time I had come around in terms of material sort of financial prospects, we were middle-class, upper-middle-class indeed, but somehow all of that didn't count for quite as much.