1 Moonlight Maiden in No Man’s Land: A Study of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s JochhonaKumari Madhurima Sen Abstract This paper analyzes Sunil Gangopadhyay’s JochhonaKumari as a novella that combines realism and fantasy to bring out the complex silences around the India-Bangladesh border relations. It demonstrates how the voice of the individual gets silenced in the face of the clamour of the contrary narratives of the two nations. Keeping in mind the significance of the Indian narrative of infiltration and the Bangladeshi narrative of denial in today’s political discourse, this paper studies the literary representation of an individual who is rejected by both nations and ends up in the no man’s land between the two countries. It examines how the author uses silence as a literary tool in the narrative to reflect the voicelessness of transnational migrants and illegally trafficked women in public discourse. Even though India was actively involved in the Liberation War of Bangladesh, the relationship between the two countries has been precarious ever since. The terms ‘Operation Pushback’ and ‘Operation Push-In’ are often heard in the political discourse of the two countries. ‘Operation Pushback’, the Indian government’s efforts from early 1990s to identify and deport illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, was termed ‘Operation Push -In’ by Bangladesh who claimed that Muslims from West Bengal were being pushed into their country under the guise of this operation. Willem van Schendel analyzes that it might be the fear of the territorially larger and more powerful neighbor, India, which compels Bangladesh to uphold this narrative (199). In contradiction to the Indian narrative of infiltration, their argument is that India is trying to eliminate Indian Muslims by sending them over to Bangladesh. Acknowledging the returned migrants as Bangladeshis would reveal the failure to control the movement of its citizens or suggest that the state was complicit in letting its surplus labour flow into India. This serves to show how the long-term effects of redrawing political boundaries are ever present in contemporary life and politics, how Partition and the 1971 war gave rise to issues which remain unresolved till now. Much has been written on the issue in literary as well as academic field. However, certain voices still remain under the cover of silence-for instance, the voice of women illegally trafficked across the borders, the voice of migrants whose nationality is rejected by both states. Sujata Ramachandran calls such migrants who are