Partition Studies

The Aftermath of the Partition of Bengal, 1947: A Historiographical Survey.[1]

The historiography of Partition has gone through a sea change during the recent years. The last decade of the last millennium was the turning point in this direction. The golden jubilee of India’s Independence led some scholars to look back on the other side of Independence i.e. Partition from an altogether different perspective. The traditional Partition historiography, with very few exceptions, had been chiefly directed to explore the causes of India’s Partition and the ‘high politics’ behind it. In contrast, the ‘new partition historiography’ highlighted the experience of the common people who had gone through it. This new genre of Partition historiography was more interested in reconstructing the aftermath of Partition rather than the causes of the landmark event. It was largely related to the process of evaluating the achievements and failures of the nation-state after fifty years of its Independence. The strong nationalist sentiment over India’s struggle against foreign domination and the attainment of Independence had faded with time. Moreover, the demolition of Babri Masjid and the consequent communal violence all over the country recalled the memories of Partition violence and to many it seemed that the Partition was a sort of ongoing process, understanding of which had a present-day relevance.

The professional historians in general showed very little interest in this newly emerging trend of Partition studies and mostly left them to practitioners of other social sciences. Gayanendra Pandey, however, was one of the few exceptions. His celebrated article in the Subaltern Studies[2] virtually opened up a new approach of viewing Partition history. He severely criticized the traditional Partition historiography to lay the foundation of a new framework for studying the Partition: ‘On the question of Partition, Indian historiography occupies a paradoxical position. On the one hand, Partition has dominated the consciousness of nationalist and professional historians in a remarkable way…On the other hand, the history of Partition is effectively suppressed by the focus on India’s freedom struggle--- the unity of India and the nationalist enterprise continued almost unaffected by Partition and all that accompanied it. The history of Partition (sometimes called the history of ‘communalism’) is presented separately, or at best as a subordinate and apparently (in the long run) inconsequential motif in the larger drama on India’s struggle for independence.’ He redirects his historical gaze away from the ‘causes’, to ‘the meaning of partition for those who lived through it, the trauma it produced and the transformation it wrought.

Meanwhile in 1993, the Economic and Political Weekly[3] had brought out a special issue on Women’s Studies which contained three articles on Partition experience written by Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Urbashi Butalia and Karuna Chanana. The focus was primarily on the suffering of the Punjabi women in the aftermath of Partition. It marked a major phase shift in the Partition historiography, opening up as it did an altogether new terrain of research on Partition - the human dimension of Partition from the perspective of gender. Later the contributors of these path-breaking articles elaborated their views in separate books.[4] In 1994 the Seminar [5]also brought out a special issue on ‘Memories of Partition’ and Urbashi Butalia thus problematized the theme: ‘Partition was not only a division of properties, of assets and liabilities. It was also, to use a phrase that partition victims use repeatedly, ‘a division of hearts’. It brought untold suffering, tragedy, trauma, pain, violence to communities who had hitherto lived together in some kind of social contract. It separated families across an arbitrarily drawn border, sometime overnight, and made it practically impossible for people to know if their parents, sisters, brothers, children were alive or dead, and these aspects of the partition --- how people coped with the trauma, how they rebuilt their lives, what resources, both physical and mental, they drew upon, how their experience of dislocation and trauma shaped their lives, and indeed the cities and towns they settled in---find little reflection in written history.’ Butalia found it surprising that the most of the studies on Partition quite abruptly ended at 1947 and most history books too ended at the point the country became independent. She also pointed out a serious gap in the historiography of Partition - the omission of experiences in Bengal and East Pakistan (Bangladesh), which, in her opinion, required detailed attention in their own right.

Thus the human dimension of the experience of Partition and the peoples’ experience of it rather than that of the policy-makers became the major content of the new Partition historiography. The sufferings and struggles of the displaced people are placed in the foreground of this history. So long they had been treated as people-in-need at best and as trouble-makers at worst, as objects i.e. statistical-demographical configurations rather than subjects. Recent years have seen a stress on their agentive role and attempt to retrieve their own perspective as far as possible. In this way we have got sensitised to the unprecedented human exodus and the greatest human crisis of the subcontinent.[6]

The Evolving Historiography of Bengal Partition

The new historiography of Partition was developed primarily on the basis of the northern Indian experiences and for some time the Partition experience on the eastern front received comparatively less attention, which was rightly pointed out by Urbashi Butallia in 1994. However, there had been some interesting works on the impact of the Bengal Partition from the 1950s, albeit with many limitations. And the turn of the century has seen a proliferation of research on Bengal’s specific experience of Partition, responding to the new historiographical trends. Let us make a quick survey of this history-writing.

Since the very inception of the Partition a number of studies were conducted primarily under Govt. initiative to evaluate the magnitude of the influx of the refugees from East Pakistan from an administrative point of view for the purpose of rehabilitation. By the beginning of 1948-49 Calcutta and other districts of West Bengal were flooded with refugees. The Govt. of West Bengal as well as the Govt. of India was confronted with numerous difficulties in handling the refugee problem. They were urgently looking for statistical data. Under this situation the Govt. of India approached the Indian Statistical Institute to come forward in making a systematic and scientific numerical study in regard to displaced persons. The Institute made immediate arrangements to collect data on the displaced families in the state. Thus the first scientific survey was instituted on May 25, 1948 and it continued up to September 9, 1948. The outcome was remarkable indeed. The survey provides a mine of useful information on the Old Migrants.[7]

Primarily on the basis of the social and economic data of the said survey, Kanti Pakrasi later produced an excellent sociological study on the refugees of West Bengal. His approach was thoughtful indeed: ‘Partition should never merely mean the physical (territorial) division of this great sub-continent, it cuts through the “corporate living” of many thousands of people who had and still have, scores of cultural similarities. Political and religious decisions happened to overpower cultural and economic considerations to divide overnight the people concerned into two distinct groups having contending passions.’ Apart from the enormous damage done to the economy of millions of people by the Partition of India, millions of minority groups, having been forced, suddenly and unexpectedly, to give up all attachments with their natal villages and home country, had to arrive helpless, without financial resources and without unquestionable rights, in the new environment of the receiving country. Quite often they were forced to live at a lower social and economic level than they had been used to earlier. Partition created a problem group, the member of which is ‘invariably and essentially someone who is homeless, uprooted, a helpless casualty, dismissed in all his circumstances, the victim of events for which, at least, as an individual, he cannot be held responsible.’[8]

Pakrasi evaluated the impact of partition on Bengal from a sociological point of view; trying to understand the process and pattern of migration, also the impact of migration on family structure, caste and occupation. It was one of the earliest systematic attempts to understand the impact of partition on West Bengal. It is still a very useful and relevant text. In view of the later research, however, the study seems to be lacking in many respects. Here the refugees are viewed as an exclusive community. But the refugees generally settled in an area surrounded by host population and their attitude towards the host population and vice versa are important in any study on the refugee community. Moreover, it stresses the victimhood of the refugees and treats them as a problem, ignoring their subjecthood.

Here I can mention another early study which was conducted by the Anthropological Survey of India in 1950s.[9] The study reviewed the condition of the refugees from East Pakistan and their relation with and attitude towards the Muslims, the government and the local people in two selected refugee settlements viz. Jirat in Hooghly, a Govt. sponsored rural refugee resettlement centre and Azadgarh set up by the refugees themselves near Jadavpur. The study revealed some interesting phenomenon. Firstly a marked degree of tension was found in regard to the Muslims, irrespective of caste, sex and age. The tensional feeling was greater and more intense among women than men. Secondly, resentment was also found against the Government as, they thought, it failed to provide sufficient assistance for rehabilitation. Thirdly, hostility towards the local inhabitants was very much present among the refugees. Because ‘the refugees expected much from them not only as members of the same ideological “in-group” but also because of their feeling that the Hindus of East Bengal were the pioneers of the movement for independence and the greatest sufferers in its cause.’ They had expected that their contributions would be appreciated and they would be received with open arms by the Hindus of West Bengal. But in reality their expectations were not fulfilled. Moreover, they faced a number of obstacles in their way of resettlement. The study showed that a little more than one-third of the refugees surveyed were antagonistic towards the local people. They felt that they were not welcome to the local people. Instead of showing sympathy the latter were making things more difficult for them. What is very interesting is that the women refugees in general were much more anxiety-prone than their men folks. They remained at home and needed sympathy, co-operation and help from the neighbours. But unfortunately they did not get it.[10] An opposite tendency was, however, found in their changed attitude towards members of other caste groups. In the changed situation the caste barriers were remarkably weakened and became flexible in all social relations except marriage. No doubt the study did a great job by recording the experience and feeling of the Hindu Bengali refugees from East Pakistan who had settled in West Bengal.

In early 1980s the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, published some Occasional Papers on the resettlement of the refugees in West Bengal in the context of Calcutta Metropolitan District. Pranati Chaudhuri observed that the ‘migration of refugees played a key role in forming the coalescence of the metropolitan district which was, before independence, only a combination of different isolated urban settlements. The refugee population pioneered in extending the horizon of metropolitan living beyond the limits of existing settlements. The refugee population and their settlements are largely responsible for setting into motion the growth dynamics observed now in different parts of metropolitan districts. The vacant marshy areas in the suburbs of Calcutta have come under habitation, due to the impact of migration from East Pakistan’[11].Asok Sen and Alok Banerjee also observed that the country’s partition had a considerable influence on the pattern of West Bengal’s urban growth. It was related to the large influx of the displaced people from East Pakistan. Calcutta and the adjoining districts of 24 Parganas, Haora and Hugli accounted for a very large share of the displaced persons settled in the urban areas of the state. ‘The refugee settlements have largely contributed to the making of the urban continuum which forms the major part of what is now known as the Calcutta Metropolitan District’.[12] However since 1951 Calcutta’s growth has been subjected to declining rates combined with the fast growth of urban population in the adjoining districts of 24 Parganas, Haora and Hugli, large parts of which now come under the statutory limits of Calcutta Metropolitan district.[13] In a separate paper they showed that in urban 24 Parganas, the number of migrants born in Pakistan rose from 2.92 lakhs in 1951 to 5.74 lakhs in 1971. The category of migrants increased from 50,000 in1951 to 93,000 in 1971 in urban Hugli. In Calcutta, however, Pakistan migrants dropped from 7.63 lakhs in1951 to 2.87 lakhs 1971. The number of Pakistan migrants in Haora dropped too, from 68,000 in 1951 to 67,000 in 1961 and then to 42,000 in 1971.[14]All these data threw light on the process of settlement of displaced persons from East Pakistan largely in some districts of south-east Bengal.[15]

With the beginning of 1990s, more particularly with the publication of The Marginal Men[16], a new chapter was opened in this field of study. It is a very comprehensive and provocative work. Prafulla Chakrabarti reconstructed the untold story of the sufferings of the refugees from East Pakistan and their unbelievable struggle for resettlement in rich details with rare mastery over the subject. He primarily focused on three aspects. Firstly, he depicted in detail the miserable conditions of the millions of uprooted and displaced persons from East Pakistan, the waves of migration, the policy adopted by the Government of India as well as the state for their relief and rehabilitation; giving us a vivid description of the suffering of the refugees in government camps and colonies, on railway platforms and pavements. Secondly, he reconstructed the politics of the refugee resistance under the leadership of UCRC backed by the Marxist left parties. The crystallization and politicization of the refugees drastically changed the political equation in West Bengal. The refugees emerged as a potential political force in Bengal politics. It took a concrete shape from the late 1950s and became the major source of the growing strength of the leftist opposition in the state during the 1960s and brought about a sea change in the contours of its political life. The most interesting and debatable aspect of the study is its final and the last section - the relationship between the refugees and the left. Chakrabarti shows that the refugees were initially unenthusiastic about the left parties and quit naturally drawn towards the Congress, the party in power. Gradually they were disillusioned about Congress initiative in refugee rehabilitation and actively joined in the opposition force. The left parties steadily penetrated among the refugees and built their organizational base. The outcome was the formation of the UCRC, a coalition of most of the left parties in West Bengal. In 1959 the UCRC was taken over by the CPI and later the CPI-M firmly established its control over the organization. The refugees extended their whole-hearted support to the left in their political mobilization and were supported by the left in their struggle for survival, in turn. To Chakrabarti, the CPI or the CPI-M was not the vanguard of the working class. As there is no real working class in the Marxist sense in West Bengal, it was the refugees who brought the left to power in West Bengal. The refugees were used by the left parties as pawns in their power game and these parties were refugeeized in turn. [17]

Chakrabarti’s thesis is highly debatable and to some extent self-contradictory. It is very difficult to believe that the refugees were used by the left just as a ladder to reach power. It `is too simplified and superficial to be accepted. The refugee syndrome does not fully explain the political turn over in West Bengal. As one political scientist has rightly observed, the methodological problem of this brilliant narrative lies in the author’s half-hearted application of the class approach to disentangle the refugee-left nexus in post-Independence Bengal politics. In his efforts to dodge economic determinism, the author unconsciously chooses to enter the blind alley of political determinism, thus throwing the baby of class analysis with the bath water of dogmatic Marxism in the process. This methodological volte-face has derailed the author from the track of objective historiography and induced him to make an overtures to Bengali chauvinism, if not also to pro-Hindu sentimentalism----an overture absolutely unworthy of so rigorous and painstaking a piece of research work.[18] However, there is no denying the fact that The Marginal Men remains a comprehensive and indispensable work in this field of study even today. Moreover, it is the first work of a professional historian on the impact of Partition in the east. Professional historians had rarely crossed the chronological barrier of 1947 and the post-Independence era had been left totally to the other social scientists to carry out their research. The Marginal Men is an exceptional work in this context too. It stimulated the present generation historians to step into an unexplored field of study.

The publication of The Marginal Men was undoubtedly a turning point in the historiography of the aftermath of Partition in Bengal, more precisely in West Bengal. The intellectual climate of 1990s was also very much congenial to evaluate the Partition after fifty years of its execution. A number of scholars came forward and took up the theme. Nilanjana Chatterjee contributed an excellent article in Calcutta: The Living City.[19] It provides a very good introduction of the problem of the East Bengal refugees and their survival strategies in West Bengal. Drawing upon a collection of reminiscences[20], Dipesh Chakrabarty[21] dipped into the Hindu Bengali memories regarding the Partition. In his words, ‘there are two aspects of this memory: the sentiment of nostalgia and the sense of trauma, and their contradictory relationship to the question of past. A traumatised memory has a narrative structure which works on a principle opposite to that of any historical narrative. At the same time, however, this memory, in order to be the memory of a trauma, has to place the event within a past that gives force to the claim of victim.’ He excavated the nostalgia for the lost homeland which was viewed as sacred and patrilineal, and essentially Hindu in content. Muslims are mentioned in the narratives; however, their traditions are not a part of the idyllic representation of the homeland of the Bengali Hindus. The homeland the refugees lost was their home alone. It was one of the fundamental problems in the history of modern Bengali nationality that this nationalist construction of ‘home’ was a Hindu home. It was not a home for all Bengalis. ‘Hindu nationalism had created a sense of home that combined sacredness with beauty. This sacred was not intolerant of the Muslim. The Muslim Bengali had a place in it created through the idea of kingship. But the home thus created was a Hindu one in which the non-Muslim League Muslim, that is, the Muslim who did not demand Pakistan—was a valued guest… What had never been thought about was how the Hindu might live in a home that embodied the Islamic sacred.’ A kind of deafness to the call of the Others was very much present in the relationship between the two communities. This deafness is as constitutive of ethnic distance as may be the more explicit elements of violence. In the moment of crisis, this deafness posed a serious obstacle to hearing the voice of the other.

On the other hand, Ross Mallick[22] took up the Marichjhanpi Massacre and criticized the policy reversal of the Left Front Government of West Bengal in regard to the refugees. Joya Chatterjee carried on her historical research further beyond the celebrated Bengal Divided. She has developed a standard criticism against the ‘Radcliffe Line’ drawn between the two parts of Bengal[23]. In her words it was ‘a hastily and ignorantly drawn line’ by a man who had ‘no background in Indian administration, nor did he have any prior experience of adjudicating disputes of this sort’.[24] Chatterjee has also criticized the tendency of interpreting the Partition in surgical metaphor; because, in her opinion, it was not carried out with a view to healing.[25] In another article Joya Chatterjee has discussed the debate over the question of relief and rehabilitation of the refugees in West Bengal[26]. She provides an alternative analytical framework (other than that of Prafulla Chakrabarti’s) of studying the refugee movement in West Bengal in terms of the notion of ‘right’ and its complex relationship with the state as well as the left parties who are accused of having used the refugees as mere ‘cannon fodder’ in their campaigns. In a more recent article she has tried to explore the complex impact of Partition on the Muslim communities that chose to remain in the state of West Bengal after 1947. After Partition the Muslim families were increasingly forced to settle in small exclusive pockets in the state. As a result, in late 1950s and 1960s, the West Bengal Muslims increasingly asserted a distinct political identity. Their settlement in dense clusters gave them more electoral muscle than they would have achieved had they been more widely dispersed. In Chatterji’s view, the ghettoization of the Muslims community in West Bengal had a degree of political influence which partly contributed to the downfall of the Congress rule in Bengal in 1967.[27]

Ranabir Samaddar, the renowned political scientist, has also devoted his energy to exploring the aftermath of Partition in Bengal. In 1997, the Golden Jubilee Year of India’s Independence as well as Partition, he edited a volume[28]which contains a number of thought-provoking articles. This is a collection of essays (1997) written by eminent historians, sociologists, and political scientists on the Partition of 1947 as it happened in the East. This volume takes a critical look at some of the existing accounts of the Partition in the east, and shows how the history that a partition creates is as significant for a political understanding of the event of partition as the history that has produced partition in the first place. If an aspect of such history of partition is the continuing trans-border population movement across the borders, other aspects are the continuing labour of memory and the emergence of new geo-political regions that make the nation a problematic concept in South Asia. Mention may be made, in this connection, of Ranabir Samaddar’s introductory article [29] as well as his article entitled “Still they come--- migrants in post-partition Bengal”.

Sandip Bandyopadhyay’s article in the volume explores the memories of the Bengali Hindus who had either fallen victim to Partition or watched the scene of destruction from a close range.[30] He observes that most of the Bengali Hindus writing or speaking on their memories of pre- partition days games the impression that there was hardly any animosity between the two communities in rural areas till the mid-1946. This type of narrative either leaves the source of tension unidentified or attributes it to an unknown, inconceivable force of external origin. It thus construes partition as something forced upon the Indian people who never wanted it. But in actual fact, in Bengal the call for division received the support of a wide section of people, including Hindus. It was not altogether an unwanted event. The Bengali Hindus actively campaigned in favour of the partition of the province. [31] Bandyopadhyay also shows that the narratives of the victims of Partition always combine contradictory elements. ‘All the individuals I have talked to start with the horrible description of the violence unleashed by the other community whom they would brand as enemy---the rival community. They also emphatically hold that it was impossible to get along with those people whom ‘you can never trust’. But in the course of interview all of them would admit that some members of the ‘other’ community had tried to protect them and had entreated them not to leave for West Bengal”. Bandyopadhyay observes that in the narratives of partition, violence recurs as a dominant theme. For the victims, the outbreak of violence appears to be far more paradoxical than the act of dividing the country.

Pradip Kumar Bose’s insightful article on “Partition—Memory Begins Where History Ends” focuses on the relationship between history and memory. ‘In the discourse of Partition there is an unprecedented rift between history and memory, though the value of memory in such context cannot be denied, because this divorce makes history dissociated from what can loosely be described as “tradition”. In the partition memories we often confront memory in all its contradictory modalities but still they can be recognizable as produced by a particular group.’[32] He tries to explore how memories constitute the identity and subjectivity of the displaced. Subharanjan Dasgupta in his article “Life—our only refuge” examines the tonal shades of protest and defiance in some representative genres of Partition literature.[33] The anthology also includes a number of poems translated into English as poetic reflection of Partition.

Later Samaddar wrote and edited a number of books on the theme and presently he is deeply engaged in refugee studies. In his The Marginal Nation,[34] Samaddar has brilliantly demonstrated the hollowness of the Partition of Bengal in the border zone through his field experience in the bordering districts of West Bengal, revealing the large scale trans-border migration from Bangladesh. The Refugees and the State – Asylum and Protection Policy of India, 1947-2000[35] is a collection of essays on the practices of asylum and refugee protection in India over the last fifty years. Written by specialists in the field of Political Science, History, Administration, Law and Gender Studies, this volume is a political, legal, institutional and ethical history concerning hospitality, care and protection. The book highlights the contradictions between these avowed virtues and the manner in which state power actually organises care and protection of the vulnerable groups and communities, such as the asylum seekers. It is an extra-ordinary study on the interface between care and power.

One of the most significant publications in recent years in this field of study is Refugees in West Bengal[36] edited by Pradip Kumar Bose. This volume puts together a dozen of articles on various issues related to refugees in West Bengal. Pradip Bose raises the issue of cultural dimension of refugeehood, a much ignored aspect and tries to relate it to the question of rehabilitation. If effective rehabilitation is to be provided then the refugee-managing institutions should go much beyond the construction of ideal-typical refugee concept and incorporate the cultural and social milieu that have characterized the past of the refugees.

Sandip Bandyopadhyay contribution in this volume delineates the role played by the local organizations as well as the international organizations including the UNHCR in dealing with the 1971 influx. There is an interesting analysis of the legal rights of the refugees by Sarbani Sen.

Dipankar Sinha gives an interesting account of Bijoygarh market. This market went beyond the mechanical-managerial terms of reference of market and became a self-reliance initiative as a constitutive element of human struggle. Its history shows how community membership provided the private domain of self-reliance a collective character.

Alok Kumar Ghosh looks critically into the process of rehabilitation of the refugees at Dandakarayna. He says that the project was based on a compromise policy of the government to resettle the refugees in some backward zones, which could cater to the twin objects of rehabilitation and development and also take the pressure off WB. Ghosh questions the rationale and motive behind such a policy. It just uprooted the refugees once again and transported them to alien lands to face a more hostile environment, where they had to live a kind of exiled and isolated life. The situation was aggravated by the refugees’ lack of faith in the govt. They felt that they were being forced to pay for the development of certain backward regions. Mistrust existed between the refugees and the local tribes as well. And when the project failed to solve the refugees’ problem, the latter’s tenacity and sincerity was questioned. He concludes that this ‘delayed and hastily improvised scheme for dispersal of the refuges ultimately failed to rebuild the broken minds of those uprooted people who needed a tremendous psychological boost to contain their frustration.’

Manas Ray’s contribution is largely his own reminiscences, his vivid childhood memories of growing up as a refugee in one of their colonies. He beautifully says, ‘The big narrative of the big nation and of big emancipation, when they came, struck us head on. We lost our smallness, our “topophilia” – the visual pleasure and sensual delight, a fondness for our place simply because we were familiar with it and it was ours.’

Ranabir Samaddar’s concluding essay shows how space has taken over time in creating identities like nationhood and how the refugee is a victim of spatialization of identity. He also contends that if we want to return to the subjecthood of refugees, we have to interrogate the nation-state and get out of the bind of inside/outside, in which the discourse of the refugee studies is caught at present. He tells us not to accept uncritically the category of the state i.e. the category of ‘border’ which produces refugees first of all; though at the same time he says quoting Barthes, “It is trying to destroy the wolf by lodging comfortably in its gullet’.

Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya provided a comprehensive account of the aftermath of Partition and its continuing legacy in South Asia in a broader perspective.[37] It has two basic storylines: first, the dislocations and disruptions caused by Partition and the manner in which these were addressed, and second, some of the long term effects of Partition on state and society in South Asia. The study has been undertaken primarily with reference to peoples, places and institutions of governance. The diverse experiences of the people who went through the Partition form the core of the study. Partition also drastically transformed the landscape of the sub-continent. They authors tell us, ‘It is worth stating that places are not merely physical space, but arenas where the lives, movements, activities and everyday routines of people are staged. They are not mere “fragments of physical space” but rather socially constructed entities invested with a range of meaning by the people who inhabit them.’[38] The also shows that the Partition had a profound impact on the institutions which govern both people and places and which thus form an essential part of the story of Partition and its aftermath. However, as the canvas of the book is huge, the discussion on the aftermath of Partition in Bengal is very sketchy and provides us not many insights.

With the beginning of the new millennium a number of in-depth studies on the refugees from East Pakistan have drawn our attention. Sudeshna Banerjee has brilliantly reconstructed the crisis of old male refugees in the refugee colonies of Calcutta, showing how they were marginalized within their own community and family.[39] Recently Nilanjana Chatterjee has tried to analyze the self-representation of Hindu East Bengali refugees as victims of Partition violence so as to historicize and politicize their claims to inclusion within India and their entitlement to humanitarian assistance in the face of state and public disavowal. She focuses on the main components of their narratives of victimhood, which tend to be framed in an essentializing rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim difference and involve the demonization of “the Muslim.”[40] She has reopened the discourse on refugee communalism and tried to show how the refugees marginalized the Muslim minorities in West Bengal. It is an area which deserves much more attention.

There is no doubt that the refugees were a very potential force for communal politics. But interestingly enough, the communal politics has never been able to strike its roots in West Bengal politics. It is generally believed that the involvement of the refugees in left political movements eroded their communal feeling. Avijit Dasgupta has tried to situate the problem from a different perspective in his article entitled “The politics of agitation and confession: displaced Bengalis in West Bengal”. The politics of agitation meant active resistance through dharna, processions, picketing, hartal, gherao and mass mobilization. They became part of the state politics in the late fifties and sixties. These movements brought the refugees and their organizations closer to the left parties in the state. This politics of agitation gave a unique character to political movements of the refugees. However, in recent years a turn around in the politics of agitation is noticeable. Today displaced Bengalis in many parts of the state subscribe to a new kind of political ideology and politics that could be described as ‘confessional politics’. Rudolph and Rudolph described the nature of confessional politics in contemporary India in the following way: ‘To confess a religion is publicly to acknowledge and express commitment to a religious identity.’[41] Using this definition, Dasgupta shows how the refugees were brought to the fold of ‘confessional politics’ propagated by BJP and its allies. From the eighties the BJP and from the late nineties the centrist party Trinamul Congress realized that refugee dominated areas could be a fertile ground for anti-left politics since these people had been let down by the Congress and later by the Left Front. Economically and socially they had remained marginalized. Many refugees who earned living as hawkers in the city and suburbs were uprooted. The swing in refugee political support from the Left Front to BJP or TMC drew attention of many.[42] The refugees’ shift towards ‘confessional politics’ became evident from 1989 Lok Sabha election onwards. BJP started increasing its share of votes. In 1998 it got the prestigious Dum Dum parliamentary seat. In 1999, it added one more seat, Krishanagar in Nadia. BJP’s advance in Nadia, a refugee dominated district, was spectacular indeed. Dasgupta notices three distinct shifts in the political allegiance of the displaced Bengalis. In the beginning, they extended support to Congress, the party in power at the Centre and in the State. However, the politics of non-violence had very little to offer to the refugees. In the second phase that is from the early sixties, the refugees turned to the left parties and became an active instrument in the agitational politics of the time. Then, from late eighties onward in some parts of the state, refugees have expressed their allegiance to a new kind of politics that has been described as the politics of confession. It seems the political behaviour of the refugees is really an interesting area of study. The thesis put forward by Prafulla Chakrabarti should be reassessed. Whether the refugees have been used by the political parties or the refugees use the political parties for their own material interest is a question which is indeed very difficult to answer.

One recent contribution in this area of research is the volume edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subharanjan Dasgupta.[43] Most of the articles included in this anthology had already been published in a reputed journal in 2002.[44] The aim of The Trauma and the Triumph is to reconstruct the Partition experience in the East from the perspective taken up by Butalia in 1994[45]. The perspective is multidisciplinary and based on an awareness of gender, class and community. They have conceptualized the Partition experiences, riot, migration and resettlement in terms of the notion of ‘trauma’. However, the refugees moved far beyond the sense of ‘victimhood’ to ‘triumph’, a sense of confidence and ability to survive and attain success in the face of stiff hurdles. The editors notice that the displaced women in particular ‘displayed exemplary resilience, fortitude, patience and strength to emerge victors against the combined nightmare of assault, exodus, displacement, grinding poverty and broken psyche’. ‘In West Bengal, in particular, the historic assertion of the refugee-woman as the tireless breadwinner changed the digits of feminine aspirations of the Bengali bhadramahila and altered the social landscape irrevocably.’ The same thing happened in Punjab also. The coming out of the women from the private domain to the public is one of the most remarkable developments in post-Partition West Bengal.

The Trauma and the Triumph has definitely developed a new approach in studying the impact of Partition on the Bengali women. Sudeshna Banerjee has shown in a review article that the gender perspective of this volume finds two channels –1) demonstrating how the politics of gender accompanying Partition used rape and other forms of violence as an instrument of nationhood, 2) bringing out the role of sexual difference in the human struggle for rehabilitation and presenting women as the main agents in this. She says that it is the second concern that makes the volume distinctive.[46]

Jasodhara Bagchi’s article in the volume shows how the community and the family were as much instrumental in the production of gendered majoritarian imaginings of the nation as the state, how they were all obsessed with female chastity as a mark of national glory and treated the rape victims accordingly. Meghna Guha Thakurta develops a methodology for the use of family history in understanding the Partition and further uses a comparative framework to understand the similarities and differences in the Partition experiences (related to gender in particular) of Hindus and Muslims. Rachel Weber finds some complexities in the women’s emergence form the private domain in the aftermath of Partition, as this was legitimated by the role of the patriarchal ‘colony’ community on the basis of women’s role as wives and mothers. She wonders whether this was not a mere expansion of the ‘private’ to include new roles, rather than a real assertion of women’s equal right in the public sphere.

The approach marking The Trauma and the Triumph was developed further by Gargi Chakravartty.[47] Chakravartty provides us with an extremely perceptive account of the experience of the refugee women of Bengal. Her main thrust is on the heroic struggle of these uprooted women in the alien surroundings of post-Partition West Bengal. They adapted themselves to the demanding role of working both within and outside of their homes to supplement the family income. They joined their men folks in resisting the policemen to save their makeshift huts in the colonies. What makes the work different is its special attention to the impact of Partition on the lives of the Muslim women in both parts of Bengal. After the Partition, quite a large number of Bengali Muslim families left West Bengal for Pakistan for better economic prospect as well for security. Most of them were educated Muslim professionals, politicians and intellectuals. Their departure created a vacuum in the socio-cultural life of Bengali Muslims who stayed back in West Bengal. The pre-Partition Bengali Muslim society was blessed with a number of prominent women social reformers like Begum Rokeya who constantly fought for the causes of the Bengali Muslim women. They relentlessly campaigned against the purdah system and advocated female education. The Partition came as a blow in the process of emancipation and empowerment of the Muslim women. Most of the Muslim women professionals and intellectuals left for East Pakistan and enriched the women’s movement there. The fate of the Muslim women in West Bengal was sealed and their status remained stagnant. What was a loss for the West Bengali Muslim society became definitely a gain for East Pakistan.

Another scholar, Anasua Raychaudhuriy[48], has tried to understand the nostalgia for a lost homeland cherished by the uprooted Hindus from East Bengal on the basis of the memories of Partition. In the nationalist discourse, the idea of desh has been associated with the idea of motherland. In the process of nation building, the concept of desh has been used as an important tool for strengthening the idea of ‘national integration’. The usage of the word desh in contemporary popular culture and politics wants to construct the idea of a nation. However, to the displaced persons the word desh corresponds to a different meaning. To them it was the ancestral land which had been lost forever due to Partition. It exists only in memories and nostalgia.

A number of notable works have also been published in Bengali. An article by Sudeshna Chakraborty on the impact of the refugee influx on West Bengal[49] is a very good introduction to the theme. Mention may be made of Sandip Bandyopadhyay’s books.[50] In his writings primarily based on oral documents we can find the refugee counter-discourse. They are indispensable for understanding the problem in particular human situations and writing a history that assigns a centrality to the refugee themselves. Partition of Bengal has been widely reflected in Bengali creative literature. Saroj Bandyopadhyay’s survey of Bengali Partition literature[51] and Asrukumars Sikdar’s recent work on the theme [52] are very useful in reconstructing the human experience of Partition in the East. Recently Udaychand Das and Arindam Chattopadhyay have also edited a volume on Bengali Partition literature.[53] All these works are helpful indeed.

An Evaluation of Partition Historiography

Thus the renewed interest in the aftermath of Partition in Bengal has undoubtedly produced a number of excellent researches in this field which is evident from the above survey. However, there are still some serious gaps. If we thematically categorize the major researches so far done we will easily find the gaps.

· Most of the works are centered on the suffering of the Hindu Bengali refugees from East Pakistan: their uprootment, migration, and struggle for resettlement. On the whole we now have a fairly big and richly nuanced corpus of psycho-sociological studies of refugees with quite a few micro-studies centring on particular colonies, families and individuals. Their history is being reconstructed not as a story of their gradual integration with hegemonic mainstream – casting them in a helpless and supplicatory position, but as a process in which they asserted their own cultural autonomy. Now it is a story of simultaneous mainstreaming and assertion of identity. Recent studies show how as agentive subjects they negotiated a very complex arena of possible choice and give-and-take. And it is now agreed that the refugees are not just economic beings and that the experience of being a refugee is profoundly cultural.

· Some scholars have explored the politics of rehabilitation and the role played by the refugees in state politics in both its communal and leftist aspects.[54]

· We have accounts of settlements outside Bengal and critiques of the government policy in this connection.[55]

· Attention as been paid to sufferings and struggles of women, particularly Hindu Bengali middle class refugee women, old male refugees and refugee children.[56]

· Attempts have been made to analyze refugee psychology.[57]

· The social impact of Partition on the Muslims of West Bengal has been specially looked into.[58]

· The role of the refugees in the process of urbanization in West Bengal has been highlighted by some scholars.[59]

· Some scholars have paid attention to the working of the Bengal Boundary Commission and its long-term consequence.[60]

· We also have questioning of the concept of nationhood in connection with refugee studies.[61]

In view of the above summary, let us now point out the limitations of Partition historiography. It is clear that the refugees have got the maximum attention in the story of the aftermath of Partition of Bengal. However, the treatment of the refugee question remains in many cases uncritical and sentimental. Furthermore, there is a tendency to see all refugees from East Pakistan as a homogenous group, which is not a fact. The East Pakistan refugees came in different waves, at different points of time and from different social backgrounds. Their expectations and experiences widely varied. It is not wise to generalize it. Most of the works on the refugees are based on the experiences of the middle class urban refugees. There has hardly been any research on the lower class refugees who migrated later and settled mostly in the rural areas of the state.

Refugee psychology has become a very rich field of study since the Second World War.[62] There is ample scope to explore the psychology of the East Bengal refugees more carefully and in greater depth. One such attempt has been made by Stephen Keller in regard to the Punjabi refugees. [63]

Furthermore, the refugees were merely a part and not the whole of the story. They were not the only victims of the Partition. The host population had to bear the burden of Partition too. Their life was also disrupted due to the drawing of the unscientific border, particularly in the bordering districts of West Bengal. Ranabir Samaddar and Joya Chatterjee have showed the fuzziness of the artificially created border between the two parts of Bengal. Recently some works have been done on the life in the ‘chitmahals’.[64] However, this problem awaits more studies.

The host population had to share the limited resources of the state with the migrants all over West Bengal. West Bengal had already been a densely populated state and got a poor share of the total agricultural land of the undivided Bengal. Refugees encroached on the lands of the host people in many cases. The problem of unemployment in the industrial sector had been growing rapidly. Naturally the influx of the refugees sent an alarming signal to the host people. They accepted them with suspicion and hesitation. Some times they regarded the refugees as responsible for each and every problem of West Bengal. The refugees, in their turn, considered the host population unsympathetic and non-cooperative. However, there is no denying the fact that without the cooperation of a large section of the host population it would not have been possible for the refugees to resettle themselves in an alien land. The dynamics of refugee-host relationship should be studied in depth to understand not only the nature and pattern of resettlement of the refugees, but the over-all impact of Partition on the state. Hardly any work has been done in this direction.

It must be moreover borne in mind that the interaction between the refugees and the host population has a great cultural implication. The Bangal-Ghati dichotomy remained an important element for quite some years in the life and culture of post-Partition West Bengal. But ultimately a new culture was created through give-and-take. It affected the private life of almost every person in the state. The refugees started playing a role that defined other roles in the changing public sphere too. It is in this way that the refugee issue gradually vanished in the state. Or perhaps it has survived by submerging itself in the changing population, both host and immigrant, and its changing cultural and political processes. Perhaps the past persists in West Bengal and continues to produce a contentious history. However, there is no denying the fact that the lives of eastern and western people are bound together in the present state of West Bengal and that what West Bengal is today has largely been shaped by Partition. Understanding this is imperative for historians and other social scientists and they are yet to address themselves to the task.

Another area which has been left almost untouched is the environmental [65]and economic impact of Partition. The artificially created boundary has disrupted the river systems of Bengal and their proper utilization. The settlement of the refugees in forest lands, marshy lands and even on the river-beds created grave environmental problems which should be studied seriously. Closely related with the environmental impact of Partition is its economic impact, which has not got sufficient attention too. The Partition disrupted the economic inter-dependence of the two parts Bengal. The decline of the jute industry may be cited as a classic example. Traditional local trading networks were also disrupted. Local markets were separated from their hinterlands and vice versa. It resulted in the decline of a number of once prosperous places. Ranabir Samaddar has told us the tragic story of a village in Malda named Bulbulchandi which was ‘severed from its hinterland due to the travails of partition, politics and freedom’.[66] One of the natural outcomes of this sort of economic disruption is the rise of a parallel economy in the border. The influx and settlement of the refugees in different parts of the state had an enormous impact on the economy of West Bengal. Almost half of the refugees preferred to settle in and around the urban centres which led to a sudden spurt in the urban growth of the state. It also transformed the urban politics of West Bengal. Except for some minor works, all this remains academically unexplored and urgently calls for the attention of researchers.[67]

The new Partition historiography faces a couple of major problems, apparently contradictory in nature. Firstly, scholars remain tied down to a stateist perspective and are unable to cross boundaries. The Partition, as some scholars have rightly pointed out, did create an academic gap which may be called the partitioning of academic communities between the studies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.[68] It impeded the development of new insights in the field of Partition studies. Strained relation between these countries has seriously hampered free academic exchange and dialogue. Foreign scholars are also not free from this difficulty. Most of the scholars opt for the study of just one successor society and very few dare to cross the Partition boundaries. The Partition is a theme of research that requires a trans-national outlook. The out-migration of the Bengali Muslims from West Bengal has not received much attention in the Indian historiography of Partition, though it is an inseparable part of the larger story of Partition migration in the east. But of course, the scholars are conscious of this problem and trying to override it.

The second problem is that even as the new historiography intends to broaden its perspective, it also narrows itself down to the life-story of the individual. In fact, Ranabir Samaddar has argued against discussing the refugees from a stateist angle, precisely because this denies the subjecthood of individuals. Pradip Bose too dislikes the leveling of the refugee to a common denominator and construction of an ideal-typical refugee figure. These scholars seem to ask – ‘Isn’t every refugee ultimately an individual? Isn’t individuality the foundation of his refugee identity?’ To them, ultimately the Partition has to be an individualistic story to be reconstructed through fragmental but overlapping memories. This, however, leaves a student of history wondering - if history is to be taken to this level in the process of challenging the straightjacket of social sciences, will it still remain history? Moreover, does it not run the risk of reducing the refugee to a romantic exotica?

Endnotes

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[1] I am grateful to Prof. Anuradha Roy for her valuable suggestions and constant encouragement in developing this paper.

[2] Pandey, Gyanendra, “The Prose of Otherness”. In Arnold.D& Hardiman D (ed), Subaltern Studies, OUP, Delhi, 1994, pp. 188-221.

[3] Economic and Political Weekly, April 24, 1993, WS-2-34

[4] Menon, Ritu and Bhasin, Kamla. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998.

Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi, Penguin Books, 1998

[5] “Memories of Partition”, Seminar, vol. 420, August 1994

[6] This is also related to the renewed interest in riot-hit people in India since the 1984 Delhi riots and the current spate of refugee studies in the world triggered off by the crisis of the post-Soviet Europe.

[7] Those refugees who came to West Bengal by 31 March 1958. See Chakraborti, N.C, Report on the Survey of the Refugee Population in West Bengal (1948), Calcutta, 1949.

[8] Ibid, page 1

[9] Guha, B.S, Studies in Social Tension among the Refugees from East Pakistan, Delhi, Department of Anthropology, Government of India, 1959.

[10] Once I interviewed an old refugee lady of Chotanilpur Colony, Burdwan, who also complained about the non-cooperation of the local people. She told me that they were treated as untouchables, irrespective of their caste and a popular notion was that the East Bengali ladies had been polluted by the Muslims (as if all were raped by the Muslims). Whenever they (the refugees) were invited to their house, they had to wash their pots in which they had been offered foods. They did not even let the refugee ladies to collect drinking water from the common water points.(Interview with Sarashibala Roy, aged 65)

[11] Chaudhury, Pranati : “Refugees in West Bengal : A Study of the Growth and Distribution of Refugees Settlements Within the CMD”, 1983, OP55, CSSS, Calcutta, page 35.

[12] Sen, Asok & Bannerjee, Alok : “Calcutta Metropolitan District in the Urban Context of West Bengal (1951-81)”, 1983, OP60, CSSS, Calcutta, pp 6 -7.

[13] CMD includes Calcutta city and 71 towns, covering most of the urban population of 24 Parganas, Haora and Hugli, 3 relatively small towns in Nadia and 544 rural maujas in 24 Parganas, Haora and Hugli.

[14]. Sen, Asok & Bannerjee, Alok : “Migrants in the Calcutta Metropolitan District (1951-81)”, 1983, OP62, CSSS, Calcutta, pp 13.

[15] Sen, Asok & Bannerjee, Alok : “Migrants in the Calcutta Metropolitan District (1951-81)”, 1983, OP62, CSSS, Calcutta, pp 13.

[16] Chakrabarti, Prafulla, The Marginal Men, Kalyani, Lumiere Books, 1990

[17] Ibid, page xxv

[18] Mukhopadhyay, Apurba Kumar, Book Review, Asian Studies, vol 9, (October-December 1991) pp 119

[19] Chatterjee, Nilanjana, “The East Bengal Refugees: A Lesson in Survival” in Chaudhuri Sukanta (ed), Calcutta: The Living City, OUP,1994

[20] Basu, Dakshinaranjan (compiled and edited), Chhere Asha Gram, Calcutta, 1975. (A collection of essays first serialised in the Bengali newspaper Jugantar from 1950 on.)

[21] Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition”, Economic and Political Weekly, vol.31, no.32, August 10,1996

[22] Mallik, Ross,“Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre”, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol.58, no.1. February 1999

[23] Chatterji, Joya, “The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and the Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947-52”, Modern Asian Studies, vol 33, no 1 (1999), pp 185-242.

[24] Urbashi Butalia has reproduced a popular tale the villagers of a bordering village named Berubari used to enjoy telling about the ridiculous Radcliffe Line ‘You see how this border curls and winds? Which person in his sane mind would draw a boundary like that? He was so confused by what he had to do that he decided, forget it. I’ll just get drunk! The bastard drank all night, and then in the mourning he woke up and picked up his pen, and naturally he couldn’t draw a straight line! So he went this way and that--- and botched the whole thing up. And of course we have to live with the consequences!’ Butalia, Urvashi, “The Nowhere People” in Bagchi, Jasodhara and Dasgupta, Subharanjan (ed), The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, Kolkata, Stree, 2003, pp.118

[25]Recently some other scholars too have criticized the very idea of partition as a means of conflict resolution. See Kumar,Radha. “The Troubled History of Partition” Foreign Affairs (January/ February 1997), vol: 76:1. 

Sambanis,Nicholas. “ Partition as a Solution  of Ethnic War: An Empirical Critique of the Theoretical Literature,” World Politics 52 (July 2000). Internet resource www.worldbank.org/research/conflict/papers/partition2pdf  (Last accessed on 21.5.2006) 

[26] Chatterji, Joya, “Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal” in Kaul, Suvir(ed), The Partitions of Memories: The Afterlife of the Division of India, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2001

[27] Chatterji, Joya, “The Aftermath of Partition: Muslims in West Bengal, 1947-67”. Paper presented at South Asia Session   202: The Bengal Partition, 1947: A Footnote in History. Available at www.aasianst.org/absts/2003abst/South/s-toc.htm#202(Last accessed on 16.7.2006) 

[28] Samaddar, Ranabir (ed), Reflections on Partition in the East, Delhi, Vikash, 1997.

[29] Ibid, Chapter 1, “The History that Partition Creates”.

[30] Ibid, Chapter 3; see also his Deshbhag-Deshtyag, Kolkata, Anustup, 1994 and Deshbhag: Smriti ar Sattwa, Kolkata, Prograssive Publishers, 1999.

[31]For an account of partition campaign see also Chatterji, Joya. Bengal Divided, New Delhi, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 240-259

[32] Ibid, Chapter 4, pp.77

[33] Ibid, Chapter 7

[34] Samaddar, Ranabir, The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal, New Delhi, Sage, 1999. See also his The Biography of the Indian Nation, Sage,2005

[35] Samaddar, Ranabir (ed) Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947-2000, New Delhi, Sage, 2006

[36]Pradip Kumar Bose (ed) Refugees in West Bengal : Institutional Practices and Contested Identities, Calcutta Research Group, Calcutta, 2000

[37] Tan,Tai Yong and Kudaisya, Gyanesh, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, London and New York, Routledge, 2000

[38] Ibid, pp.24.

[39] Banerjee, Sudeshna, “Displacement within Displacement: The Crisis of Old Age in the Refugee Colonies of Calcutta”, Studies in History,19,2, n.s. (2003)

[40] Chatterjee, Nilanjana, “Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengali Refugee Narratives of Communal Violence”, available at www.sacw.net

[41] In Western Europe the roots of confessional politics go back to the Reformation in the sixteenth century. It unleashed civil and international war. In post-World War II Europe, confessional politics took the form of support for political parties that acknowledge a commitment to Catholic or Protestant Christianity or to Christianity generally, and pursue policy objectives that implement or at least are consistent with their religious commitment. Other parties, to a greater or lesser degree, advocate laicizing or secularizing politics, that is, freeing politics and the state from ecclesiastical control or religious influence. In this sense, an important political cleavage that can affect party competition is that between confessional parties or between them and non-confessional or anti-confessional parties. It is the European sense of confessional politics that we have in mind when we inquire whether in independent India confessional politics will again become, as it was prior to independence, not only an important but also a destructive cleavage in national politics”. Quoted by Dasgupta, Avijit, “The politics of agitation and confession: displaced Bengalis in West Bengal” in Roy, Sanjay K (ed), Refugees and Human Rights, Jaipur & Delhi, Rawat Publications, 2001, pp95/29.

[42] Ibid, pp124

[43] Bagchi, Jasodhara and Dasgupta, Subharanjan (ed), The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, Kolkata, Stree, 2003

[44] “Porus Border, Divided Selves: A symposium on Partition in the East”, Seminar, 510, February 2002

[45] The Problem, Memories of Partition, Seminar, Vol. 420, August 1994. The anthology Trauma and Triumph incorporates a number of interviews, reminiscences, creative and literary texts as well as some documentary evidences which are very useful for further research.

[46] Banerjee, Sudeshna, Book Review, History (Journal of the Department of History, Burdwan University), vol.VII, no.1, 2005, pp-161-163.

[47] Chakravartty, Gargi, Coming Out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal, New Delhi, Bluejay Books, 2005.

[48] Basu Raychaudhury, Anasua, “Nostalgia of ‘Desh’, Memories of Partition”. Economic and Political Weekly. December 25, 2004.

[49] Chakraborty, Sudeshna, “Udvastu Srot o Pashim Bangler Janajinan” in Basu, Swapan and Dutta, Harsha (Ed), Bish Sataker Bangali Jiban o Samskriti, Pustak Bipani, Kolkata, 2000, pp.171-179

[50] Bandopadhyay, Sandip, Deshbhag Deshtyag, Kolkata, Anustup, 1994

Bandopadhyay, Sandip, Deshbhag: Smriti ar Sattwa, Kolkata, Progressive Publishers, 1999

[51] Bandopadhyay, Saroj, “Deshbhag: Bangla Kathasahityer Darpane” in Basu, Swapan and Dutta, Harsha (Ed), Bish Sataker Bangali Jiban o Samskriti, Pustak Bipani, Kolkata, 2000, pp. 160-170.

[52] Asrukumar, Sikdar (Ed), Bhanga Bangle O Bangla Sahitya,Kolkata, Dey’s, 2005

[53] Das, Udaychand and Chattopadhyay, Arindam (Ed), Deshbhag o Bangla Upanayas, Centre for Advanced Study in Bengali, Department of Bengali, Burdwan University, 2005.

[54] Prafulla Chakrabarti’s path breaking work on the role of the refugees in the Left politics in West Bengal , Joya Chatterjee’s article on politics of rehabilation in West Bengal and Avijit Dasgupta’s study on the shift of political allegiance of the displaced Bengalis in West Bengal.

[55] Ross Mallik’s study on the Marichjhanpi Massacre, Saibal Kumar Gupta’s reminiscence (Dandakaranya: A Survey of Rehabilitation, Calcutta, Bibhasa,1999. Edited by Alok Ghosh), Alok Ghosh’s study on the Bengali refugees at Dandakaranya and Sabyashi Basu Ray’s article on the refugees settled in the Andamans

[56] Jasodhara Bagchi and ,Subhoranjan Dasgupta’s celebrated work on gender and partition in Eastern India; Gargi, Chakravartty’s study on the refugee women of Bengal; Sudeshna Banerjee’s article on the crisis of old age in the refugee colonies of Calcutta; Monmayee Basu’s article on the sufferings of the women and Tridib Santapa Kundu’s three consecutive articles in Itihas Anusandhan (vol.13,14 &15) on the suffering of the women, children and the aged are worth mentioning.

1)“Bangali nari jibane deshbhager prabhab” (Impact of partition on the lives of the Bengali women) in Chattopadhyay, Goutam (ed.), Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 13,Kolkata,Farma K.L.M.Pvt. Ltd., 1999, pp.589-599.

2)“Chhinnamul Chhalebela: Bangalay deshbhagjanita paristhitir ekti dik (Uprooted Childhood: an aspect of the aftermath of partition in Bengal) in Chattopadhyay, Goutam (ed.), Itihas Anusandhan, Vol.14,Kolkata, Farma K.L.M.Pvt. Ltd., 2000, pp. 296-293.

3)“Bardhakye Bastuchyuti: Bangalay desbhagjanita durbhoger ekti dik” (Uprootment in old age: an aspect of post-partition suffering in Bengal) in Chattopadhyay, Goutam (ed.), Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 15,Kolkata, Farma K.L.M.Pvt. Ltd., 2001, pp.392-397.

[57] The 1950s Anthropological Survey study on their hostile attitude to the Muslims, the government and the local people; Nilanjana Chatterjee on their deliberate claiming of victimhood with a view to claiming certain rights in the asylum country and their hostility to Muslims; Dipesh Chakrabarty and Anasua Raychaudhuri on their nostalgia for the lost homeland; Sandip Bandyopadhyay on the politics of their memory – their remembrance and non-remembrance; Manas Ray on their identity crisis; Saroj Bandyopadhyay using creative literature to understand their identity crisis; Asrukumar Sikdar’s survey of creative literature to explore refugee psychology.

[58] Joya Chatterji on their ghettoization and its political repercussion; Nilanajana Chatterjee on their demonization and marginalization by Hindu refugees; Gargi Chakrabarty on the vacuum in their socio-cultural life and set-back in the process of progress of Muslim women.

[59] Pranati Chaudhury, Asok Sen and Alok Bannerjee’s joint study. See also Kundu, Tridib Santapa,“Partition, migration and the process of urbanization in West Bengal, 1947-1971”. The paper has been presented at a UGC sponsored national level seminar on Urbanization in Bengal from Ancient to Modern Times organized by the Department of History, Bolpur College and Institute of Historical Studies, on 6-7 March, 2005 and it would be published shortly in the Urbanization in India Through the Ages as Professor Nisith Ranjan Ray Commemoration Volume by Bolpur College and Institute of Historical Studies jointly.

[60] Joya Chatterji questioning this in one of her articles; also Ranabir Samaddar’s The Marginal Nation.

[61] Ranabir Samaddar’s concluding essay in Pradip Bose’s Refugees in West Bengal

[62] For a survey of literature on the experience of the refugees, see Stain, Barry.N, “The Experience of Being a Refugee: Insights from the Research Literature” at www.msu.edu/course/pls/461/stein/MNREXP1.htm

[63] Keller, Stephen, Uprooting and Social Change: The Role of the Refugees in Development, Delhi, Monohar, 1975

[64] Sen, Arindam K, Tales of Nowhere People, Kolkata, Centre for Development Activities, 2001and “Marooned: The Chitmahal People” in Humanscape, November 2002

[65] The only article that has drawn my attention in this connection is Munshi, Sunil, “Banga Bibhag o Paribesher Upar Tar Prabhab” in Mondal, Somdatta and Hazra, Sukla (Ed), Banga Bibhag: Samajik, Samskritik o Rajnaitik Pratiphalan, Bibekananda College, Madhamgram, North 24 Parganas, 2002.

[66] Samaddar, Ranabir, The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal, New Delhi, Sage,1999, pp.162-189

[67] See Pranati Chakraborty, Asok Sen and Alok Bannerjee’s joint study and Tridib Santapa Kundu’s study on the role of the East Pakistan refugees in the process of urbanization in West Bengal.

[68] Rahman, Md.Mahbubar and Schendel, Willem Van, “ ‘I Am Not a Refugee’: Rethinking Partition Migration”, Modern Asian Studies 37,3 (2003) pp 553