Let’s Return to Our Own Home: Muslim Return Migrations in Post-Partition Bengal, 1947-1964 (original) (raw)
Related papers
THE INVISIBLE REFUGEES: MUSLIM 'RETURNEES' IN EAST PAKISTAN (1947-71)
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (Hum), 2018
Partition of India displaced huge population in newly created two states who sought refuge in the state where their co-religionists were in a majority. Although much has been written about the Hindu refugees to India, very less is known about the Muslim refugees to Pakistan. This article is about the Muslim 'returnees' and their struggle to settle in East Pakistan, the hazards and discriminations they faced and policy of the new state of Pakistan in accommodating them. It shows how the dream of homecoming turned into disillusionment for them. By incorporating diverse source materials, this article investigates how, despite belonging to the same religion, the returnee refugees had confronted issues of differences on the basis of language, culture and region in a country, which was established on the basis of one Islamic identity. It discusses the process in which from a space that displaced huge Hindu population soon emerged as a 'gradual refugee absorbent space'. It studies new policies for the rehabilitation of the refugees, regulations and laws that were passed, the emergence of the concept of enemy property and the grabbing spree of property left behind by Hindu migrants. Lastly, it discusses the politics over the so-called Muhajirs and their final fate, which has not been settled even after seventy years of Partition. This article intends to argue that the identity of the refugees was thus 'multi-layered' even in case of the Muslim returnees, and interrogates the general perception of refugees as a 'monolithic community' in South Asia. Note I have categorically used the term 'returnees' to denote the 'refugees who migrated to and fro India and East Bengal (Pakistan)' in many sentences including in the title of this article, as it was mentioned in the contemporary official and legal documents (I.B. records, files of the Home-Political department and External Affairs). Also, I have mostly mentioned the term 'East Bengal' in this article to denote the geographical area of the Eastern wing of Pakistan, while writing up till mid-1950s. As, the name 'East Bengal' officially continued within that geographical territory until the Constitution of 1956 formally renamed the Eastern wing as 'East Pakistan'. For describing the land after 1956, I used the term 'East Pakistan' in my writing.
The Journal of Migration Affairs (TISS), 2019
This paper studies the 1947 Partition of India, more specifically the Partition of Bengal, which took place along with the Independence of India and Pakistan. Discourses around the Partition— an event of enduring socio-political significance — have predominantly focused on the moment of rupture that compelled individuals as well as their families to cross the Radcliffe Line. A common critical consensus is that the two most dominant themes that characterise the 1947 Partition are trauma and nostalgia, and these have multiple connotations for those who migrated during the Partition. This paper focuses on the Partition of Bengal and the argument that the vivisection of land initiated a process of cross-border migration that continued unabated for three decades. While scholars have mostly studied cross-border migration in Bengal against the backdrop of nationalism and nation-state formation, the paper intends to study the life-stories of refugees to determine if it is empirically productive to think of migration in terms of caste and not just the nation-state parameter. This paper studies caste against the backdrop of the Partition but does not restrict itself to a chronological reading of the history of caste in Bengal; rather it attempts to move beyond its epistemological determinations to see how ‘lived experiences’ can lead to an alternate canon formation that might interrogate the way narratives of displacement have been studied so far.
REVISITING THE LIFE STRUGGLE OF MARGINAL HINDU BENGALI REFUGEES IN WEST BENGAL IN POST-INDEPENDENT INDIA, 2021
It was the most painful chapter in the life of Bengalis and Sikhs during the partition. Most researchers agree that religion was the main catalyst for the partition. Partition divided Greater India into two new countries, India and Pakistan, based on religious identity. Behind the partition, there were sorrows, pains, feelings, memories, and many untold stories. Particularly, marginal Bengali Hindus and Sikhs were more adversely affected by the Partition than upper-caste Hindus. The question is that while the Sikhs got the opportunity of property exchange and citizenship, the Bengalis did not. Despite all these challenges the Bangladeshi Bengali marginalized lower caste Hindu Refugees are still living in Bengal,
In the wake of the San Bernardino and Orlando shootings, as well as the Paris and Brussels attacks, and in the midst of the right wing populism of US. presidential campaigns and UK referendum debates, the political rhetoric around Muslim migration has sunk to an all-time low. The Bengal Diaspora provides a much needed antidote. By studying Muslim migration across continents the book provides insights into a global climate of Islamophobia, and it challenges us to think critically about migration theory's universalizing logic. In this review essay, we will focus on the three areas of study in which the book makes the most striking intervention, as well as three questions left unanswered or posed for future work.
Book Review by Sahana Ghosh of "The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration"
There has been a welcome rise in recent scholarship on the links between the two partitions of 1947 and 1971 and what these links have meant for residents of the vast eastern region of the subcontinent. This extraordinary book focuses our attention on Muslim migrations and settlements within and beyond this region in the course of the 20 th century. In doing so, it aims to balance out the focus on predominantly Hindu refugees in the historiography of partition and its aftermath, as well as to address the broader—arguably Eurocentric—fields of migration and diaspora studies. It begins by proposing that we view Bengal as not only a source of migrants but as a destination: to conceive of a 'Bengal diaspora within Bengal as well as outside it' (p. 2). This conceptual scaffolding is boldly built by considering, in the same analytical frame, short-distance migrations and settlements within the subcontinent—between eastern India and East Pakistan and within eastern India—alongside longer-distance migrations and settlements between the Bengal region and the UK. This is an ambitious and powerful epistemological move that decentres dominant theorisations of diaspora—and indeed, transnationalism—that are built on solely long-distance mobilities. What does such a naming and framing accomplish? The book, thus framed, unfolds in three parts. The first part sets up the vast historical and theoretical canvas of the project, with chapter 1 outlining a sweeping history of mobility and immobility in 'the eastern zone' from 1847 to 1947. This counters the dominant historiography of the subcontinent that accounts for the inter-Asian migrations of the 19 th century as gradually slowing down due to sedentarisation through intensive
Different branches of anthropological inquiry that have focused on Muslim populations in the Global South, have tended to treat Islam as something like an independent variable. This is true of both those concerned with social structure and those which focused on social signseach has often treated Muslims as either derivative of a monolithic Islam or as the sites of readable gestures. In The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration, the authors move us on from these tendencies through multidisciplinary and historical inquiry, in ways that always grasp the real life embodiments through which Muslim diasporas are forged and re-forged.
Revisited: Partition and the Bengali Muslims of India
The Geopolitics, 2022
It may come as a surprise to many people that Bengali-speaking Muslims form the second largest Muslim ethno-linguistic group in the world after Arab Muslims. The 1947 Partition is remembered largely by the massacres of more than a million people, which took place as Hindu and Muslim mobs clashed during the migration of between fifteen to twenty million people to newly created India and Pakistan. While the scholarship of the event is largely focused on the Punjab region where some of the worst massacres took place, there is a need to produce more scholarship on what other regions experienced. It is important to note that, despite the growth in scholarship about Bengal’s partition in recent years, there remains a particular need to document the Partition experiences of Bengali Muslims of India and conduct archival research in light of the increasing strength of the Indian right-wing, which continues to label this group as “outsiders”. Hence, in this article commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s partition, it will be worthwhile to look at the colonial history concerning the Bengali Muslims in three of the states of India: West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura.
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 1997
The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an estimated 18 million people. This paper focuses on the predicament of the minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of West Bengal. It considers the responses of Indian federal and provincial governments to the challenge of refugee rehabilitation. A study is made of the Dandakaranya scheme which was undertaken after 1958 to resettle the refugees by colonising forest land: the project was sited in a peninsular region marked by plateaus and hill ranges which the refugees, originally from the riverine and deltaic landscape of Bengal, found hard to accept. Despite substantial official rehabilitation efforts, the refugees demanded to be resettled back in their "natural habitat" of Indian Bengal. However, this was resisted by the state. Notwithstanding this opposition, a large number of East Bengal refugees moved back into regions which formed a part of erstwhile undivided Bengal where, without any government aid and planning, they colonised lands and created their own habitats. Many preferred to become squatters in the slums that sprawled in and around Calcutta. The complex interplay of identity and landscape, of dependence and self-help, that informed the choices which the refugees made in rebuilding their lives is analysed in the paper.