Sekhar Bandyopadhyay - Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of Dalit Refugees, 1946-1961

Caste and Partition in Bengal

Caste and Partition in Bengal

The Story of Dalit Refugees, 19461961

SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY

Emeritus Professor of History, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

and

ANASUA BASU RAY CHAUDHURY

Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, Kolkata

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932390

ISBN 9780192859723

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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859723.001.0001

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For

the Dalit refugees from East Bengal,

who lost everything due to Partition,

and suffered immeasurably,

due to no fault of their own.

Contents

It is now for almost a decade that we have been doing research for this book, and during this period we have incurred many debts which need to be acknowledged now. First of all, we are thankful to the Royal Society of New Zealand, which by awarding a Marsden Grant in 2011 enabled us to undertake this research. We would like to thank Victoria University of Wellington for providing the necessary research facilities and leave for the principal investigator. We are also thankful to the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group for offering this project a hub in Kolkata and for providing all the facilities for its associate investigator. Furthermore, we like to thank its former Director Ranabir Samaddar for his advice and guidance at every step of the project.

At different stages of this project, we were given valuable research assistance by a group of wonderful young scholars: Anwesha Sengupta, Hilal Ahmed, Benjamin Kingsbury, Sukla Chakraborty, and Hayden Thorne. We acknowledge their precious input to its final outcome; without their help, it would have been difficult for us to complete it. We have worked in many libraries and archives across the world, like the Victoria University of Wellington Library, National Library, Kolkata; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; British Library, London; the University of Chicago and University of Cambridge libraries, as well as West Bengal State Archive, Kolkata; and National Archive of India, New Delhi. We thank the staff of all these institutions for their generous help. We are particularly thankful to Swati Sengupta Chatterjee for her valuable assistance in locating materials in IB records in West Bengal State Archives. We are also indebted to Jagadish Chandra Mandal, son of Jogendranath Mandal, for sharing with us some of his stories and perspectives about his father and family and giving us access to some valuable documents in his collection. Furthermore, we take this opportunity to thank Deepak Bhattacharya who helped us get access to the papers of the Department of Refugee, Relief, and Rehabilitation, Government of West Bengal, Kolkata. We would also like to thank Ashok Chakrabarti for introducing us to the residents of Coopers camp and organising some of our meetings with them.

We wish to acknowledge scholars who have worked before us on this themeparticularly Joya Chatterji, Abhijit Dasgupta, Debjani Sengupta, Nilanjana Chatterjee, Haimanti Roy, Dwaipayan Sen, Uditi Sen, and Swati Sengupta Chatterjee. Empirical information and analytical insights from their writings have helped us shape our arguments.

We have presented papers on various aspects of this project at numerous conferences, seminars, and webinars in Australia, India, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, UK, and USA. We are thankful to all the participants who raised questions, gave constructive comments, and helped us think critically about our arguments. We are also thankful to the two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. An earlier version of the first chapter of this book appeared as an article in Studies in History . We are thankful to its editors and publisher for permitting us to reprint it here.

Finally, we wish to thank most sincerely all the former residents of the refugee camps who shared with us their painful memories of those horrible days of displacement and struggle for rehabilitation and gave us the opportunity to tell their stories to the world. It is to them that we dedicate this book.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

Victoria University of Wellington

Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury

Observer Research Foundation, Kolkata

1 June 2021

Wellington/Kolkata

Partition and Caste

Caste as an analytical category is seldom introduced into the discussion of Partition of India in 1947. In conventional narratives of Partition, the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress are presented as the two main players, and the Partition-related violence is assumed to be primarily between the Hindus and the Sikhs on one side and the Muslims on the other. All internal differentiations within these groups, based on gender, caste, or region, are collapsed to present the two contending groups as homogenous subcontinental categories representing two distinct social and eventually political identities. If the gender imbalance in this historiography has now been rectified to some extent, but we do not know why they almost completely disappeared after the Partition. Was it because of Partition politics? Then, after the Partition, we witnessed endless streams of refugees coming into West Bengal, and among them were many Dalit peasants. Their different experiences of migration and resettlement remain largely unrecognised. This book seeks to address this discursive absence of the caste question and the Dalit from the long history of Partition in Bengal.